David Graeber’s Open Library: Beyond the Monastic Self: Joint Mind and the Partial Illusion of Individuation 

What if we think about this exhibition as a distributed carnival, using all the elements of carnivalesque—from the collective participation to equal access for all, allowing for the possibility of creative exploration and appropriation? What if we imagine it not as a place or a set of objects, but as a platform for all those who wish to view, add to and adjust to proposed connections to their own language and culture? 

From Bakhtin and Dostoevsky to David Graeber

When I first met David Graeber, we spent the day wandering around Union Square in New York City, going from one café to the next and talking. One of the first things we did, like many others who are getting to know each other, was to exchange the titles of our favorite books. For people who grew up in countries—Russia and the US—that had been mortal enemies for half a century, we had an unexpectedly large number of favorites to share.

I learned from David that in Madagascar he brought along only two books: Dostoevsky and Bakhtin. These two books were also very dear to me when I was a teenager in the Soviet Union. These books influenced David’s first book and his favorite: Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar.

According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky invented a new type of literature — the polyphonic novel, abandoning the traditional European novel. In Dostoevsky’s world there is no main narrator or dominant voice, but rather a multiplicity of equal voices, constantly in dialogue with one another. This is an accurate description of the role of an anthropologist who studies different cultures, but does so in a way that respects the perspective of the people he is trying to understand. 

David fought all his life against the idea that there is only one proper way for human societies to exist and flourish. He continually pointed to the existence of radically different cultures and ways of organizing human affairs.

Freedom and Care

Probably this is precisely the definition of freedom: the ability to imagine a variety of social arrangements and change the existing one according to the choices one makes. But freedom must always come with care. Freedom to do anything without the understanding of Others is the very description of the power. David talked about how the interpretive labor is specifically being done by the oppressed, the dependent, who need to find out what’s going on in the mind of power. Interpretative labor makes the vulnerable socially smarter than the powerful who rely on brutal force and have little interest in dialog.

The effort to understand and care for others and protect their voices has been a major focus of David’s life – from Madagascar to Rojava, from Palestine to North American indigenous communities and the feminist movement. David has sought to amplify the voices of these marginalized and forgotten, including ancient cultures, which are our opportunity to explore other ways of social organization. 

Archaeologist Rosamarie Joyce once said that “archaeology is an incredibly politicized science that actively uses censorship. We only study societies that confirm our assumption that the existing order is unchangeable.

For David, care wasn’t merely a moral obligation or a duty tied to law; it was something deeper. Through discovering these “other worlds,” he gained insights into how to rethink and rearrange his own life within the social systems he inhabited. His groundbreaking work in economics, history, and sociology stemmed from this profound revelation: that other worlds and ways of life not only exist but are real and vibrant. The problem is that we often choose not to see them. His discoveries were, in essence, an invitation to open our eyes to the richness of human possibilities beyond the confines of dominant systems.

Why can’t we change the system?

David and I wrote an essay, Another art world or Artificial Scarcity, exploring why and how the institutions of the Western art world have become a place of exclusion: the “talented” are separated from the “untalented,” spectators from creators, producers from consumers, the empowered from those who are not.

We described how the essence of the game lay in mesmerizing participants through exclusion, without which the whole system would not function. The world of Art is the territory in which the confrontation between different conceptions of what human nature is, unfolds with the greatest force. Art World is promising us that everyone should really be an artist, should be free and creative, but in practice this is absolutely impossible. We noted that this system of artificial scarcity is arranged remarkably similar to the way our financial and economic system is arranged and, in a sense, is the center of it. The Art World provides justification for all the inequality and cruelty that is inherent in our social system in the name of “civilization,” “development,” and “high culture.” Just as the genius masterpieces kept in museums around the world are eternal, so too is the system of violence and oppression based on notions of the infinite value and immutability of our social structure. It is no accident that most revolutions from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution began with the destruction of museums.

Another World of Art, as a practical guide toward Change.

In our essay, we asked ourselves a practical question: if we don’t like something, how can we build it differently? How can we actually create “Another World of Art”? How to build another art world that becomes a space of freedom and care for each other, rather than a place where worthwhile people are separated from unworthy ones, where the chosen ones live in a constant struggle with each other for a place in eternity?

In the unfinished fourth part of this essay collection, we discussed examples of real-life Another Art Worlds, in particular, the Soviet Proletkult, which did not last long but left an enormous impact on our modern lives. I hope to finish and publish this part.

I’ve also started working on a project called “David Graeber’s Open Library.” It’s a visualization of the connections between the 15,000 authors featured in the David Graeber Digital Library. The main goal of the project, and it’s not that easy to accomplish from a technical standpoint, is to create a database that could be modified and expanded by other users in different languages.

David Graeber’s Open Library project is a continuation of the research we began back then. I didn’t want to do this project without David. This is why it is based on his library. It is a research into the circle of his friends and adversaries—people he took seriously, and maybe those he did not pay enough attention to. It is a project about his very much ongoing dialogue with so many people around space and time. In this way, David is still involved in this project with me and we are doing it together.

His library includes both living authors and historical figures. Borges once said that “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.” This project for me is a continuation of my dialogue with David, that was so violently interrupted. This dialog was never private, but always collective, and it should be expanded to as many people as were interested in participating in it: children, people outside academia, exhibition visitors, and pretty much everyone else, people from different cultures and speaking different languages. Most importantly, such a library should be decentralised.

If Anthropology tells us to look at our long-held beliefs through the eyes of another culture. Perhaps a good place to start is to look at the connections that existed in David’s library through the eyes of different cultures, not to evaluate them, but to complement, modify, and expand them.

Perhaps this is the definition of a democratic archive.