What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
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My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible…

Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group. This text is coming out of left-field a bit, and is meant to provide a different flavour from the other great texts in the series so far; it's one of my absolute favourites :)

The Text

David Graeber, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

This is a fun little meditation that dips into really high-level concepts like ontology/epistemology, philosophy of mind, rationalism, and political economy all while touching-base with a very intimate, grounded, embodied investigation on being alive, on being a human animal. It asks such Important Questions as, ‘why is sex fun?’

David Graeber is an anthropologist and an anarchist. Known for works like Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Bullshits Jobs, his writing specializes in re-enchanting the mundane and applying high-level marxist thought to daily lived experiences.

This text examines capitalist cultural assumptions about the point of living, which colour our understandings of the whole animal kingdom, including ourselves. And it looks at historical challenges to this set of assumptions, from Kropotkin onward. This text is an examination of Panpsychism, the philosophical school of materialist thought arguing that mind/consciousness pervades the universe. Oh ya, and it dunks on the original lobster boy.

This text asks The Big Question: what is the point of life, the universe, and everything?

Is it... play? Do atoms play?

How would we know? And why might we recoil at the idea? And why do we discount the possibility?

I like this text because, to quote it, “it gives us ground to unthink the world around us.” Have fun with it, and share your thoughts and feelings :)

“I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.”

    • Gorn [they/them,he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Haha, it reminds me of those drunk people you occasionally see in bars who do the ritual display of spreading their arms back, puffing their chest, and yelling into someone else's face, 'come at me bro!

      It is clearly a ritual oriented entirely towards increasing the combatant's genetic fitness.

      It is funny that we see ants, basically, playing soccer (or more like the original Ba Game), and immediately presuppose crude darwinian/survivalist motives.

      But, it is even easy for me to do writing this, despite having just read Graeber's piece! Which is only because of my culture, who's worldview can be traced right back to the time of Darwin's great disagreement with Kropotkin; my forefolks simply chose the wrong side hahaha