On April 3rd, we host a Zoom meeting to discuss David Graeber’s work.

The meeting will be about David Graeber’s essay “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?”

Professor Steven Shaviro will give the talk and it will be followed by a discussion from the audience.

Steven Shaviro is Emeritus Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. His recent publications have focused on science fiction, music videos, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. He has previously spoken at the Institute about the importance of Whitehead for Graeber’s thought.

In “What’s The Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” David Graeber writes about the importance of play, not
only for human beings, but for other living entities as well. Play involves the suspension of the grim utilitarian calculus of “competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak”, and instead allows for the “free exercise of entity’s most complex powers or capacities”, an exercise that can “become an end in itself.” I will relate Graeber’s account of play with other modern formulations, and suggest how play offers us an alternative to the ideology of capitalist austerity.