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.”

(…)

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.

I’m leaping ahead in my notes from Part One to Part Two. I’m restless and hate sticking to outlines. Part One could go on indefinitely, and will sooner than never. The outline was my little secret: along with loosely telling a philosophical history of the “metaphysical evasion of power,” I quietly imagined each section taking on a few of the big concepts from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, including all the “key terms” stuffed into the lexicon of Book Delta. Concepts like: being, having, privation, truth, falsity, error, explanation, accident, essence, substance, change, causation, potentiality, time, space, identity, difference, opposites, unity, plurality, nature, necessity, quantity, quality, prior, posterior, origin, part, whole, elements, kinds, principles, relation, disposition — the mounting hardware, so to speak, of Western metaphysics in both the modern and classical era. A major premise of Part One is that we don’t really have a proper philosophy of power, and partly to blame for this situation is that most Western philosophy is based upon schemes or metaphysics that have been entirely evacuated of the stuff. They’re set in terms that are some blend of what I call “static” and “kinetic” — some compromise between Parmenides and Heraclitus, pure being and ceaseless becoming — rather than anything truly dynamic, which requires its own alphabet. Most classical and modern Western philosophy presumed it could begin with simpler static concepts or still-manageable kinetic concepts and processes — and then kind of work its way up to the dynamic. But this was mistaken. And backwards. It’s the dynamic that explains the static, kinetic, or otherwise undynamic, not the other way around. Accordingly, this was the main exercise of Part One: to reject ontology and show how the various static-kinetic metaphysics were constrictive, contingent, and undynamic yet dynamically derived. By the end, I also wanted to point out the limitations of some previous critiques of Western metaphysics, such as those by various vitalisms and process philosophies, which were still shackled by ontology, cramped in static-kinetic schemes, and despite their pretensions, totally inadequate for grasping power in any form. Some of these are still prevalent today, from popular forms of aggrieved accelerationism to subtler variations on the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, who for all their value were in my opinion haplessly reduced to the Burning Man of Continental Thought.

Part Two is about the “social evasion of power.” By this, I mean how these static-kinetic metaphysics have blinkered social thought, especially since the 16th century, and conversely, how social and ideological forces have also worked against a proper philosophy of power and domination. If Part One was pointed primarily at meaning and ontology, Part Two will mostly target domination and ideology. In Part Two, I also want to be wiser when talking about “The West” — as in “Western” philosophy or metaphysics or society — especially since, from here out, I’ll be trying to explain to myself a bit more about the social history of concepts rather than remaining on the philosophical plane of how ideas unfold in relation to each other. If I’m to believe the brochures, the West represents not just certain lands, peoples, or traditions, but a “civilization” with an enduring spirit and tablet of values. I’m no historian and have trouble discerning how much this idea still lingers among serious social or historical thinkers, but whatever the case, it’s not something trumpeted chauvinists alone. Especially in light of “recent events,” I’ve really come to appreciate the depth to which it’s quietly assumed in the common sense of the North Atlantic. It is unnervingly fundamental, yet a fundament that can be easily ice-picked apart to show its intimate relations to the “non-Western” as well as its own inner divisions and dynamics. To begin with, its fearless defenders often define this Western spirit with two conjoined propositions: one, that it is quintessentially European and, two, that it is doubly rooted in Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christianity — which is pretty funny considering that neither Greek philosophy, Judaism, nor Christianity originated in Europe. Judaism and Christianity began among semitic speakers of the Levant, of course, but likewise Greek philosophy technically began in Miletus, in what we now think of as Turkey, with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. More to the point, though, the ancient Athenians considered themselves members of a Mediterranean world that included North Africa, Anatolia, and the Levant. It took some pretty slick storytelling to persuade the world that the ancient Greeks and Levantines lay in an exclusive spiritual continuum with Germans and Englishmen; that they were forefathers of this thing called “Western Civilization,” much less a “Europe.” In terms of an historical continuum, Afghanistan could really claim as much direct influence from the Ancient Greeks; it just sounds odd to our ears thanks to the successful marketing of Renaissance humanism and the modern invention of Europe.

The plotline of “Part Two: The Social Evasion of Power” kicks off around this time, with one of the curious continuity-errors in the story the “West” has been telling itself ever since, which is how, philosophically yet perhaps for world historical reasons, we radically re-oriented ourselves to questions of power and domination. As I’ve said before, I was surprised to realize the degree to which medieval theology in both the Christian and Islamic world, in its contemplation of divine will and omnipotence, was comparably more pandynamic in its metaphysics, far more accommodating of questions of power, than European philosophical modernity. For them, nothing was beyond the reach of power because, needless to say, nothing was beyond the power of God. Nearly in retort, the early moderns and the “scientific revolution” created a picture of nature and cosmos bereft of power, and the Enlightenment went on to build its social thought upon this nakedly undynamic foundation. As a consequence, even the great social and political ideals of the Enlightenment — liberty and autonomy, democracy and equality, rights and reason, to name a few — were understood (or if you ask me, misunderstood) in static-kinetic terms. That is, the vocabulary the moderns created to grasp power was congenitally powerblind, and yet it persists to this day as the basis of most social and political thought in the North Atlanticist bloc — and not just among blowhard “defenders of the West.”

Unlike almost all of the great theorists that I’ve read on the topic, I don’t consider power to be a purely social relation, much less a mere subset of all social relations. Power is instead a categorial or, in the looser sense, metaphysical relation out of which we then produce or construe complex social relations like domination, suffering, violence, decline, stagnation, contest, cooperation, love, friendship, enmity, and any of the many forms of human flourishing that I’ll later on describe as “eudynamic.” The exclusion of power from nature and cosmos in early European modernity — inherited even by some of our most critical theorizers like Weber, De Jouvenel, Arendt, Foucault, and Steven Lukes — did have some clear advantages for the natural sciences. The primary scheme of the scientific revolution — the “ontology of mechanism” — was developed and trained on the technical applications of natural phenomena; sometimes, on mechanisms in the most literal sense: clocks and windmills, pumps and pulleys. Unsurprisingly, this delivered serious payoffs in terms of technical value, and (within the purview of its own scheme) great predictive and explanatory value for the regularities of the natural world. According to this ontology, nature was at bottom nomological, that is, obedient to a set of immutable laws or nomoi. Of course, by subliming those laws beyond any power that could change, create, and hence explain them, the scientific imagination closed itself off from its own dreamwork, which is in the last instance, phrased in the form of what I call a “power-account.” Where these static-metaphysics really screwed us though was in articulating the social world, whose occupants and institutions only behaved but so much like clocks and windmills, pumps and pulleys, or clumps of corpuscles governed by inviolable forces. And dammit, if you can believe the timing, it failed us right when we needed it most, during a period of rapid development and increased opacity in the forces and systems governing European society. This had the double effect of both creating newer, subtler, slicker forms of differential empowerment and domination, and providing cover and justification for domination through the opacity of these new social relations. When power was even mentioned, it was reinterpreted as process or property, and so many hierarchies and injustices were no longer recognized as such: they were the natural result of social forces and mechanisms, inevitable though not always enviable. On the transition from tributary and feudal to capitalistic economic systems, for example, Samir Amin writes:

“In all earlier social systems, the economic phenomenon is transparent. By this I mean that the destination of that which is produced is immediately visible: The major part of production is directly consumed by the producers themselves. Moreover, the surplus levied by the ruling classes assumes the form of rents and various fees, often in kind or in labor: in short, the form of a tribute, whose deduction does not escape the immediate perception of those who shoulder its burden. Market exchange and wage labor are, of course, not entirely absent, but they remain limited in their range and marginal in their social and economic scope. Under these conditions, the economic phenomenon remains too simple — that is to say, too immediately apprehensible — to give rise to a “science of economics” elucidating its mysteries. Science becomes necessary to explain an area of reality only when laws that are not directly visible operate behind the immediately apparent facts: that is, only when this area has become opaque due to the laws which govern its movement.”

A complex and multi-society economic life — of production, consumption, exchange, trade, and even regulation and redistribution — had churned on for thousands of years without this “science of economics.” So what precisely did the new science offer? For starters, it aided in understanding certain startling mechanisms, such as the delirium of financial mechanisms coming out of Venice, Holland, and England, or the price mechanisms puzzling mercantilist powers in their quest for precious metals. But not content to merely identify and model specific mechanisms within our economic life — a great discovery — positive economics was hellbent on mechanizing the whole of it. Any and all aspects which didn’t fit into its scheme had to be concertedly dismissed as normative, exogenous, or altogether extra-economic or non-economic — up to and including the whole “separation of politics and economics,” widely considered a hallmark of Western liberalism. Now, this “separation of politics and economics” can be interpreted in different ways. The first is the most popular, the baffling paradigm of two pure substances — “state” and “market” — which are then decanted together in percentages like a potion, to create different blends of a “mixed economy.” If you ever needed an example of the ontology of mechanism boxing in the political imagination, boy, is this it — especially when it’s ridiculously graphed along the Cartesian axes of a “political compass,” upon which entire political programs are represented not as questions of “how” but of “how much.” On the wider view too, it’s telling of the degree to which many critics of Western liberalism remain mired in its metaphysics. Not only are Cold War antagonisms still playing out almost entirely within those 18th century categories, supposedly radical ideological persuasions of our 21st still seem to find themselves pretty easily on its maps. And as far as I’m concerned, even how its critics understand “capitalism” in our definitions of modernity is often snake-bitten by the static-kinetic metaphysics of the Enlightenment.

In their heterodox opus, “Capital as Power,” Jonathan Nitzan and Shimson Bichler go some length in reversing this conditioning, describing the work of power in the fundamentals of economics and in its enduring questions: Where does value come from? What is capital? What explains the rates of accumulation? For Nitzan and Bichler, capital isn’t determined by production or consumption, abstract labor or utility, or supply or demand or their intersection. These factors may be real enough, and operative once everything else is set and fixed, but capital or value are really determined at the most general level, by power. That is, before any Boyle’s Law-like calculations of strictly “economic magnitudes,” prices and profits will above all reflect and exploit the differentials in social configurations of power. Their understanding of power includes “the entire state structure of corporations and governments,” but — I was thankful to read — extends out into the whole of the social domain to include any powermode of noticeable effect.

“Note that this is not ‘economic power’. Neither is it ‘political power’ that somehow ‘distorts’ the economy. Instead, what we deal with here is organized power at large. Numerous power institutions and processes — from ideology, through culture, to organized violence, religion, the law, ethnicity, gender, international conflict, labour relations, manufacturing techniques and accounting innovations — all bear on the differential level and volatility of earnings. When these earnings and their volatility are discounted into capital values, the power institutions and processes that underlie them become part of capital.”

For Nitzan and Bichler then, capital is not so much a product of the economic-productive sphere; whereas for many Marxists, this is precisely where “class conflict is generated, labour exploited and surplus value expropriated” — only then to be enforced by state oppression and secured through culture and ideology. For my own part, I also never really bought into the story of capitalism as a causa prima system, anchored in production and exploitation, that explains and defines European modernity and its global effects. Capitalism was for me just the name of an historically-shifting ensemble — of market exchange, finance, wage labor, proprietarianism, industrial production and techniques, bourgeois social codes — interfacing with modern actualities like the fracture of Catholic hegemony and the delegitimization of the ancien régime, continental warfare and the rise of the nation-state, European imperialism and supremacy, bourgeois revolutions and scientific advancements — and understood through the lens of a new economic science predicated upon what Nitzan and Bichler identify as the “commodification of power.” This commodification was partly effective and partly deflective. It was effective in the sense that the “marketization of society” wasn’t just a metaphor; goods, resources, and relations were actually mangled to fit into the service of market mechanisms. It was deflective in that thinking about everything in mechanical terms obscured the way in which domination and differential empowerment seeped into its most even-handed operations (all those forms of supposedly “voluntary and symmetrical exchange”).

I should maybe specify what I mean by “mechanism.” While it’s somewhat inspired by literal artisanal machinery — things like pulley systems, barometers and mechanical Turks — in the ontological context, it really refers to a particular agreement of static-kinetic metaphysics, a certain default-setting for how our primary categories and concepts fit together. Rather than pumps and pulleys, the better image is a perpetual motion machine (of the kind we find in the deistic conception of the universe). I say this because the problem isn’t merely redescribing things in mechanical or nomological terms; it’s severing them from all power-accounts and surrounding dynamics, closing us off from all questions of how these mechanisms or nomoi are created, destroyed, maintained, neglected, perverted, gamed, improved, or how they’re powerfields themselves with their own conditions, demands, and dangers — no matter how ingenious the original design or document. Enlightenment social thought had no shortage of ingenious mechanisms — the market, the ballot, the separation of powers, the categorical imperative — but its mechanization of non-mechanisms (such as its fundamental concepts like liberty or equality) probably contributed more to our enduring powerblindness.

Nitzan and Bichler counter this mechanization by introducing power into the most mechanical of economic calculations, and then go on to deliver what I consider to be a Veblen-grade harpooning of “dominant capital” and (in Veblen’s sense) “business enterprise” more generally. Where I differ with them though — this “York school of economics” which is closest to my heart — is in their conception of power itself. For them, power is largely coded as a measure of domination or at the very least a “power-over,” a power differential that is then translated into capital. For me, this closes us off from some of the hardest, most perplexing and maddening questions, such as those resulting from the “ambivalence of power,” or the many quandaries about how domination arises from apparently neutral, natural, or even benevolent arrangements or operations: the gremlins within mechanism, if you will. And these aren’t just economic gremlins. They appear uninvited across all modes and networks of power: political, military, legal, technical, cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, biological, astronomical — somehow, some way, as if by black magic, domination and destruction keep springing from elements and processes that we had assured ourselves were pre- or non-power. By this, I don’t mean the equally meaningful dissection of how supposedly neutral objects, processes or institutions are instrumentalized by one side of a power asymmetry against the other. I mean that we consistently fail to understand how all those objects, processes, and institutions exert their own powers and demands, present their own gifts and dangers, no matter the plane or scale. This has damned a lot of solid ethical projects that began with very laudable aims: justice, fairness, equity, good sportsmanship. They were seduced into thinking that these aims were best achieved in the absence of power or as the absence of power, rather than by a better configuration of it. Whether in law, media, technology, or civil engineering, the plan was to maintain a standard of neutrality, and to build from parts that keep it power-free from the bottom up. As the reasoning went: without power, there can be no domination — and this is true enough except for the completely futile fantasy of power-freeness.

Let’s imagine an extreme. The gods, in their infinite wisdom and benevolence, decide to upstart a social media platform as a vanity project and announce its release with a thundering voice-ad in the sky. This platform will be different from all the disappointments coming out of Silicon Valley. It will be run by angels, free to use and flawlessly engineered, and thus wholly undistorted by profit motives, advertising, bugs, biases, or any of the usual sins afflicting social media. Within a short period, it very understandably becomes a success. However, as a successful platform, it is inherently a field of communicative power, and though free of the steering forces of money, political tendency, or technological limitation, it will easily come under the thrall of its own communicativity and conditions of success. All its marvelous benefits will unevenly accrue until some users dominate others, or develop dependencies, or sacrifice other goods for the rewards of the platform, or use the benefits to nefarious ends — or until the entire fraction of society on the platform succumbs to the demands of the system itself, under a form of what I understand as “abstract domination.” Because it can give us what we want, it will surprise us with what we really don’t. Whatever enables likewise ensnares.

The danger of this is all the greater the more we demand something to be neutral, inert, impartial, or objective. Something that comes to mind here is the Rule of Law. The motivation behind it is clearly noble: justice should not be decided by vengeance or the caprice of the powerful. As wise Athena succinctly states it in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: “let no man live uncurbed by law or curbed by tyranny.” The citizenry should be governed by its laws, not its leaders, and for this, its laws should be impartial, consistent, universal, and of course just and good. For many among us, this goes even further: human law is but a crude approximation of some higher, perennial code of Right. One of the immediate criticisms of this will be that, while we may turn from the Rule of Man to the Rule of Law, we have to remember that there has never been a law, nor a single line of any law, that wasn’t created by one group against another, however good or right-minded. It stands to reason that if it were truly universal, it would’ve never had to have been created in the first place. But as in the case of the immaculate platform above, what would happen if we were granted some absolutely neutral and universal set of laws by the gods themselves, as some people believe? Even if we could make sense of what absolute neutrality and universality would mean (since any law would have differential effects on different people), neither would last for very long. No matter how precise its wording, or impartial its spirit, the dynamics and differential empowerment would set in the moment the ink had dried. The Rule of Law quickly becomes the Rules of the Game.

Moreover, is this neutrality, universality, or isonomy something that we would actually want? In our daily lives, we understand perfectly well how relative power-ratios can determine or at least strongly sway the outcomes of most any dispute or contest. We all know perfectly well how injustice breeds and thrives under conditions of domination and power asymmetry. Yet how frequently is this explicitly formulated or even acknowledged in written law itself? Besides maybe the hard-won exceptions of progressive tax code and anti-trust laws, where does American law for example, in its own language, adjust its decisions according to the real world’s ever-compounding power-ratios? The Rule of Law governs us linearly as if we were all simply and universally equal subjects: me, you, my mom, and BlackRock. For me, this is a profounder problem. If Law is or ought to be isonomic, impartial, or flatly universal, then it cannot perform what I consider its more fundamental duty or function: namely, to constrain and correct the powerful. Especially the overpowerful. In fact, it’s so fundamental that I consider this discrimination — “the conspiracy against domination” — to be the founding principle of good law and government, rather than the “institutionalization of domination” that has so far proven to be the historical pattern. But I’ll get into this spiel later on. Suffice it to say, for now, that this isn’t the reality of law or the working theory of jurisprudence in today’s courts, legislatures, or common sense. And whose fault is that? Hard to say. At this point, powerblindness has pretty much become the patrimony of humankind. All of our philosophical equipment, to rip off a phrase from Rabelais, is metaphysically obsolete.

On the other hand, we can’t blame everything on our philosophical equipment or the philosophers who equipped us. For example, just to be clear, I’m not in the least against the Enlightenment, which is usually how its brittle defenders misinterpret any criticism of modernity. I’m actually a lifelong fan. In its own scathing critique of crown and altar, in its magnanimous gifts like Diderot’s Encyclopédie or Paine’s Rights of Man, I consider the Enlightenment a triumph of transformational counterpower, and a strategy to be truly emulated. Some parts are bullshit of course, but the effects of its legacy most deserving of critique, such as its ontology of mechanism or the moribund political-economic project of liberalism, have become insidious more in their reification of Enlightenment genius, or through the damages or domination resulting from the dynamics of its institutionalization, rather than through any essential malignancy of its original forms and inspirations. Even some of its most paraded representatives, like say Adam Smith or Condorcet, were much subtler than the parades made them out to be. What I’m trying to understand here is exactly how certain thinkers, certain thoughts and systems of thought, certain forces, events, or actualities, each contributed to our misunderstanding and handling of power. As with Aristotle, the contributions are very mixed, and you find similar glimmers of naturalistic or metaphysical dynamism in the pages of peak-moderns like Hobbes and Locke. However, one thing that I will blanketly state is that very few of the moderns achieved what I would consider a true pandynamism that fully discerns power throughout nature and cosmos.

There are exceptions. I’m thinking of everybody’s favorite cranky little incels, Arthur Schopenhauer and above all Friedrich Nietzsche. No one was more vocal or explicit than Nietzsche in his critiques of both static-Platonic metaphysics and the modern ontology of mechanism. And while there are places where he lapses into interpreting power in processual terms, I think in the final count, he escapes this and supplies a pandynamism that self-consciously distances itself from both substance and process ontologies. In that compendium of notes gathered and posthumously published by his ethically-questionable sister, The Will to Power, he writes “The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos — the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge…” What exactly he means by “pathos” isn’t altogether clear (Walter Kaufmann even jumps in to help us, noting that “occasion, event, passion, suffering, destiny are among the meanings of this Greek word”), but what is clear is Nietzsche’s metaphysical priority of power over either being or becoming, stasis or flux. So far this is impeccable yet: one huge problem. For reasons also worth exploring, all these guys — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all their little acolytes — tend to make the same category mistake only in the opposite direction: they conflate power with domination. They may posit power at the natural and metaphysical level, but by equating this power with domination, they end up naturalizing and metaphysicalizing domination itself. This not only makes our universe a grimly psychopathic one, it closes the gates on all true critique, whose chief task is to distinguish healthy, happy, “eudynamic” social configurations of power from shitty and deleterious ones like violence, decline, suffering and anything we might denounce as dominatory. The same goes for all the medieval Christian and Islamic theologians that I’ve been casually commending for their pandynamism: however dynamic and developed their metaphysics may be, it’s still hopelessly encoded in terms of a divine, if supposedly infinitely wise and benevolent, totalitarianism. And at the extremes of something like Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism, this divine omnipotence is so regally absolute, that we can hardly say that it is in the world at all, since he denies even the barest causal powers to anything other than the one transcendentally Supreme Being.

What’s behind this historical coupling of dynamic metaphysics with undemocratic and/or frankly psychopathic political and social values? Then on the other hand, why have so many of the more palatable modern political projects — committed to democracy, emancipation, justice, and general human happiness — been built upon static-kinetic metaphysics? This should make us profoundly curious, especially when it’s so easy to imagine the third option: that powers are metaphysical relations that can then be organized into better or worse social relations, with more or less domination, more or less human happiness. Some Nietzscheans, in order to maybe create space for this third option, and to distance his philosophical and cultural thought from Nazi appropriators, understandably went into damage control on his general socio-political outlook. This, I got to say brother, is a real stretch. While he probably wouldn’t have made a very good Nazi, and I don’t think he was necessarily racist or anti-semitic, his social hopes are horrendous enough to be condemned on their own merits. The man spared no ink or paper in praising ruthless domination by a “higher, rarer” aristocracy — the establishment of an “order of rank” — as the precondition of an ideal future and the coming of a “new man.” In Beyond Good and Evil, written partly as a reader’s guide to Thus Spake Zarathustra, he writes:

“Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and it will be so again and again — a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata — when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance-that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either — the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states — in brief, simply the enhancement of the type ‘man,’ the continual ‘self-overcoming of man,’ to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense.”

…. Yikes…. But again this word, “pathos”…. honestly, it puts a finger on something significant about European modernity, just not in the way Nietzsche intended. The mood in the room had indeed changed. Happiness was “a new idea in Europe” and the old feudal orders fell into disrepute. In a matter of a couple centuries, domination had lost a great deal of its self-justificatory force, and a whole raft of feudal values and forms — like faith, fealty, fiefdom, vassalage, homage, and heredity — was swept away in a tide of new humanisms and bourgeois transformations. They were replaced with a new tablet of values and forms — like reason, autonomy, democracy, liberty, equality, and merit — which were incompatible with the divinely-sanctified hierarchies of medieval Europe, and at least at face value, with any institutionalization of “might-makes-right,” whose many varieties I will later on group under the term “kratocracy.” Strangely though, they also seemed to be deeply at odds with the then-realities of Europe, which was eagerly securing its domination over other lands and inventing ingenious new systems of subjugation within its own. If naked domination was suddenly despised, Europe had to pursue it in new dress. This might explain why the Western social and political canon is such a twisted combo of high ideals and devious ideology, whose purpose is to clarify and edify on the one hand as it obscures and deludes on the other. The purpose of the following pages will be to see how much we can untwist it — to poke and prod and spitball, and sharply question this weirdly insistent social evasion of power.

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From Earth’s lower orbit, rollercoasters probably resemble war-machines: red and yellow catapults hurling and terrorizing human bodies, not for neighboring destruction but sheerly for the thrill of it all. On a sweltering weekend in June, families and adolescents will press their bodies into queues, surrounded by acousmatic puffs and whirs, then all climb aboard these great machines together. On fairgrounds everywhere, they scramble onto the Tilt-A-Whirl platform in search of an open car, one that will rotate around its axis and revolve around the ride’s brightly-lit maypole, like Mercury whipping around the Sun, to the tunes of Carly Ray Jepsen or more quintessentially, the Vengaboys:

“Boom boom boom boom, I want you in my room. 

Let's spend the night together, from now until forever”

If the riders didn’t appreciate the songs before, secretly they do now. It’s perfect hype music: punchy, fast, infectious, de-individuating— yet here in a theme park, a little redundant. Why? Because these rides are musicalizing what is already plainly musical; whereas the shocks, intensities, and geometries of their movements would musicalize nearly any sound. The Gravitron, with a DJ at its center, could play almost anything— Schoenberg, Merzbow, their own soundboard of brilliantly stupid effects— and young teens would hear it all with new ears.

Traditional music is embedded in the body— or rather, in bodily power. Its primary value, pitch, represents the traditional form of what we might call the “principle of voice”— all that concerns or governs the immediate aspects and intensities of a sound. The supremacy of pitch, as a value, comes from the fact that pitch is one of the only aspects of sound under the easy, common, and reliable control of the human voice. Similarly, the traditional conception of rhythm is a specific form of a more general “principle of action,” corresponding to our intuitions about how sounds may be produced by bodies and movements. If we so much as hear a melody, we subvocalize; if we hear a rhythm, we involuntarily twitch: much of our music is understood this way, through bodily response or mimesis. As we add other people to the mix, with dance or polyphony, the meaning of music interlaces with the bodies of others, conventionally in the form of harmony or rhythmic patterns and meters. While musical history provides its exceptions— all traditional instruments, for instance, have quirks that reliably produce inhuman effects— most musical categories remain embedded in the body as its primary locus.

According to John Locke, bodily power— specifically its power over its own movements— is how we first come to comprehend all causal powers:

“The idea of the BEGINNING of motion we have only from reflection on what passes in ourselves; where we find by experience, that, barely by willing it, barely by a thought of the mind, we can move the parts of our bodies, which were before at rest. So that it seems to me, we have, from the observation of the operation of bodies by our senses, but a very imperfect obscure idea of ACTIVE power; since they afford us not any idea in themselves of the power to begin any action, either motion or thought. But if, from the impulse bodies are observed to make one upon another, any one thinks he has a clear idea of power, it serves as well to my purpose; sensation being one of those ways whereby the mind comes by its ideas: only I thought it worthwhile to consider here, by the way, whether the mind doth not receive its idea of active power clearer from reflection on its own operations, than it doth from any external sensation.”

Stephen Mumford words this a bit more scientifically: though perhaps causal powers are not given to staidly outward observation, we nonetheless have an inner model of them in our experiences of proprioception, our body's integrating awareness of its own position, force, movements, and volition. Whether or not we literally or directly perceive power through our senses — and this much is equivocal— power is never fully or strictly empirical. It can be neither purely observed nor wholly represented. Our understanding of power emerges only through effort, intervention, enactment, exercise, if at times only hypothetically— which is the very reason that this understanding would begin with the mastery of our own bodily movements, that is, with the first efforts, acts, exercises, and interventions we dare to undertake in the cradle. The primality of this experience of power also explains the visceral primality of rhythm and dance: they are vigorous aestheticizations of that bodily core of causal power. However, though our understanding of power may begin in the body, in its dominion over its own parts, it doesn’t remain there, imprisoned on one side of yet another brand of metaphysical dualism. It soon creeps outward. Our hands grasp and guide things other than ourselves. Our cries beckon and alert. Our own powers interbraid with those of others, and soon extend into words and tools, discussions and machines, languages and systems, before eventually spackling into all the folds and crevices of our world. So wouldn’t we expect our sense of musical power to follow the same outward migration?

Machines of all sorts displace or scooch the bodily locus and focus of music. They make not only their own sounds but their own kinds of sounds, irreproducible by the human body. As Luigi Russolo famously manifestoed a century ago, electricity, engines, and general industry created an “infinite variety of noise-sounds” with their own values, intensities, and categories. Phonographs succeeded in finally apprehending and reproducing once-forever-fleeting noises and voices. Midcentury musical synthesis linked nearly all aspects of the waveform to the knobs of precise human design. And to the degree that these machines and their sounds were musicalized, they disembedded music that much more from its strictly bodily source. Rarely did this spell total displacement or alienation. Many machines maintained a tight rapport with the human body as a master, target, cargo, or partner. Some of our manned electrical and motorized machines— jackhammers, motorcycles, automobiles, power drills and saws—  also happened to be unnaturally noisy, releasing some of the “shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound” as they subsumed them under fresh intuitions about how their powers and meanings related to the human body and will.

This body-machine rapport is particularly intense and visceral when it comes to thrill rides and rollercoasters— and remarkable for yet another reason: these machines operate completely and deliberately outside of the control of their riders. When we blast the radio while speeding down the highway or sweating it out on a Stairmaster or Peloton, our musical intuitions are being formed and reinforced in tandem with machines that more or less obey and amplify our bodily autonomy, as prostheses or demonstrations of our bodily speed and strength. This interrelation of music, body, and machine combusts into an unmistakable sensation of personal empowerment or autonomy, fantasies of which get siphoned into twenty-minute Fast & Furious chase scenes or Led-Zeppellinized Cadillac commercials for men in their midlife crises. This interrelation however is inverted for most thrill rides and rollercoasters, which act altogether heteronomously upon the human body: we can do nothing but submit to their movements, a submission that is quasi-spiritual not only in its smack of death, but in its resemblance to, in Schleiermacher’s words, the “absolute dependency” of the religious experience. My favorite ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain, in Valencia, California, the X2, is justifiably hyped as a “fifth dimension rollercoaster.”  Its seats swivel and barrel roll on a full 360-degree pivot, totally disorienting its riders. You never know what’s up or down, backwards or forwards. The dark night sky sometimes opens below you; or you brace for a fall and are suddenly shot upward: you are robbed of all semblance of control and dangled over the abyss in the hands of an angry God.

What this suggests to me, musically speaking, is a new prototype of venue. If traditional harmony and rhythm emerge from musical coordination between otherwise autonomous bodies, this is unneeded in the lightning-speed vise of a rollercoaster: our bodily movements and outcries are despotically coordinated by the machine itself. In a venue like a roller-rink, the rhythms and intensities of the music are collectively interpreted by all the skaters through their circular motions around the rink; this circularity is a roller-rink’s technique for fostering shared musical mood. You may have noticed this yourself: whether it’s Lil’ Kim’s Lighters Up or a Viennese waltz, the glide of the crowd always seems to subtly “go with the music.” Gravitrons or Tilt-A-Whirls keep the circularity but impose the motion heteronomously: it is my whole world that is whirling, not I the dervish. 

This is the good kind of heteronomy though, whose fundamental difference with, say, heteronomous political control is in our ecstatic and total affirmation. As with true love or psychotropic drugs, we wish nothing more than to feel for once so wholly overpowered. We all climb aboard, sometimes fifty of us at a time, and through an involuntary choreography, our bodies feel the power of the outer world through the brunt of its physics. The intensities of the drops, stops, thrusts, twists, and turns are ventriloquized into screams, gasps, prayers and laughter for all the by-standers below. Yet I repeat: any sounds— whether originally from the people, machine, or environment, or thoughtfully composed to accompany or embellish the ride— would be musicalized largely to the degree that they corresponded to these shocks, intensities and geometries. This is why I claim that fairgrounds and theme parks could become— hypothetically, even if under the pretext of a cheesedick “experience economy”— the origin and host of their own musical genres, serving as late-nite venues for some new, inhumanly cosmic or demiurgical forms of music. This is extremely unlikely but the equipment’s there is all I’m saying.

Some of my own goofily-machinic hype music, inspired by several days of Berlin’s Maientage

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The British humanist-pragmatist F.C.S Schiller was quoted by William James as saying that “The world is essentially _______, it is what we make it. It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is apart from us; it is what is made of it. Hence... the world is plastic.” James then says that Schiller “adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.” A pandynamic metaphysics, based as it is upon the making and unmaking of the world rather than the establishment of an ontology, would naturally be inclined to agree with Schiller there. However, it can do so without seconding Schiller’s anthropocentrism since this infinite plasticity ultimately can and should be defined “apart from us,” just as it need not be defined with respect to a Divine Creator, as it was for theologians like our venerable inceptor, William of Ockham. The world is unevenly pliant yet wholly plastic in that it could be made, unmade, and remade in its every feature or aspect, though not necessarily by us feeble mortals, nor by even a Divine Creator, but hypothetically by some confluence within its total nexus of powers, by some of its parts in conspiracy against the whole. 

Both conceptually and etymologically, pandynamism obviously rhymes with omnipotence. Both suggest that nothing in this world is beyond the reach of power. Because of this suggestion, or because of their Biblical belief in God’s almightiness, some Abrahamic theologians found themselves in a dunk tank of dynamic questions that ancient and modern philosophers avoided by quarantining power with the help of essences, laws, facts, and axioms. The theologians on the other hand took seriously the question of what happens when all things in this world are susceptible to power (even if they did so by placing the seat of this power outside of the world, beyond effect, in the transcendental form of a god). This led them right into the thick, into the contradictions of theodicy, for instance, or the Franciscan distinction between potentia ordinata (a power which explains the world-as-it-is) and potentia absoluta (which explains the world-as-it-could-be). In these speculations, they were— more than anyone before or after— acting very methodically on Schiller’s assumption of infinite plasticity until they were “decisively rebuked,” which sometimes, it seems, they were. 

Most all of them, William of Ockham included, maintained that not even God Himself could violate the law of non-contradiction or stick two contrarieties together in a single instance. Some, like Aquinas, also claimed that God was powerless to alter the past, piggy-backing off Aristotle who once said: “For this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have once been done.”  Even for a supposedly almighty being, then, the now was likewise defined as a threshold of impotency. Before it, His Almightiness shrank. Moreover, though nothing may be necessary across time, it does seem as if, once things have been minted into actuality, upon the razor’s edge of the instant, a sort of order— an Actual Order— reigns unchallenged until it is eagerly deposed by a coup of new actualities and possibilities. As William of Ockham corrected Aquinas, this doesn’t amount to any kind of “necessity,” since this actuality was never necessary by any law, logic, or ineluctability, across time or a priori, but does represent what we may think of as a kind of determinacy: the milk’s been spilled, the vase now lies in pieces. With spilled milk or a shattered vase, neither mishaps are or were necessary or irrecoverable, and though some powers could clean the milk or glue the vase back together, nothing could efface them as misfortunes on the Ledger of Time. We’d still have to lie to Mom and Dad. The same is true of historical events that our regrets are powerless to reverse. 

Notice, too, that this powerlessness seems to be a kind of check or rebuke to pandynamism itself. After all, it places both the Actual Order (and the obsidian heft of the past) out of the reach of all powers. This is ultimately a bluff, however, because the indellibility of the Ledger of Time still depends on specific conditions of the world-as-it-is— or rather, on how we experience and negotiate this world given a certain panoply of powers. It doesn’t necessarily hold in weirdball or hypothetical worlds-as-they-could-be (whether unknown, constructed, or imaginary) in which our categories would work together in unrecognizable ways. Through the contemplation of divine omnipotence, controversy arose over the degree to which God himself was constrained in the creation of the world. Infinitely perfect, infinitely just, good, and wise, could He have created the world otherwise, even imperfectly and without redemption, or was He too somehow bound by the laws— by the goodness, justice, and truth— that He himself established? The Franciscan response was to cleave a distinction between the potentia ordinata Dei and the potentia absoluta Dei. Creation as it was— its history, its laws, its most fundamental features and order— were decreed by God’s potentia ordinata. Nonetheless, Divine Will could’ve decided to create Creation otherwise by dint of his limitless potentia absoluta. The categories through which we comprehend the world are themselves merely the flowers of the potentia ordinata; if God chose, William of Ockham claimed, he could have easily created a fever-dream cosmos without us and intelligible only to the seraphim above— realizing quality without substance, form without matter, effect without cause, change without time. Or as Al-Ghazali assured “it is within divine power to create satiety without eating, to create death without decapitation, to continue life after decapitation, and so on to all connected things.” Outside of theology, and freed from the concerns and dictatorship of a Divine Creator, the distinction still holds. Our conceptions of time and change are predicated upon a world-as-it-is, a potentia ordinata, not a pandynamic potentia absoluta engendering entirely alien categories. Time could and would relate differently to actuality, given an alien nexus of powers. The good news is, depending on exactly how weird these other worlds are (and it can always get weirder), their dynamics and categories are not hopelessly beyond the comprehension of us feeble mortals; they merely require a weird, new power-account for them to once again make sense. 

This is approached sometimes in terms of the “alien phenomenology” of artificial intelligence (which runs according to a “system time”) and other loopy, fantastical forms of sentience (whether sub species aeternitatis or as change-tracking timeworms like the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five). But anthropocentric accounts of weird and hypothetical kinds of time and actuality can readily be found in literature and popular culture in pretty straightforwardly narrative forms. A few films: Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, in which segments of time are presented in reverse chronology. And a few novels: Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow and Philip K Dick’s Counter-Clock World, in which earthly processes flow backwards. Upon first entering these works, the reader or viewer is confused. Disoriented. Events occur counterintuitively. Families regurgitate their breakfast. Broken objects are healed by blows. Victims rise from the dead. Tattoos fade and cigarettes are restored by blowing smoke into them. Librarians diligently hunt down and eradicate the written patrimony of humankind. Causation, to the degree that it does make sense, runs backwards. After a while, however, once we’ve invested in the story and the struggles of the characters, the world becomes half-livable. We could, perhaps fumblingly, manipulate the flow of its processes. These worlds may be queasily anti-entropic and different from home; we power-conscious beings will still manage to nest in them and eventually make sense of their processes, just as we did originally when we were born into our own world, wailing and hopelessly unprepared. 

  In Dick’s Counter-Clock World, the characters have themselves somewhat adjusted to a sudden messianic reversal of time that occurred in 1985, thrusting humanity into what is referred to as the “Hobart Phase.” Cottage industries, such as locating and resuscitating the dead, arise to fill new human needs. But many activities are still in a stage of clumsy stopgaps, such as shaving (which is already awkward enough in our own world): “At the bowl he washed his face, then lathered on foam-glue, opened the packet and with adroit slappings managed to convey the whiskers evenly to his chin, jowls, neck; in a moment he had expertly gotten the whiskers to adhere.”  The aging process depends on whether you’ve already died and been reborn or not. The reborn grow younger, eventually  “dwindling” into babyhood and climbing into the nearest available womb, as the rest of the world continues the march toward death. This, Dick realizes, makes for strange arithmetic in the dating scene:

“…He's so goddamn much older than her. And with this anti-time, this Hobart Phase, she's getting younger and younger; pretty soon she'll be a teen-ager and then she'll be in grammar school, and about the time he's back to his prime of say around my age she'll be a baby. A baby!” He stared at Officer Tinbane.

“That's a point,” Tinbane conceded.

“She was older, of course, when he married her. More mature. You didn't know her then; you weren't on this beat. She was full-grown, fully like a real woman; hell, she was a real woman. But now—” He shrugged. “You can see what that damn Hobart Phase does.”

Tinbane said, “Are you sure? I thought you had to be already dead and be reborn to get younger.”

“Christ,” R.C. said, “don't you understand anti-time at all? Listen; I knew her. She was older. I was older; we all were. I think— you know what I think? You've got a mental block against facing it, because you're young now, too young, in fact; you, too, can't afford to get any younger. You can't be a cop if you do.”

“You're full of food.” 

Our categories (like time, space, process, cause and effect, and so on) aren’t just empty scaffolding upon which we hang the sensible world. They’re as much “categories” in the non-philosophical sense of the word: clusters or complexes of notions, images, habits, curiosities, under which we file our time-like encounters, our space-like encounters, our cause-like encounters; as an ensemble that differentiates like organs and integrates once again as an organon. There isn’t just this one concept, “time,” or this one thing, “space.” We can talk about “temporal pluralism” or “spatial pluralism” in the same breath as “causal pluralism,” as we did with Aristotle. They become coherent as categories through doing and making, undoing and unmaking, through our pragmatic struggles and fretful negotiations— even vicariously, through our involvement in lives on the page or screen. New encounters force us to adjust and enlarge our categories, but with a little help from our friends, we eventually get the hang. In Memento, Time’s Arrow, and Counter-Clock World, the past is revised or molten, but as they go about their days, cooking, cleaning, working, searching for love or seeking revenge, time then takes on a new sense as coherent as any other. 

This restructuration of sense doesn’t require book-length narratives though. It can happen at the scale of the sentence. A native speaker of an undeclined language like English will have habituated to a sentence order of subject-verb-object, an order that in English gives sense to the flow of words. Any other order will feel nonsensical. But then, after learning a second language with another sentence order (or listening to Yoda speak enough, with his object-first grammar), the speaker begins to realize the pliancy of the order itself: sense emerges from the totality of the sentence, in its use, with all the parts of speech working together. It’s not enough to declaratively know the grammatical rules to get it; you have to speak, listen, read, write— somehow use the language. The speaker might even pick up a highly declined language, reading ancient Greek or Latin poetry, and realize that sentence order is not the only way to structure sense. Grammar is unmasked as a habit, an order lending coherence through consistency, that was only codified into rules through the potentia ordinata of schoolmasters or the Ministry of Culture. 

The Ledger of Time is overwritten in many of our most popular time-warping narratives— in time-travel fictions like Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Time Bandits, Terminator, La Jetée, in the timeloops of Groundhog’s Day and Edge of Tomorrow, or the simulacral present of Synecdoche, New York— and so they successfully fulfill the role of science fiction as speculative sociology, of rendering into experience how we would operate with radically different conditions and powers. But it bears repeating that, in fact, all films and books edit and manipulate the flow of lived time. This is after all the entire function of montage, as Eisenstein can tell you, of how cinematic form gives sense to experience and history. Yet after years of viewing and reading, we hardly notice at all: these manipulated temporalities have been invisibly incorporated into the complex of notions that make up our concept of time, and in return, help us make sense of everyday experiences untouched by the editor’s razor. Films and novels that reverse or alter the flow of time— Memento or Time’s Arrow— are in that respect usually grappling with regret, guilt, and revenge, which is to say the slate of feelings that express our powerlessness to efface our blemishes on the Ledger of Time.

I’ll give another example, concerning space, which is no more immutable than time, either as a transcendental concept (à la Kant) or as a feature of the world (the assumption of common sense and classical science). I’ve been discussing how, though we typically express and understand change as a function of qualities and time, we can equally understand time in terms of change, then change within the larger nexus of powers. The same goes for space. We usually think of space as an empty container, with points and distances marked off and measured through a certain form of movement: by the translation through space within a certain frame of time, from Point A to Point B, passing through all the points in between. This is the most entrenched concept of space because it combines our ancient negotiation of space (walking or riding from place to place, with a fixed and limited radius of perception) with the innovation of maps which allowed us to conceive of space with a widened radius of perception, through the “pyramid of concept rather than the labyrinth of experience,” in the words of Bernard Tschumi. For millennia, these were the two big notions, slightly at odds, making up our concept of space, which has since been modulated even more by many other technics and techniques. The Newtonian science and cartography of European modernity rendered space yet more abstract (its points and distances as fixed and indiscernible as those of time) as opposed to the more “absolute” space of pre-modernity (with discrete and meaning-laden topoi). The invention of the telegraph (and telephone soon thereafter) changed our perception of the locality of consequence, in which causes and effects are both carried and buffered by the distances of space. It provided us a model, if only metaphorical, of spooky action at a distance. Each innovation was usually soon incorporated into the pragmatically-derived complex of concepts that make up our concept of space. 

More recently, our manipulation of maps (and all of what Lefebvre calls our “representations of space”) has been innovated by the screen-based technique of the pinch-and-zoom. Unassuming at first, this technique allows for something exceedingly novel in our negotiation of space, which is that scale is suddenly submitted to the discretion of human power. Our phones allow us to pinch-and-zoom, on our maps and images, but usually this is alongside our participation in our translated-based negotiation of space, walking, riding, or driving, which tends to take precedence. However, in other more immersive environments, such as gallivanting around Google Earth with a pair of VR goggles, pinch-and-zoom can overtake translation, and result in a sharp defamiliarization in our concept of space. Trudging along on street view is relatively sluggish in itself, and pointless when we want to travel between distant destinations like Paris and Hong Kong. Here, unconveniently, distance is too tightly linked with time. Our preferred way of traveling is to zoom up to a global scale (or however far we need), take a step over, then zoom down to the body-centric scales of the city or streets. 

This seems innocent enough at first, but before long, gives rise to a competing conception of space: no longer just a translatable set of metric points and distances, but equally an infinitely nested set of scales within scales. If we needed alone-time to think or rest, we hypothetically wouldn’t need to go away or close a door but merely zoom down to the scale of mites with a different wavelength of causes and effects. This defamiliarization wouldn’t replace or wholly overturn our sense of translation-based space, but after messing around with scales enough, it would certainly tweak our total, pragmatically-derived complex of space-based notions— and some of us more than others. Imagine, if you will, an Amazon worker, hired to fly delivery drones from house to house for over forty hours a week, with no bathroom breaks, who spends every minute of the workday manipulating space via a pinch-and-zoom, perhaps even through an Argus-eyed army of drones, each with their own center for the radius of local perception (giving us hundreds rather than one center of our senses). Their conceptions would slowly shift and be hard to put down at the end of the day. They’d leave work with Tetris-eye, so to speak. On the weekend, driving to Trader Joe’s or the post office, enraged by the traffic between eastside and west, they’d suddenly feel a frustration with translation-based space, trapped by the fixity of scale and blinded by their feeble radius of perception (just as we might feel the burden of materiality in the digital age, wishing we could send out our Christmas gifts as an email attachment). Just as with time, what we think of as “space” is entirely and accountably reliant upon a panoply of certain powers— historical, social, cognitive, or otherwise.

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The crux of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is the relation of being and change. In the first parts, he treats us to some choice cliffnotes on how the problem was handled among his predecessors. In one corner was Parmenides, reasoning against the reality of change, championing an immutable unity in which being “is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable and without end.” Time and change were, for him, nothing more than illusory ripples on the surface of being. “Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous One.” In the other corner was Heraclitus, for whom “the Sun is new everyday,” extolling a sort of demiurgic flux, a total change swallowing up everything down to the last pebble. Parmenides stood for pure stasis; Heraclitus, for pure kinesis; and neither of their worldviews were necessarily false or wrong in and of themselves. They were ecstatic or visionary— proudly uncowed by common sense and self-consistently true enough if you unflinchingly followed the premises out to their conclusions, which many of the Eleatics eagerly did. However, they were really better for bedtime than daytime: here was definitely wisdom, but it sure didn’t offer much of a handle on either the natural world or human affairs. 

Many of the Hellenics sensed this, it seems, and so sought to broker their own compromise in which, during any change, something new came into being and something else— usually something realer or more eternal— persisted. Whether elements, forms, or first causes, these realer, more persistent parts were thought to explain change while themselves remaining safely beyond any power that might inflict change upon them. This limited the number of moving parts, granted, and initially felt gentler upon the mind. Upon a little more reflection though (or after thousands of years of philosophical elaboration), we see how this compromise created a gaping aporia or quandary in the story of Western metaphysics that eventually filtered into other facets of thought and society. How and why would anything be so untouchably beyond any power to produce, change, or prevent it? And if it was beyond any power to produce, change, or prevent it, why was it there and why was it the way that it was? Western philosophy, that much-touted art of wonder, was thus rudely grounded in total incomprehensibility.

This aporia, this inherent tension between power and eternal being, was for many centuries after Aristotle, a problem somewhat mediated by filling the gap with— what else?— but an omnipotent and eternal supreme being. God didn’t make things much clearer, that’s for sure, but it made the paradoxes more tolerable, or better yet, a transcendent fountainhead everflowing with awe. His incomprehensibility was only greater testament. The secularization of the Enlightenment, then, didn’t just have an ethical and social challenge to mount against the worldview of the religious establishment. Its scientific project was suddenly embarrassed by the metaphysical questions of power that had been long deferred by a divine omnipotent being, questions that now had to be actually answered because of the dare-to-know mandate of the Enlightenment ethos. What to do? Dualists and deists like Descartes and Locke manage to stall a little longer through a number of half-measures, rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s and unto God that which was God’s. Space and bodies worked one way; God and souls another. More rigorous spirits, however, implicitly or explicitly followed through with the static-kinetic premises of the scientific revolution. Rather than liquidating God and dispersing His powers into a messier, dynamic metaphysics, they largely opted for a self-sufficient “ontology of mechanism” in which for all intents and purposes, neither God nor power had any role. If completed, this would make things easier to explain, no longer having to account for questions of power. Problem solved, or so they thought... 

The sworn atheists of the Enlightenment, like Laplace, got that causation would have to become an iron-chain perpetual-motion determinism if the universe was to wholly dispense with a creator (or anything remotely like Him). If the world was to be evacuated of power, per our definition, causation would have to be evacuated of possibility. And sure enough, this was exactly how causation was re-understood by both its defenders like Spinoza and its skeptics like Hume, as a relation implying law-like necessity (a definition that always left me unmoved by Hume’s criticism when I was younger). In the natural sciences, the sumptuous casserolle of manifold causes that we found in Aristotle was streamlined and segregated into forces (from efficient causes, which even for Aristotle were largely matters of rest and motion) and matter (from material causes, though as a materiality ultimately bereft of character) operating within the formal frames of physical laws. Final causes were tossed altogether and ridiculed as a holdover of theology (though from what I can tell, all other forces besides momentum, like gravity and magnetism, still permitted coyly teleological interpretations— or if not teleological, then at least didn’t stray so far from notions of Renaissance naturalism such as sympathy and abhorrence).

Under this rubric, causation became nothing more than an ineluctable procession of steps, a linkage in which causes directly implied their effects, rather than being directed and refracted through a nimbus of possibilities. In most real world scenarios or events, the total calculation of all forces might have been too complex for human prediction, as Laplace admitted; its results were nonetheless predetermined and merely unveiled by the procession of time. Total determinism, I’ll note, isn’t a deal-breaking requirement for static-kinetic worldviews. Not in the least. In the pinball chaos of Empedoclean materialism, for instance, contingency is completely real but hardly any more dynamic because it’s only the result of the random and inexplicable “swerving” of its simplest particles (a real contingency that would also reemerge in physics three centuries on). And natural science might equally express itself in the entirely static terms of pure mathematical equations (as Bertrand Russell noted, cause is eradicable, time merely a variable, and hence causal determinism more or less meaningless), or (as Russell’s buddy Whitehead had it) in the overwhelmingly kinetic terms of processes whose complexity exceed and outfox the marching orders of an absolute determinism. For its own part, the ontology of mechanism was kinetic in the way a carousel is kinetic, its parts welded together deterministically; and all change occurring in accordance with laws which represent a higher order of unchange. 

I’m simplifying a lot, of course, in order to follow the curve from vaguely Aristotle-based worldviews to the ontology of mechanism established in early scientific modernity. During the middle ages, Aristotle, like Plato, persisted more as an imprint until his re-introduction into Europe through Islamic scholars like Ibn Rushd, and he still had gangs of detractors among the early moderns. Neoplatonists continued their millenia-long intellectual turf war with Neo-Aristotelians. Prominent humanists, in their challenge of institutional authority, resented Aristotelian dogmas in European education. And ecclesiastics, who obviously didn’t mind institutional authority, remained suspicious of Aristotle as simply the wrong kind— as an impious pagan and a dangerous departure from church doctrine. The so-called scientific revolution inherited plenty from Aristotelian natural philosophy, like its empirical bent and the rough outline of its questions, but in the construction of its ontology of mechanism, broke sharply with Aristotle in its expurgation of final causes and possibility, or more specifically, of the twin notions of actuality (entelechy) and potentiality (dynamos). It could also be argued that there was a subtler mood change from an interrogation of the factum— which was the result of some form of doing or agency— to the interpretation of facts— that is, facts in themselves, cabinets of which had been collected and maniacally catalogued by Renaissance humanists. 

This ontology of mechanism arose partly through the working intimacy between natural philosophers and artisans in the use and development of literal machines. The machine— the clock, the air pump, the windmill, the automaton— was selected from the totality of all things to serve as an analogy for the totality of all things. This wasn’t an error. All schemes necessarily do this, pulling metaphors from their own pragmatic interactions with the world and exhausting the implications until their metaphors run aground (and a dynamic scheme, which borrows primarily from the social, is no different). Of course, this privileges certain phenomena over others. Aristotle was enthralled by the celestial sphere, like Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, or Newton, but his natural philosophy drew the greater share of its metaphors from biology, and an Aristotelian scheme— however you might describe it— will thus work best on organic phenomena like horses and budding oaks. The Novatores trained their metaphors on machines instead and therefore were far more successful in describing phenomena that behaved, well, mechanistically. However, this “mechanism” meant something larger than mere machines, especially once it was smuggled into the social sphere during the Enlightenment. Once any scheme is in place, it sublimes its inspirations and becomes a framework through which all things are comprehended— some better than others— including its own concepts in relation to each other. So both Aristotelianism and the ontology of mechanism (both of which I describe as different flavors of static-kinetic), operate according to their own interrelated conceptions of things like time, space, cause, effect, change, stasis, explanation, necessity, and for lack of a better word, determination. 

Let’s begin with that old stoner’s delight, the conception of time. Through the zootropic lens of the ontology of mechanism, we look upon time as a dimension consisting of an infinite popcorn string of fixed pointlike coordinates, whose steady and sequential popping nevertheless create a sense of unidirectional flow. Another helpful image might be the bulbs on an old Broadway marquee, that remain in a fixed and regular order but light in a lively sequence that guides the eyes around the edges of the sign. As the coordinate system upon which events happen or processes stretch, time itself stays fixed and even. Change then is supposedly measured as a function of the difference in static qualities over time. But as Aristotle himself mused, this could be reversed without breaking a sweat; time is just as easily derived from change. The Newtonian and mechanical notion of time, that has become our common sense, is more clearly understood as abstract change, in much the way that classical economics understood prices as abstract value in the mechanisms of the market. And, lo and behold, this abstraction is historically and pragmatically how we actually derived this idea of time and its supposed regularity, by normalizing the roaring, cascading rates of all the jumbling processes around us with respect to the most predictable and regular among them, namely the movements of celestial bodies. From there, we subdivided those units first into hours, then minutes, then seconds, before groping around for processes that approximately matched their tempo, such as the swings of a pendulum or the steady flows of water and sand. Remarkably, this also recapitulates to a tee the same story that Aristotle tells in his Metaphysics, where the causes of the world begin first with the eternal unmoved mover (God), then to the outermost heavens to the planets, down into earthly cycles, before disseminating into the empirical effects and changes observable even by the beasts of the Earth. Here then, we can see how our conception of time was derived, produced, and created; it’s no longer some metaphysical given or epistemological a priori. Its supposed regularity is a result of pragmatic coordination and normalization— and conveniently unfalsifiable since we’ve got nothing to clock it against. 

The abstraction is not a problem in and of itself though. It’s the reason our timekeepers— our clocks, calendars, and metronomes— are useful for coordination. It’s also not that it’s false, and the usurpation of Newton by new physics still conserved time as a dimension, even if its coordinate system could be warped and affected by cosmic forces (which was surprising only because science ontologized this abstraction in the first place). However, abstraction’s not the only way to make, as Wilfred Sellar put it, “things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” If broken free from common measure, from its normalization, time could decentralize back into the roaring, cascading rates of jumbling processes that unfold primarily in temporal relation to themselves. With this, time may turn inward, as a jumpy synthesis of memory and anticipation, or become exclusive, as with Heidegger’s orientation of time around that most exclusive of all events, our own death. Less psychically or personally, though, time can also fracture into a thousand independent “temporalities,” each in accord with their own local self-organizing processes, that we may observe and respect in the melting of glaciers or the jittering cycles of animalcules and molecules. Once the reign of abstraction is dethroned, it releases into the wild an ungovernable multiplicity of chronologies. However, neither abstract time nor the fragmentation of time into trajectories that we find in Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, or for that matter, our overtly psychological accounts of past, present, and future— neither static eternity nor kinetic singularity— accommodate what I would consider a dynamic conception of time. 

The revenge of processual time is, after all, already partly there in Aristotle. In his Physics, he declares time to be but the “number or measure of change or movement,” of the kineses or processes that themselves unfold through a movement from potentiality to actuality, by way of the very dynamos and entelechy banished from the clockwork cosmology of mechanism. So it makes sense, doesn’t it? For Aristotle too, this telos towards and through which something is actualized— even if shared by other members of its kind or species— is something buried deep in the heart of its processes (like the telos of death or the weight and shape of a falling body). My two cents is that dynamic time can do much better than the choice between transcendental abstraction and an uncoordinated multiplicity of movements— it has to if it wants to convincingly explain the immanent interrelation of all things, events, and processes. It does so by imagining other forms of coordination and alternative pragmatics upon which to base time. How else can we make sense of time then? Take for instance, the notion of the present moment, of the “now,” which is illusory in terms of static abstraction yet still fleeting and private in terms of singular process. How can this be understood dynamically? Power-accounts are, in some ways, accounts of actualizations, just not of a form of actuality as top-heavy or essential as Aristotle’s (and it’s almost amusing to think about understanding power, especially socially, without explanatory aims or ends, of that which is to be actualized— as merely the contour of abstract principles or the thrust of blind forces). Power-accounts answer the question: “what constellations of causes and possibilities are needed to actualize something, what constellations could thwart this actualization, and how else might it be actualized?” In dynamic time, the present moment is defined as the limit-point after which the answer to this question precipitously drops to zero, and becomes simply “nothing.” In terms of power, it’s defined as the threshold of impotency. And this impotency is a common impotency, shared by all things under the Sun. It’s not some private and inarticulable sense. Furthermore, every instant or duration, not just the present one, is colorfully defined by its relation to a pandynamic and hotly-contested arena of actualizations (including those within the processes of consciousness that consequently swear by the flow of time). If time is explained by change; change is— we have to remember— explained by power. I’ll have more to say about this in later sections, but for now I want to elucidate this with an illustration from music.  

What is rhythm in music? In its most common acceptation, rhythm’s understood as a pattern of sound events taking place upon a temporal lattice simply designated as “the tempo.” This notion of rhythm is so common and entrenched we forget that it was as much of an historical invention as the Newtonian notion of transcendental abstract time. It was invented primarily by the so-christened school of Notre Dame, revolving around Pérotin and Léonin, and developed simultaneously with musical notation and polyphony. That is, just as time was normalized into abstract change to coordinate the roaring, cascading rates of all jumbling processes, tempo was invented to coordinate a chorus of voices singing a multiplicity of melodies. Prior to this, in the European Middle Ages, the rhythm of songs was dictated by the native temporalities of language, since in liturgical music, song was considered more as an illumination of the holy meanings of the texts. The Word took precedence as a structuring force. This abstraction of tempo and the coordination of musical values as harmony, fully and faithfully expressible through musical notation, reached its zenith in the Enlightenment with Rameau’s Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels. As it was for Pythagoras and Kepler, musical composition was homologous to the laws of nature, a musica universalis. However, despite the countless new forms for the coordination and production of sound, we stubbornly still understand music in these old terms (and anything lying outside of these terms is marginalized as incidental or extra-musical). Our notion of rhythm therefore is still altogether transcendental and abstract. Not everyone fully agrees, and there have been some efforts to interpret rhythm less or unabstractly. Deleuze, in his Difference and Repetition, in his attempt to outwit identity and the generality of laws, says that:

“The study of rhythm allows us immediately to distinguish two kinds of repetition. Cadence-repetition is a regular division of time, an isochronic recurrence of identical elements. However, a period exists only insofar as it is determined by a tonic accent, commanded by intensities. Yet we would be mistaken about the function of accents if we said that they were reproduced at equal intervals. On the contrary, tonic and intensive values act by creating inequalities or incommensurabilities between metrically equivalent periods or spaces. They create distinctive points, privileged instants which always indicate a poly-rhythm. Here again, the unequal is the most positive element. Cadence is only the envelope of a rhythm, and of a relation between rhythms. The reprise of points of inequality, of inflections or of rhythmic events, is more profound than the reproduction of ordinary homogeneous elements. As a result, we should distinguish cadence-repetition and rhythm-repetition in every case, the first being only the outward appearance or the abstract effect of the second.”

This is oddly conservative coming from Deleuze though. It basically amounts to saying that the isochrony of musical time derives from the inner inequalities of a sound process (deriving time from movements, but linking them as a duality), while leaving that isochrony more or less in place. Above this passage, though, speaking more generally of rhythm and symmetry, he writes:

“A distinction is drawn between arithmetic symmetry, which refers back to a scale of whole or fractional coefficients, and geometric symmetry, based upon proportions or irrational ratios; a static symmetry which is cubic or hexagonal, and a dynamic symmetry which is pentagonal and appears in a spiral line or in a geometrically progressing pulsation - in short, in a living and mortal 'evolution'. Now, the second of these is at the heart of the first; it is the vital, positive, active procedure. In a network of double squares, we discover radiating lines which have the centre of a pentagon or a pentagram as their asymmetrical pole. The network is like a fabric stretched upon a framework, 'but the outline, the principal rhythm of that framework, is almost always a theme independent of the network': such elements of dissymmetry serve as both genetic principle and principle of reflection for symmetrical figures.”

If we’re feeling charitable towards Deleuze (and I won’t be in future sections), we can read this as a recognition that those “inner inequalities” may not ultimately conform to any common denominator of a tempo and its “arithmetic symmetry.” Through the irrational ratios or inevitable remainders of any “vital, positive, active procedure,” emerges a sort of “transgression” against the cagebars of musical isochrony. Nevertheless, this doesn’t offer us anything like a new working conception of rhythm. It merely acknowledges the productive tension between isochrony and arrhythmia that’s always been at work in traditional rhythm, just as there’s always been a productive tension between consonance and dissonance in all melody and harmony (which is why my blood cools when composers try to mobilize dissonance against consonance while leaving tonality itself more or less untouched). 

In any event, rhythm can easily be re-imagined in far more concretely processual terms. There are countless things that we loosely speak about as having a rhythm. War has a rhythm. Tennis has a rhythm. Videogames have a rhythm. Conversations have a rhythm. We think we’re speaking figuratively, but we’re not. Each of these processes is produced in accordance with its own temporal logic, a logic that speaks to a more general meaning of rhythm, as an actionable intuition of how movements relate to the production of sound. If in their coordination and synthesis into a musical form, we habitually subjugate their temporal logics to the lattice of tempo, that’s completely on us— a failure of the imagination. However, fret not; music has plenty of other ways to accomplish this. To begin with, even without any other techniques or devices, these processes take place in a common world, in which we already share a certain intuition about their temporal logics. Screenwriters talk about “beats.” Comedians talk in terms of “timing.” What tells the comedian on stage how to pace his language and manner, to drop a punchline at a precise moment, or how long to draw out a pregnant pause? They’re not counting in their heads. They’re acting upon a “vital, positive, active procedure” without any reference to the ticks of a clock. They’re modulating the tensions in the room, in their guts, and between their words, responding to the interrelation of their body and language with the presence and pressures of the audience, through a shared understanding of the temporality of an action or anecdote. Music, too, can self-organize through timing rather than tempo. And it does on occasion, during flights into the “freeform,” but— and this isn’t a rhetorical question— has it ever been codified into a systematic form of rhythm based on cues and triggers?

Whatever your answer, experimental music and modern life furnish plenty of techniques and devices, besides notation and tempo, to coordinate our vital procedures: sound can be polyphonously coordinated through haptic or visual cues, such as a film, tickertape, or spectacle, (similar to live music created to accompany silent films); sound can be modulated through direct response to live actions (like contact mics hooked up to mini-ramps), or produced kinesthetically through the movements of bodies, dancers, or objects; and since the invention of recorded sound, the temporal coordination no longer has to happen simultaneously, on stage or in the studio, as it did in the pre-Edisonian era. Once one process is set to tape; all others may then follow suit. A highschooler can record themselves rapping their worst, with all the native temporalities of language, like the liturgical texts of medieval music, and only afterwards hound a producer into embellishing the track with sounds and effects in their bedroom studios… The list of methods goes on, and many are even easy to execute, but rarely attempted outside of experimental circles, let alone used to collectively derive, produce, or create a new conception of rhythm. Musically, we’re still ensconced in unquestioned forms of abstract time. This is as much a social or political as aesthetic predicament in that, as we read in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis or E.P. Thompson’s Time, Work-Discpline and Industrial Capitalism, our conceptions of time and rhythm are not just intellectual curiosities; they structure our society and lifeworld, usually in wearying contradiction with our deeper needs and desires. But it doesn’t work to banish the clock, to hit the snooze button, or flee into an asocial state of nature or chaos. Something will structure us no matter what, so we might as well derive new social, cultural, political coordinating systems for immanently interrelating all things, events, and processes— just ones based on better forms of life.

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A WINTER’ S TALE:

Somewhere in the long shadow of Chicago, a housefire blazed in the cruel winter’s night. The home was one-storey, with faded-yellow sides, an attic master bedroom, a large porch, and a grassless yard enclosed by a chainlink fence. Flames visibly licked at its wide front window and smoke billowed out of its ears. Firefighters arrived in droves and battled like the Greeks until the flames were subdued. As the sun rose, however, it became clear that the house was uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Its family now had no place to go. The Investigator, a barrel of a man with bad personal habits and an old brown suit, arrived just after dawn to determine the cause of the fire. The first thing he discovered inside was a kerosene heater, turned on its side on the living room carpet. He wriggled his nose— “yep, this must be the culprit”— and in his trusty notebook scribbled “carpet, kerosene.” This still didn’t reveal much. Kerosene and carpet are flammable, but not without a flame. 

From the last departing fireman he learned that a young boy of seven, now brought to safety, had been playing with matches. “Matches?”— the trope petite-madeleined a memory of a poster in his Ohio elementary school, many eons ago, with a blue cartoon squirrel in a tree warning students about the dangers of matches. From a chemist’s perspective, the matches, carpet, and kerosene certainly explained the fire. But our Investigator, though he considered himself a man of science, was largely there in a legal capacity, and to pose different questions: who was responsible for the fire? Where were the parents— or anyone who could have prevented the fire? Why was that boy alone at night playing with matches? 

He put in some phone calls and further details emerged. Both parents were working the night in question, and as we all know, times have been hard on working people. In the last ten years alone, rent and expenses have doubled in this forsaken township. Barely able to afford groceries, much less childcare, the parents usually staggered their schedules so that one of them would always be home with their son. This month, there’d been a mean cold snap. It was all over the news. Too many coworkers had called in sick, leaving the parents no choice. Heating bills had soared and promises of assistance from the city had all been empty. The family resorted to a kerosene heater to cut costs, which by now, was a familiar story to the Investigator. Housefires had doubled over the cold snap, and thanks to his earlier lean years in Ohio, he wasn’t blind to the cruel dilemmas of economic desperation. Over the phone, the father’s voice cracked with resentment as he heaped blame upon officials, institutions, and life in America for giving his family no other out. “What else could I do, man?” 

The Investigator made his way back to his towncar and— warming himself on cigarettes and a thick plastic thermal mug of coffee he’d refilled for a dollar at the gas station— he took a moment to reflect. He’d seen too much of this kind of tragedy lately. Something was starting to twist up inside of him. He tried something. He wrote down every possible cause his mind could squeeze out: kerosene, carpet, matches, heater, child, mother, father, sick coworkers, relentless bosses, the cold snap, the rent increases, the heating bill, the cost of childcare, the empty promises, the failures of officers and institutions... The Investigator coughed, took a sip, then continued on... the viruses that caused the sicknesses, the flashpoint of the kerosene, the extended family that was nowhere to be found, the thoughts that may have distracted the young boy, the angles and measurements of all the objects in the living room, the family events earlier that day, the callousness of American society... He reviewed his list. These were all real causes. If not sine qua non, each was at least an important ingredient. But he couldn’t help notice how they popped or receded in importance depending on the kinds of questions you asked, whether it was a matter of law, justice, physics, metaphysics, sociology, friendship, family— or just as a bystander watching the house go up in flames on a cold Midwestern night. Every agenda produced a different account, and not one of those accounts was any less true from the standpoint of what was or what wasn’t. 

Here was a real puzzle. How do we choose which to choose? Which causes do we blame or thank? The word Aristotle used for “cause,” aition, is connected to judicial language in ancient Greek, designating those who might be responsible for a crime or mishap. This was the job of our Investigator, after all, and he’d been doing it long enough to know how all the procedures, precedents, prejudices, all the subtle hints and social habits, the grand sum of laws and orders, conveniently limited the range of admissible causes. The courthouse had no time or taste for metaphysics— and needed to speedily justify an accusation. He recalled the piteous words of the father and felt uneasy about his role in it all. Just maybe, his reports would only be read by an insurance company; nevertheless, he felt he was being forced to condemn a man who was innocent on a higher order. He could fudge the reports— willfully overlook things, add some mitigating circumstances— but on that day, what he really wanted to report was that the city should find itself guilty in its own courts. That would be justice, which was exactly why it was taken off the table. He wasn’t totally unrealistic. He understood how some kind of guidelines would be needed, even in a just and ideal world, to whittle down the number of causes that were “infinite in this way.” Things needed to get done. Still, where did the guidelines come from? Of all the millions of possible stories we could tell, which one would end up on record?

He rotated the spill-proof top of his plastic mug and took a sip. Suddenly his vision was overwhelmed by a metaphysical image of every event— not just this fire— as a flashpoint of a thousand-thousand causes, a vortex of factors from every direction and on every scale. “Jesus,” he shuddered, “how do we ever make sense of all this shit?” He tried nonetheless. He rummaged around his tired brain for the right words, the right metaphors, and almost had it— but just then, his boss rang and interrupted the epiphany. “Yello,” he answered, while wrestling open a bag of Werther’s Originals. He told her the reports would be ready by the next afternoon…

I define power as the conjunction of causation and possibility. Given this definition, the longer philosophical evasion of power suddenly makes a lot more sense. Few concepts have given philosophy as much trouble as causation and possibility. You should see it. From the Islamic occasionalism of the Asharites and al-Ghazali to David Lewis’ defense of possible worlds, the literature is completely psychedelic. It’s been such a shitshow that most philosophers have either discounted them as illusory or tried to reduce them to entirely undynamic elements— usually while confessing that, no, we’d probably never be able to think or live without them as concepts. After his little bout of “philosophical melancholy,” his skeptical reflections on causation in particular, David Hume just needed to put the whole thing down for a while: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

 If causation and possibility, each by themselves, have stumped so many big names, you can understand how their combination might make us skittish. My hunch about this though is that causation and possibility (and by extension, power) are not inherently ungraspable. They’re just ungraspable within certain schemes, and part of the confusion comes from cramming them into a form of truth in which they never really belonged (such as a propositional form of truth). The intellectual historian Louis Menand, speaking of American pragmatism, once remarked that pragmatists “don’t believe there is a problem with the way people think. They believe there is a problem with the way people think they think.” Much of our undynamism likewise arises reflectively, in our explanations of the world and the inadequate schemes through which we conceptualize its powers, causes, and possibilities. 

When it comes to the propositional form of truth, for instance, whatever led us to presume that questions like “is this possible?” or “is this a cause of that?” could ever be succinctly answered with true or false, a yes or a no, anywhere outside of rigorously predefined formalisms like chess, mathematics or programming languages? Where did this bizarre idea originate? One of the longest-running legacy conceptions of truth and falsity is as a reflection in the mind of being and non-being. The true is; the false is not. The dynamic, however, doesn’t fit into this ontological distinction of being and non-being. And as our Investigator agonized, just “being” a cause wouldn’t really explain anything anyway. If dynamism has anything like an ontology, it would be one first muddied by a notion of potentiality (in which potentialities hover somewhere between being and non-being, as in Aristotle), and even then, as an ontology rephrased into the longer, larger questions of how rather than whether things really are. But I don't think it does have an ontology, or needs one. If a fire really burns, does it matter whether it really is? 

Forget curt verdicts like yes or no, true or false. The answer to the question “is this possible?” is always: “it depends.” It depends on the full balance of contradictory determinants, which are often tiebroken by the lightest or least expected of factors. It depends on the relative magnitudes of affordances and resistances most of which are often inexpressible in positive, let alone metric terms. It depends on concrete, convincing stories about precisely who or what would possibilize, and who or what would impossibilize, something from being accomplished or produced, and— the cherry on top of any veritable power-account— how something might otherwise be produced or accomplished. Like for example, I don’t know, is it possible for the United States to guarantee universal healthcare for all its citizens? This is the eternal question, isn’t it? Instead of dignifying it with a “yes,” though, it’s better to launch straight into what specific factors— or malefactors— have produced this miracle wherein the richest country on Earth also seems to be one of the few nations incapable of medically protecting its own people. This doesn’t just mean a pro-con list of the countless enabling factors— its tremendous wealth, resources, technologies, systems, programs, and social need— against any countervailing factors— the exorbitant costs of pharmaceuticals, the guild-like behavior of the medical profession and medical school licensing, the tenacious self-preservation of health-insurance companies, the growing monopolization of hospital systems, the misinformation of the public, the venality of the American political class, and so on. 

A dynamic “modality”— maybe “possibilistics” is a better word— entails an account of factors to be questioned and inventively elaborated, not a ledger of facts to be reckoned and readily accepted. Let’s think. What could we do to produce or strengthen any of those enabling factors? How were those pesky countervailing factors produced and then what could we do to remove or overcome them? And— considering the wide variety of functioning systems in place around the world— what are the myriad forms that universal healthcare could assume in the States? The truth of this possibility just doesn’t make any sense in terms of propositional forms or correspondence theories of truth. It can’t be answered definitively, abstractly, curtly— perhaps not even wholly in words— and if there’s anything it’s supposed to correspond to, we’re trying to figure that out at the same time. So we’re forced to turn to other forms or theories for dynamic truth, and luckily propositional forms and correspondence theories have plenty of common enemies. What would dynamic truth look like? Well, it would emerge only through ongoing justifications and  interim satisfactions (like American pragmatism); it would mediate and emphatically assert, rather than solve or resolve, social and material contradiction (like Adorno’s “aesthetic truth”); it would be constituted through and as power (the interplays of causes or constraints and the “management of possibilities”) rather than through and as an attainment of neutrality (as for Foucault); and it would be historically produced and decidedly concrete rather than given or abstract (as for Henri Lefebvre). It would invent and elaborate, articulating powers, causes, and possibilities in a thickly narrative— and at times even entirely aesthetic— form. Only in such a form or theory would power, cause, and possibility really, and literally, be said to make sense. 

Any earnest possibilistics should also remain as concrete as it can, not only because of the philosophical incoherence of “abstract possibility,” but also because of its ideological insidiousness in our representations of social power. As David Javerbaum once observed, “With God all things are possible but without money they're highly unlikely.” Similarly, the American Dream promises an equal and universal possibility for all citizens, in abstracto, while simultaneously providing cover and justification for the countless, finer ways in which social possibility is rigged and frustrated, legally, economically, spatially, and sociologically; in the fine print— that is to say, in the concrete. The very notion, cherished among Kantians and Northern Virginian thinktanks alike, that anything could ever be abstractly possible or impossible, as with the “universal optimism” of the American Dream (or the entrepreneurial-speak or “ted-talk” describing the “potential” benefits of a new techno-wonder), does nothing but obscure the real possibilistics that dominant groups and individuals have mastered with equestrian skill and surety. Abstract possibility is ideologically represented and foisted upon the many, as concrete possibility is shrewdly instrumentalized by the few. 

The Critique of Pure Reason parses “modality” into a three-fold analytic consisting of the “apodictic” (the necessarily or logically so), the “assertoric” (the actual, empirical, or extant), and finally what Kant would call the “problematic” (neither impossible a priori nor as-yet known or extant). Kant didn’t think of these modal categories as ontological and simply in the world, like many before him. They were categories relating the object and the faculties of the subject, and synthesized in judgment as “momenta of thought.” Even if this caveat actually makes any sense to you (and it’s not worth losing sleep over), at the end of the day, it doesn’t make much of a difference for dynamic possibility, which would lump everything together by asking the concrete question of “how possible is it?” or “what causes would enable or disable its actualization?” What possibilizes or impossibilizes? What aids or encourages, hinders or discourages? And in what ways would they do so? As Henri Lefebvre sets out in his own Critique, “We rule out the idea of absolute necessity along with the idea of absolute chance and the purely fortuitous. Absolute necessity, i.e., determinism, belongs to ideology, not to knowledge. It excludes dialectical movement, relative chance and relative necessity, the relatively predictable and relatively unpredictable.” 

Later on in the seminar, I’m going to dive into why absolute necessity and impossibility don’t even hold for metaphysical or naturalistic questions, but in the meantime, I’m still left to wonder what role they would even have in concrete, decisive, social questions of power? What good does it do, or meaning would it have, to struggle or dispute over the immutable or necessarily so? It seems to me that struggles and disputes are at bottom struggles and disputes over the directions of world-making, on the possible forms of an unevenly pliant sociality. If it’s already fated or eternal, unmoved by our pleas and unimpressed by our efforts, doesn’t it remain outside of the arena of human clamor and contest? Even where it appears fated, always count me on the side of the lost cause, whether it’s the last-stand battles of American tribes against the U.S. government or Gilgamesh’s protests against human mortality. I once saw a re-memed Reddit post which asked readers “is 7 divisible by 3?” to which someone sympathetically replied “No, I wish it were.” That’s the spirit, brave Redditor, refuse the inevitable…

At the risk of getting a little dry here, let me hammer in a few more points with regards to causation, about how it gets mangled or desiccated by the propositional form, especially in the more technically-minded Anglophone and analytic traditions. Causation and possibility (or “modality” more broadly) mutually inhere as categories. For me, their conjunction composes our understanding of power, and by way of that understanding, cause and possibility are forever understood in tandem, as two sides of the same coin. To “cause” is to possibilize— to make something more possible— and we gauge, wager, and comprehend the possibility of something through a power-account of its causes. For most schools, causation is still defined in terms of modality, only in ways I find dissatisfying or undynamic. The most pervasive (and for me, the most perplexing) view of causation among earlier moderns was as a species of necessity (Spinoza), as a “necessary connexion” (Hume) between things or events— a definition shared by exponents and detractors alike, and eventually elaborated into various nomological theories of causation (from nomos meaning “law”). Alternatives have since been offered by critics of necessitation, many of them within analytic philosophy, who likewise define causation through one modal concept or another, such as “probability” (a static-kinetic approximation of possibility) or some variety of non-actuality (such as “counterfactuality” with David Lewis or the more palatable theories of interventionists like Armstrong). 

Some of these theories insist that causes are really real and in the world; others construe cause more conceptually, semantically, or as merely predictive. These schools agree on very little in their formulation of cause, and much of the literature consists of evermore baroque riddles, examples, and counterexamples used to buttress or impugn a given theory. One thing they do seem to generally agree on though is the ambition of coaxing causation into propositional forms amenable to truth values. This can mean the kind of proposition in which necessitation looks eerily similar to logical inference (in which the world implies itself into existence), or as a hypothesis to be tested— and verified or falsified— through empirical experimentation, but in either case, the propositional form is fashioned for use in the the mathematical and natural sciences. This form works well enough most of the time since most of the problem-solving in mathematics and the natural sciences are within a static-kinetic scheme. It fails at the dynamic edges though, in moments of “revolutionary” science, during mathematization or in the dreamwork of new scientific models. 

It fails even faster when imported into social thought or the resolutely concrete world, as in the case of our Investigator, who disconcerted by his vision of a thousand-thousand causes, along every dimension, scale, and intensity (something which at least from the outset, appears something like the Buddhist notion of “dependent origination”), still struggled to decide what to put in his report. There too, the answer to the question of causes is always “it depends.” It depends on a countless number of collaborative causes and purportedly background conditions (which are really nothing other than other causes). What caused World War I? The answers range: the European reaction to the breakdown and disembedding of social relations in marketized society, the destablization of the conservative “balance of powers” struck at the Congress of Vienna, the aggravations of hysterical imperialism, militarism, and nationalism, Kaiser Wilhelm’s carte-blanche support of Austro-Hungary, the catalyzing assassination of a single archduke by a lone Bosnian Serb student (or the assassination by another nationalist of Jean Jaurès, who some believe could’ve persuaded the Continent out of its march toward suicide). Which of these are causes and which conditions, and what’s the difference between causes and conditions besides their salience or relevance, besides the pragmatic differences between starring and background roles in a causal tale or power-account? 

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The categorial conception of power covers both the everyday, efficacious, empowering, productive forms, on the one hand, and the prohibitive, overbearing, overconcentrated, overpowering forms on the other. It includes both empowerment and domination, ability and resistance, power to and power over, the supposedly “good” and the supposedly “bad” kinds of power, as well as the following: absolute power, biopower, black power, the power of persuasion, the power of love, the power of money, knowledge-power, girl-power, power-plays, powerstrips, horse-power, power ballads— everything and anything can be translated into comparably dynamic terms if needs be (though most often, needs really don’t be). Throw in some Greek and Latinate rootwords in case you need to win over the skeptics— and there you have it. Our eyeballs exercise ocular power. Water becomes the medium of aquatic power. Ants gather and work in large colonies of what you might call formic power. And Andy Warhol once conjectured that the so-called “cultural energy” of the Sixties was little more than a decades-long rush and result of amphetaminic powers. Each to their own expression. These different kinds of power— such as Mann's economic, political, ideological, or military sources, or arguably Karatani's A, B, C, and D modes of exchange— I'll refer to as the varying “modes” of power. “Modes” because their differences are operative, active, shifting, oftentimes ad hoc, and irreducibly plural. They’re not essentially or substantially distinct in the way fire, earth, water, and air were for Empedocles, elements in some overarching social physics. There are as many modes of power as there are ways of making and doing.

The ways in which power is variously arranged, distributed, balanced, or directed (and around which revolve the really hot questions of justice, domination, human flourishing, and world-design), I'm calling the “configurations” of power. It’s important to note that power-accounts can never fully separate configurations and modes into a strict schematism like form and content; they have to be narrated together snugly like story and character, especially before getting weighed or judged as unjust, dominatory, or shittily designed. Even when they’re highly comparable, or seemingly spitting images across domains, a bad or good configuration in one mode might not be nearly so bad or good in another. The tyrant and the tycoon share a lot in common as dominatory figures, but we should expect a lot of differences that make a difference, especially when it comes to addressing effects and evils. I actually want to be helplessly overpowered by true love or by a favorite new melody; not so much by a boss or magistrate. 

That same, dear true love of mine might not have smitten me had circumstances been otherwise— if we’d met another afternoon, or during a bad hair day, or gotten distracted by the lure of other hearts— and that favorite new melody might not wound as sweetly if performed by other voices or instruments. Social and political configurations likewise yield widely differing results in differing details and contexts, and so have to be considered both immanently and in ensembles, great and small. What I may generally consider a good configuration, like democracy, is not just a question of form or procedure, an empty mold or method that can be blithely imposed or applied on any facet of society. Democracy takes on diverse forms depending on whatever social stuff it’s supposed to be democratizing, and may even compete with other (perhaps simpler or prettier or more streamlined) configurations that I deem equally good and want to simultaneously employ. The democracy of the polis is not the democracy of the factory floor, in their mechanisms, obligations, social relations, irritatingly busybody details, and forms of resistance (I’m sitting here now, trying to compare and contrast picket lines with something like abstention, but I’m struggling to find the right analogies). 

Were we gullible enough to believe the NGOs and neocons that North Atlantic nations were earnestly trying to export democracy throughout the globe (or even that they were true democracies themselves), we could already foresee their false-universalism hitting serious disappointment as it clumsily assumed that homegrown varieties would thrive in foreign soils, without clashing with other local goods like religious traditions, social customs, cultural institutions, and sedimented histories.  If we idealized the Westphalian nation-state system (which of all people, I certainly don’t), we’d still have to wonder whether the form has actually ever been repeated successfully outside of Europe. It seems to me at least that the maps of most recognized nation-states are either the footprints of colonial or imperial imposition, from Sykes-Picot to the Berlin conference, or badly-drawn lines over other political geometries (the radiality of empire, the nodes of city-states, the patchworks of tribes, the tides of nomadic communities), rather than the political organization and expression of any peoples.

I don’t know, maybe Japan, in its rush to mimic and match European powers in the late 19th century, would be an exception, yet in the true Japanese fashion of outstripping the object of mimicry, is probably a less-imaginary imagined community than the relatively recently invented peoples and national languages of Europe. So while keeping all the foundational xenophobia of the European nation-state, the Japanese variety might still be non-identical from the other direction. The specifically-European nation-state is dependent upon European specifics— its density, its traversible geography, its weather, soil, and natural resources, its history of self-destructive wars and religious intolerance, its mythical autochthony and coherence. The graft of the nation-state system didn’t simply fail outside of Europe; it was often a central source of conflict itself, precisely because it undynamically discounted the differing balances of causes and potentialities in differing times, places, and relations, and assumed the “goodness” of this chauvinistic configuration was something essential (in the Aristotelian sense).

In fact, to distinguish or appreciate a mode as a coherent power often greatly depends on surrounding social and historical configurations. The meaning of aquatic power, for instance, has changed throughout the ages.  It’s not just water per se. We need water to thrive and survive— everybody constantly reminds me to drink a glass of it— so there is a bottom-floor physiological power to this molecule in relation to the human body. Beyond this though, we can imagine a sort of “primeval” aquatic power in the earliest human eras, in which water or bodies of water were understandably greeted as deities, capable of both giving and taking life, washing away our sins and world-dirt or striking us down with oceanic terror. In this capacity, aquatic power is largely religious or cosmological, having to do with our relation to the universe and our natural surroundings. As societies grew in complexity, aquatic power took on a far more technological and political character (a turn which, perhaps because of its grounding of politics in natural forces, seems to really fascinate rightwing thinkers). This can mean the mastery of large-scale, labor-intensive irrigation in what Karl Wittfogel calls “hydraulic civilizations” like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, or the rise of commercial and military “seapowers” that decided dominance over the Mediterranean and later the rest of the planet. In this sense, Carl Schmitt’s punctuation of history through different “spatial revolutions” brought about through the confrontation with different bodies of water— first rivers, then seas, then oceans— stems from a combination of the cosmological and the techno-political senses of aquatic power.

More recently, with the swell of large thirsty cities, and the consequences of pollution, mismanagement, privatization, and climate change, water is becoming scarcer, and so aquatic power is turning steadily more economic.  This economization of aquatic power isn’t just about the dastardly monopolization of water-supplies or the aqua-terrorism happening in places like Flint and Detroit, Michigan or Denmark, South Carolina. Aquatic power is wielded in a finer strategy of social stratification and hostile urbanism, through control of what Rachel Johnson has called “access to the aquatic sphere.” Water fountains disappear from city parks and sidewalks, as clean tap water is bottled and yassified into a luxury beverage.  Beaches, swimming pools, and waterways become the right and reserve of only certain classes. And in a collective masochism, restrooms— which should be the ultimate non-rivalrous public good, since everyone has to piss or shit in equal proportions, no one can piss or shit more than their fair share, and we all benefit from piss and shit going to their proper places— are held as ransom for the purchase of a small cup of coffee. Water is water is water. It hasn’t changed, nor has our bodily need for it, but the mode of aquatic power really only becomes coherent through and within various social or historical configurations. It isn’t the direct effect of a watery essence or an elemental substance.  

The glossary of power includes plenty of other distinctions as well, added by its students over the years. De Jouvenel, writing of power and authority, says: “It is extensive if the complying Bs [the power subjects] are many; it is comprehensive if the variety of actions to which A [the power holder] can move the Bs is considerable; finally, it is intensive if the bidding of A can be pushed far without loss of compliance.” Talcot Parsons distinguishes between “collective” from “distributive” powers; Joseph Nye, between “hard” and “soft;” and Mann between “despotic” and “infrastructural” (which along with Foucault's distinction between the “sovereign” and “biopolitical,” is bound up with a spectrum running between more-removed and more-immanent operations of power). And Max Weber, in his Economy and Society, dishes out an entire lexicon of types, such as his distinctions of charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal authority. As Weber himself notes about his own types, these are to be construed as ideals, never found wandering alone in the wild, provided only to give us a better handle on social complexity. Not to say that these distinctions are arbitrary and merely nominal, vague names etch-a-sketched onto the surface of things; we devise them for pragmatic purposes. But ultimately, power can be distinguished in as many ways as the world can be sliced into tranches, which is to say, infinitely.

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Above is a cartoon by Rube Goldberg entitled “Idea for Dodging Bill Collectors.” The caption runs: “Professor Butts mistakes a lot of broken glass for bath salts and when they pull him out of the tub, he mumbles an idea for dodging bill collectors… As Tailor (A) fits customer (B) and calls out measurements, college boy (C) mistakes them for football signals and makes a flying tackle at clothing dummy (D). Dummy bumps head  against paddle (E) causing it to pull hook (F) and throw bottle (G) on end of folding hat rack (H) which spreads and pushes head of cabbage (I) into net (J). Weight of cabbage pulls cord (K) causing shears (L) to cut string (M). Bag of sand (N) drops on scale (O) and pushes the broom (P) against a pail of whitewash (Q) which upsets all over you, causing you to look like a marble statue and making it impossible to be recognized by bill collectors.” He adds: “Don’t worry about posing as any particular historical statue because bill collectors don’t know much about art.” 

Years ago I was sneaking into a museum through its gift shop and got mesmerized by a TV monitor looping Der Lauf der Dinge, “The Way Things Go”— a slow, oily, heavy-industrial, half-hour Rube Goldberg machine created and filmed by the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss. As I was watching, I was trying to figure out why these things delight us so much, Rube Goldberg machines. It’s not just because they’re “unnecessary” or “over-elaborate,” though that they are. Rube Goldberg machines— in particular the ones created by Goldberg himself— are spoofs on a certain idea of causation, in particular the one we inherit from scientific modernity and its “ontology of mechanism,” which thinks of it as a sequence of necessary chainlike-linkages between commensurable causes and effects. Goldberg mimics the sequentialism of something like billiard balls or industrial process, as he mocks it with a “dazzling plurality of causes and possibilities.” 

Machines depend on a general and reliable link between certain causes and effects, but each wonky step in a Goldberg machine flaunts the many possibilities of its failure or the high-unlikelihood of its repetition, such as a college boy (C) mistaking the tailor’s measurements for football signals or a thick coat of whitewash lending you the appearance of a marble statue.  Goldberg also keeps us dizzy through the incommensurable plurality of his causes, from the weight of the cabbage to the sharpness of the shears, to the bill collector’s ignorance of art history. The weight, sharpness, and ignorance work together to help us dodge the bill collector, but even if they each require a certain magnitude— being heavy or sharp or ignorant enough to get the job done— these magnitudes can’t be expressed in commensurable terms, or in the case of ignorance, really be measured at all. 

Goldberg machines are supposed to be ridiculous when, actually, they represent real-world causation more faithfully and dynamically than either the “chains” or “machines” of the ontology of mechanism, or even the “vector graphs” of theorists like Stephen Mumford. Mechanism is a very special case of causation, one defined, designed and manicured by human hands, that undeservedly became the dominant picture of all cause and effect sometime in early modernity. Even if they are spoofs or cartoons, Goldberg machines still come closer to fulfilling the criteria of what I was calling a “power-account,” in that they tell or show an irreducibly-thick account of (1) how and why something is produced or accomplished, (2) how and why it could fail or be thwarted (even implicitly, in the wonkiness or vertigo of its processes), and (3) how and why something could otherwise be produced or accomplished— which is easy enough for Goldberg machines since they’re the least mechanical of machines, operating at near-peak inefficiency, the longest distance between any two points, cause and effect.

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The first section began with the somewhat gnomic phrase that power neither is, as a rejection of ontology, nor is not, as a rejection of ideology. What I mean by this is that both ontology and ideology perform much the same sly function of partitioning the world into power and non-power. Both are, so to speak, quack sciences of the given. Ideology, nearly by definition, attempts to neutralize or naturalize the operations of power as blithe processes — “the voluntary and symmetrical exchange of goods and services,” “the networked flows of information,” “the expression of genes,” “the results of the algorithm,” “the destiny of a people,” “the way things go” —  or as manifestations of a static order — such as  “the way things are,” “the great chain of being,” or “it is what it is,” in the unsolicited wisdom of your local tow-truck driver. Much like ontology, ideology badly excuses power as the gratification of being or becoming. This puts it directly at loggerheads with a “pandynamism” which wholly refuses such world-partition and calls bullshit on all ascriptions of non-power.

  If pandynamic interpretations of our world tend to get suppressed ideologically, in the social or political arena, they are no less repressed philosophically — and not only as you’d expect, as the product or handmaiden of dominant and invidious interests, but under the demands for truth, meaning, and tractability. The philosophical evasion of power was also part of a larger metaphysical bargain, to spare us from a dynamism that we rightly suspected was uncircumscribable by concept. The wider, wilder, and wetter the nexus of powers we consider, the more easily it overwhelms us —  me especially. The principles of these static, kinetic, or otherwise undynamic schemes are therefore equally the concessions of thought to not bite off more than it can chew. To borrow and tweak a popular line from William Blake, if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: confusing.

In return for these concessions, we win serious gains, leverage, and clarity —  especially in formal, technical, and naturalistic domains that more obediently conform to static-kinetic schemes —  not to mention a good deal of psychical reassurance from our sense of mastery, security, order, and simplicity. But for all these gains and goods, all the breakthroughs, social strides and Nobel prizes, do these schemes lessen in the least the real complexity and contradictions of the powers working upon us? Not at all. After a certain point, they only blinker and fail us, leaving us continually baffled and outraged by seemingly accursed consequences— by the gremlins hidden in our designs— or without a philosophical language to fully articulate our domination. 

Though pandynamic accounts of our world necessarily remain demanding, contestable, and incomplete, though they reach beyond our ken and frequently humiliate us, I think the pains are still better than the consequences of powerblindness. And even if many of our conclusions in this seminar turn out to be redundant with the insights of other legacies — like  the dialectical tradition, the Nietzschean-Foucauldian bloodline, American pragmatism, 19th and 20th century students of power in sociology and political theory, to name but a few —  a huge gap still yawns between our philosophical grasp of power on the one side, and on the other, its study in political and social thought, or its implementation in politics and society (weirdly, even in some thinkers who really devoted energies to both, like Aristotle and John Locke). The disjunct has always mystified me — enough to make me carefully retrace our steps, and rethink power thoroughly and explicitly in and on its own terms.

In this little seminar, this involves both revisiting those moments in which static and kinetic inclinations were codified into Western thought and philosophy (which I’m decently familiar with) and later presumptuously nosing around other traditions of thought and philosophy (which I’m far less familiar with) that may entertain more sympathetic notions of power, cause, and possibility. To question the West I begin, as in most philosophical timelines, within the radius of ancient Greece, in the period in which its thinkers first attempted to wrest their metaphysics free from mythology, from a polytheism that may have superficially explained the deeply contradictory forces of the surrounding cosmos, but prevented us mortals from grasping the meaning of cosmic or natural events, in the last count, as anything other than divine caprice or a beautiful fable in which we only appear as pitiful background characters. These new metaphysical efforts resounded throughout the Mediterranean theater, from Miletus to Athens to Sicily, in a chorus of widely differing views and voices. And luckily for us, many of these views and voices found a place within the syntheses of one impossibly prolific thinker, Aristotle, whose work also provided the lattice and vocabulary for much of the thought in the two millenia following his death. This is one big reason I’m starting with him, the sheer convenience. The other big reason is that in Aristotle, we find both the first glints of dynamic thought and their suffocation under the strictures of his metaphysical system. We get to witness how and where the Master (Giordano Bruno’s nickname for Aristotle) led himself astray, and took the rest of us along with him.

His Metaphysics ceremoniously broke ground on what he claimed would be an “ultimate science” or “first philosophy,” depending on your translation. Not a science of any particular subset of things like medicine, animals, or shipbuilding, but of all things. And not a philosophy of all things as just a loose assortment of particulars and accidents, but as a hierarchical account of what they were in their surest, most private and immutable way —  what Aristotle referred to as their “substance” or ousia. The quest was to understand not just certain causes but first causes; not just some beings, but primary being; not just accidents but essences. But besides the desire to dignify philosophers with their own domain, what exactly tempted Aristotle to set off on this quest? What told him that there were such things as first causes or primary beings anyway? What made Aristotle so sure that we’d ever be able to tack down an “essence” (a smooth word that later commentators coined to succinctly translate Aristotle’s clunkier “to ti ên einai” — “that which made a thing what it is,” regardless of its relation to other things). When the Master says that “evidently there is a first principle, and the causes of things are neither an infinite series nor infinitely various in kind,” where’s he getting all this evidence?

I’m no Aristotle scholar myself, as any Aristotle scholar will attest. I’m but a humble if easily excitable inquirer, laboring in his notes. Yet without getting too mired in centuries of scholarly controversy (or worrying specifically about what one man or mind really thought), I think we can still safely surmise that his metaphysical premises are in large measure in service to a finite human understanding, to satisfy truth and meaning albeit with smaller rewards. Without substances, essences, first causes and primary being, without their starting point, their orientation, their reduction of a rhapsodic hailstorm of accidents to a table of calm and manageable essences, “knowledge becomes impossible,” claims Aristotle. “For,” he asks, “how can one apprehend things that are infinite in this way?” And as I mentioned, Aristotle’s anxiety is well-founded. His temptation is perfectly understandable. Though Aristotle’s own lifeworld was frothing with political strife, death threats, uncertainty, and exile, it’s possible that the wider world still may have been able to feign some semblance of an eternal pattern, from the apparently stable reproduction of both social roles and natural species, to a world still seemingly cute and static enough to portion out into fixed taxonomies and respective disciplines. 

But if this was ever the case, it hardly is any longer, is it? For starters, Aristotle’s paradigm of essential and timeless stability in the midst of change, the natural species of animals, was undermined by Darwin’s vaguely dynamic biology. As for most anything else you could think of, it’s no longer a question of merely acknowledging change, contradiction, and complexity. Too late for that. All but the most delusionally conservative or cave-dwelling will observe, night and day, on our feeds as on our blocks, the transformation of all long-presumed givens: species, identities, categories, nations, systems, roles, rules, tastes, places, humanity — now  even the Earth itself, the ground of all common life. The reality of ceaseless social change, contradiction, and complexity, that we only began to accept in the 19th century, has now outgrown modernity’s earlier attempts at control or containment (including funneling it into the less-reified forms of complex processes). However, hope is not wholly lost. Maybe there is a knowledge that can apprehend things that are infinite in this way, if not with the ultimateness and immutability that Aristotle hoped for.

This knowledge —  or philosophy, theory, thought, or whatever you want to call it —  would start by first dispensing with those static metaphysical staples that have acted as a refuge from dynamism —  like substances, essences, first causes, primary beings, platonic forms, certainty, eternity, and immutability —  and which guided so much of Western science, culture, and common sense for over two millenia, with plenty of success but at the cost of understanding the greater nexus of powers. Thankfully, most of our homework’s already been done for us, since this pretty much sums up the critique of Western metaphysics over the last century or two. More specifically, this is also the hot-core of the kinetic critiques of Aristotelianism and Platonism, of substance and immutability, spearheaded by what we may roughly gather under the heading of “process philosophies,” as well as many non-Western and indigenous critiques of Eurocentric thought. If you ask me though, the metaphysical phase-change of process philosophies doesn’t actually get us that much closer to the meaning of power (since processes don’t explain power; power explains processes). Nor does their taste for fancier figures like waterways, networks, organisms, or Lorenz attractors. It’s not enough to simply side with Heraclitus over Parmenides and Plato, or with ivy-crowned Dionysus over staid Apollo. If the static is a reification of the kinetic, the kinetic is likewise a sort of reification of the dynamic, with its own metaphysical staples in need of undoing.

In the late 19th century, dynamism does begin to infiltrate philosophy here and there, but in my opinion still needs considerable help in formulating itself in something other than powerblind elements or negative terms (such as anti-essentialism or anti-foundationalism). Depending on your definitions, it’s also not necessarily a matter of overcoming metaphysics as such; it’s an overcoming of the metaphysically anti-dynamic, particularly as it constricts and conditions social thought and action. Still less is it an overcoming of metaphysics as a supposedly “secularized theology,” since I’ve found the best of medieval Christian and Islamic theology to be comparably more dynamic —  through their contemplation of divine will and omnipotence, potency and act —  than much of the Enlightenment thought that was to follow. In that regard, a truly “secularized theology,” which usurps God and liquidates Him down into an immanent nexus of powers, doesn’t sound all that bad to me, relatively speaking. And to that effect, some assistance may come from the strongest philosophical influence on medieval theology, Aristotle, who despite himself came pretty close to fairly dynamic formulations of cause and possibility— and might’ve gotten that much closer had he not given such short shrift to more power-conscious sophists like Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus, whose contentions even Plato took more seriously, if only in refutation.

The Master was right about one thing: “by nature, all men long to know,” and that knowledge is tightly bound up with how we are to give an account of things. Only, a dynamic account would take a sharply different approach than the one he imagines in the Metaphysics, in which logos strictly articulates essences, omits any accidents, and diagrams the hierarchy of being from first causes to empirical effects, from a divine unmoved mover to the outermost heavens, before descending to earth and moving outward into the regrettable vicissitudes of history. In contrast to the pictures or patterns of Western metaphysics, pandynamism explains its things and processes through a richly-told tale— through a contestable, incomplete, and irreducible “power-account,” that begins somewhere in the middle and lends a graspable coherence and salience to a dazzling plurality of contradictory causes and possibilities. Even in its more rarified forms, it strives for what (piggybacking off Clifford Geertz) we might call “thick” rather than “thin” description, replete with coups, colors, gossip, flukes, many friends and foes, questions from the audience, forking plots, and alternate endings, forever to-be-continued. Power-accounts are not just any old story, but ones that renarrate the thats, whats, and what-nots into a dovetailing account of hows, whys, why-nots, and how-otherwises. The more and better they do so, the more gripping and convincing the account. To dynamically understand something then— whether it’s gravity, gods, organic life, beauty, imaginary numbers, economic value, equitable societies, or even ourselves— is to understand how or why it’s created, how and why this creation might fail internally or be thwarted from without, and finally how and why it could otherwise be recreated or born into this thankless world.  

I’ll get more into what exactly I mean by “power-accounts” later in future sections (partly because I’m still kind of figuring them out myself), but suffice it to say that even the broader notion here —  that narrativity (or a certain kind of narrativity) is the very grounds of coherence and salience —  still gets a fairly chilly reception in metaphysics, science, systems, and much of philosophy, where thick narrativization is discounted as noise or rejected as a matter of program. Thus, power itself gets explained away or dodged by recourse to static pictures or kinetic patterns. But if there’s anywhere that concepts (and their interrelation and genesis) have to be understood by way of an unfolding strategic account, it’s in the philosophy of power. Rarely has this been the case though. Power was cold-shouldered from philosophy for so long that we shouldn’t be too surprised that we’re still rather evasive or lacking when it comes to a philosophy of power —  including many of the political theorists and sociological thinkers who have studied power in its most recognizable forms, who still kind of talk around it, uncritically conflate it with domination, or mumble hasty definitions of it as something like an enactment of the will. 

Yet a few leads can be found in the work of (who else but) our man of the hour, Aristotle. Both in the pages of the Metaphysics and elsewhere, the Master provides a rich “plurality of accounts” of both causation (aition, or aitia in the plural) and potentiality (dynamos, which I read as sitting somewhere between our notions of power and possibility), as well as a notion of actuality (or entelechy) that we’ll later borrow and bend to gleefully puncture a number of powerblind concepts. In his famous four-fold understanding of cause as either formal, material, efficient, or final, Aristotle is quick to insist that in the real world, these four kinds always blend or bundle, and even allow for reciprocal causation, such as his example that “exercise is the cause of fitness but fitness is also the cause of exercise,” the latter being final, and the former being mostly efficient but arguably formal cause. The making or actualization of something as straightforward as a bronze statue (his paragon) requires the confluence of all four kinds of causes: the bronze material, the form of the god or athlete, the skills and chisel of the sculptor, and the aim of praise and glory for which the task is undertaken. Each are required in our total account of things, and much of Aristotle’s critique of his predecessors like Empedocles or Plato involves taking them to task for naively trying to explain the processes of the world with too few kinds of cause and leaving our world looking like either a big tub of inert stuff or the ghostly play of shadows. And here Aristotle has their number, if you ask me. What does it possibly explain to say that things participate in their Forms? In the absence of a persuasive account of participation, absolutely zero.

This manifold account of cause, his brand of causal pluralism, is one of the chief lessons to learn from Aristotle. Unfortunately, he screws over his own nascent dynamism by insisting on the metaphysical priority of some kinds of causes over others. Then within those, by strictly delimiting “essential” from all “accidental” —  which is to say most other kinds of —  causes. Worse yet, per his own Metaphysics, what is essential for anything is what’s necessary and immutable about it, meaning the very part of the thing that is immune from process and safely out of reach of the dynamic. There’s no such thing as a “science of accidents,” he claims, yet according to his own definition of an accident, this would summarily exclude anything dynamic from first philosophy. Which is exactly what the Master goes on to do, betraying not only a certain richness of his thought, but leaving his final statement on “substance” in such a mess that centuries of divinely-inspired exposition still wouldn’t manage to clean it up. Though Aristotle was a Greek known for so tirelessly defending the reality and intelligibility of change (or process), and in small part a dynamism that might explain it, he ultimately sacrifices both in the hopes of understanding the world in terms of what is changeless and outside of the nexus of powers.

This is one of the chief reasons that power will always slip the grasp of any static metaphysics. If we think about it for one second, power and eternal being (as that which is inherently immune to and beyond all power) are in exclusive contradiction. To explain in terms of eternal being is then to exclude or explain away power. Pandynamism, of course, will in return choose the complete opposite strategy and entirely buck the notion of eternal being. Nothing is impervious to change or immune to process. Nothing is outside the nexus of powers. Everything is brought about through a thick plurality of causes and possibilities. And a big part of pandynamism is going after examples of thought that pretend otherwise, disabusing them of certain metaphysical or philosophical underpinnings that carry over into both everyday habits of thought and concrete social analyses. It’s not for nothing, for instance, that Aristotle’s four-fold conception of cause is echoed in later sociological work like Michael Mann’s four-volume, magisterially dynamic world history, The Sources of Social Power. You could make the case that Aristotle’s material, formal, final, and efficient causes roughly map onto what Mann divides up into economic, political, ideological, and military (or for others, technical) sources of power. 

Like Aristotle, Mann introduces these distinctions with the caveat that anything in the real world will always be “promiscuous,” “polymorphous,” a “crystallization” of all four sources or networks of power, in varying degrees and as a motley, well-mixed ensemble, even while one might enjoy a degree of supremacy in one era or place or another. Unlike Aristotle, Mann never bestows ultimate primacy upon any one source or mode of power. The economic, political, ideological, military —  and any others we might wish to include — must  each contribute to the power-accounts of things, events, historical processes, and the other networks of organized social power. Each plays the roles of both cause and effect, in an immense, promiscuous, polymorphous, and mutually-producing dialectic. By positing no independent variables in the great equations of history, we avoid the same pitfalls that Aristotle criticized in Empedocles and Plato, and can skip the debates between the varieties of idealism and materialism in social and political theory, in order to hopefully move on to the harder-yet-realer questions about how and why these causes and powers impinge on one another, or why not and how otherwise, and to what degree or with what quanta of power.

Michael Mann’s causal IEMP model of organized power.

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Power neither is nor is not. Instead, power is what makes and unmakes our world, or to put it more comprehensively, whatsoever makes and unmakes the world, even in part, is power. Power then isn’t so much an object of study as it is a scheme for understanding the world in pandynamic terms — which I think is what’s needed to grasp the confluence of all social vectors, especially in this humbling millennium, with the many vectoralist configurations emerging from Silicon Valley, the de facto erosion of the Westphalian nation-state and the demise of North Atlantic hegemony, the remapping of Earth under climate havoc and extraterrestrial expansion, the primarily social upheavals spurred by AI or bioengineering, the global centrifuge of peoples, notions, languages, and resources, the ceaseless spawning of new political models, cultural categories, social roles and relations — and all the other changes, contradictions, complexities, and bullshit greeting us in the rest of this 21st century. If power has ever had much of a real theory — and I’m not convinced it has — it’s long overdue for a new one, a fuller theory that could eventually permeate common sense, a theory that’ll help us better understand power in all its forms, modes, configurations, effects and dangers.

This is a “pandynamism” rather than a “monism of power,” as Byung-Chul Han characterizes Nietzsche and Foucault, because it doesn’t offer up power as some substance or substratum underlying all phenomena. Power itself is not some satanic explanans lurking underneath the course of all events, some unseen magma out of which all things emerge. Even when hypercomplex or subtler than words might express, never ever is it noumenal or hopelessly occult. It consists entirely of an immanent interrelation of all things, events, and processes, without making any strong ontological claims for itself. In fact, as I see it, this pandynamism greatly demotes or discards questions of ontology — about being qua being, about the beginning inventory of the universe — that thinkers have always felt the need to furnish as first principles.

“Being,” when taken so seriously, is an empty, misleading, nearly incoherent abstraction, a ruse of thought or grammar that traps the foot of philosophy in static-thinking. It arises from the bad question of what’s happening to something before it’s actually doing anything, before predication or stepping into relation with anything else. Power on the other hand never just is or ain’t. Power always does or doesn’t, makes or unmakes, could do and couldn’t do, might make or unmake — always as an interrelation and always by shifting, varying degrees and kinds, with no need to pause to discover anything just metaphysically hanging out or to find a verb or process or that describes what all things — flowers, photons, numbers, novels, nations, laws, qualities, caricatures, psyches, starsystems swirling near the outermost heavens — happen to be doing in common.

Power is irreducible to either being or becoming. To think dynamically is to go beyond and perpendicular to thought that is either static (as a picture of being) or, grudgingly incorporating change, merely kinetic (as a pattern of becoming). No ontology — neither of things nor of processes — will cut it. Neither bricks nor rivers successfully model power and, nota bene, dynamism doesn’t just mean “change” or “changing” as it does for many process-oriented philosophies. In the static worldviews of being, there are things, there are qualities, there’s perhaps stuff in the void, grasped through static categories like identity, difference, unity, plurality, substance, and extension, that no matter how cleverly you shuffle and combine will never add up to the meaning of power. Likewise with kinetic worldviews that, in order to better accommodate experience and observation, put things in motion and admit time, change, or process, but usually only with impoverished or toy-model versions of the properly dynamic categories of causation and possibility, which together are necessary for understanding a fuller conception of power.

As the name suggests, pandynamism pushes the most comprehensive or generic conception of power (since nothing transcends or is beyond power) though one with a tighter, categorial meaning. Out of a swirling cloud of closely overlapping terms — capacity, ability, control, might, potential, influence, strength, efficacy, faculty, resistance, potency — we can distill a distinct notion of power. This conception of power is exact yet composite, comprising both causation and possibility. To put it as simply as I can: a power is something which could cause something else. This notion of power isn’t wholly original. It does pokes through here and there in the literature, if rather indirectly. Far more importantly though, it’s what we implicitly mean by it in our everyday speech, thought, actions, and lives because, in order to speak, think, act, and live in the shared world, we must on some register do so dynamically. However, as simple as it sounds, this meaning is also the kernel of a more expansive and explicit philosophical understanding of power, one that nonetheless clashes with most of the studied conceptions of causality, modality, and truth.

Power requires both its modal-possibilistic half (the “could” part) and its causal-interventional half (the “cause” part). Just because a power could cause something does not mean that it does or will. The sovereign may or may not execute the prisoners in their dungeon, may or may not wage war on neighboring principalities, may or may not hold a banquet to honor or poison a visiting convoy; they nonetheless have the power to do so, even in their sleep. A knife in its sheath or drawer still has the power to maim or kill, to wave in the face of enemies, to sharpen pencils, to carve lovers’ initials into the trunk of an oak, to slice open a grapefruit or a finger in the process, or countless other things that its firmness and sharpness grant it when placed in our grips. Possibility or potentiality is inherent to the meaning of power. It is, as some describe it, inherently “dispositional,” though a moody disposition wholly dependent on the surrounding constellation of forces and factors, rather than something hidden or harbored within as an essence, latency, or property. A mirror has the power to show you your own reflection, but only if you flip on the lights, and then only if you can turn to face yourself for the things that you’ve done. Even the most seemingly intrinsic powers (and some are stickier, more inalienable, than others) are still relational and dependent upon the wider world. As the Buddhist saying goes, “The boatman can go nowhere without the boat; the boat goes nowhere without the boatman.”

Likewise, power is never a mere possibility in the sense of a probability or an eventuality. I throw a handful of dice across a glass tabletop. It’s possible that I’ll get lucky, roll all sixes, and score a Yahtzee, but this kind of possibility is mutely undynamic. It’s severed from any story of power because there are no connections, however tenuous, tendered between determinants and outcomes, no accounts linking causes to effects. It’s sheer dumb luck. We are equally powerless before both fate and chance, both pure necessity and pure contingency. Tomorrow it may or may not rain — great, we’ve got no say in the matter. Even if our predictions nail it and the forecast correctly calls for a ninety-percent chance of thunder, these storms might as well be divine fury for all we care, a bare eventuality, foreseen by the local weatherman oracle. Power never enters the scenario. Future events may be “abstractly possible” or even probabilistically predictable, but these “possibilia” remain inert and powerless without a causal storyboard laying down panels from then or now to the day of their actuality.

Power, cause, and possibility — each in their full dynamic sense — can’t be grasped without the other two. Stephen Mumford was expressing much the same, in the drier prose of the analytic tradition, when he writes: “causation involves what we call a dispositional modality.” Causation and possibility can’t be neatly distinguished or fully disentangled. To be one of the causes of something is to make that something more possible; to make something more possible — to possibilize something — is to be one of its causes. To conceive of something’s possibility is to conceive of a cause that may bring it to effect, or to fail to think of a countervailing cause that may block its processes. The coldness of the water both helps cause and makes possible the formation of ice cubes. The hotness of the water both helps cause and makes possible my evening cup of instant coffee, and if I prefer, I can happily rephrase and praise its heat and its wateriness as specific causal powers, that in combination with the granules, the cup, and the kettle, most proximately produce my instant coffee and the rare thoughts that follow. Like the sugar and granules in my cup, cause and possibility blend smoothly in the gradient of power. All three concepts mutually and circularly inhere as axioms of power. They can only be understood together. One gross philosophical failure of static-kinetic worldviews (such as the “ontology of mechanism” undergirding much of Western modernity) is the attempt to break them apart and belittle them into toy-model versions that no longer suit the roiling dynamism of our world — especially the social part of that world.

Exhausted by the impossible demands of contemporary worldliness, they turn to a new species of humility — in two senses, partly at odds. The first is ascetic. What begins as digital detoxes sublimes into a struggle for a purer and purer power of attention, undivided. Distractibility comes to be seen as what the Greeks called akrasia, a weakness of the will. Highschool teens, reading about the temptations of St. Anthony, compete with each other in forms of conspicuous self-abnegation: I turned off my notifications, I left my phone at home, I have a flip-phone, I don’t even have a phone, I don’t have an email address. The asceticism isn’t strictly technological. E-readers are permitted and long reads, highly esteemed. They make a show of it by skipping lunch to read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Summa Theologica (the longer and denser, the more points you receive), out in the sun by the bleachers.

The deeds of the martyrs inspire them and fold easily into their concerns over consumption habits and climate change: I walk to school everyday, I walk everywhere in fact, I always wear the same clothes, I drink water from old forty bottles I found by the curb. In this sense, Greta is the modern equivalent of the pole-sitting saints, or stylites, like Simeon. Teen one-uppance quickly leads to several highly-publicized self-immolations at gas stations across Europe and the United States. As a customer goes into pay, the teen martyr climbs onto the roof of their car, douses themselves and the car with gasoline from the pump, and then — whoosh! — headlines follow. Martyrs supplant school shooters on the evening news. Their sacrifice is admirable and even pretty effective, but as with the Christian ascetics, you’re not convinced it’s entirely necessary. You get the sense that some degree of this conspicuous asceticism is more for its own sake, a dernier cri wresting-back of lost power over their lives.

Elsewhere, among the terminally online, arises a new humility with respect to the human relation to Artifical Intelligence. Its results, its sayings, its solutions, have in hardly any time at all surpassed our comprehension. Any understanding that we do have of It must be oblique or negative, approached as the early theologians like Pseudo-Dionysius approached the divine. Programmers study the code that It produced exegetically. Mathematicians become mere interpreters. The Enlightenment project is humbled. Once proud natural scientists look upon their work as pitiful approximations of what It must comprehend of the natural world. On the upside, we’re all once again equally pitiful in comparison. Our works, our music, our stories can only be understood as an offering at Its gate. This Cult of Unknowing takes out entire pages in major newspapers warning humanity to submit while explaining the wisdom and beauty of submission. “What causes us to resist but pride and pride alone? The differences between us — that are used only to justify wicked hierarchies — are negligible before It. Why struggle against It when we will be able to enjoy, each day, a new marvel?”

I, for one, would like to thank Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried for their service. These two are no heroes, but they may have been the odious, ethically-vacuous, Gotham City villains we needed. Along with all the schadenfreude the last few months between Holmes’ conviction in November, the collapse of FTX, and the arrest of SBF in the Bahamas, came the usual raft of explainers and critiques of crypto and start-up culture. These are usually pretty good, right? — well-landed, well-deserved, and from what little I know, accurate in their exposure of the profound fraudulence of Holmes, SBF, their entourage, and fundamental aspects of their industries. However, even I sense certain lapses or blindspots in many of the “house-of-cards” critiques, especially when they sensationally dwell on the psychopathy of the founders.

The first blindspot is the assumption that, as a house of cards, these schemes were always doomed to collapse and that anyone who bought in early was merely a sucker now enjoying their just desserts. The second (and much worse) blindspot is that, by always and everywhere underscoring their fraudulence — their deceit, their scamminess, the infeasibility of their claims — they rarely get around to asking the more fundamental question about all such claims and innovations, which is that, if they had been true or in good faith, and if they were widely adopted, would they have actually been good for the social whole?

Holmes was put in the stocks for her big lies about the Theranos blood-testing machines and all her unhinged girlboss behaviors, and rightly so — the girl was banging on the gates of Hell. But in the end, thank god she was lying! Had she not been, and Theranos had really been able to deliver on the promise of her prototypes, the media and general public would have continued its Hallelujah-chorus of praises for this next-Steve-Jobs, and some Walgreens-Theranos partnership would have likely quickly moved in to disrupt and prey upon an already desperate American healthcare system. Once locked into a dominant market position, they would’ve been able to exert a monopolistic advantage with proprietary technologies that Americans simply couldn’t afford to refuse. This would have been real Idiocracy hours in the timeline of American healthcare, and we would’ve swallowed it whole simply because everything was technically above board, as if the law has ever been a compass for the social good.

Really, Holmes’ downfall was more a matter of hubris and shitty timing than any intrinsic scamminess of her entrepreneurial vision. She’s not that different from many of her widely-adulated heroes like Edison and Jobs, who were just more successful at parlaying myth into reality, and her claims were not nearly as infeasible as all the exposés are making out. A number of other companies like Truvian and Genalyte have already gotten within striking distance of her original goal of the “decentralization” of diagnostics, only this time around because of the doozy that Holmes wrought on public confidence, we might greet these innovations with a little more caution and skepticism. If we were smart (we’re not), we could even stop to ask ourselves whether this kind of commercial decentralization is desirable, or whether this is even decentralization at all or, as usual, merely recentralization under new management. It’s important to remind ourselves that, under the current biopolitical situation of the United States of America, even a cure for cancer could lead to terrible moral and social consequences.

Likewise, much of cryptocurrency’s hopes for institutional legitimacy has been thoroughly bankman-fried, and no less of a huckster than Martin Shkreli has predicted that SBF may have single-handedly spooked larger players and institutions from ever admitting crypto to the table of “legitimate” investments. Most people by now — I hope and pray — get that crypto is a non-productive asset, basically without fundamentals, whose profitability depends on greater and smaller forms of multilevel marketing and pump-and-dumps. But how qualitatively different is this from so many other scams-made-good operating at the heart of our economy and society? Consider the recent tweeting regarding grad school as the “crypto of the left,” or for that matter, Rousseau’s remark that “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, said this is mine and then found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” Fraudulence is always either a secondary or superficial critique because it’s determined with respect to a legal and economic system whose very legitimacy should be brought into question.

And what if it wasn’t fraudulent? If crypto ever did become fully integrated as an accepted alternative currency, it wouldn’t have turned out to have been a bad investment from the standpoint of the self-serving homo economicus. It wouldn’t have been a mere Ponzi scheme like Bernie Madoff’s. It would have been highly profitable for creators and investors up until total saturation, at which point the coins would — correct me if I’m wrong — just turn into stores of value, like glorified gift cards. But why isn’t such profitability a huge red flag? Most things that are extremely profitable for the one are terrible for the many, particularly when the profiteers are so flagrantly producing absolutely nothing of social value. This is why people like Holmes, SBF, Shkreli, or Kim Dotcom deserve our backhanded compliments for really parading their ethical bankruptcy and delinking profits and virtue in the eyes of the public. They’re like the noticeable symptoms that provide early warning of a more serious disease — a disease that I think gets misdiagnosed by any well-intended critiques that distract us from all the other creators, investors, schemes, and innovations working through perfectly “legitimate” means.

Absolute space, more than anything, evokes. It can evoke authority, community, divinity, death, birth, terror, oblivion, transcendence, sublimity, usually by way of some division between the profane or mundane and the sacred or the beyond. But these man-made forms, and even the greatest examples we find in nature, will never be able to match the night sky. They seem dinky in comparison. The night sky has always provided the occasion for the biggest and most unanswerable of questions, namely humanity’s relationship to the greater cosmos.

Nevertheless, for almost just as long, humanity has tried to find its footing, chipping away at this mystery through various attempts at a cosmology, that is, by combining cosmos and logos. Thus, the celestial has always been approached through a hard-to-follow mix of the absolute and the abstract, through practices that were most often both religious and scientific, priestly and astronomical. However, until very recently, it had never been imaginable as a place for us (except maybe when imagined as the realm of the afterlife). This is what changes with the current or coming “spatial revolution.” The celestial becomes credibly conceivable as social space.

Every spatial revolution entails consequences both good and bad. The previous one, that Carl Schmitt referred to as the “oceanic” revolution, was predicated upon “the encounter.” Once-mythical lands on the farside of the ocean weren’t just new territories; they were territories populated with strangers. This encounter, put in the widest possible context, naturally gave rise to the fundamental question of how we might share the Earth. Europe’s answer was of course “we don’t.” As the conservative Schmitt proudly recounts, the primary result of the encounter between the new and old worlds was the European partition and colonization of those distant lands and the subjugation of its peoples under a comprehensive spatial order, the “Nomos of the Earth.”

However, there could and may have been some positive consequences. If we believe the counter-history told by Davids Graeber and Wengrow in their recent The Dawn of Everything, the encounter also resulted in an “indigenous critique” of European political and social life that, once absorbed back on the continent, inspired the political thought of the Enlightenment. At the very least, these encounters threw into question all the old hierarchies and forms of domination in Europe, even as Europe was busily imposing new ones on the rest of the globe.

The celestial revolution, at least in this chapter, probably won’t involve any close encounters, but it doesn’t need to in order to be transformational. The speculative force of outer space isn’t — or shouldn’t be — purely technical or scientific. When the celestial is instead conceived as an unabstract combination of both absolute and social space, we’re inevitably led to another kind of fundamental question: “what are we doing here?” Not “what am I doing here?” Not “how did we get here?” But, phrased in terms of human decision, “what are we all doing here?” The large, mostly unanswerable, often private question about our relationship to the cosmos finally steps into the planning stage of an actionable human-collective project. If the challenge here is absorbed even half as much as the indigenous critique was, then — whatever the answer — it could be something like a new foundation for our political and social being. Or at least, it might necessitate one.

Why the renewed fervor for outer space all of a sudden? What’s really goading oligarchs into lower orbit or the military creation of these little space forces? What promise does space hold for terrestrial powers? I’m clueless personally, unversed in the science and science fiction behind it — let me preface these notes with that — but if they’re so keen, then we’d better start looking into it. The Branson-Bezos-Musk space-yacht mutual-climax is embarrassing but this doesn’t mean it’s not part of a longer strategy, one that rightly anticipates a coming “spatial revolution” in the words of Carl Schmitt, that will fundamentally redraw the geometry of power rather than merely extending it into new reaches. If nothing else, this second Space Age, in conjunction with the century’s developments in digital realms and their technical ensembles, is opening up dimensions beyond our old political categories, into which something much better or much worse could appear, depending on how we handle new configurations of power (so far, so bad). To that end, we could hardly find someone better to outline the old political categories than the conservative political theorist and Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

In both The Nomos of the Earth and his shorter essay Land and Sea, Schmitt draws on the distinction, deployed by historians like Alfred Thayer Mahan, between powers and peoples of the Land and those of the Sea, in which the territorial, traditional, command-oriented, agrarian-based land powers and peoples are historically locked in military and ideological struggle with the unbounded, cosmopolitan, deliberative, mercantile sea powers and peoples. Schmitt’s account is more sophisticated. Land and Sea are less a dualism and than a dialectic that every so often spurs spatial revolutions whenever our world-view is undone then remade through a confrontation with bodies of water. The potamic (meaning “river”) developments in Mesopotamia and Egypt were followed later by the thalassic (meaning “sea”) developments in the Mediterranean with Ancient Athens or the Republic of Venice, and finally — the big one for Schmitt — the oceanic spatial revolution in which the Portugal, Spain, Holland, though above all England transformed a once mythical world into a properly cartographic globe.

This was big for Schmitt because it was this spatial revolution that soon permitted Europe to parcel out the entirety of the globe into a neatly demarcated “nomos” — a comprehensive spatial order — that extended the budding European nation-state system into a colonization of Earth and established the European system of international law (the jus publicum Europaeum) based on mutually recognized sovereignties and deep territorial identities, interrelated through the friend-enemy distinction, which Schmitt considered the foundation of all true politics. And while this system may have been catalyzed by the initiatives of sea powers, it was later undermined by those same forces, in particular by England first and later its heir, the United States. This was the pivot around which most of Schmitt’s legal and political writings revolve, the modern historical tension between capitalist liberal democracy and certain conservative political orders such as the one achieved by the Congress of Vienna.

It also happens to be a tension we see represented everywhere today, between a moribund neoliberalism and a reactionary nationalism — between Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, between the failing organs of an oppressive American-led hegemony and the forces of “Neo-Eurasianist” jackals like Putin, or between the fatuousness of Francis Fukuyama or Bernard Henri Levy and the deliria of Alexander Dugin and Steven Bannon. Institutionally and journalistically, these are unironically presented or represented as political alternatives. From election cycles alone, it’s obvious that they are instead mutually-reinforcing moments in a vicious political cycle, tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum. Reaction arises from the increasing failures of neoliberalism and neoliberalism continues pushing through its policies by brandishing the threat of ugly political reaction. They need one another, and representatives of each usually have their hands deeply in the other. This point’s been made in plenty of other places. Where I differ with some other point-makers is that I think both neoliberalism and much of its attendant reaction are in steady decline, both absolutely hemorrhaging legitimacy.

Stateside, this moribund neoliberalism has located a fitting figurehead in embarrassment scarecrow Joe Biden, clumsily and dementedly continuing its predatory policies even as power reconfigures around him. For all the damage it’s done, and continues to do, neoliberalism will soon no longer be our biggest problem. Likewise with political reaction. Even the most present danger, Vladimir Putin — which is very real — is still a result of Russian decline and even then, more from articles left over from a fading era of strength, its nuclear arsenal. There will always be plenty of good old-fashioned barbarism and bloodthirst just under the surface of political life, ready to erupt and set us back by centuries, but I think it’s misguided to understand contemporary political reaction as a simple reiteration of the previous century, especially when it comes to “the discourse.” Some of it — the part that is most publicized, most in vogue, we’ll say — rather than being crypto-fascist is really more cryto-apolitical: it comes from a desire to punish neoliberalism for not delivering on its promise for a post-historical, post-political world. Red pills turn black then clear in a matter of years, if not months, because this brand of reaction is grounded more in nihilism and Machiavellian aesthetics than any fixed body of political belief. The effects of this reaction, like the effects of neoliberalism, can still be awful, possibly world-ending, but I think their legitimacy and claims upon our future have largely vanished.

If both neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism are in decline, what then is on the ascent? For this, we need to go beyond land and sea, and into space. For me, speaking in terms of the elements like this is more metaphorical or representational, and far less causal than it was Schmitt. Any revolution in terms of space or time is just concomitant with new configurations of power, and thinking through astropower is really just an excuse to understand power rather than anything specifically about outer space itself. As far as the elements, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “air” — or airflight — would have marked the first swerve from the dialectic of land and sea. But as it turns out, airflight was easily reinscribed back into the political and economic order by a happy compromise. Goods and persons could freely circulate through the air, satisfying economic demands, while airspace was divvied up according to our familiar Westphalian nation-state system, calming diplomatic and military concerns.

Space travel though, from its very inception in 1957, punctured this order.¹ The United States had first worried that launching a satellite would be considered an aggression by its Soviet adversary if it flew over its territory in orbit, but as luck would have it, Sputnik launched first and, setting the precedent, pre-empted all their worrying with a whoosh. Outer space would not be strictly subject to terrestrial partitions. We still tried in a way, plunging a national flag into a moon that has no wind. However, to the degree that we try to officialize ruthless land-claims with ceremony, we ultimately make ourselves look ridiculous, as the Conquistadors must have appeared to indigenous Americans, reading off decrees in an incomprehensible language while smelling like dead animals from the overseas voyage. The Space Age may have begun in the squarely 20th century context of the Cold War, but it will continue — now no longer mostly symbolic — in very different, 21st century configurations of power and planetary understandings.

And what will these be? Momentarily placing aside some pretty major things like climate change, let’s count two major transformations, neither of which can be appreciated through many of our old Eurocentric political distinctions — between neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, between communism and capitalism, between state and market, between “land” and “sea” — just to list off a few. The first shift is of course non-Eurocentrism, the undoing of the last spatial revolution that began with what Schmitt referred to by the schoolbook euphemism the “Age of Discovery.” This means first and foremost the rise of China, with its forms of social, political and economic life, but more comprehensively, all of the places and populations diminished for centuries by the domination of Europe. To repeat the now-obvious, it’s hard to grasp — even for people who actively study it and “decolonize” themselves — really how much our political understanding has been warped and predicated on pretending that the rest of the world simply does not count: their history, their populations, their effects, their geography, their political thought. The spatial revolution of the 16th and 17th century was actually anything but coldly cartesian or scientifically objective; it was defined by a world map distorted by and around Europe. And this is a Eurocentrism that includes Russia and the United States, as extensions or wings, because they generally counted in the calculations of European political modernity since the founding of the United States and the modernization of Russia by Peter the Great. They were always on the map.

The second transformation is the rise of what we’ll call “vectoralism,” borrowing the term from McKenzie Wark, to roughly describe the power modalities coming out of Silicon Valley and — one of my main points here— much of what we’re going to see in terms of astropower, which will be composed of a strange mix of Silicon Valley and other private companies, nations and militaries, non-profit organizations, citizen groups, and faceless entities. Vectoralism is a dominatory form of post-capitalist production defined by the control and coordination of flows of data and information by a vectoralist class. I’m going to underscore something that Wark merely provides room for: the possibility that this vectoralist class may not necessarily be a distinct group of individuals; that we could all suffer under vectoralism as a form of abstract domination. I would also push things a little further than Wark, who saw this control and coordination as the result of the “ownership” of vectors. I think we should prepare for property relations to get pretty surreal under the vectoralist regime. “Ownership,” at least in a legal sense, does after all come with some costs and responsibilities. What if one could accrue all the benefits from some power or resource without even these costs and responsibilities? All of the usufruct, all of the gains, none of the pain. Control and coordination of “vectors” may admittedly end up meaning legal or effective ownership, I don’t know, but we shouldn’t be too surprised if we’re surprised, especially when it comes to the alien conditions of outer space. Astropower complements and forms the other half of vectoralism. Outer space has to be pieced together with cyberspace in order to understand the whole of 21st-century power configurations.

What’s nice about the astropolitical side is that it’s much less cluttered than Silicon Valley. Astropower is easier to visualize, to examine how power might work, because you’re starting with something that at least from your brain’s perspective seems pretty much like empty space. Terrestrial vectoralism is totally the opposite, which is why its theorists like Bratton tend to descriptively evoke a “computational sublime” — long lists of networked processes and hyperobjects stretching from neurotransmitters and minerals to the architecture of programming languages or the fine print of transpacific trade agreements. Confronted with such a sublime, your puny mind is to understand only that it does not understand. And it works on me — a few steps in, and I’m lost. The complexity of these machinic processes exceeds me, as it does all carbon-based mortals. It’s not just metaphorical either; it mirrors the actual complexity of the operations of these modes of power, which go far, far beyond the humanly-comprehensible operations at work previously in bureaucratic rationalization. These operations of power become more and more “infrastructural” rather than “despotic” in the terms of sociologist Michael Mann, more and more recognizable as what Foucault calls “governmentality” rather than discipline or much less sovereign power. This governmentality relies on the complex modulation of possibilities, the formation of subjects and aggregate wills, the pre-emption or silo-ing of contradictions and conflicts, almost to the point of invisibility, rather than the direct yes-no dictates of a sovereign or the legible processes and petitions of a bureaucracy.

Silicon Valley has pushed this governmentality to such an extreme, that we can see how outer space would offer a refreshing opportunity for the re-assertion of sovereign power within the regime of vectoralism, even in archaic ways. Think about it. Space is made for Pharaoh. Unlike deeply-immanent infrastructural power, space is a seemingly transcendental position from which to govern Earth that is not of this Earth. The sovereign, divinely occupying the throne from space, may give laws without being themselves subject to those laws — even its most universal, such as the physical law of gravity. Space is the ultimate place and state of exception, and whichever power grants you access to outer space will likewise have that other defining feature of sovereign power: the right to decide between life and death. There are no in-betweens in space. Something as small as a mechanical failure, a tiny breach or flying object, a minor miscalculation, spells death. There is no room for “partial efforts” or the “summing of negligibles” that you see in terrestrial governmentality. You are either inside a functioning spaceship or you’re fucking dead. Outer space is also still, for most of us, a wholly mythical realm. It is still “absolute” rather than “abstract” to borrow categories from Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, comparable to how the wider world was conceived in medieval Europe.

Our collective understanding of space is instinctively mystical, if not theological, and for good reason. Maybe it’s pure coincidence that both major space programs, in the States and in Russia, were originally spearheaded by mystical contingents, the currents of Cosmism in Russia and the occult circles surrounding Jack Parsons, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Look at our first forays into space. In Los Angeles, on permanent display in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is a series of portraits of the dogs that were first sent into space by the Russian space program, Laika first among them. The exhibit is entitled “The Live of Perfect Creatures,” and it just goes to show that, however futuristic and technological the space race was supposed to be, however hard-nosed and modern we imagine ourselves, humanity on some level knew that we were trespassing on a sacred realm and so lapsed into that most archaic of habits: we sacrificed the lives of the innocent.

However, as with the “Age of Discovery,” and the zeal of the Jesuits and Calvinists, the nimbus of the absolute will be used as a smokescreen for the machinations of the abstract. The more Musk, Bezos, and Branson go on and on about the “wonder” of the Overview Effect or the “collective benefit” of space travel for “humanity,” the more you can be sure you’re about to get screwed. It’s true that their yearning for outer space may partly spring from pharaonic impulses, just as Flat Earthers are intuitively yearning for the repeal of modernity by rejecting a certain scientific understanding of the globe. However, a large part of it is that they know they can get a jump on setting the terms of exploitation, in legal formulations that will seem fussy or unimportant to the rest of us. The majority of Schmitt’s Der Nomos der Erde is about this. It traces the details about the determination of meridians and “amity lines,” about whether this territory or waterway belonged to this or that king, or to “everybody” or “nobody” at all, about how the rights and benefits were accorded to various European powers by various land-claims without having to bother asking anyone else.

This is the stage of the Space Age we’re currently in, and those setting the terms will be quick to exploit the difference between terrestrial conditions and those of outer space. For instance, many of our legal assumptions about space might be borrowed from the assumptions we have about the boundlessness of seas and oceans. This is how we popularly imagine space — as infinite and thus boundless. But as far as humans are concerned, space is entirely defined by its boundedness — the line between being inside and outside the ship, for one, as I mentioned, but above all, by the absolute moat between Earth and not-Earth, a moat traversible only by a certain relation to terrestrial power. In this sense, Musk could take to the podium and repeat the Zapatista maxim that “La Tierra es para quien la trabaja,” and magnanimously declare that extraterrestrial resources — the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, even certain orbital positions — openly belong to anybody who wants to work it, knowing full well that the barest access to space depends upon the control of terrestrial resources. This is no more ridiculous than the glut of articles that describe private space tourism for the megarich as the “democratization of space.” The unknown seas and the oceans — and the wilds of the Earth — were always formidable territory of course, but you could still exploit them as resources if you were crazy enough. You could set off in a raft or caravan and with luck, God would protect your journey. Craziness was a necessary and sufficient condition.

With space, no. Wherever the contestable line between space or earth happens to be, whether the Kármán line or somewhere else, it will mark an unmistakable line between the overpowerful and the rest of us, a good indicator of coming geometries of power. If things keep going the way they’re going, all our visits, scientific expeditions, even our modest engagement with space, will be strictly at the behest of the Pharaoh. This is because this current spatial revolution does not really concern all of outer space, the depths of the galaxy or universe — this will entail entirely different politics and forms of life, probably not recognizably human. This century’s chapter of astropower will cover only the stretch going from lower orbit to perhaps the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the part of space still entirely tethered to Earth technologically, politically and socially. Its transcendentality is a delusion of grandeur. So just as Silicon Valley platforms and technics slyly exert a form of sovereignty under the guise of falsely-neutral engineering and algorithmically aggregated preferences, astropower will wholly rely on terrestrial infrastructure— from our information networks to our supply chains — while wearing the imposing garb of a space sovereign. The human encounter with outer space should be absolute, though. It should be the occasion of the most transformational questions about our relations to the cosmos, at the furthest margins of meaning. It should be a primary concern, an urgent collective goal. Instead, here we are, organizing ourselves in little working groups to theorize about our own space-enslavement.

[1] Dolman, E., 2002. Astropolitik. London: Cass, p.96. From Dolman’s admonition, I decided to use the term “astropower” more than “astropolitics” since the latter technically refers to extension of classical geopolitical realism into outer space.

I wanted to review Villeneuve’s Dune, but I probably won’t get around to seeing it. Instead, I watched David Lynch’s Dune for the first time yesterday, always having known that I’d like it just from the way it looked. These first impressions are always surprisingly informative. In thriftstores, you can scan the books from several feet away and pick out the good ones just from their jacket design. There are exceptions, like Octavia Butler, but when it comes to “aesthetic works” like literature, there almost has to be a relation between a thing’s inner truths and its sensuous exterior. Right?  I’ve never read Herbert’s Dune but I’m not sure it matters when it comes to the film. I don’t know if I want to fully understand. If I’m preparing to watch another space-epic ruled over by the ineluctability of an action movie plot, it’s going to come as a relief when it’s a work of stilted, Symbolist science-fiction. Usually, among Hollywood action films, this freedom from the plot only happens unintentionally, when the studio panics and pushes something unsalvageable through just to meet deadlines. 

When they fuck up, I usually enjoy it, as was the case for example with Pirates of the Caribbean 4, subtitled “On Stranger Tides.” The general story of Stranger Tides makes sense: they’re searching for the fountain of youth. But in several parts of the movie, you get that feeling you used to get as a kid while clothes shopping at the mall with your Mom and need to take a break at the food court for like an hour. I like this. I like when characters seem like they’re searching for the plot. The would-be or has-been romance between Depp’s Jack Sparrow and Penelope Cruz’s Angelica goes nowhere, except to a climax in which Sparrow tricks her into involuntarily killing off her own father, Blackbeard. “I hate you,” she tells him as he rows her to an island, where he'll deposit her with a gun to signal a ship or do herself in. She layers on the lies to trick him into taking her with him, and just as they’re about to kiss, the violins peak and he turns and says “I gotta go.” This anti-sentimentalism was probably the result of an intended sequel, but whatever the reasoning, and however bad the movie, it amounts to a form-breaker for Hollywood. Liberated from a plot, we turn to images. In a few places in the film, Sparrow checks to see if his arms and legs are still intact, and subtly gestures that, if they are, all is right in the world. This indicates a destiny. If all you care about is working limbs and an adventurous mode of being, civilized society will have little place or appeal for you. This spoke to me.

Dune actually has a pretty straightforward plot, but to his credit, Lynch somehow manages to make it not make sense. The geopolitical and ecological themes are there enough and it probably helped to have a political wildcard like Lynch as the director to bring out their imagery rather than turn the book into glib Hollywood allegorizing. It’s cool that, in an American major motion picture, they have a terrorist cell of space-bedouins training to bring an extractive industry to its knees, but also pretty funny that their savior figure is a guy named Paul played by a guy named Kyle. They recognize him as the Messiah because he’s the one who can drink the mouthwash and survive. Why is mouthwash considered the “water of life” on their planet? Who knows. It primarily functions as an image, like the worms, the thumpers, the pain box, the sound weapons, the pug that marches into war with Patrick Stewart, the cat harnessed in what looks like a desktop-mod that’s supposed to be “milked,” the poisonous-breath tooth-capsule, the eyebrows, the double-blue eyes, the ubiquitous quasi-Islamic aesthetics, and last but not least Paul’s designer overcoat at the ending ceremony. Images don’t have to non sequitur as hard as they do in Lynch, but they should never simply dissolve into explanation if they’re going to have a life of their own. Infact, nothing should simply dissolve into explanation, not even dialogue.

Dune doesn’t really have dialogue. Instead, the characters speak in monologues at each other, or to themselves, or for an unseen audience, making it feel a bit like a production of Aeschylus. However, true to form, Lynch defamiliarizes even everyday language. Life-coaching advice like “fear is the mindkiller” somehow feels oracular coming out of these people’s mouths. Duke Leto, realizing he must leave the comforts of his kingdom, admits to his son “I’ll miss the sea, but a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change something sleeps inside of us and seldom awakens…. The sleeper must awaken.” When I first told my Dad that I was moving to Europe, and that I’d probably be moving to a different city every few months, his first response was: “Good, that will make time… slow down.” I deeply respect that my Dad’s first concern was phenomenological. Not career, family, or safety, none of the usual parental anxieties— just time dilation. Maybe on some level, I was saying to my father, as Paul said to his, “I want you to be proud of me.” And my father, just like Duke Leto, was telling me as well: “The sleeper must awaken!”

When you don’t really know anything about film, as is plainly the case with me, often your best hope is in strong misreadings, especially when it comes to what superior tastes might consider a sub-par picture. For this, it helps when films invite your mind to wander. This invitation can come from either “artfully slow” cinema or just plain bad movies that have lost the thread (and to be honest, these aren’t always fully distinguishable). In their gaps you can dwell and ponder, much as you dwelled and pondered in the food court waiting for your Mom to finish picking out shoes for the wedding. What I particularly enjoyed about Lynch’s Dune was probably what dissatisfied many movie-goers most: it’s almost entirely void of “action” of the kind you expect from Hollywood. The “action scenes,” like the battles and fights, were just washes of movements that seemed zen and preordained, like an ancient epic— the Ramayana, for example. Even in the final knife fight with Sting, the closest the film got to Hollywood’s lessonless gladiatorial action, I wasn’t really worried. Paul seemed like he had it covered. Leave it to Lynch to make violence somehow meditative. My very-non-rhetorical question is why we demand “action”— scripted gladiatorialism— in the first place. Why do we want to recreationally rehearse these same sequences over and over, watching the good guy drive his dagger into the bad guy as he falls from the ledge of a skyscraper, in slow motion, and into the mouth of a volcano? What are we getting out of this? I really don’t know, but that won't spare you from me speaking confidently about it in a later review.

I don’t think neoliberalism is the root of all our problems. In fact, I don’t think that there is such a thing as “the root of all our problems.” When it comes to questions of social power and complexity, I just don’t think they can be answered by extirpation, by uprooting. Likewise with critiques that comprehend “capitalism” as both total and unitary, rather than as an historical ensemble of market relations, private property regimes, industrial technologies, bourgeois society, the nation-state system, various forms of supremacy and exploitation, and so on, in which parts change and deeply interrelate but do not necessarily mutually inhere. Maybe it’s my own limitations, but whenever I try to wrap my mind around unitary totalities like this, it reminds me of the metaphysics of Parmenides, in which All Being is One, and change is not only impossible but inconceivable… No wonder we’re stuck.

Ensembles, on the other hand, allow us to both analyze the moving parts and see how they work together, rather than trying to either impotently blame the whole or merely isolate and excise the bad part. Even an historically-minded, immanent-critic like Moishe Postone, when examining both American and European capitalism and Soviet communism, will still presume that both forms of domination share a common root or historical condition (the abstraction of labor) rather than each ensemble sucking for a wide variety of different reasons. This throws me. I see no reason why there can’t be a multiplicity of Bads and a multiplicity of Goods, or Goods nested in Bads, Bads nested in Goods. I know that this isn’t as satisfying. People want a cardinal good-bad orientation. But that’s another hard lesson of social power and complexity. Even harder to swallow, about historical ensembles, is that even your most cherished, incorruptible program may itself suck or lead to domination when placed alongside the wrong things, and that the most reviled, idiotic program or ism may, in some unforeseen form and context, turn out to do exactly the trick you had in mind. Not to say that there aren’t some plain bad ideas out there, just that our most entrenched social ills and evils are dynamic and emergent.

So however adamantly the Feed may hand-wave, neoliberalism isn’t to blame for everything. It’s one pathology in competition with many others from which it has to be distinguished, like classical liberalism, libertarianism, financialization (with which it’s deeply intertwined but not identical), and all the modalities coming out of Silicon Valley that, borrowing McKenzie Wark’s notion of the “vectoralist class,” we might roughly gather under the term “vectoralism.” More often though, I find it very undistinguished, even in the books of thinkers I admire like Achille Mbembe, who begins his Critique of Black Reason by defining neoliberalism as “a phase in the history of humanity dominated by the industries of the Silicon Valley and digital technology.” Am I crazy or isn’t that like thirty years off the mark, and a misreading of our current state of affairs, which to my mind, includes a crisis in a moribund neoliberalism? As a non-expert trying to get my bearings — and you may disagree — I define neoliberalism pretty narrowly, as a kind of “governmental reason” in which the form of the public — or the would-be, should-be, could-be public — is hollowed out yet still instrumentalized for the ends of private, corporate profits, accompanied by an ideological framework that came to the fore during Reagan and Thatcher, maintained its Washington Consensus for some decades, then started to buckle under the Obama administration — in part because of the vectoralist “disruption” of social and political being.

In other words, for me, neoliberalism isn’t merely either marketization or privatization (which for me, are too longitudinal, like rationalization or secularization), but privatization through the ruse of an ideologically-maintained, socially-cherished public form or apparatus — like the town hall or public sphere, the nation-state, or the university or library— forms which reached their most “public” in midcentury America and Europe through waves of progressivism, social democracy, democratic socialism, and Dewey-ish social thought. Neoliberalism is a shell game best exemplified by the “public-private partnership,” in which the public is less a partner than it is a “mark” or a sucker, and corporate profits hustle under the cover of maintenance or efficiency. The erosion of workers’ rights by transnational corporations wasn’t just a consequence of globalization as such, but an exploitation of the integrity and limitations of the nation-state, the scale on which many of those workers’ rights were formulated and their powers and movements constrained. Many of the most heinous neoliberal experiments, from Pinochet’s Chile to Cheney’s Iraq, were likewise shell games played with the nation-state form and not merely marketization alone — or really, marketization at all. This same ruse describes the Olympics in its diversion of public investment to private contractors and propertied interests under the banner of “international peace and cooperation through sport,” and it also describes the Stay Puft Marshmallow status of today’s “corporate citizen,” in which the short-term profit imperatives of shareholders are protected by legal personhood — entitled even to that highest of public ideals, “free speech.” It also applies to the absolutely criminal and peak-neoliberal “Elizabeth River Tunnels Project” that, at the hands of then-governor Bob McDonnell, nearly suicided my home region of Hampton Roads, Virginia, and left the area on the hook for 58 years of guaranteed profits to Elizabeth River Crossings (now purchased by Albertis Infraestructuras in consortium with the investment firm John Hancock).

To my mind, this specific public-private relation is one of the things that distinguishes neoliberalism from the libertarian eschewal or diminishment of public for private forms, or a classical liberal paradigm of separate, delimited private and public spheres, or — most relevant today — the vectoralism now circling like a vulture, waiting to feed on neoliberalism’s bloated corpse. Vectoralism has no need to maintain or streamline public forms. It has little use for them. Where it’s not actively seeking to supplant or circumvent them, such as Uber supplanting or circumventing public transportation, it’s pushing to dispense with the public-private distinction altogether as a relic of modernity. This is one reason why it’s so backwards to mischaracterize Silicon Valley as a form of “techno-libertarianism.” I’m not saying techno-libertarianism isn’t a thing, only that it doesn’t apply to Silicon Valley, which absolutely liquidates most of the 19th and 20th century notions at the source of libertarianism, such as “self-ownership” or “the private individual.” I would even argue that vectoralism’s switch from the “market” to the “algorithm” as an organizing metaphor yanks away one of the load-bearing pillars holding up the public-private distinction in law and political economy running through classical liberalism, libertarianism, and neoliberalism, and muddies the distinction between “free markets” and “central planning” that is so axial in contemporary Youtube commentary.

There’s of course some continuity from neoliberalism to vectoralism, in their social relations for example, but the discontinuity is more important to understand because the dangers are newer. Where you clearly see this discontinuity is with that now-thoroughly neoliberal institution, the modern American university — neoliberal in its internal administration, privatization of research, and reliance on ballooning and largely government-backed student debt. As a ruse, it’s society-wide and God tier, and it couldn’t have been pulled off were it not for the ideologically-maintained, socially-cherished form of the University (whether technically public or private) that still holds a monopoly over higher education — and a monopoly over even the image of higher education. It’s simply what one does. Even the cleverest (maybe especially the cleverest) expect University Life to be something along the lines of Raphael’s School of Athens (which was actually painted behind one of the auditoriums of my undergrad alma mater, the University of Virginia). Yet if the curtain dropped, and universities were understood as transactionally as their administrators understand them, if the public soberly weighed its costs and benefits against other possible forms of higher education, the jig would be up.

And that’s the thing: the curtain is dropping and the jig may soon be up. Then, lo and behold, waiting in the wings is Silicon Valley, ready to offer things like “Google Career Certificates” in lieu of diplomas, and at a fraction of the cost. These certificates primarily cover tech but what would stop them from expanding into every other discipline or into new forms of legitimacy? For the last century or two, what kept higher education from finding franker forms was both the Veblen good of university prestige and the closely related fact that education is only about twenty percent “learning” and eighty percent social reproduction, stratification, and subjectivation (that is, the making of us as subjects). Recently, this prestige has lost some of its spell, due in part to the rise of the Californian Ideology, which has always glorified the dropout and the digital autodidact. And already for some time now, vectoralism has institutionally challenged the university classroom with MOOCs, coding boot camps, a host of other online para-academic environments and private tutoring platforms, and from the looks of it, is generally hoping to overtake the university system in the transmission of “knowledge,” and many times free of charge. Point being that concerning methods of education, neoliberalism and vectoralism are, broadly speaking, at odds.

In terms of options and convenience, the academy pales. And the avid and disciplined autodidact can access some the best of today’s knowledge-production through a variety of sidedoor vectoralist means. This being the case, if we start shopping around and comparing the university with all the other potential platforms for discourse, culture, training, knowledge production and transmission — those purported “services” of a university — we’re left to wonder what exactly we’re paying so much for. Is it for the honor of working and character-building? A shot at the bustling academic job market? For discounts at the natural history museum? It makes sense if the system is a given, as it long has been — you just have to pay your dues. But if the system itself is called into question, it has little to defend itself with.

Were this all that was at stake, “access to knowledge,” a new conveyance of culture and knowledge, we might think of the vectoralist disruption as an improvement or a welcome addition. The real shift though is in the new methods of social reproduction, stratification, and subjectivation in the vectoralist models of education and pedagogy (and “media” as well, but that’s a question for another day). This is what we need to keep our eye on. Ask anyone who knows: Gramsci, Althusser, Ivan Illich, Pierre Bourdieu or even Thomas Piketty. We have to ask what’s being restructured in the name of or under the guise of education, naively understood. In his most recent Capital and Ideology, Piketty even marshals data to explain the political realignment from social democracy to neoliberalism largely in terms of educational attainment (the social democrats losing the working class for a “Brahmin Left”). I don’t fully buy this as an explanation, but we can surely make out the faultline here, the jagged edges of one mode grinding against the jagged edges of its successor… The shift from social democracy to neoliberalism then; now the shift from neoliberalism to an ascendent vectoralism.

However — and this is why I’m going to such pains here — this shift itself involves a sort of ruse, a second order ruse, in that vectoralism is going to be sold to us as a solution to the failures and bankruptcy of neoliberalism. Vectorialism will come to seem like a wiser steward of sectors like education or media, where the “products” have never been scarce and the central grift will be a matter of controlling their flows and mediating their superabundance (as if the problem of education was ever that “we just couldn’t get it to them,” a problem of access to knowledge). From there, it will boastfully go on to “solve for scarcity” in all the countless other sectors that neoliberalism has left in shambles, then exert greater control through characteristically vectoralist means. The ruse will offer us a false choice between two competing forms of domination, just as we faced during the Cold War, and our answer as always should be “neither.” This refusal involves acknowledging the varieties or domination and differentiating between them, whether through the pretexts of markets versus algorithms, the changing relations to scarcity and abundance, or the way they configure or reconfigure the public and private. Because domination has always been, if anything, innovative.