Untenable History
Carolyn Nakamura on Graeber and Wengrow's 'The Dawn of Everything'
Some histories reside in people, in bodies and landscapes. When Natalie Diaz speaks of water, I often feel like she is speaking of time.
She writes,
I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not a metaphor.
A few stanzas later, she translates:
… ’Aha Makav means the river runs through
the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of
our land.
This is a poor translation, like all translations.
As waters in which the past is always flowing, histories are elemental, untethered and resistant to imperial time—a mean mechanical clock time that would transform peasants into workers, distant lands into European colonies, and modern life into obsessively measured units of progress and productivity. The European plunder of overseas lands not only forcibly removed and killed millions of enslaved African and Indigenous peoples, brutalized landscapes and fractured more-than-human relations and ecologies, it also colonized time. If colonial regimes did not always or absolutely deny the humanity of those they sought to dominate and displace, they invariably did deny their presence in modern time and space. A fiendish kind of ignorance enabled such erasure, since what colonizers mistook for absence, were in fact meaningful and deeply enmeshed relations of co-inhabitance—histories that their ‘enlightened reason’ could not or would not grasp. Colonialism directly nourished what Reinhard Koselleck identified as one of the conceptual achievements of Enlightenment philosophy: a new concept of history that superseded a plurality of histories with a collective singular “history in general.” This idea, from its outset synonymous with the concept of world history, introduced a new “condition of possible experience and possible expectation.” History like the clock, no longer bound to God or nature, was instead made by men: as Schelling would declare by 1798, “man has history not because he participates in it, but because he produces it.” [efn_note] F. W. G. Schelling. 1798. Ailgemeine Übersicht der neuesten philosophischen Literatur,” Philisophisches Journal 8 (quoted in Koselleck 1983,196, n.7.). [/efn_note] As the imperial time of history systematically erases, literally and semantically, multitudes of histories in order to make itself, it is no wonder Dionne Brand declares, “I do not believe in time. I do believe in water.”
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, is a hefty testament to their belief in imperial time. Even as they introduce into popular discourse an important critique of corrosive ideas of social evolution and developmental history, there is no question that they remain loyal, even obsessive, enthusiasts of “history in general.” This seven hundred page tome presents their ambitious effort at (re)making history, offering a “new history of humankind,” “a new science of history,” “a new world history.” Toward this end they rally a wide selection of ethnographic and archaeological examples to demonstrate how humans have always experimented with and chosen a variety of social arrangements, generally keeping in check the irreversible and permanent accumulation and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, until now. Concerned with the current state of human affairs in which something “has gone terribly wrong,” the authors argue that the most illuminating inquiry into the political conditions of our time should not focus on the origins of inequality; rather it should ask why and how we have become stuck: “why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo Sapiens—supposedly the wisest of apes—allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root?” Their answer, in part, is a failure of imagination: we humans (apparently every single one of us) have lost the ability to imagine otherwise, to imagine any kind of present or future society free from the state, free from governance rooted in an ancient idea of patriarchy that has hoodwinked us into accepting its violence as a form of care. We are stuck because our sense of history, hitched to the swindle of human progress, has radically impoverished our understanding of freedom. If our received historical narrative has foreclosed on the possibility to imagine a more liberated, cooperative, (state-less) future, then the answer for Graeber and Wengrow is to rewrite history from ‘facts,’ namely archaeological and anthropological evidence.
This approach reveals a keen awareness (and redirection rather than rejection) of the ways in which states construct political time, the normative time of global modern life. States have always invested heavily in narratives of their own inevitability. The stakes are existential, as people must believe in and accept state power in order for it to survive. We are stuck because states use all means available to ensure that citizens internalize a narrative of benevolent and/or inevitable state power, and perhaps most critically the idea that human societies simply cannot do without it. And so we accept violence as a form of care. An essential tool of the state project is the construction of memory, which embroiders critical fictions (such as stadial theory) into understandings of the past in order to establish the state as a historical inevitability. As Meryam-Bahia Irafoui explains,
By defining modernity and the meaning of progress, the State also defines the meaning of ‘history.’ It imposes systematic ruptures upon histories (of countries, peoples, humans, etc.). Through creating permanent ruptures it fabricates a standardized structural continuity in their place…
Given that such history-making seeks to permanently negate all pre-existing or competing histories (concepts of time no less than space), I wonder: can any new—or even “radical”—history of humankind ever be liberating? I have only doubts.
Despite their critiques of Enlightenment thought—certain ideals and its mythical version of history—Graeber and Wengrow cannot quite resist amplifying and redirecting certain ‘facts’ towards a new grand narrative: a story that in the past humans were more free (not necessarily more equal), and a concerted return to pursuing principles of individual freedom (not equality) offers the best way out of our collective oppression. However appealing (or not) such a narrative might be, it seems more critical—even more liberating and hopeful—in this political present to instead recall that histories are not always or only made or fixed in ‘the past’; they also exist as ongoing relations not entirely graspable by language or rational thought—something akin to rivers and oceans, climate and weather, even coal or soil that are shot through with time and yet un-enclosable by categories of past, present and future. There can be no singular collective history that isn’t also a cleansing fiction. To make history, as Michel de Certeau observed, is to transform nature into culture. It is a particular idea that becomes thinkable only when humans see themselves as separate from—and also apart and above—the rest of the world. Human-centered history reckoned by imperial time marks a threshold between being in and out of animal life, and perhaps this is the rotten core of the matter: the conceit that humans, their doings and imaginings, can ever really be separated from nature, from the world, from each other.