THE WHITE REVIEW: In the same way one might say that representative democracy obstructs actual democracy, you could say the academy obstructs actual thinking.
DAVID GRAEBER: In academia there’s an obsession with process, but also an obsession with networks of power and how they are created. Now of course it would be easy enough to take the same approach as activists, and start by grounding it all in some common commitment to action; that would have to be some notion that we’re all pursuing the same thing, call it truth, knowledge, understanding, whatever you want. If so, a certain generosity would be required, similar to that of consensus process: at the very least, if you disagree with someone, you would want to make the most charitable conceivable interpretation of their argument to be able to see what the real point of disagreement is. Of course this is almost never what academics do; instead, most act like politicians, and regularly make the least generous reading of their opponent possible, treat debate like gladiatorial combat where one does whatever it takes to prevail. Oddly, they justify it by what are purportedly radical, even semi-anarchist politics — especially via Foucault. Appealing to Foucault allows them to argue that since there is no ultimate truth, since power is everything, there is no common purpose to be appealed to, and sectarian-style argument is okay. Anyway I think that’s the way a lot of academics read Foucault. For most, his work on power becomes the ultimate validation of the reality of the professional classes, so removed from material production, and whose children now almost completely dominate the world of scholarship. For them, it’s all obviously true that everything is really about administration and control, since after all they do live a in a world where power is diffused across networks without any clear us versus them, that reality is whatever you can convince people of, everything is strategic games whereby everybody is trying to dominate everybody else. I think the results have been quite pernicious.