“Every beloved object is the center of a paradise.”— Novalis.

The first premise of pandynamism could easily fit on a plaque: it says that everything can be understood in terms of power, specifically as a conjoined story of cause and possibility. While parts and pieces of a scheme or metaphysics can be assumed or held constant for certain periods or purposes — and they usually have to be — no part or piece should be resolutely or ultimately understood as non-power or undynamic. Its second premise is: this is apparently easier said than done, because not only do most schemes or metaphysics mistake certain parts or pieces for non-power, those are usually the same parts and pieces enshrined as first principles or foundational elements (even for many schemes or metaphysics that believe they’re doing otherwise). So the name of the game is to find those parts and pieces either proudly or slyly characterized as given (without causes), inert (without effects), strictly necessary or purely contingent (rather than possibilistic), fixed or processual (either denying or merely assuming change rather than explaining it), or that are somehow distinguished from or defined in opposition to power.

With some concepts, this happens across schemes or metaphysics, as it frequently does with the concept of desire. Desire gets partitioned from power, almost inadvertently, for the reason that desire and power are so often set as complementary terms of a common diagram, in which power is the means to achieve the ends of desires. That is, power is thought of as an instrument in the service of a will or desire. As Max Weber defined it, power is “the chances within a social relation to impose one’s will also against the resistance of others, independently of what gives rise to these chances.” It is the means, or the measure of the means, to reach some ends that, for Weber, hang above us like a constellation of stars (or in his words, like “warring gods”). I’m no fan of this diagram, of course. For one, I dispute the definition. Power is not always in the service of a discernible will or desire. Oceans and economic systems exert enormous power over us that can’t be explained by anything like a desire or will, except in figures of speech like “Neptune’s will is law” and the “invisible hand of the market.” Secondly, since wills and desires are both produced by powers and productive powers themselves, they obviously can’t be its complementary term. Where else would our likes, lusts, hungers, interests, addictions, voter preferences, beauty standards, market demands, moral ideals — the whole gamut of desiderata — come from if not from power? And once they’ve taken hold, who would argue that desires are powerless, or that the “objects” of desire are simply that, just objects? Certainly not Weber. In spite of his methodological definitions, much of the man’s career was made outlining the power of our wills, desires, and ideals, if under another name like “meaning” or “motivation.” Desires are powers acting in the world, not just inner states — and partly the effect of the objects themselves. Think about it. Isn’t there something about the objects of desire that makes you want them? They seduce you. Or compel you. Or otherwise hold an undeniable pull or power over you — sometimes subtly, sometimes irresistibly and to the point of total possession. Nowhere is this more painfully clear than with the so-called “love object,” as the poets have long tried to warn us.

The young Dante buckled like a hinge when he first set eyes upon his fair Beatrice, uttering to himself and speaking of love, “Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi” — “Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.” He was unmistakably in love’s clutches, not the other way around. Whenever he saw his beloved strolling around Florence, he was instantly reduced to a shaking, sweating, puking embarrassment to himself and everyone around him, including his fair Beatrice. Which is all to say that, if ever a person was on the receiving end of the power of love, it was poor old Dante Alighieri. But how would you make any sense of this power in the diagram above — or any diagram that treats the object of desire as a passive object, or a token to be acquired, or worst of all, as merely a stopper to fill a void? Despite Beatrice’s standing in Florentine society, the guy was obviously after more than a trophy or conquest, and while her absence, or aloofness — or even her premature death — might have done much to inflame his longing, as it’s known to do, how would this explain his amore a prima vista? Do we love someone less when they’re near or once we commit to them for life? Isn’t the surest sign of our passion that they’re still present even when they’re not, to the point of distracting us from thinking about anything else? Long after Beatrice’s death and up until Dante’s own, she was always with him. For Dante, love is ever-present, never a lack, and when he reunites with Beatrice in paradise, he discovers that love is in fact the supreme cosmic principle, which makes and governs all that is in Heaven and Hell and everywhere in between. Personally, I wouldn’t go that far. And you don’t need to be in love to understand the power of your desires. Even the dumbest objects — a beverage, a cigarette, a glowing screen, a big empty bed with soft, welcoming linen after a few sleepless nights — will easily have their way with you. Nearly any desire, no matter how simple, can reveal the flaws in this instrumentalist diagram. Love, though, is its total refutation.

It makes sense that Dante did go that far. He died and completed the Divina Commedia in 1321, right before the beginning of the end of the European Middle Ages (which I’ll conveniently mark on the calendar as 1347, the arrival of the Black Death in Genoa). Dante’s worldview was Catholic with a hero’s dose of Aristotelianism. Thomas Aquinas makes a cameo in paradise to clarify doctrine, but the edifice of his Heaven comes out of the pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In Aristotle, that which we strive for, the telos, is anything but passive. It’s a cause, the so-called “final cause,” and depending on which book of Aristotle you’re reading, often the most dominant or important kind. All things, even in the natural world, forever reach toward their highest ends. They are moved and beckoned by their final causes. In the centuries after Dante, European science slowly distanced itself from Aristotle. And in this separation, specifically in the development of the ontology of mechanism, the telos, the final cause, was polemically discarded as irreal, unnecessary, or an unfortunate holdover from Aristotle. His material and formal cause were largely rendered static (as respectively, abstract mass and transcendental law), with only the efficient cause (mathematically reworked as “force”) left to explain real change and bring about effects. If we understand power as the conjunction of cause and possibility, we can see how this conception of cause as principally efficient cause would supply the basis for the conception of power as principally an instrument. Even if you subscribed to my causal-modal definition of power, still only one aspect of cause could be activated by possibility, leaving the others to wither on the vine. Little wonder Dante wouldn’t see it this way. He was a man of a previous era.

Of course, the ontology of mechanism certainly did not subscribe to the causal-modal definition of power. In most versions, causation was necessitation. Causes necessarily produced their effects. And they were pre-determined. Pushed from behind, not pulled from ahead. This rendered teleology either void or redundant. If you truly believed in necessity, it would be futile or delusional to debate the ends of change or action. The die’s already cast. Given that, there’s really no place for desires within these metaphysics except as a mirage or epiphenomenon. Some versions of mechanism, even those of a scientific bent, retained the primacy of efficient cause without demanding causal necessity. Modern ping-pong variants of Epicurean atomism, such as Gassendi’s, allowed for chance or indeterminacy in the natural world. His atomism paralleled the contemporary scientific study of gases, and in keeping, his metaphysics was more gaseous than strictly mechanical. The behavior of gases obeyed predictable laws en gros, but no one was brazen enough to claim they could predict the behavior of any one part or particle. Their collisions and percussions were still efficient causes, but the final results seemed pretty random — possibly the effect of the “clinamen,” or swerve, built into the order of things. Robert Boyle thought that the all-knowing God could still track the path of each and every particle. Indeterminacy, he claimed, was only human ignorance. For Gassendi, though, indeterminacy cracked the door for real metaphysical randomness, leaving enough room for free human action. This had been an argument at least since the days of Epicurus and Lucretius: that indeterminacy was a prerequisite for human freedom. But if this is freedom, it’s only freedom in the very weakest sense, one bereft of true power. Though I’m no longer condemned to a future foreseen, I can only hope for the best and cheer from the sidelines. Nothing I do could be meaningfully considered a choice or the enactment of a true will or desire. Power, however, is only power where it meaningfully conditions. Fate or chance never enter the frame. Plus, as twisted as they might get, our desires are never random, are they? When we want something, we want something in particular. Does love, for example, accept any substitutes? Not so easily. Just ask the grieving or the brokenhearted. The greater the desire, the more demandingly it determines, organizes, and judges the means of its own fulfillment.

A well-known caricature of this is Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. If you’ve never seen it, it’s inspired by the historical exploits of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, or “Fitzcarraldo,” an Irishman obsessed by a vision of building a world-class opera house in the deep Amazonian outpost of Iquitos. The title role is perfectly filled by none other than our problematic king, Klaus Kinski. At no point in the film do we doubt the power of Fitzcarraldo’s desire. It ceaselessly conscripts its own causes and has him clanging a church bell and screaming like a toddler: “I want my opera.” His wife Molly is nearly as indomitable. She promises skeptical investors that “Fitzcarraldo will build it, and Caruso will sing at the premier. It’s only the dreamers that move mountains.” She wasn’t bluffing either. It’s this dream that throws him into an ill-fated rubber-trade expedition to fund his opera, his dream that emboldens him to recruit the Amazonian tribes after his crew abandons him, his dream that convinces him to wench a steamship over the massive hill separating the two rivers, and — once his business plan founders in the rapids of the Amazon — it’s his dream that moves him to hire the Manaus opera to play on the steamship on the river along Iquitos, finally realizing his vision in a slightly altered form. At every turn, the end exactingly shapes its means.

It’s not always pretty. You’re given no reason to like Fitzcarraldo. The man was a functional psychotic. However, you can’t help but envy his dedication. And of course, most everything said of Fitzcarraldo can be (and has been) said of Herzog himself, a filmmaker obsessed with obsession as a general motif. When it came to making the film, true to form, Herzog insisted on physically recreating the deeds of Fitzcarraldo, likewise with the help of the local Amazonian tribes (though apparently the real-life Fitzgerald was sensible enough to disassemble the ship before schlepping it over the hill). This is incredible for more than just its masochism. It’s almost as if, not content to remain a legend along the lines of Noah’s ark, here was a desire so potent and so particular, that it somehow forced its way into historical fact twice within the span of a century.

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Once the ontology of mechanism eliminated final causes, if not always in its metaphysics then at least in its accounts, it was forced to reduce our more bodily desires to a combination of material and efficient causes (as a calculus of pleasures and pains) or sublime our more spiritual desires into the demands of transcendentally formal causes (our desire for things like human happiness or political freedom were actually the imperatives of a moral reason or law). This split became a primary quandary of both metaphysics and moral philosophy, and one that successive metaphysics tried to resolve or overcome, particularly among the process-oriented “ontologies of organism” arising in reaction in the 19th century. Against mechanism’s exclusive image of matter and machine, we might think of them as defending “life,” both in the sense of zōē and bios. Their proponents saw no way of comprehending life, in either sense, without introducing some kind of telos or final causes back into their metaphysics — not as a transcendental ideal, but as a causal process embedded in with all other kinds of causal processes, material, formal, and efficient. Their metaphysics not only provided a foothold for desire, it opened the gates for many fancy new models of desire that could explain its emergent interrelation with biology, cognition, and society. This didn’t make things any simpler, but it did make them more specific. Desire was again real, yet no longer the amorphous or all-pervasive force that it was for panpsychism or Dante’s Paradiso. For these ontologies of organism, it was a set of processes belonging to the domain of life. It was a concern of the living.

Even when these models of desire were not in the gushy, visceral terms of biology, they were still very fluid — either hydraulic or energetic in nature — permitting them to later overlap with the “ontologies of computation” of the 20th century. According to them, desire could be understood as a complex of fluids, flows, and forces, one now ever more socially integrated with a system of signals, intensities, networks, and feedback loops. To the degree that I understand them, these process-oriented models of desire are all fascinating, but they don’t get us any closer to understanding desire as a power because power itself cannot be understood as a process. In fact, to understand desire in terms of power, we don’t necessarily need any fancy new models (which is fortunate for me, since I don’t have one). Any old model or desire will do, provided we can subject them to questions about how they relate to other forms, modes, and configurations of power. If a desire isn’t given, where did it come from? If it isn’t inert, what does it produce? If it isn’t necessary or purely contingent, what else might be desired? If it isn’t fixed or merely processual, how do we intervene or create other desires? If it isn’t distinguished from power but power as well, how is it involved in making the world around us, specifically a world that we all might truly want? I think this set of questions and relations is important enough to deserve its own name, so I’m going to call it “voluntude,” if for nothing else than the pure thrill of neologism.

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In opposition to the instrumental diagram, there’s another tradition that sees power as deeply involved with the questions of desire. In the modern day, this is most notably taken up by Hannah Arendt. You might think of Arendt as having inverted Weber. Against his hard-nosed realism, she extolled something closer to a discursive idealism, and against his equation of power with self-interested means, she placed the real seat of power in the collective determination of ends. She disavowed violence as the basis of political life, and cautioned the New Left of her day against naive glamorizations of violent action-for-action’s-sake. “Violence,” she wrote, “can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.” Violence, for her, was tellingly “distinguished by its instrumental character.” Even when employed for high-minded or idealistic ends, it was no less brutishly instrumental if those ends were not as deeply considered as the means to achieve them. She wrote that “power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.” It was a formulation of power that was, she claimed, inherited from the classical world, above all from the Athenian polis, in which fellows on an equal footing (under the conditions of isonomy) came together to speak and imagine, and through speaking and imagining brought forth a shared world which all might wish for and best flourish in. According to Arendt, once violence and coercion were deployed, or even at play at the margins, speech halted, fellows dispersed, and power was thus broken off and no longer in session. When an institution or governing body resorted to violent repression, marching tanks down the boulevard or cutting down dissidents on sight, she claimed that this was a sign of impotence, a loss of world-making power. Power, for Arendt, is constituted by the coordination and concert of wills, through voluntude rather than through force.

This was a refreshing rebuke to Weber, but Arendt overshoots the mark and delivers a conception of power almost incompatible with some of our most urgent uses of the term. While there’s a certain flair in describing something like the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the militaristic undergirding of the American empire, or the Nazi genocide of Jews and the Israeli genocide of Gaza, as something other than power, I’m not so sure the victims would find the distinction very persuasive. Arendt’s notion of power requires us to wildly downplay the efficient causality we feel pressing in on us and ruthlessly shaping our world. I suppose we could partly salvage her argument by saying that, in cases like these, the perpetrators were forced to resort to actualized violence because they were losing their grip on other modes of power, such as economic control or ideological hegemony. This could be said of any violence, such as violent crime, which is usually highest in areas systematically denied all other social means to viable life. But even in the case of crime, this doesn’t necessarily signal a loss of power or last resort. A mob or cartel can operate almost strictly through dint of violence and retain unchallenged control over a city, region, or nation. We could instead distinguish violence as one mode of power among others (by its desublimated, destructive, and typically physical character), and further show that it’s power rather merely causation because it can coercively shape its world either through actualized acts or merely potential threats, just as economic modes of power can shape the world either through the forces of actualized production and allocation, or through promised inducements, predicted returns, or threats of poverty and starvation.

Violence and economic power can never be cleansed from the largely discursive power that Arendt imagines taking place in the political sphere. She wasn’t naive. She conceded that the fine speech and deeds taking place within the Athenian polis were predicated upon the conquests of the Athenian empire, the economic labors of subjugated women and slaves, and a number of other factors in that Mediterranean nexus of powers that flowered into the brief exception of ancient Greek democracy. She just thought of them as “preconditions” rather than power, which only leaves me wondering why something that makes power possible would not also be considered power itself. Plus, as exceptional as the Athenian polis was, it makes for an odd choice for a generalized paradigm of power. Realists could probably make a stronger case for the primacy of violence by invoking the Mongol Empire, which lasted roughly the same span of time, but ruled over most of the Eurasian landmass and acquired its rule through slaughtering one tenth of the world’s population. Arendt’s diagram of power and desire is rhetorically sharp, I’ll give her that much, but in the end, it blinkers us to the way power operates as a densely mixed panoply of modes — cultural, political, economic, and militaristic — that can sustain violence and oppression as readily as it can cooperation and debate.

More recently, Byung-Chul Han, in his book What is Power?, has offered up his own diagram of power and desire. He also takes issue with Weber, writing “power is usually defined as a causal relation: the power of the ego is the cause which affects a particular behaviour in an alter against the latter’s will. It enables the ego to impose his or her decisions without having to show any consideration for the alter.” For Han, power is instead, or as much, a “communicative medium” mediating between ego and alter (his placeholder terms for the self and the other). As in Arendt, violence interrupts this communication. It breaks it off, and in its extremes, will even go so far as to annihilate the alter. Han says that, in the power relation, the ego would never wish to destroy the alter, but rather expand into it, to commandeer its will and steer its wishes. Han thus calls power “eloquent,” an eloquence that coaxes the alter into adopting the ego’s desires as its own. Rather than overwhelming the alter’s “no” by force, “the power of the ego reaches its peak in this sort of emphatic ‘yes’ on the part of the alter, a response that does not contain a trace of a ‘yes, alright then.’”

This definition applies to an empire at its zenith whose subjects can no longer think beyond its hegemony, a cult ecstatically obeying the whims of their guru even unto death, or (what I take to be his main target) the channels through which we internalize the imperatives of the systems in which we live, becoming servants to our tools or grindset entrepreneurs of the self. So Han agrees with Arendt that power lies more in a communication between the ego and alter, yet it’s a communication that functions to entrench the domination of the ego over the alter, in the way Weber sees legitimacy securing compliance to the point that force is no longer necessary. This is a neat trick, to combine the insights of Arendt and Weber. I see that. The problem though is that their overlap in his Venn diagram is so narrow that it doesn’t help much beyond special cases.

On the whole, I’m as puzzled by Han’s framing of power in this book as I am his understanding of love in The Agony of Eros. For Han, love and power emerge from a mediation between ego and alter rather than — as seems obvious to me — the ego and the alter emerging from love and power, and then nowhere nearly as sharply-defined as Han likes to paint them. For me, they’re so incredibly and intimately entangled that it takes years of either reflection or therapy to tell where egos stop and alters begin. On top of that, as he describes them, love and power are not so much mediations as they are mutual exclusions. Power, for example, is the ego’s encroachment into the center of the alter. It is, he says, fundamentally “ipse-centric” — all about itself, and its boundaries stay sharp and its wishes its own, even as it expands and annexes the other. It is an unambivalent and unidirectional domination. Love, for Han, is just mutual exclusion in the opposite direction. In love, the self is willingly disempowered and negated by the will of the other. Swallowed up, self-sacrificed, and closer to death than to Dante’s eternal life. In love and power, both the ego and alter remain almost Cartesianly clear and distinct for Han, and their “wills” are not only known and discernible from the outset, they’re mutually exclusive and seemingly zero-sum. Even if you agreed with Han’s formulations, you’d still have to admit it’s a pretty funny framework for a critic of modern hyperindividualism and marketized social relations.

I see things very differently. Rather than defining power as domination, and love as its powerless opposite, I think of love and domination as contrary configurations of power, which even in their contrariness, are rarely clean or distinct, much less respectful of the boundaries between self and others. How often do we fail to recognize domination or appreciate love, not least of all because of how they might at times resemble or feed one another? And isn’t this only made worse by thinking of love and domination as the will of one yielding to the will of the other, rather than as dynamic relations overwhelming them both? Where does the ego’s will to dominate come from if not from others? Would a loving world come about only through a collective disempowerment? How can two people who truly love one another hurt each other so deeply? And if it were just a matter of the ego’s will versus the alter’s, why do we so often seek to be dominated or flee from love?

I think part of the confusion stems from defining domination simply as a power-over. This is an error made even, maybe especially, by theorists who want to study power empirically, and hope that they might be able to measure or at least safely identify domination purely in terms of power-asymmetry. The problem with this is that, though domination usually involves a power-over, so too does love, as we saw with Dante and Beatrice. Even when wholly requited and genuinely enacted, love — and those whom we love — still hold a tremendous power over us. Yet this doesn’t make it domination. The difference is often pretty clear, but when it’s not, it’s not. Whether in toxic personal relationships or political pathologies, sometimes they can’t be meaningfully distinguished by any measure or principle, but only by asking difficult, probing questions about where our desires come from, what they’re connected to, and what they’re actually bringing about. Which is to say, it’s as much a matter of voluntude as it is visible asymmetry. Though steep power asymmetries are the first place to look for domination, it can’t be measured wholly in those terms.

Take the Sun, for instance. Nothing has more power over us than the Sun in the sky, yet as the source of all light, warmth, and life, it provides us with everything that we have and want. We desire the Sun for its immediate pleasures, but also as a prime factor in so many other desires. It grows the meals we enjoy. It’s the main ingredient for a perfect day. It lights up the faces of our loved ones and, when you think about it, is the reason we see anything at all. Though we’re wholly and deeply dependent on it, it makes possible all we hold dear. It has its drawbacks, like giving us skin cancer or killing our pets if we leave them in the car, but on the whole, its powers are welcomed with infinite thanks, wholly distinguishing it from domination. Similarly, a political leader may by all measures hold great power over a citizenry. However, if that leader is dutifully wielding that power to help organize that city according to the wishes and welfare of that citizenry, truly and to the best of their abilities, it is a kind of power-over but I wouldn’t call this domination. When you discover a favorite new song and loop it on repeat until your eardrums bleed, you’re listening in order to be overwhelmed, and to feel your spine seized and your every other cell in its thrall. But because of how deeply its powers enmesh with your feelings, nobody would call this domination.

And when it comes to true love — this may sound trite but I’m going to say it anyway — it may be the only power over which domination can never, as an axiom, truly prevail. Nothing is more unconquerable than the human heart. What I mean is that, no matter how much might or wealth you wield, no matter how vast your kingdom or fearsome your rule, you can never make someone fall in love with you. Against their refusal, all siege or force is futile. The castle walls can only be breached by song. This is true in a deeper sense as well. Even if you could, by slipping them a love potion, control their feelings and make them love you, this still wouldn’t be what your heart was after. Your desire to be truly loved by them is the desire that they, wholly and voluntarily, and out of everybody else in the world, choose to love you and choose you to love. Love resists domination by definition. It is neither otherworldly magic nor inner delirium. It’s a real power in the world that can collapse empires and bring the ruthless to heel.

Recently, I watched Scorsese’s Casino for the first time. Tightly based upon the true story of the downfall of the Las Vegas mob, it’s often described as a panoramic gangster film. To me, though, I see it as more of a classical tragedy centered on its hero “Ace” Rosenstein, a hotshot odds-maker selected by the Chicago mob to run its “Tangiers” casino. Through a combo of mob violence and Ace’s coldly scientific approach to gambling, he quickly becomes a very powerful man on the strip. Unlike the feral Nicky, an associate from Chicago lured to Vegas by its untapped criminal opportunities, Ace is eminently self-controlled and calculating. Inside the casino, with his mastery of contingency, he’s a portrait of power as “the chances within a social relation to impose one’s will also against the resistance of others, independently of what gives rise to these chances.” However, not long after arriving in Vegas, he discovers Ginger, a seductive courtesan who haunts the tables and cons wealthy men out of their money. “She was one of the best-known, best-liked and most respected hustlers in town. Smart hustlers like her could keep a guy awake for two or three days before sending him home broke to the little woman and his bank examiners.”

After seeing her in action, he falls madly in love, but his realism persists. “In Vegas, for a girl like Ginger, love costs money,” and with his position and means, Ace could secure her company, and even her affection. Her love eluded him, however. This belonged to another — to an abusive, irredeemable pimp named Lester, who she’d been with for years. Her love for Lester baffled Ace. It offered her nothing. He, on the other hand, could offer everything he thought she wished for — money, security, pleasure, attention — and before long, he proposes. Ginger is honest with him: she cares for him, but she doesn’t love him. Ace remains undeterred. He’s certain that, with enough time and tenacity, her affection will turn to love, and after he promises to set her up for life, with or without him, she finally accepts his proposal. But this time around, when it comes to the operations of love, Ace has badly miscalculated. From there on out, the story unfolds as disastrously as Euripides’ Medea. Despite his efforts and original passion, Ace never wins her. How could he? He never learned, nor even really asked, what Ginger’s heart truly needed or wanted. He presumed that he could somehow make her love him. For this hubris, his downfall was sealed— as well as the downfall of the entire Vegas mob.

This is the reason this movie got to me, and whenever a movie gets to me, I instantly rush to the reviews and soak up the details of its backstory. I’m one of those people. Scrolling through the Casino lore, I got the impression that the true story had been tamped down in order to make it more believable. There were actually four casinos rather than one, for example. And the real Nicky, Ace, and Ginger, who are forever memorialized in tabloid clips and reels, seemed truer to their characters than Pesci, DeNiro, and Stone could ever portray. Nicky was the perfect wildcard, and Ace, the slick and relentless tycoon. Then finally there was Ginger, known to the press as Geri Rosenthal née McGee. I couldn’t stop sifting through her photos. She was beautiful and tragic, as you might expect, but this wasn’t the only thing that hooked me. It was something about the look in her eyes, her body language, and the defiance in her cheeks. Together they expressed what Ace realized only too late: “In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and to keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose, and in the end we get it all. But with Ginger… I should’ve known better.”

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The real Ginger and Ace, Geri and Frank Rosenthal

Here come some loooooooooooooooong, loopy notes, in three chunks, on my notion of a “power account.” They get pretty metaphysical, caveat lector, but only in due preparation for social questions of power. I don’t expect anyone to read it all, especially not in one sitting, but I need to get the concept nice and clear. For me, power accounts are what constitute dynamic understanding, and from what I’ve come up with so far, are defined by three main criteria (which probably won’t make much sense upfront, but I’ll list them anyways). One: power accounts shape their story, and sieve their causes, possibilities, and effects, according to an immanent criterion of importance, and in fact must make the case for this importance through their own telling. Two: power accounts are sufficiently concrete in the philosophical sense that they don’t rely on “abstract causation.” They don’t strip their main characters of their distinctive causal powers. And finally, three: as a development of the causal-modal definition of power, a power account must simultaneously convey, if only implicitly, four different things: a convincing story of how an ensemble of causes will bring about their effects; how they might fail to bring them about or might bring about others; how those effects might otherwise be brought about by another ensemble of causes; and finally, how this story compares and contrasts with alternative or hypothetical stories, with different causes, possibilities, and effects — that is, with close parallel worlds or stories no less convincing or coherent than its own. If I define power as the marriage of cause and possibility, then power accounts indulge us with all the plot twists and drama of their impassioned affair. Like I said, this probably doesn’t mean much to you yet, but in the three pieces to follow, I’m going to try to lay it out with almost didactic clarity, even if I have to sacrifice some style to get it done. The last criterion is the most ornate, so I’ll start with that, then follow up with shorter explanations of the other two.

I.

This first section is about two elusive but I think related concepts: my notion of a “power account” and the Buddhist figure of the tetralemma (or “catuṣkoṭi”), particularly as it was wielded by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, a third-century Indian monk and founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. “Madhyamaka” means “Middle Way” in Sanskrit, and refers to a philosophical outlook that steers between absolute realism and utter nihilism. In English, the name gives the unfortunate impression of a mealy-mouthed centrism (like Tony Blair’s “Third Way”) which does no justice to Nagarjuna’s penetrating radicalism. What initially drew me to his thought was what I took to be our shared rejection of ontology. In fact, from what I’ve read, his rejection was so radical it threw even some of his closest readers for a loop. Nagarjuna had a nice, succinct word for this rejection of ontology: śūnyatā — usually translated as “emptiness” — which you’ve likely heard of before in reference to Buddhism. This translation also misses the mark a little because it still evokes a non-existence or negation of being, when what Nagarjuna was trying to do (in my untutored opinion) was to disabuse us of any metaphysics built on being and non-being, or any combination of the two.

Why would he do this? Well, for one, even if we could nail down a solid ontology, it wouldn’t provide the foundation we think it does. It’s neither needed nor achievable. Nevertheless, sages have been at it for so long now that many are loath to let it drop, and that includes some of Nagarjuna’s fellow Buddhist commentariat. Some of them protested that Nagarjuna didn’t have a problem with ontology per se. He was only denying “svabhava,” a term that doesn’t really have a clean English equivalent but which means something like “own-being” or “self-existence,” and encompasses both “essence” and “substance,” the Western philosophical terms you find in Aristotle. Ontology is fine, they said; Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka was just rejecting all essentialisms and substance ontologies, such as the intrinsic beings and unchanging natures found throughout Indian metaphysics. My contention is that ontology is not fine. And for as zero as I know about Sanskrit or Pali, I’m going to go ahead and claim that all ontology is a form of svabhava. As if I weren’t already out of my depths enough, I’m even going to bring in the tetralemma to help show my reasoning.

The tetralemma, known as the double or four-fold negation (hence “tetra-lemma” — four propositions), is a device of Buddhist logic or dialectics. Rather than representing a sacred figure, the tetralemma is more of philosophical prop, used for refusing bad questions rather than refuting specific claims. It has a scary reputation, but it’s largely undeserved. The gist of it is actually pretty straightforward. It basically says that when you’re asserting or questioning a certain Something, you have four general options to contend with: first, you have that Something, or alternatively you can have Something Else, or a mix of that Something and Something Else, or neither that Something nor Something Else. If none of those four options bears out or makes sense, then that means that there’s probably something screwy about your original assertion or question. Is my new jacket blue or red? The answer may be that my new jacket is blue, or maybe red, or maybe some mix of the two, like purple, or maybe neither red nor blue, like yellow. This is easy enough because the question makes sense. However, if I didn’t buy a new jacket or if I didn’t have a jacket at all, then it’d make no sense to squabble over what color it is. It’s just a screwy question, so none of the four options hold. Nagarjuna ran with this, turning it into his signature philosophical method. By demonstrating that none of the four options held for a given question, he’d go on to prove to his readers or audience that it was hopelessly screwy. I think the custom of expressing this in Western formal logic is misleading (for reasons I won’t go into here), but if it helps you visualize the four folds or quadrants, this is what that looks like (where P is the assertion of that Something and asterisk means Else):

It’s true that Nagarjuna uses the tetralemma dialectically, to overcome “binary thinking,” but it drives me crazy when this is interpreted to mean that everything is fuzzy, trippy, or paradoxical, like some 14-year-old Youtuber talking about how he visualizes a hypercube. The point of the tetralemma is to clarify and it works pretty well if you let it. Let’s take ontology. Ontology has been assailed elsewhere by other means, and it’s the boilerplate example when it comes to the tetralemma, but I’m going to give it all my own spin. In terms of something’s “ontological status,” you have four options to choose from: being, non-being, a mix of being and non-being (perhaps like becoming), and neither being nor non-being (perhaps like transcendence). In previous sections, I go into the reasons why “being” is not the bedrock people think it is; that it’s a ruse of grammar or thought that tries to describe what all things are doing in common (“they’re all just… being”), or that imagines things as just metaphysically hanging out before stepping into action or predication. It makes sense why we do this. Before we build anything, the first thing we do is gather our materials. It feels only natural to begin the same way when reconstructing our world. Unfortunately, when really pressed, being turns into an empty abstraction that adds nothing at all: “there are over 8,000 languages spoken in the world, all of which are” or “water is composed of two existing hydrogen atoms and one existing oxygen atom” or “Had he never been born, Thermistocles would never have won the Battle of Salamis.” There’s a reason these sentences read like a highschooler trying to bulk up the word-count of an essay: beingness as such adds nothing to any real account. It elucidates little and explains even less. If you want to understand how Thermistocles defeated the Persians at Salamis, it functions only as a joke to say that it’s first and foremost because he was. Beingness does no work here. Nor is it implicit: it could be omitted from every causal story without a loss. If a fire really burns, does it matter whether it really is?

On the flipside, this doesn’t mean that these things “don’t really exist” either. This would presume the very thing we’re trying to disavow: that ontology’s partition of the world into being and non-being is fundamentally meaningful. When Nagarjuna said that not even the Buddha himself had svabhava, critics accused him of utter nihilism, because missing the point, they presumed that anything real had to be grounded in ontology. But Nagarjuna was rejecting the presumption, not the Buddha. To accuse the Buddha, or anything else, of non-being would only dignify the screwy question that he wanted us to get beyond. However, as his disciple Chandrakirti remarked, while svabhava may not be an enduring feature of the world, it is an annoying habit of the mind. Browse some online forums and you’re bound to read statements to the effect of: “Money doesn’t exist. It’s just a social construct.” “Transnistria isn’t a real nation-state.” “There is no such thing as human consciousness. Experience is an illusion.” “God created the integers. All the rest is the work of man.” Or bite on the clickbait title of the Nature article I read the other day: “​​Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does).” You read about all manner of things, rudely divested of their claims to being. What do we get out of this divestment though? For traditional metaphysics, I think part of the impulse is to strip away the clutter, just to see what we’re working with. This makes sense. The fewer the parts, the easier it is to understand. Parsimony is therefore prized. Of course, this stripping away can quickly get out of hand and lead us to the same “utter nihilism” decried by Nagarjuna’s critics — especially when we’re not sure what we’re looking for. We are, in the immortal words of Dante, going to sea without a port in mind.

Most of the time when we say something doesn’t exist, though, it isn’t really ontology talk. When cryptid-deniers tell you yetis don’t exist, this isn’t an ontological or even metaphysical statement. Everyone already gets what it means for an animal to exist, in the flesh and bone and hiding from photographers somewhere in the forest. Any questions about whether yetis exist are, in Carnap’s words, “internal to the framework” of what we all understand perfectly well about animals. There’s no controversy; hence no need for ontology. When anon says “money doesn’t exist,” rarely are they being literal. They know that money is a thing in the world. They’re making a point about how its value isn’t fixed or inherent, but fluid or socially determined. There could be an ontological slant if we take it to mean something about the broad category of values, but we don’t have to go down that alley. The jab about Transnistrian nation-statehood is slightly more ontological because, despite their recent invention, it seems that some undismissable portion of the world population really thinks of these “sets of people” as a natural kind. The more deadly serious they take this idea, the more brain-damaged their politics is by ontology. It’s just as likely, however, that Transnitria-deniers are only calmly restating the social fact that it isn’t widely recognized by the international community or separated by bold lines on any maps. It just depends on who you’re talking to. Once we come to mathematics, and whether or not fractions or probabilities exist, we now step fully onto the terrain of ontology precisely because we’re totally stumped on what it means for mathematical objects to exist in the first place. Likewise with human consciousness. The debate didn’t rage for centuries because we couldn’t agree on whether consciousness met the criteria. It raged on because consciousness was frustrating our ability to come up with any criteria to settle the question. This is the great irony. The only time we seem to turn to ontology to debate whether something exists or not is when it doesn’t make any difference either way. If some grizzled Russian misanthrope managed to prove once and for all that mathematical objects like numbers didn’t really exist, what would this change? Would we stop using it? Would the theorems no longer hold? Name one difference this would make to the practice of mathematics. Similarly, would you be any less conscious if consciousness was illusory? Philosophers could also prove that birthdays didn’t exist. It’s not like we’d stop celebrating them. We’d just be left wondering what that even means.

Dissatisfied with this “binary” partition of the world into being and non-being, many throughout the ages hedged their bets with an “in between” — a combo or blend, or an “interpenetration of opposites.” This brings us to the third quadrant of our tetralemma, the mix of being and non-being most popularly interpreted as becoming. In this interpretation, becoming is like a titration that introduces non-being into some being until, over time, a new being results. Or equally, one being pushes its way in until some other being is pushed out and into the shadow realm of non-being. By either account, becoming is somehow composed of being and non-being. This is a convenient way to think about it because, once again, it mimics one manner in which we often create change ourselves in our everyday projects. We slowly turn the volume down on one song as we turn up the volume of another and sense the transition with our ears. We add yellow paint to red paint and what appears but this new being, orange paint. This makes perfect sense to us, but only from a deceptive simplicity. First of all, it presumes the special case in which we have two elements already on hand and neatly separated, like at the beginning of craft hour. Secondly, it only explains change in a shallow sense because it conveniently leaves out what makes these elements elemental or how their combination actually brings about change. For instance, in the color theory of painting, yellow added to red will create orange, red added to blue will make purple, because yellow, blue, and red are elementary colors. That’s nice and all, but the real question is how they do this? And what makes yellow, red, and blue elementary colors in the first place? That is, why red, yellow, and blue rather than purple, orange, and green? Or for that matter, what is it that makes all blue things blue or all red things red? I know it’s “because” they all reflect a certain wavelength of light, but why do they all reflect that wavelength of light? This isn’t something we actually understand. It’s just something we fucking noticed. We can chart out all the predictable changes into laws of color and optics, but that doesn’t really explain why these changes behave the way they do. And apparently, as of press time, scientists are still stumped. The only thing that we can say that all blue things have in common is that they’re blue. That’s the best we’ve come up with in three thousand years.

To truly understand the changes, we’d have to get into what creates these colors and makes them elementary (thus nullifying them as first principles), and what causes their combination to produce certain colors rather than others. Likewise, we’d have to ask the same questions when trying to explain becoming as a composition of being and non-being. What’s causing these beings and non-beings to surge and ebb into becoming in the first place? The songs we’d be mixing wouldn’t be any more elemental or changeless than the change that’s created by mixing them (since as sound, they are already processes or species of becoming). Instead, here, change is effectuated and explained by a set of actions and potentialities, not by any being or its absence. In other words, the transition is explained by the less elemental: by the DJ and dancers, by the interweaving of the songs, by the play of the mixer, by the mood in the room. The kinetic is explained by the dynamic, not by the static. Becoming is not explained by being and non-being; it’s explained by the various powers pulling it off. Is it even helpful at all to think of becoming as a mix of being and non-being? As I grow and change as a person, yes, in some sense I become someone who I previously wasn’t, but is this really through some seance between the old and new me? When thinking about social change, like the French Revolution or China’s transition from communism to state capitalism, we explain it by putting together a story of diverse historical powers, not as a mix of being and non-being. If the mixing metaphor doesn’t make sense in either history or our everyday life, why would it fare any better in our metaphysics? It’s a long-repeated metaphysical conceit, with a nice ring to it, but it doesn’t make much sense when thinking seriously about changes in our world. At the same time, it’s also not particularly helpful to think of becoming as fundamentally pure either or to think of change as just “happening.” Ontology isn’t saved by substituting becoming for being as a fundamental element. Merely assuming change as a given doesn’t explain anything for the reason that assumption is never explanation. It excuses you from explanation, in fact. They’d balk at this description, but I think this applies to many if not most process ontologies. They acknowledge and accommodate the obvious reality of change, which is a step forward, but fall back into the same ontological trap by trying to ground themselves in what is essentially just liquid being.

That’s enough for now on the third panel of the tetralemma. Let’s move onto the fourth, transcendence, which immediately starts off on the wrong foot with respect to ontology. We think of ontology as the attempt to take stock of the “starting inventory of the world,” to say what is and isn’t in the world. Yet when we talk about something being “transcendental,” we usually either mean that it transcends this world and so is not “in” the world at all, or that it’s everywhere and nowhere at once and thus cannot be found within time and space. If this isn’t already a quandary, it’s at least a serious collision of metaphors. In either case, it reveals much about what’s actually going on underneath a lot of our ontological statements. In the taking stock, or gathering of materials, we’re thinking about beings as something that “there is” or “there are,” or in Spanish, German, or Swedish what the world “has,” “gives” or “finds.” In whichever words we choose to say it, ontology is in part trying to express something indexical. One image of being then is as something which we can point to or discover in the world. We’re saying “there it is” or “behold” or “here you go.” Or if the being isn’t there, it’s at last somewhere — meaning that ontology heavily relies on our categories of both space and indication. This is why transcendence puts you in such an awkward position. How do you locate something that’s not in the world? How do you point at something that is everywhere and nowhere at once? What could we possibly mean by a space beyond all space? Transcendence is thus not exactly being, but it ain’t exactly non-being either. With ontology, we’re once again beguiled by everyday scenarios, in which our spatial concepts and indications go over without a hitch. Everyone knows what it means when I say “there’s no liquor in the cabinet.” We all get what counts as inside and outside of the cabinet, and we all know how to point to the bottle of liquor or show our disappointed guests that the cabinet is empty. But this doesn’t scale to settle controversies about transcendental beings because we aren’t any clearer about where they are or how we would manage to point at them.

For example, strict materialists like Baron d’Holbach denied that transcendental things had any being at all. For him, there was nothing beyond the material world, and within that material world was only matter and motion. This was his ontology, based upon certain scientific conceptions of space and indication, which he wielded mercilessly in the defense of his atheism. Gods, spirits, angels, devils, heavens and hells didn’t make the cut, sorry. However, as centuries of tiresome debate have shown, this particular line of argument did little to settle the question of whether “there are” gods, spirits, angels, devils, heavens or hells, because much of the 18th century priestly class would have amicably agreed with d’Holbach that these things were either immaterial or beyond the material world. That wasn’t a problem for them. If anything, materiality was a lower kind of being than the immaterial or the beyond. The two sides were first and foremost disagreeing on the meaning of being, because their ontologies were shaped by very different ideas of space and indication (and of course motivated by antagonistic social and political beliefs). However, you come to the same stalemate when debating about almost any supposedly transcendental things, like properties or numbers, even among people who are otherwise in general agreement. While most people believe in numbers (whatever that means), a debate has long raged between realists and nominalists about the status of their being. Some Platonists and mystics excluded, most people defending the transcendental being of numbers are probably thinking about them as being everywhere at once rather than floating in some heavenly realm apart. They are in the world, and in fact absolutely everywhere. Yet this ubiquity doesn’t make them any easier to point to, and can even make pointing to them impossible (as Quine will tell you, pointing is not the straightforward thing you think it is). If a realist and a nominalist were walking down the aisles of a supermarket, the realist could point to a six-pack of Pepsi on a shelf as proof that the number six really existed in the world. The nominalist might scoff that he was only pointing at six Pepsi bottles, not a number, or that he was simultaneously pointing at one thing (the six pack) or to an indeterminate number of other Pepsi bottles on the shelf. The realist might retort that, au contraire, the number of Pepsis isn’t indeterminate; the bottles just need to be added up to find the number that exists. If the nominalist challenged the realist to show how you “add up” things in the world, the realist might grab two six packs, separate them from the rest and place them next to each other on the opposite shelf, physically performing the relation of ontology to space and indication right there in the middle of the soda aisle. This little debate could go back and forth forever — and did for centuries, until it kind of flamed out when a lot of philosophers of mathematics started to feel the pointlessness of ontology for the discipline. Many came to the conclusion that it was behavior, not beingness, that really mattered for mathematical objects anyway. Mathematical history can attest. What were previously non-beings or even impossible mathematical objects — zeros, negative numbers, irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, infinitesimals — were suddenly baptized into being not by pointing or discovery, but by demonstrating their interoperability with the rest of mathematics or the rest of the world. Ontology made no difference whatsoever. It never does.

This is one of the reasons I also don’t believe in an “ontology of powers” either, of the sort defended by Stephen Mumford and George Molnar (and in other ways, John Locke and his venerably learnèd contemporary Ralph Cudworth). Power is a composite of cause and possibility, and while I can explain perfectly well what I mean by this composition, I’d have no clue how to argue that causes and possibilities “really exist.” If I had a lump of clay, no one would disagree that it could be made into any number of possible shapes: an animal, a pyramid, a likeness of my father. But what would it mean to debate whether these possibilities exist or not? If they don’t, it doesn’t make them any less possible, and if they do, then we’d have to go and invent a special category of existence because they sure don’t exist like the lump of clay does. As Aristotle describes potentialities: “that which is capable of being and not being is, in a way, being and, in a way, not-being.” To clarify, we might turn to the biological metaphors so beloved by Aristotle. They might be “latent,” like a virus or illness, or “in utero,” in which possibility is a kind of pregnant being. So instead of being “out there,” we’re secretly thinking of possibilities as being “in there,” as the unborn are waiting in their mothers. Whatever workaround we come up with, possibility will never make sense in terms of either being or becoming because it isn’t reducible to them. I should phrase this more strongly: power, cause, and possibility resist any and all ontology because fully understanding them entails thinking without it. And now having passed through all the panels of our tetralemma, this is now easier to do because we see that the question of ontology is, and has always been, a screwy one. Thank you, Nagarjuna.

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While reading about the tetralemma, I immediately recognized a vague similarity with something I was struggling to articulate about my notion of a “power account.” Earlier on, I knew that power accounts were a kind of narrative. But they weren’t any old kind of story — least of all a sequence of events. I defined power as the marriage of cause and possibility; it was only reasonable to expect this relationship to be the central drama of any veritable power account. Conveniently, its storyboard could be sectioned into four general panels or quadrants, corresponding to the four main ways that cause dissects into possibility. In the first, we’d see how a certain ensemble of causes might successfully actualize some effects. In the second, we’d see how they might be thwarted or diverted to other effects. In the third, we’d see how those same effects could be achieved by another cast of causes. And in the fourth and final panel, we’d peep parallel stories, with different causes and different effects, that nonetheless begged a comparison with the original story. When all four were convincingly told and coherently held together, we’d have a framework for what I consider dynamic understanding. This was largely at odds with what was supposed to constitute understanding in so many domains: namely, the plotting of a process, or kinesis, from a chain of causes and effects, usually anchored by verified being and coherently linked by necessity. Whether this process was the eruption of a civil war, the interpretation of a novel, the workings of the internal combustion engine, or the movements of celestial bodies, the traditional criterion of explanation was how unbreakably it connected fixed points into unswerving lines. To understand why something was the case, supposedly, was to understand why it was necessarily — or at least reliably — the case. To understand how something worked was to know why it would necessarily or primarily work or unfold in a certain manner. You never get beyond the first panel. Your account always tells a rousing success story. In contrast, power accounts begin with failure, the moment you get how something could not work, not be the case, or might have succeeded otherwise. This is easier to swallow when thinking about culture, society, and history. Here, we’ve come to expect more wiggle room in our explanations, since our predictions and certainties are so frequently foiled by contingency and surprise (though neither contingency or surprise are equivalent to possibility in a dynamic sense). It’s also easier to accept in our personal lives and development, where selves emerge in the jostle amongst competing selves in our coming of age. There nevertheless persists the sense that the real explanation — the deeper explanation — would rightly name and properly plot the causes. My contention is that, though the modes and stories might be wildly different, power accounts constitute real understanding in all domains, and perform no less of a role in philosophical, scientific and (in Whitehead’s sense) cosmological questions than they do in fuzzier social, cultural, or historical ones.

One of the older hallmarks of scientific modernity was the quest for the Laws of Nature, the project of subjugating the cosmos through static and transcendental laws or nomoi, which governed the kinetic operations of immanent, efficient cause. This was the elevator pitch of the ontology of mechanism. It prided itself on its completeness and certainty, a pride achieved only by suppressing uncomfortable questions. Questions like: if all changes are produced as the application of a law, then what produces the laws themselves? Or, if nature acts in habits, what’s maintaining these regularities? If something does produce the laws, then isn’t there the potential that the laws could not be produced, and therefore they’d no longer be the inviolable guide rails for all kinetic operations? If nothing produces these inviolable laws or enforces their inviolability, if no account can be furnished besides “just because,” doesn’t this put those laws beyond our comprehension? The Laplacian dream of a complete table of all the Laws of Nature would bring science to the rim of an outermost heaven, beyond which we could understand absolutely nothing. The final aim of science would thus become sublime ignorance. Needless to say, I don’t actually believe that the meaning of understanding is grasping inviolable productive laws, but nearly the opposite, something closer to the verum factum of Giambattista Vico: we only understand that which we could cause or create ourselves, if only hypothetically as a supreme omnipotent being. Here you can see, understanding inherently involves power, comprising as it does both cause and possibility: that which we could cause or create. Understanding is profoundly modal, something that is hypothetically, counterfactually, or imaginatively reconstructed and recapitulated, even in cases where it’s later successfully minted in fact or by deed. Moreover, to know how to create something also means knowing how not to create it. To really understand how to bake a cake or weld a bike is to simultaneously understand how to really botch the job. To know how to write a great novel is to be agonizingly aware of all the ways to write a terrible one. To truly understand things like gravity or inertia — those seemingly unbending rules governing the natural world — is to understand the possibility of their violation, not their inviolability; their circumvention, not their ineluctability.

Let’s take something like Newton’s First Law of Motion: Every object perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, except insofar as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon, otherwise recognized as the principle of inertia. Insofar as it is a law of mechanics or kinematics, it’s only because we have no clue why it holds. In fact, in terms of a mechanics which explains everything in terms of force and mass, inertia is something we inherently cannot understand. We can’t bring in any force or mass to explain how inertia works since inertia is defined by the addition of no new forces or masses. Just like the color of things, we can say what it does, but next to nothing about how or why. This is because its violation is beyond our comprehension. In a dynamic understanding of inertia, we’d be able to, at least in theory, turn it off, tweak it, recreate it under different conditions, or bricolage a universe that worked just fine without it.

The problem though is not so much about how we think. It’s about how we think we think. When I say that power accounts “constitute dynamic understanding,” this sounds grandiose, but I’m really suggesting that they constitute understanding in all domains, even in our everyday lives and tacit physical know-how. It’s just that they contradict how we often reflectively conceive of understanding, particularly within our specialized disciplines. You get in your car in the morning, turn the key, put it into gear, and the car goes. This you understand. You could try to express this operation, if not as a set of laws, at least a predictable chain of events. Turning the key is what makes the car start. Putting it in gear and pressing the gas makes the car go. Turning the steering clockwise and counter-clockwise makes the car go right and left. However, this isn’t as simple or lawful as it seems, not only because you might decide to not turn the key or press the gas, but because one morning you may get in your car, turn the key, press the gas, and suddenly it doesn’t work. This is when it dawns on you that you don’t understand cars any more than you do magic carpets. You understand them only as self-propelling processes — as automobiles. So you call up your handy uncle and complain that when you turn the key, the car stays dead silent. You assure him that the lights still turn on, and he deduces that it’s not the battery but maybe the ignition. Your uncle understands more by virtue of the fact that he concretely sees how the process might fail and the car might not go. For all that, the man is humble enough to know his limits, and suggests you tow the thing to a mechanic, someone who understands how the car might otherwise go. A solid mechanic, one that more deeply understands cars, will know how to either fix or replace the ignition, or bypass it through some kludge or hotwiring to get it back to the shop. He’ll be able to conscript other causes to help us achieve the same effect, a moving automobile. You call the most highly-rated mechanic you can find, with one review online bragging about how he managed to save a stranded vehicle using a coat-hanger and a piece of gum. Yet even this man has heroes greater than he. In the waiting room, while stirring some non-dairy creamer into your coffee cup, you notice the faded pages of a magazine framed upon the wall. It’s about a Frenchman, Émile Leray. The article sings the deeds of this former electrician whose Citroën wrecked in the middle of a trek across the Sahara. With death a near certainty, and walking a suicide mission, Leray quickly got to work converting his Citroën into a crude form of motorcycle. The reporter detailed how “he started by removing the body of the car in order to use it as a shelter. He then took three of the wheels of the vehicle and strategically placed them on his new invention. He also shortened the frame and fixed the axles. Next, he converted the car’s rear bumper into a rudimentary seat and put the engine in front of it. Now all that was left to do was to place the suspension on the rear wheel and rig the ignition to the handlebar so that the new invention functioned like a real motorbike.” With all this completed, our hero rode his cycle all the way back to town to claim his bragging rights. Squeaking back into the pleather chair, you think to yourself: now there goes a man who understands cars. He understands them so well in fact that he could transform a car into something it wasn’t, a motorcycle.

Notice how this story unfolds like a tetralemma, each step corresponding to a greater understanding, from clueless driver, to world-wise uncle, to talented mechanic, to the god-tier bricolage of Emile Leray. Only in this tetralemma, we started with becoming rather than being, with a mere process or kinesis, that of a working automobile. Initially, the only way we understand the car’s processes is either (from the passenger side) as a given flow or (from the driver side) through the slavish repetition of the same steps in the same order, by rote procedure or rule. This is a pretty shit understanding in any domain, I think we can all agree, whether it’s baking a cake, solving a math problem, writing an essay, song, or screenplay, playing chess, or devising the political or economic system of an entire society. Its story welds causes to effects, whether by habit or necessitation. Our understanding deepens as we consider all the permutations of Something and Something Else, that is, through all the ways that cause might fold into possibility (rather than folds of “negation,” as others have characterized it). This is the shift from thinking about process to thinking about power. In the first panel is a relation of causes and effects. In the second, the possibility of other effects. In the third, the possibility of other causes. And in the fourth and final, the possibility of other causes and other effects. Here’s a mock-up of this in the form of a tetralemma:

Think about chess. I don’t know about you, but lately my feed’s been totally clogged with chess content: GothamChess narrating a Mikhail Tal or Magnus Carlsen game as if it was Homer’s Iliad, or a head-bobbing Hikaru disrespecting his opponents by “pushing Harry” or using “bongcloud” openings. I’m way too sloppy, impatient, or stupid to be very good myself, but I respect the art and rationalize the time lost on chess clips as good study in the general principles of strategy. As I talked about in an earlier section, in strategy, it’s obviously not enough to merely follow the rules in order to win. This doesn’t even count as strategy. Even random moves follow the rules. You’re just “pushing wood,” as they say. Strategy begins with a decent plan to checkmate the king, or to slay enough of his defenders to make that plan easier. This begins on the first panel of the tetralemma, where certain moves will be followed by other moves, eventually ending in checkmate. However, as any time on chess.com will teach you, very little will go as originally planned and you’re quickly bumped into the second panel, whether you like it or not. As you go from beginner to intermediate, you become better and better at grasping all the ways that your plan or pieces might be endangered, then by way of the third panel, how your pieces might be protected or how there might still be a clever path to victory. Strategy involves some calculation, but no human player can map out all the permutations, and after the first six or seven moves of the standard openings and defenses, this isn’t what advanced players are doing, least of all grandmasters. Instead, they think in broad gestalts, and in tournament play, will recall comparisons with great games they’ve studied by Fischer, Casablanca, or Karpov, despite any contrasts in exact positions or precise paths to victory. As bona fide masters, they confidently occupy the fourth panel. Military strategists follow the same path. In the first panel, you begin with the bungling assumption that you’re just going to waltz unimpeded to a “mission accomplished” due to your superior numbers or firepower (as Michael Mann tells us, most wars are lost by the aggressor). But by the final panel, you’ll have something like Frederick the Great vanquishing the far-larger Austrian at the Battle of Leuthen through the use of a bold “oblique-order attack” that he remembered from studying Epaminondas’ victory at the Battle of Leuctra (I had to look this up — I’m terrible at military history). To understand a game or a battle, even in retrospect, when the sequence of events is set and established, is still to grasp the ways that its many causes fold into so many possibilities. The causes don’t even have to be sequential or temporally staggered. This is the framework of any power account, whether for appreciating a novel or album, devising a mathematical proof, learning a language, studying the morphology of a plant, or criticizing imperialism or the rise of Silicon Valley.

As in Nagarjuna, the tetralemma itself doesn’t provide any answers. It only helps us organize our questions of power — and lord knows we’re going to need it. For any power account, the causes and possibilities involved are themselves infinite in number, detail, and kind. However, lucky for us, we don’t have to consider them all at once. This brings us to the two other criteria of power accounts — importance and concreteness — which I’ll now get into in the next, hopefully shorter parts…

Power is not a purely social relation. It’s a metaphysical or categorial relation, out of which we then configure or construe better or worse social relations like domination, suffering, violence, contest, cooperation, love, friendship, enmity, misery, happiness, and malaise. Questions about whether a configuration is good or bad, better or worse, and why, will depend on many things: its consequences, its principles, its beneficiaries, its victims, the particular time, place, or flex of a form of power, and its role within a greater design, history, or social nexus. These questions can be endlessly disputed, day and night, and as a matter of fact, should be. No power is intrinsically good or bad, and no unsituated power can be deemed just or unjust, emancipatory or oppressive, productive or unproductive, democratic or undemocratic. Contrast this however with the popular and theoretical tendency to construe “power,” explicitly or otherwise, as domination— as pejorative, coercive, manipulative, excessive, merely as power-over— or likewise, to construe better-working configurations like democracy and egalitarianism as something other than power, if not its absence. The poppiest treatments of the topic, like Robert Greene’s sniveling self-help The 48 Laws of Power, are inevitably the most psychopathic, but to be honest, it’s not always better in the academy. The political theorist Robert Dahl tells us that: “my intuitive idea of power, then, is something like this: A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” That is, he begins from a political theory of power which, defined by measurable contest, precludes consent or cooperation. What could possibly go wrong?

At the same time, power is also both popularly and theoretically associated with strictly political forms and institutions— that is, with “politics” in its more journalistic sense. If you casually drop the word “power” mid-conversation, as I’m inclined to do, people’s thoughts immediately leap to matters of state, or to the greater history of kingdoms and empires. Our images of power are deeply beholden to court and parliament. Curiously enough, though, these two preconceptions of power— both as domination and as state— put us in a funny spot. Together, as a syllogism, they imply that our political forms and organizations can never be more than varieties of domination; that we can never overcome or minimize domination, only produce different flavors of it. Political theory, then, only helps you pick your poison. This outlook plagues what is often referred to as the “realist” plank of modern political theory. Max Weber, who I consider to be on the softer side of realism, defined power (Macht) as “any chance within a social relation to impose one’s will also against the resistance of others, independently of what gives rise to this chance.” Scaled up to the political level, this means that the establishment of rule (Herrschaft) is little more than the institutionalization of domination, with authority looming above and obedience cowering below. As he says, Herrschaft is “the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.” In this “scientific” understanding of power, legitimacy becomes the measure of compliance yielding to domination rather than of justice resisting it. Weber’s attitude toward domination gets more nuanced the further you wade into his work, but even this is partly due to a certain wobbliness in the English translation of “Herrschaft,” and partly due to a treacherousness in the general realist outlook, in which, ever since Thrasymachus, it’s been difficult to discern whether they’re describing, defending, or ironically decrying domination. Nevertheless, for the harder realists, however cooperative politics may appear or become, it remains at bottom pure struggle— Kampf— and usually in its nastiest, most violent and rivalrous sense, with peace and agreement achievable only in stalemate or acquiescence.

This feels less realist than it does tragic, a dark insistence that domination is a terrestrial constant only to be endured in different permutations. The best alternative, though, is not power-blindness. It’s not toxically-positive liberalism or staid functionalism, in which domination is merely a misunderstanding in need of deliberation or a technocratic problem in need of solution. The best alternative is a veritably dynamic theory that explains how different configurations of power “enhance capacities while minimizing domination,” and how various forms of power flex into shifting degrees and dimensions of domination, depending on how and where they’re put into operation. The point of critique, after all, is to distinguish better, healthier, and juster configurations of power from worse, crueler, and shittier ones, in both their positive and negative moments. What makes this so tricky, besides the contestability of domination itself, is that its forms are constantly innovating, conditions are continually shifting, goalposts are moving, tables are turning, and every manifestation of power is itself, even in any one moment, inherently ambivalent. In this section, I’m going to explain how this “ambivalence of power” follows from a dynamic metaphysics, in particular from our causal-modal definition of power, however much it runs against our habits of neatly cleaving the world into trust and suspicion, heroes and villains, helpful and harmful, useful and useless, and last but not least, good and evil. This doesn’t eliminate values but it does illuminate them. Power is ambivalent in every mode— political, economic, ideological, cultural, social— but for the time being, I’m going to focus on technical power, precisely in order to emphasize how this “ambivalence of power” (and its corollary, “abstract domination”) doesn’t rely on the social dimension of power, and isn’t merely the result of human error, folly, or frailty.

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Read Leroi-Gourhan, Mumford, Simondon, Ellul, Stiegler, or Don Ihde. When these philosophers talk about “technics,” they don’t just mean technology. They’re not just talking about the gizmos: the windmills, combustion engines, birth control pills, Macbooks, coffee machines, or nuclear warheads. The term also encompasses social relations braided into technical objects and systems. The same goes for “technical power.” It comprises the total dynamics between tools and people, the technical dynamics between tools and tools, and the consequent social dynamics between people and people. The power of an automobile can include or involve all of the following: the automobile parts, the manufacturers, the mechanics, the drivers, the roads and highway systems, the highway and traffic police, the parallel public transport systems, the petroleum industry, the advent of self-driving vehicles, the principles of aerodynamics, and much, much more. It all depends on your scope. For the philosophers above, the scope gets pretty panoramic, so they usually try to break technics down into its increasing levels of extensive complexity: from tools and workers, to machines and operators, to technical systems and industries, until arriving at some total conglomerate of systems, such as the leviathan that Mumford dubbed the “Megamachine.” Or alternatively, they approach it through its degrees of intensive autonomy: from tools, to machines, to automated systems, to computational decision-making, culminating one day in the futurist feverdream of artificial general intelligence. Whatever their approach, they encourage us to understand technics in terms of interdependence and development— scientific, social, historical— rather than from the workshop and boardroom perspectives of engineering or entrepreneurialism. This is a welcome improvement, especially in the ethical void that is modern industry and research. However, by itself, it doesn’t amount to a dynamic philosophy of technics, one that understands developments and interdependencies fully in terms of powers rather than processes. A good, solid philosophy of technics will require an expert technical understanding (pace Martin Heidegger), in order to say how it all works and what specifically characterizes the technical. That being said, many of its unruliest gremlins only reveal themselves once we understand technics somewhat less technically, as another form or mode of power.

Tools are obviously a form of power. For all that obviousness, the dynamics of tools has long been obfuscated by the static-kinetic metaphysics underlying so much of technical thinking, as well as by the funny notion that tools, machines, and technical systems are but power-neutral objects until vicariously implemented by us power-happy humans. Lewis Mumford himself partly lapses into this when he sermonizes that “the machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises.” Here, I couldn’t disagree more. The machine itself does indeed make demands and hold out promises, merely in its own idiom. Yet the misguided idea that it doesn’t was one of the chief reasons it was chosen as a master metaphor for the natural world in early scientific modernity. Novatores like Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes were polemic in their rejection of Aristotle and teleology. They re-imagined the whole of nature as the gears and motions of a cosmic clock, wholly comprehensible in terms of forces, masses, and inviolable laws, without any need of the purposes or final causes of the Aristotelian worldview. One problem though: this new paradigm didn’t dispense with teleology in the way the Novatores had envisioned. The point of the new sciences was, after all, to understand the world, yet how could we understand a clock without understanding the purpose of time-keeping? If there was a machine in your kitchen or office, and you could describe how its parts moved, but had no fucking clue what it was for, would you honestly claim to understand it? If your coworker knew how the parts of a stapler fit together, but didn’t know how to use one, you’d probably think they were the boss’ idiot nephew, not a model of scientific learning. Mumford caught this gaff as well, but phrased it differently than I would: “By introducing the concept of a man-made mechanism, Descartes was secretly restoring those very subjective attributes: design, purpose, telos.” I don’t think of it as a question of subjectivity, because I don’t think purpose, or telos, depends on subjects. For me, it’s more the comic proposition that the natural world can be most meaningfully understood as a pointless machine.

You could try to salvage the metaphor by claiming, as many have, that the great cosmic mechanism does have an ultimate purpose, simply one known only to its Maker. This is a defensible position, but little help to us mortals, since in most mechanistic philosophies, the world itself remains locked in step by the chains of causal necessity. This means that, even if our spirits were free and self-determining, we’d never be able to impose our plans onto the causally necessary or divinely predetermined processes of the world around us. We could imagine but never act, seized in a state of metaphysical paralysis. Few of the early mechanists really took this to heart. Undeterred, they proclaimed that causal necessity could somehow be “guided” or “harnessed” for the benefit of humanity, which to me sounds a bit like installing a steering wheel on a freight train. Do we harness an animal to go wherever it was going anyway? Conversely, if it’s true, and our technologies and experiments are actually steering causal processes toward our own desired ends, then it’s hard to see how we could still seriously claim they’re necessary or predetermined.

For the sake of consistency, you could always double-down on determinism and dismiss any and all intervention as illusory, as later mechanists like La Mettrie or Baron d’Holbach vehemently did. However, by doing so, you’d be both denying the technological prometheanism of the new sciences and rendering their master metaphor incoherent. For if the world’s a machine (of the sort that natural philosophers trained their concepts on), then the world is a tool, and tools are utterly incomprehensible in terms of causal determinism (or even what’s characterized as “mechanistic processes”). Metaphysically, what distinguishes a tool from an object is its possible uses, an open possibility directly at odds with determinism. Just like the mystery machine in your kitchen or office, if you could only describe the physical qualities of a tool, or how its parts worked together, then you would only understand it as an object, and as a tool only once you grasped, however vaguely, its possible uses and failures. If you still want to insist that the cosmos is causally determined, then by definition, it can’t be a machine— of any sort. Sorry, buddy, you gotta get yourself a new metaphor.

This means that the natural philosophers, perhaps unwittingly, were offering the public a confusing and flatly contradictory programme. Free human control and causal determinism were mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop them from becoming the twin promises of Western scientific modernity. This wasn’t due to some split between science and technology, because there ain’t no such a split. Science draws its concepts from technology as much as technology instantiates scientific concepts. The two are conjoined twins, only now trying to travel in opposite directions. One of its heads was the virgin-autist Isaac Newton with the immutable laws of his Principia and Optics. The other was the slick-talking salesman Francis Bacon with his Novum Organon and New Atlantis, promising that the natural sciences would usher in “the enlargement of the bounds of humane empire.” This was quite the pitch. Bacon was eyeing not only utility and betterment, but world domination. Mumford weighs in to say:

“Behind all Bacon’s expectations, however, there was a little-noted factor that was to mark the inauguration of an age committed increasingly to the pursuit of science and the perfection of machines: an ambition for conquest that coincided with a growing sense of power which the machines already in existence, particularly cannon and firearms, had greatly stimulated. According to Bacon, there are three kinds of human ambition. The first is that of extending one’s personal power in one’s own country—the ambition of princes, lords, soldiers, merchants. The second is the increase of the power of one’s country over other countries— more dignified than the first, according to Bacon, but not less covetous and selfish. Finally, there is the ambition to enlarge the power and the dominion of the human race “over the universe of things.” This last seemed to Bacon a more disinterested and noble ambition than the other two, for “the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences.”

These were the kind of quotes that had later critics, both inside and outside the scientific community, accusing Bacon of crass utilitarianism, of a perversion of science that led to the dehumanizations, exploitation, colonialism, and endless wars of expansionist Europe. For some defenders of the new sciences, this perversion could be absolved by renewing vows to a “more disinterested and noble ambition,” by separating the “pure” from the “applied” sciences, or the sciences from technology, or most improbably, knowledge from power. It wasn’t enough for science to merely disavow Bacon’s blares for global domination. It had to go and swear off “utility” altogether. Some suggested that it follow the lead of that purest, that least worldly, of all scientific disciplines: mathematics, which naturally aligned with divine contemplation in theological rationalists like Leibniz and Newton, or best of all, in the number theory of actual monks like Marin Mersenne. But was this “pure” mathematics actually without utility? It depends on what we mean by “utility,” I guess. It’s a word with contradictory definitions. One meaning of utility is having a predefined function, such as a key that only opens one door, or when we insult someone as “utilitarian” to call them dreamless. In this sense, sure enough, pure mathematics has no utility, no predefined functions to serve, and so much the better for it. But if “utility” just means “usefulness,” as it does in most lexicons, then the utility of pure mathematics was boundless. There was no limit to what you could do with it. Pureness then was a surplus, not an absence, of utility.

History bears this out with regard to Marin Mersenne. In 17th century France, Mersenne’s arcane investigations into prime factorization might have struck his contemporaries as fairly useless, or useful only insofar as it offered a glimpse into the unfathomable mind of God. Three centuries on, though, and number theory became one the bases of computational cryptography, a branch of mathematics so useful it’s been militarized and guarded at the highest levels as a state or corporate secret. Coming from the other direction, recall that Cardano, Fermat, and the devoutly Jansenist Pascal didn’t devise the foundations of probability in an act of sheer mathematical epiphany. They were trying to solve problems related to that most disinterested of all human activities: gambling. Nonetheless, these same probabilistic concepts later became a cornerstone of quantum physics, in order to, once again, offer us a glimpse into the unfathomable. It just goes to show, no matter how pure mathematics might get, at no point does it ever detach itself from our power-laden world. And if this is true for mathematics, it’d be rash to believe it’s any different for the this-worldy natural sciences. There were plenty of metaphysical and scientific treatises in early modernity that spoke about “powers” (specifically “causal powers”), but most of the time these weren’t supposed to be the same kind of “powers” that appeared in the social and political treatises. They were sharply distinguished, especially by the chad-disenchanters of the Enlightenment, for whom the social sense of power had no place in an impersonal cosmos. Stones could have mass and position. They could have qualities and quantities. They could be acted upon by laws and forces. They didn’t have power though— not in the same sense as courts and parliaments. My contention is that they do indeed have power in the same sense, the sense of power as composed by cause and possibility, that extends from the king of kings to the merest things of his kingdom.

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To see what I mean, we need to review some simple ideas we have about causes and things. For this, we’ll return to a time long, long ago, before human society blemished the face of the earth. Imagine, if you will, a boulder upon a cliff sometime in the Precambrian era. There it has rested for untold eons, when suddenly, one day, it’s shaken from its perch and rolls down the cliffside, into a cluster of rocks in the valley below, sending them asunder like a set of bowling pins. A classically Newtonian event. In this story, the boulder plays the protagonist. Its motion is the cause; and the scattering of the rocks, the effect. This is a completely true story. The boulder did have a “causal power,” the force of its momentum, which was transferred to the rocks below, like the passing of a baton. However, there’s another telling, still in tune with Newton, though less intuitively Newtonian. In the telling of stories, minds are like eyes. They tend to follow motion. They prefer discrete, punchy, proximate actions. And so in our first intuition, causation seems to “flow” in one direction from the boulder to the rocks below. However, in this scenario, it’s no less true to say that the rocks in the valley were the cause and the boulder was the effect, that the arrows of causation “flowed” from the rocks to the boulder. After all, the rocks in the valley caused the boulder to stop, lightly chipping its edges in the collision. That is, they transferred their stillness, and the causal powers of that stillness, to the boulder all while subtly leaving their mark. Instead of ascribing the operative forces to the potential energy of the boulder, to the gravitational advantage of its height upon the perch, we could equally describe the positional advantage of the rocks in the valley, closer to the Earth’s center, which beckoned the boulder into their midst. Both accounts are simultaneously and equally true. The arrows of causation go both ways. Even in this simplest of Newtonian stories, the causal powers of both boulder and rocks work reciprocally upon each other.

Reciprocity isn’t just a restatement of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which tells us that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” For one, it undermines any clean distinction between actions and reactions, but more significantly, it means that for any event, action, or process, everything involved is always both a cause and effect. This is nothing original. Strictly as a causal model, some version of this has been banging around for a while in disciplines like cybernetics and systems theory. Common sense has, little surprise, been slower to catch on. Reciprocity runs against several habits of mind, such as the tendency to seek out “first causes,” not just in the lofty Aristotelian sense of an unmoved mover, but of any kind: metaphysical, temporal, or local. There’s nowhere to naturally start and nothing to fully blame. This can be maddening when settling feuds or misunderstandings, but this “bidirectional” or “multidirectional” causality helped science get a steadier grip on the slippery, emergent, chaotic phenomena of our world, even allowing for the “upward” and “downward” causation between different levels and scales of any system. Beyond this, reciprocity also works between radically different kinds of causes (and hence different modes of power). Thus even when we’re speaking about Newton’s Third Law of Motion, reciprocity demands that we ask how the boulder and the rocks in the valley affect the “Laws of Nature.” How do they affect gravity? How do they affect inertia? To put it more gently, how are these “laws” (whether causal powers or mere regularities) caused or conditioned by the things they supposedly govern, even if in some collective sense?

Without a natural starting point, causal stories (like the power accounts built upon them) will begin in media res and proceed as choose-your-own-adventures guided by questions of coherence, salience, and relevance. In conventional practice, science tends to proceed cautiously, sticking with very empirical and uniform kinds of causes. Metaphysics, not so much. It’s freer to follow out reciprocity into what you could think of as “omnidirectionality.” You’ll find this in some of the more avant-garde anti-mechanistic metaphysics, such as certain varieties of 19th century “ontologies of organism” (or organicism) and 20th century “ontologies of computation” (such as cybernetics). It also characterizes the causal nexus of Buddhist metaphysics, in the conception of “mutual arising” or “dependent origination” (paticca samuppada in Pali, or pratitya samutpada in Sanskrit), in which causal reciprocity expands all the way out into a cosmic holism, in which absolutely everything is causally linked to everything else, and which mutually supports other pillars of Buddhism like “impermanence” (the wholesale denial of static metaphysics) and “emptiness” (the wholesale denial of ontology).

As cool as these causal models are, they’re not in and of themselves dynamic. They’re just complex. Dynamism requires that our causal models be integrated with a modal dimension of possibility. Both cause and possibility are needed to combine into the full gradient of power. To get a better handle on the “ambivalence of power,” I’m going to consider them in turn, because ambivalence has two aspects; one having more do with its causal dimension, the other, with its modal or possibilistic dimension. Along the causal dimension, the ambivalence hinges upon reciprocity. Just as causation is never “flowing” in one direction, but always both directions at once, accordingly so too is power, even in the most asymmetrical power operations (whether it’s between people and tools or between lords and bondsmen). Power always works in both directions because the causes that constitute it are always reciprocal (a dynamic that underpins what Don Ihde calls the “non-neutrality” of technics). Along the modal or possibilistic dimension, the ambivalence of power is a result of what we’ll call “pleotropy,” a term borrowed from biology by the metaphysician George Molnar, and that I borrow in turn, slightly altered in meaning. It’s a weird word, but the concept behind it is more widely accepted than reciprocity (Ihde uses the similar term “multistability” when speaking about the pleotropy of technics). Etymologically, pleotropy means “more or many ways,” and the basic interpretation of this is that every cause has many possible effects. More evocatively, it means that every set of causes is like a fountain ever-flowing with both actual and possible effects.

Bringing this back to technics, I’ll set up yet another scenario, only this time in a period in which humans busily roamed the Earth. I could begin with the advent of tools among early hominids, like Leroi-Gourhan, but will fast-forward a bit to Mesopotamia, right before the rise of the Sumerian Empire, to establish an appreciably social context for the interpretation of tools. What were these guys working with? Well, all kinds of tools, but let’s go with a simpler category like blades: the knife, the axe, the plow. Clearly, blades empower their users. Their sharpness and strength supplement the causal powers of our bare hands, enabling us to cut or puncture things we otherwise couldn’t. Their form and basic properties change very little or very slowly in use. Despite this simplicity, their possible uses range widely. Primarily, blades can cut or part anything softer than themselves: wood, fruit, hair, soil, cloth, and flesh, whether human or animal. Their properties condition without wholly determining their use; the connection of causes to effects is pleotropic, with one set of causes branching out into an incalculable spread of possible effects. By “incalculable” I don’t mean just very large. I mean, quite literally, that possibility can’t be formulated as a sort of calculus among predeterminable options, a forking path or flowchart between causes and various effects. It’s open-ended, not multiple-choice. It’s possibility in a dynamic sense, not in the static-kinetic approximation of possibility as either probability or contingency. Pleotropy entails a nimbus of possibilities, not a fixed menu, and the reason I’m fond of this word is because the “pleo-” prefix means more than just “multiple.” It connotes an excess, a flowing over, too many or too much to be counted or contained. Aside from slicing and violence, the knife or dagger can also be used to point, scratch a back, clean fingernails, prop open doors, juggle or play games, impress women and passers-by, write in the sand, trade for other goods — the list is inexhaustible because the whole manifold of possibilities is itself pliant. It gets even wilder when we realize that the ambivalence of tools lies not just in their immediate physical actions, but in the social interpretation of these actions. The archaeological record backs this up. As Mumford attests:

“In the forest that stretches from the crown of the mountain seaward the hunter stalks his game: his is possibly the oldest deliberate technical operation of mankind for in their origin the weapon and the tool are interchangeable. The simple hammerhead serves equally as a missile: the knife kills the game and cuts it up: the ax may cut down a tree or slay an enemy.”

Deleuze and Guattari, likewise, write in Milles Plateaux:

“A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). But although this extrinsic distinction explains certain secondary adaptations of a technical object, it does not preclude a general convertibility between the two groups, to the extent that it seems very difficult to propose an intrinsic difference between weapons and tools. The types of percussion, as defined by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, are found on both sides. ‘For ages on end agricultural implements and weapons of war must have remained identical.’”

This convertibility is pleotropic: the causes are identical; the effects, multifarious. The tool becomes a weapon not by physical alteration, nor even by drastically different physical actions, but through differing social relations to beneficence and violence. This ambivalence was the pivot upon which cities and empires arose in ancient Mesopotamia, where entire constructive and agricultural systems were alternatively used for the gains of productive growth and the spoils of destructive war. Likewise, as critics have observed, the same productive systems that in one sense liberated us from scarcity and toil, whether in the agricultural turn or the industrial revolution, were very often quickly commandeered as apparatuses of coercion and control. However, every productive system will always carry this threat of counter-productive employment, and in proportion to its very productivity. This is no cause for despair, nor evidence for the dour techno-pessimism you find in everyone from Martin Heidegger to Ted Kaczynski. Wholly to the contrary. The ambivalence of power refutes by definition both Heidegger’s techno-quasi-essentialism (“The essence of modern technology lies in Enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing”) and the Unabomber’s techno-determinism (“if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy”). Taken to heart, the ambivalance of power should also instill in us an ambivalence of mood, in which we refrain from betting the house on either pessimism or optimism, or attributing destinies to devices or any other form or system of power.

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Causal reciprocity means that, in every relation, even between just two things, each will be both a cause and an effect of the other. Translated into terms of power, as a composite of cause and possibility, this means that in every relation, even just between two things, each exerts some form, mode, or measure of power upon the other. Power moves inevitably in both directions: whatsoever enables likewise constrains. In technical terms, as the tool, machine, or system serves us, it simultaneously puts differing demands upon us, often demanding more and more, until the point at which we’re more in its service than it is in ours. Not only is it a double-edged sword, we can’t always be sure which side is the handle and which is the blade. In dynamic terms, this runs against the common conception of power as a unidirectional power-over, and frustrates our wishes to safely and incontestably determine, once and for all, the character of our configurations. In the relations of domination, cooperation, violence, friendship, love, happiness, and misery, run cross-currents and contradictions that should never be suppressed or ignored. This isn’t because of the messiness of social relations. It’s inherent to all power dynamics, technical or otherwise. However clear-cut the domination or beneficence may be at any one point, we still cannot cleanly and incontestably determine who is dominating who, or who is benefiting who, once and for all. We can never set it and forget it. So critique requires vigilance. The small, hidden, seemingly negligible counter-demands can quickly compound and turn the tables, whether in private dealings or on the plane of history.

In fact, many times, the question of “who” can be misleading. Every powerform— tools, weapons, systems, concepts, cash, charisma, laws— simultaneously makes reciprocal claims upon us, claims we often ignore even as they grow stronger or increasingly effective. After a certain point, unknowable in advance, the tilt of the power asymmetry will shift and switch, until we effectively fall under its thrall or control, and become dominated by the powerform itself. Through a mix of both pleotropic and reciprocal ambivalence, the systems that we participate in, precisely in order for the gains they give us, and precisely as powerfields with conditions of success, eventually come to dominate us both individually and collectively. This is what I think of as “abstract domination.” This doesn’t mean domination by a principle of abstraction, or social domination reified into “abstract” systems like law, technology, or economics, as it’s often described, but domination that is “abstract” insofar as it is not subjective or figurative (with one subject or party dominating another) but by the system or powerform itself, by a revenge of preconditions that makes it hard to name the powerholder or divine the source of domination. Again, this isn’t because the forms themselves are too “abstract,” lacking human warmth or prudence. It happens as much in religious systems as it does in technical systems, as much with words as it does with numbers, as much in the demands of beauty as in the demands of the market. Most persistent forms of domination are a noxious blend of both the figurative and the abstract, working in turns or in tandem, but my bet is that any strategy for “enhancing capacities while minimizing domination” will need a decent overview of which is which and how they come about. Unfortunately, I see signs that our view is pretty blinkered, especially in the recent public debates surrounding the platforms and technical systems coming out of Silicon Valley. So in the next part, I’m going to use them as a concrete example for thinking about abstract domination and the ambivalence of power.

“Let none resemble another; let each resemble the highest! How can that happen? Let each be all complete in itself.” — Friedrich Schiller

The hierarchical order of feudal Europe was toppled by detonating the tiers of privilege — that is, the privilegium or “private law” — accorded to the different parts or stations of the Old Regime. Even if the fuse had been lit by the flares of far more radical egalitarian spirits — Cathars, Hussites, Levelers, indigenous Americans, a handful of really-hard-going lumières and commonwealthmen — I think of this primarily legal egalitarianism as the most lasting and universally agreed-upon notion of “equality” to come out of the birth-pangs of modern Europe. Other meanings had mixed success. This was probably because they embarrassed the forms of hierarchy still consistent with this bold, new, modern European society. When philosophers described an innate moral equality that accorded respect and reason to every individual, this was great news so long as it extended to gentlemen and not to women, workers, servants, paupers, or the vast majority of humanity of non-European descent. Likewise, any broader cultural or ideological recognition of equality (whether of people or peoples) guaranteed only an “equality among equals” if it wasn’t backed up with the corresponding power to demand that recognition. And anywhere that equality got in the way of the newly-gathering hierarchies of accumulation, it was shouted down by the demands of property, inverted as an injustice, and willfully confused for static or mathematical equality. To this day, even some of its defenders will backslide into static categories: that equality, while not “identicality,” is a rough “similarity” or a comparability of some common, god-given “qualities” or inalienable “possessions” — though usually tautological ones like human dignity or moral worth (again, aren’t we dignified or worthy only to the degree that we can feasibly demand equality?). The oft-heard rationale is that, on some fundamental level, we are samer than we are different, and herein lies the basis for social “unity.” As Bill Clinton proclaimed to the primer-inter-pares Yale graduating class: “My basic belief is the only way that you can make the most of the world that lies before you is to believe that, as interesting and fascinating and profoundly important as all of our diversities are, our common humanity matters more.”

Even if you think this math checks out (and I don’t), it suggests that egalitarianism will always depend on some degree of smoothing over or leveling down, a sapping of color, character, or capacities. It doesn’t help that so many 20th-century utopian projects visualized egalitarianism as uniformity, as grids, blocks, and products scrubbed of difference. “Champions of individual liberty” could then latch onto images of featureless grey apartment-barracks and human masses packaged in standard-issue tunic suits, and present them as proof that social equality can only be achieved through top-down normalization. Social inequality in the meaningful sense, though, is not about similarities and differences. It’s not a static relation. It’s a power differential, and not a differential between our individual capacities — between our talents, passions, and efforts — as some try to pretend. It’s the power differential between stifling, accreted forms of institutionalized power, under which our individual capacities actually dull and fall into disuse. The best egalitarian projects question not only the intensity of these differentials and the relative powers involved, but how they came to be and the results that are sure to follow — both their causes and effects within the greater social nexus of powers.

I’ll leave the question of causes for later and focus for now on the social and moral effects. The problem with stark inequalities is not merely that they’re “unfair,” or that they create unnecessary suffering in the form of poverty or deprivation (though you’d like to think this would be enough of a reason for any decent society). As I see it, the bigger problem with severe power imbalances is that they simultaneously create the two conditions in which social evils truly thrive: impunity among the overpowerful and desperation among the powerless. When it comes to heeding any moral scruples, norms, or constraints whatsoever, the powerful no longer must, and the powerless no longer can. Put this way, you have to play stupid not to see it. What could any “moral defense” of these asymmetries possibly mean? Impunity and desperation, each in their own way, raze the preconditions of ethics or morality, and atrophy the constitution of what on the individual level we think of as the “conscience.” Stark inequality produces bitter iniquity, nearly by deduction or definition. This flips Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals on its head. He was absolutely right-on about how moralities emerge from or in tandem with power relations, yet totally off the mark in an equally important respect: we have to say that stark power imbalances actually create “master” and “slave” immoralities. They define a broken social whole that can’t help but overproduce insufferable behavior in two complementary flavors, neither of them “good,” “noble,” “vital,” or “life-affirming.” So rather than invoking morals or ethics to defend or redefine egalitarianism, the move is to invoke egalitarianism to defend or redefine morals and ethics.

Moral sense and ethical agency depend on weighing the consequences of our actions: on how they figure into the wider stream of causes and effects, and more generally, how we understand social causation altogether. For instance, the rude readjustment of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem — of “the banality of evil” — lies in its account of the social causation of great evils, of how they arise through summing millions of instances of inaction, thoughtlessness, cowardice, rigidity, and deferrals to authority, and in the case of someone as pathetic as Adolf Eichmann, couldn’t be explained by any diabolical source singled out for final reckoning. On the stand at least, Eichmann readily agreed: the annihilation of European Jews was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of Humanity.” So instead of a satisfying confrontation with evil or a refutation of an immoral value system, what the public got was an unwelcome glimpse into the underlying social metaphysics of evil and immoral action. “Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all ‘normal persons,’ must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was ‘no exception within the Nazi regime.’ However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally.’ This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.”

Arendt wouldn’t exactly see it this way, but down to the details of Eichmann’s chief logistical role in the mass transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, it’s almost a direct repudiation of the widely-memed “trolley problem” conception of ethics, in which the lone individual employs universalizable, power-blind judgment in order to derive the most moral choice within any given dilemma. Eichmann himself protested that much of his earlier efforts to shuffle and resettle Jews elsewhere were, in fact, precisely this kind of moral reasoning — that he was trying to save as many lives as possible given the circumstances of the “Jewish problem.” During the police examination, he revealed that, actually, “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.” Along with nearly everyone present, Arendt was astonished to hear this coming out of a man of such “modest mental gifts,” but was still quick to correct Eichmann on his distorted reading of the Critique of Practical Reason. But let’s say Eichmann had gotten his Kant right. Let’s say he was an internationally-renowned Kant scholar. Germany surely had more of those than any other place in the world — and a lot of good that did. And why would it do any good? What would either force or permit someone in such grim trolley-problem situations to call or act upon their autonomous moral reasoning, even if they could or wanted to in cooler circumstances? Even as a thought experiment, I’d like to think that the real moral sticking-points for any trolley problem would be things like: why are there people strapped to the train tracks? Who or what is forcing some poor slob to choose between killing five sickly adults and two newborns? How did this happen and why can’t they refuse or get out of it? How did power configurations, in their conjunction of cause and possibility, get so botched to ever create this dilemma in the first place? I mean, I get the usefulness of dilemmas. In a dilemma, we’re powerless to alter our choices, and our choices are nearly equally terrible in outcome. It’s meant to test our bare ethics in a controlled experiment. However, how is moral choice anything but false without real possibilities to choose from or causal powers to change anything? What good is ethics if divorced from the powers that are shaping our choices, reasoning, and possible outcomes?

In the same regard, when it comes to inequality, we have to ask how our sense of causation warps under the pressures of grotesque power-asymmetries. What do consequences mean to the desperate or the immune? Both sides experience a sort of kink or tear in the causal nexus. The desperate, for their part, don’t have the luxury to consider wider consequences. The future must be sacrificed to present need. And the more power-imbalances press upon necessities like shelter, safety, or general subsistence, the more necessary (and hence less autonomous) our desperate reactions become. The possibilities for moral choice are pruned down to a nub. But it isn’t absolute: there will always be heroics and exceptional actors, some extra-good individuals or groups here and there, able to retain their relative moral autonomy in the grip of pain, panic, hunger, poverty, addiction, or danger. On the level of the social whole, though, it stands to reason that the majority of people will never be better than average. On average, they’ll only be as good and decent as the worlds they inhabit. We’ll call this the “Principle of Moral Mediocrity.” Preach, punish, and police all you want: the social percentages of malignant reaction and evil effects will remain the same. They’re predictable by-products of a brutally lop-sided distribution of power… which is why it’s so hilarious and shammy that our attempts at social reform are overwhelmingly directed at those with the least power to change anything, when what needs re-forming is the form of the social whole. Even shammier though is that, once these reforms inevitably fail, apologists submit this failure as proof that social inequality is an ineluctable fact of modern life. That’s the brilliance of these reforms. As with so much of charity, philanthropy, humanitarian aid, effective altruism, any largesse-like transfer of goods or aisance made only to keep the laboring classes productive, they affect changes without affecting the production of change. They empirically reduce differences while entrenching differentials of power.

This leads us right into other questions, though, about the overpowerful themselves. On a more abstract level, we understand that as a bracket or echelon, they may be committed to compounding differentials, even at the cost of great human suffering or sometimes jeopardizing their own goals, legacy, or self-preservation. What de Jouvenel perceived about the State — that “the struggle to magnify itself is of Power’s essence” — would apply to any form of overconcentrated power. But what about on the moral level, or in terms of the individual conscience? What explains the callousness or heedlessness of the overpowerful? Here, psychopathology only diagnoses the results — that certain actors are motivated by “greed,” or that “power causes a form of brain damage,” bludgeoning empathy or comically convincing moguls that it’s wiser to build bunkers in the Swiss mountainside rather than alter the course of world destruction. This doesn’t explain their relation to moral choice. What’s the underlying social metaphysics in their case? For them, the causal nexus isn’t foreshortened by a relative necessitation, as it is for the doomed, but it seems to me that they’re even more consistent — often gleeful — in their iniquity. When this isn’t folklorically explained as the upper echelons simply being overpopulated by the wicked — by species of metaphorical-reptilians or rings of pedophiles, that can only be identified through sinister genealogies, Epstein’s flight-logs, or roman salutes at presidential inaugurations — it’s chalked up to something nearly as mysterious, something which has cursed social and political organization for as long as we can remember: this inexplicable phenomenon, “corruption.”

Corruption is something that we’ve simply observed time and time again, in our heroes, leadership, watchdog institutions, and even in our mechanisms of democratic representation, where as soon as we promote the very good and virtuous among us to positions of power they cease being either very good, or virtuous, or “one of us.” After too many historical disappointments to count, the lessons have coalesced into the maxim that “power naturally corrupts” and, even more unquestionably, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s sound advice, but doesn’t explain why power corrupts. Is it just, as we tend to imagine, the human conscience succumbing to some kind of power-madness or supernatural possession? It certainly appears that way — and always will if we insist on thinking of moral autonomy as hermetic, or of the conscience as something working outside or against rather than integrally within the broader nexus of powers. Corruption mystifies us insofar as we only track the changes within the individual or entity itself, which is a bit like blaming our flowerbeds for turning black when the Sun goes down. The metaphysics of corruption narrates the change as a form of metamorphosis, initiated by an exposure to “external influences.” The antidote usually prescribed is some kind of quarantine: keep our leaders away from the wrong crowd, fortify the walls of our institutions, banish the forces of hatred that turn our heroes to the dark side. Grimes pleafully tweets out to Elon: “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a call. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.” This may work for a while, as a mechanism, in that it staves off collusions that might end in even greater concentrations of power. However, without bucking up and addressing the worrisome power differentials working on these people, entities or institutions, it’s only a matter of time until the safeguards fail and the walls are eventually breached.

In moral terms, though, it also completely flies in the face of how we describe the conscience of the overpowerful: that they are disconnected, aloof, insular, lacking in empathy or understanding for the rest of the world. It seems strange then to think that we might cure corruption by even greater isolation from the “external influences” that give form to conscience, that force the recognition of others — of their existence, their worth, their suffering, their capacities, or their equality with those lording over them. At the same time, you would no longer think of it as a “conscience” if it were merely a product of those external influences, wholly determined by context and robbed of its moral autonomy to act conscientiously. This forces us to consider that the conscience (and all moral autonomy as such) depends neither on union nor isolation, but on the configuration of relative powers — whether over self-determination or the choice between all those competing “external influences,” good, bad, or simply informative. Under the sea-level pressures of more egalitarian differentials, moral autonomy thrives in a balanced exchange with the surrounding nexus of powers. Under the geothermal pressures of focused institutional power, or in the stratospheric vacuum of plutocratic distance, it soon loses its integrity. The actual wisdom behind the infographics about not “appealing to the conscience of your oppressors” is what it understands about the underlying relationship between oppression and conscientiousness. Not to say that it never works. There will always be flukes or exceptions — usually from spikes in the much-less-calculable forms of ideological or cultural power (check out Ashoka’s change of heart after his bloody conquest of Kalinga) — but applying the “Principle of Moral Mediocrity,” we’d be fools to rely on them.

It’s not a question about individuals. It’s often not wholly a question about people, even. Power-asymmetries are not merely between two people, two groups, two nations, two identities —  between two points within the whole. These are asymmetries in the broader shapes of the world. Cruel immorality or cynical amorality describe these huge shapes every bit as much as they do any agent, any organ, or anything positioned within. In the junctures of highly overconcentrated power, even things — objects, laws, abstractions, institutions, the most mechanical and least human of operations and processes — will themselves act immorally or amorally, and dutifully reproduce the same social ills and evils, as if animated by malice. The stars will seem to be aligned against us. This undermines that school of thought which Elizabeth Anderson has named “luck egalitarianism,” which she defines through a quotation from one of its lecturers, Richard Arneson: “The concern of distributive justice is to compensate individuals for misfortune. Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society — all of us regarded collectively-to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it . .. Distributive justice stipulates that the lucky should transfer some or all of their gains due to luck to the unlucky.” As a defender of “democratic equality,” Elizabeth Anderson rebuts “The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed.” It think it cuts even deeper though: under the conditions of galling inequality, it becomes increasingly impossible to even distinguish whether the effects and evils are the result of natural misfortune or social oppression. The entire idea of “brute luck” becomes untenable.

I’m writing this a few weeks after the fires in Los Angeles that destroyed the Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. Altadena was my home for a few years, and until it was consumed by the Eaton fire, was also the home of my best friend and his family, where I spent the recent summer. In the midst of all the smoking embers and shattered lives, there was rightfully a need to find a culprit, in order to place responsibility. The question was often: how much of this was a human failing and how much of it was a natural disaster? The unstated assumption here was that natural disasters, as acts of God, are amoral and so exculpate human responsibility. I think this is mostly true when considering individual cases, such as defendants on trial for calamities that they were helpless to prevent. I’d even say that it’s mostly true that nature unto itself is amoral, in that it’s at least a little weird or category-mistaken to condemn something like the homicidal brutality of the animal kingdom. It’s another matter altogether though when we’re talking about the ever-widening interface between earth and society, or the entanglements of nature and culture, in which natural disasters can become deeply moral phenomena (think of all the moral thought that spun out of the Black Death or the Lisbon Earthquake). However “natural” they may be, their disastrousness is usually in large part social.

This came into sharp relief in the news surrounding the Los Angeles fires. Nearly any contributing factor you could name — climate change, land management, insurance industries, municipal malfeasance, the housing and homelessness crisis — were recognizably crises of social inequality and domination, and perfect kindling even if you didn’t want to agree they were “causes.” It was certainly in some people’s interests that we didn’t recognize the social element of these disasters, but in all their hollering and attempts at distraction, they ended up proving it anyway. Characteristically eager to avoid social questions and pin the blame on the downtrodden, the local news was on the scene, interviewing concerned citizens who were quick to scapegoat the “homeless encampments” hidden in the city’s wooded areas. This was a smooth-brained strategy. Let’s say it was true. What would Los Angeles do if it found out that some lone homeless arsonist had either accidentally or maliciously set the city ablaze? Burn them at the stake in front of city hall? Have fun. It won’t accomplish anything. The only solution would be to house them. The imperatives of current housing markets and policy will only drive more people into homelessness. Urban evictions will only force them to seek peace further into the brush of the natural perimeters. And the city and the police can only brutalize the homeless but so much until you’d expect one of them to dream of revenge and light the world on fire, just to let everyone see how it feels. It’s not for nothing that people keep mentioning the pyromaniac “painted faces” in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Yet it wouldn’t be so irrational an act. That is, you could blame them but could you really blame them? The fires would be the Great Equalizer, at last, tearing through the tinderbox of Californian inegalitarianism. So even if this story is a total lie, it’s a lie that tells a larger truth: that inequality is everybody’s problem.

Freedom is good, but not good enough. Even at its best, I think that freedom, or liberty, was always something of a limited concept. But once European moderns promised liberty as a universal value, from then on out, its quality only degraded through the successive brands of liberalism that took its name. Over the centuries between, we’ve gotten ideologized into believing that liberty, democracy, and the West naturally combine into “Western liberal democracies.” When it’s probably more accurate to say that we’ve been whittling down the meanings of liberty and democracy into a better fit with oligarchy and empire. Here’s what I mean. It makes perfect sense to say that a bird flying over the skies of Manhattan is free. Ask any red-blooded, American ten-year-old: nothing emblematizes freedom like a bird in flight. Now picture this bird, late one afternoon, fluttering to a rest on the ledge of a penthouse on the Upper West Side. It peers in through the window and what does it see? A white, coiffed housecat, lounging on a sectional sofa on the other side of the glass. The two animals observe one another. The bird can’t help but notice that this cat with a shitty attitude nevertheless appears safe, rested, well-fed, and adored. The bird assures itself that, for all these luxuries, that cat remains a captive. It is unfree, despite the softness of its unfreedom. Beyond this though, while the bird may have its freedom, the cat its security, and each some degree of autonomy, both of these animals are still relatively powerless with respect to the Manhattan around them. The world for them is a given. Most all of its shapes and decisions are made by us homo sapiens, with only the rarest consultation with the animals. It is, in other words, an oligarchy. And neither the bird’s flight nor the cat’s penthouse do anything to contradict this basic oligarchical relation. They may even enjoy the world they inhabit, with all the cat toys and bird feeders, but if they didn’t, they’d be shit out of luck.

The moral of the story is that most of us homo sapiens are also living under some comparable form of oligarchy, even if many of us are loath to admit it. Patriotic, high-fructosed Americans such as myself are raised to believe that we lived in the greatest democracy in the world— with our prized national securities and constitutionally-promised freedoms. But democracy is foremost about a shared distribution and coordination of power in the making of the world, and as the fable of the bird and the cat goes to show, many of these most cherished freedoms and securities are perfectly compatible with the soft oligarchy in place in the United States of America. A lot of us have led the good life in the United States. Totally. That doesn’t make it a democracy. As far as many of us are concerned, it’s not a democracy. And not because its democracy isn’t “direct” or whatever, but because its mechanisms and institutions of would-be-democratic representation and participation are undermined by wider configurations of power. The demos has little sway in any major decisions or general structures of institutionalized power. These are determined by a small cluster of agents and organizations: the military and arms industry (and larger security apparatus), the petroleum and resource industries, the financial sector, Silicon Valley, certain dynasties, cartels, and houses of patrimonial wealth, and an assortment of conglomerates, governmental agencies, and foreign actors, national or otherwise. In other words, all the best people. Once everything’s in place, these agents and organizations are happy to let the rest of us decorate. They’re not particularly interested in dictating our lifestyles and self-expressions. They have more important things to worry about: entrenchment, expansion, domination. So we the people are then free to do whatever the hell we please, provided it doesn’t interfere with the imperatives of these dominant entities. And in fact this is precisely how freedom was redefined by 19th century liberals like Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill: freedom is a matter of mutual non-interference. The more we can let each other alone, the reasoning goes, the freer our society becomes. It’s been pointed out before that one interpretation of this is roundly at odds with society itself, since this kind of freedom is only maximized in isolation— in the cabin, on the frontier, on the high seas, on distant red planets, in tourism ads for Alaskan get-aways... All the go-to backdrops for the broadly libertarian imagination. The freest society by that measure would be no society at all. However, far worse, the liberal notion of freedom has also been twisted to mean that any interference with the workings of oligarchy or empire amounts to a hatred of freedom itself.

So it goes with the contemporary caricatures of the classically liberal notion of freedom. In contrast to this, we have lots of other, more “robust” notions of freedom: freedom as collective fulfillment, freedom as self-actualization, freedom as obedience to reason rather than passions, freedom as civic participation, freedom as the production of concrete possibilities, and freedom as the minimization of domination… All very fine things. Whether or not we should adorn them with the sash of “freedom” is another question. According to Gerald C. MacCallum, we most certainly should, because at the end of the day, these are all just different “values” for the same “triadic relation” at the base of all definitions of liberty.

“Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format ‘x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become),’ x ranges over agents, y ranges over such ‘preventing conditions’ as constraints, restrictions, inter­ferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.”

MacCallum claims that all the different definitions of liberty just reflect the different answers or ranges for each of these variables, and that many of the hot disputes or ambiguities around liberty result from their omission, as in phrases like “free society” or “free will.” MacCallum’s onto something here, but I’d argue that these actually all represent different equations of power not liberty. He’s right that we should ditch the bad distinctions between “negative” and “positive,” or between the “freedom from” and the “freedom to,” but this is because all operations of effective power are matters of capacities overcoming resistances or of resistances thwarting capacities. What makes one negative and another positive, one present and another absent, or one capacity and another resistance, is more or less arbitrary, since each can be phrased in terms of the other. As MacCallum asks, is the prisoner “unfree because of the presence of the locked chains, or is he unfree because he lacks a key?” Am I broke because I lack money and drive or because I’m burdened and screwed by the systems in which I live? Am I a slave to vapes because of the addictiveness of nicotine or because I lack the willpower to quit? What distinguishes freedom from those other equations of power isn’t negativity or positivity, from-ness or to-ness, capacity or resistance (and trying to define liberty this way is just a holdover from the ontological partition of the world into being and non-being). Instead, I think what distinguishes liberty as a concept is how it fences off motion from arrest, process from interruption, or change from cessation. It says what must stop and what may go. Liberty is a cordon that sets the limits between stasis and kinesis, and so for this reason, is primarily a static-kinetic concept (all the better for reifying the gurgling democratic impulses of the 17th and 18th centuries). This doesn’t mean it’s a bunk concept. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t super important or necessary. It does mean, however, that it can only do so much, and that it can’t serve as the “value among values” for steeply dynamic endeavors like self-actualization or the minimization of domination.

Look at it this way. One thing that we know that liberty is not, is bondage and captivity. If you’re free, that means you’re neither enslaved nor imprisoned. This is a gimme. And aside from a few Stoics, this distinction holds for nearly any culture, era, or definition of liberty. It’s as true for “liberal” as it is for “republican” definitions of freedom. It was just as true among the ancients as it is among the moderns. Now, if by some republican virtue, power and participation were also extended to all the “free men” of Athens or the Roman Republic, great, that was a nice bonus, but I see it as something added rather than inherent to the meaning of freedom. Libertas and civitas were conjoined but never identical. You can at least imagine a free Athenian with no civic power, no role in shaping the polis, but it’s much harder to imagine a free Athenian with a shackle around his neck. In this sense, the liberal conception of freedom comes from sticking tight to the physical intuition that something is free when it is unbound, uncaged, unfettered, unhindered. The seawaters flow freely down the canal. The dog is free to roam indoors and out. The slave is freed from their chains. Thomas Hobbes, who many consider the originator of this conception, defined liberty literal-mindedly as the absence of an impediment to motion— a definition that could apply as equally to gears and gases as it does to people. But even this physical intuition doesn’t imply freedom is simply an absence of interference, since it can— and often must— be expressed conversely, as the impediment itself. Why is the dog free to roam indoors and out? Because we propped the door open with a bucket, that’s why; freedom is a total relation between the bucket, the door, and the dog, not a quality of any one. How did the slaves of North America ultimately escape their shackles? Because one day, after a little bit of fratricidal bloodletting and the reconstitution of an entire country, their masters were forbidden from enslaving people. Lincoln himself expressed emancipation as an interdiction: “there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another." In these cases, liberty discerns both what may and what may not move. In most evocations of liberty, though, it doesn’t mean literal physical movement, and despite the literal-mindedness of many freedom-definers out there, doesn’t come down to a question of coercion. Liberty draws the boundaries between all forms of stasis and kinesis— that is, around any and all kinds of process or change. Liberty, then, is a silhouette of power. It marks contours— maximums and minimums— without determining much of anything that happens in between its bounds. This is why it’s easier to express liberty nomologically, in the form of a universal law or nomos, and why it would dovetail so smoothly with an ontology of mechanism. However, this is also why liberty is no match for something like domination, which can’t be understood nomologically. It operates on a higher dimension, if you want to call it that.

I’ll illustrate my meaning with the game of chess. The rules of chess are static-kinetic in a pretty straightforward sense: they dictate how and when each of the pieces may and may not move. They spell out the liberties of each piece or player, in both how they can move and how they’re protected by constraints on the movements of others (that is, both “positively” and “negatively”). These are hard limits: unambiguous, universal, incontestable. As essential as these rules are, however, they don’t tell you how to win the game. More to the point, there are no rules anyone can follow in order to win a game of chess. Some moves are better or cleverer than others, or bolder, dumber, or more imaginative, but nothing in chess strategy is a matter of necessity or prohibition. Every move has to be understood within the nexus of all previous and possible moves. Chess strategy is, in fewer words, dynamic. And as you probably guessed, the comparison I’m trying to draw here is that liberty is more like the rules of chess and things like the “minimization of domination” are more like its strategy. Liberty isn’t always expressed as a rule, law, or norm, but it’s at best only expressible as a moment within a larger power account. Domination is another story. It is nothing if not devious, innovative, forever a moving target— “an inherently contestable concept.” It can’t be banned but only challenged by equally clever, equally organized capacities and strategies. Trying to corner it with a concept like liberty is like watching one of those videos where panting security guards chase parkour Tik-Tokkers around a parking garage, to pitiless laughter.

The Irish political theorist Philip Pettit clearly gets this, this lag between our commonest conception of liberty and the struggle against domination. To overcome that handicap, he recommends both a stronger idea of liberty (a classically “republican” conception of liberty as non-domination, only expanded to include everyone rather than just landowners or virtuous elites) and what I consider a somewhat weaker idea of domination (which, as the antonym of liberty, he defines as being at the mercy of arbitrary interference). Harken back to the 19th century, he asks us, and imagine a kindly, adoring husband who lavishly keeps his wife and permits her every whim. He never interferes and never would interfere, this gentle gentleman, but he nevertheless could interfere, and so for Pettit, she is no freer than the slave of a “benevolent master,” whatever that may mean. Another example Pettit uses is the American colonies, which were effectively self-administering under the “salutary neglect” of English rule. The English Crown interfered relatively little in domestic American affairs. However, the colonists— working from the republican idea of liberty among 17th and 18th century commonwealthmen— bristled that England nevertheless maintained the right to do so. Its domination was implied in the most minor tax or insult: “For by the same power, by which the people of England can compel them to pay one penny, they may compel them to pay the last penny they have. There will be nothing but arbitrary imposition on the one side, and humble petition on the other,” as Pettit quotes from Joseph Priestley. But is this really all we mean by domination— “arbitrary interference?”

His formulation is at least dynamic in my terms, I’ll give it that much, in that it combines a relatively modal dimension (“arbitrary”) with a causal one (“interference”), but this describes just one tentacle among very many. Is arbitrary interference really how we should understand economic domination, for example, or is it merely a sign or test of it in certain circumstances? When our would-be-democratic mechanisms and institutions are undermined and made available as instruments of oligarchy, is it really a problem of them potentially interfering? Isn’t it more that they aren’t doing the various things they’re supposed to be doing? Maybe I don’t appreciate the true breadth of this word, “interference,” but the problem with domination isn’t going to be that something conditions us, but specifically how it conditions us. And “liberty” doesn’t denote for me what is needed to overcome it, since domination is not something that can simply be banished, by a boundary or a bubble, inside of which we can all act on our reasons and wishes like busy little sovereigns. The forms of power that dominate us will be, when differently configured, the very same powers that we use to act on those reasons or wishes. As Pettit himself seems to get closer to saying in other chapters of Republicanism, the true antonym of domination is really something much closer to the concept of “empowerment.” Emancipation is obviously frequently empowering, we see that. A brutally subjugated colony overthrowing the yoke of an imperial power, or a prisoner or populace finally freed from incarceration, is empowered by their release (putting aside the question of how that emancipation is achieved, maintained, or internally institutionalized). But here’s the catch: empowerment usually also involves a considerable constriction of liberties. That’s the price you pay: that which empowers in other ways constrains. The nature of these constraints will depend on the context and modes of power, but if you got your heart set on the World Cup, the White House, Carnegie Hall, or the Nobel Prize for Literature, your calendar is probably going to fill up pretty fast. Imagine a head-of-state assuming office and thinking to themselves “finally, some peace of mind.” And when it comes to highly institutionalized forms, we want these greater powers to be accompanied with greater constraints, because if not, that empowerment will itself soon distend into domination. Pettit is using the wrong tools for the right job. If you want to overcome domination, the last thing you need is to be exiled from power by too much liberty. And if you stretch and squint, and insist on giving the name of “liberty” to this overcoming, all you’ll get is a confused concept, one that is in many places equivalent to its own opposites.

My thought is that this is bound to happen whenever dynamism gets encased in the static-kinetic terms of liberty, as it does in concepts like “free speech” (which I’ll get into later) and “free will” (which I’ll talk about now). A lot of theorists tend to dismiss free will as a metaphysical concept rather than a properly political one, but I of course think that’s a cheap dodge since metaphysics and politics are profoundly related. For me, free will is a mutilation of the dynamic concept of autonomy, which we’ll define for the time being as the relative power something has over itself. Remember how I italicized above that liberty is a silhouette of power? When theologians and philosophers came up with the idea of free will, this silhouette again took on a recognizably human form. The picture they offered was that our human form was but a mortal shell, protecting the soul inside from influences without, so that it could act on its own reasons and wishes like a busy little sovereign. Only then, sealed off like a bell jar or a porcelain bust, was it truly free. Here again, when trying to make sense of our will or autonomy, we see freedom only doing what freedom can only do: defining a contour or boundary between kinesis and stasis, between what may proceed (the soul or will) and what must be held at bay (the rest of the world). This partition is why free will had to be unconvincingly defended by way of a metaphysical dualism. Dualism was built into the very concept. Because we insisted on understanding autonomy in the static-kinetic terms of liberty, the only way we could make sense of it was by closing our eyes and imagining the human will severed off from the surrounding nexus of powers: “there you go, little man, now you’re free.” These days, “free will” has fallen out of philosophical fashion, or been futilely updated by making its boundaries more permeable. Nevertheless, it has still left us with a confused and sadly hermetic conception of autonomy, which has gone on to influence our idea of autonomy in everything from aesthetics to geopolitics. In contrast to this, we can move on to more dynamic conceptions of autonomy as something gained rather than given; relative rather than axiomatic. Autonomy is not in any way isolation. Autonomy is created through an unsettling entanglement and struggle with the surrounding nexus of powers— with all those forces, events, structures, and institutions that the hermetic conceptions promised to keep us safe from. Autonomy cannot be granted, by a god, law or rampart, as kind of a free space. This will always fail the dynamic, especially in our social thought and action. Liberty is for so many things only a beginning. The real demand is always for power.