immanence

The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s forum on religion, secularism, and the public sphere, is in the midst of publishing a series of responses to David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. My contribution, entitled “The Dawn of Everything Good?“, appeared last week. The series can be read here. The following comments build on those I’ve written there, so it’s recommended (though not essential) that you read those first.

The dawn of what, precisely?

One of the things I find interesting about The Dawn of Everything is that it’s never exactly clear what Graeber and Wengrow (henceforth, “G & W”) mean by their title. Do they intend their book to be the ultimate tell-all about the origins of everything? They claim that this isn’t what they’re doing, but those claims don’t always ring true. Or is it a reference to theories of “the dawn of everything,” including some of the very theories (or paradigms, really) that they critique? In that case the title should be accompanied by a question mark (“The Dawn of Everything?“). Or could it be a reference to their own hopes for the present moment — or for any moment (processual thinkers that they are) — that we have options we can choose from today that would make tomorrow a better day, less encumbered by trajectories inherited from the past?

I’ll take it to mean the latter, as I find that option most intriguing. As I write in my Immanent Frame piece:

“If humans, as Marx said, “make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing,” historical research needs to probe both the evolution of those “conditions” and the choices made. Graeber and Wengrow “select” a focus on the latter (human agency) because prevailing metanarratives de-emphasize it, but the two go hand in hand.”

I find the book deeply compelling in the range of historical and archaeological research marshaled to support the authors’ arguments, and at least partially convincing in its overall case — that humans have more political options than most “theories of everything” have recognized. I find the theoretical armature by which they build that case a bit less satisfying.

In particular, the two triads that organize their discussion of the state and of freedom — key concepts for them — are both provocative and not very fully fleshed out. As I continue to think about the book, I feel a need to contextualize them more directly in today’s world.

The first triad takes the modern state to be an amalgam of physical power, informational power, and charismatic power (or as they put it on p. 507, “sovereignty, bureaucracy, and a competitive political field”). As G & W argue, history shows that these three need not combine in the way they seem to in today’s world. In seeming opposition to this are their “three freedoms”: “(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones” (p. 503).

These two triads do not exactly map onto each other, nor do they map clearly onto other models I’ve found useful (such as critical theorist Christian Fuchs’s differentiation between political power, economic power, and cultural authority). And if Graeber were around to continue thinking about them today, I would hope that a future volume might get more precise in its thinking about how we can build on the “three freedoms” from within the global, economically integrated, and highly mediated state system we have today.

Three powers, three freedoms

Each of them, it turns out, is deeply complex in our world. Let’s look at them individually, beginning with the three forms of power.

Physical power: Sovereign states and their police forces certainly continue to claim a monopoly on power. But militarily, states today are hardly sovereign; they participate in alliances that may or may not keep their own citizens (and even their elites) safe and secure. The war in Ukraine shows how messy the relations between force-wielders can get, as some countries provide ambiguous levels of military support in defense of an idea of national sovereignty, and others do the same in support of resistance to purported imperial power (as in the case of Iran’s recent agreement to support Russia more directly).

And even in the seemingly most powerful state on Earth, the U.S., nothing can be taken for granted, as we see nearly every day how widely physical force is distributed — for instance, among gun owners willing to wield it (as mass shooters). There may be laws against murder, in other words, but the laws don’t prevent it from happening, and the power of “the state” to control it is hardly guaranteed.

Informational power: This, if anything, is even more widely distributed. It’s true that the economic power of the distributors (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, et al.) is vast, and that there are huge inequalities between classes, with global elites and the global middle class on one side and a global underclass on the other. But in the era of social media, anyone with a mobile phone — between 5.3 and 6.6 billion humans, according to estimates — along with those who access the internet in other ways, can all participate in one way or another in shaping the information received by others.

While states can play a huge role in the control of information — as they do, for instance, in today’s Russia, but also wherever the “propaganda model” remains intact — they are far from the only players shaping the informational (or, for that matter, the “bureaucratic”) landscape. Informational power is wielded by climate scientists and their journalistic allies just as it is by climate deniers and their fossil-fuel industry backers. It is in this sense “better” when it more clearly connects humans with the larger, extra-human world than when it fails to do that. (More on that in a bit.) It is clearly a key arena of struggle in the shaping of tomorrow’s world.

Charismatic power: This is perhaps even more of a wild card, with the Donald Trumps of the world — wealthy, loud, and aggrieved — wielding that power disproportionately. (The fact that they wield it so much better than status-quo managerialist politicians like Joe Biden has a noticeable political impact these days.) But so do Jay-Z and Kanye, Beyoncé and Shakira, Cristiano Ronaldo and Justin Bieber, and all the other stars and “influencers” wielding charismatic power on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, with their billions of followers.

Charisma is, in some ways, highly centralized within the media systems that dominate, from Hollywood to TikTok, but also decentralized and transnationally cross-cutting in that both aggrieved populists (like Trump and Putin) and evangelists of personal and intersectional freedom (like Cardi B) find and build alliances across borders. Charisma is in this sense also an arena of intense struggle, with religious and other ideas playing a significant role in shaping them in some places. That environmental activists have barely made it into the ranks of the world’s reputational leaders (Greta Thunberg being one of a very few exceptions) is one of the reasons why climate change has turned into the global emergency that it is.

Now, on to the three forms of freedom.

The freedom to move, or spatial freedom (a.k.a. environmental, territorial, or land rights): State power is arguably the strongest in its capacity to keep people both out (e.g., migrants stopped at borders) and in (e.g., incarcerated). At the same time, freedom to move is highly variable, with the world’s mobile classes — Wall Street executives, tech industry professionals, and others with money to relocate and/or economically valued professional profiles (the Monocle class, you might call them) — able to do that swiftly and smoothly, while the underclasses labor and suffer within ever more carceral systems of spatial regulation.

So where spatial freedom, or the freedom to move and start one’s life over in a new place, is in fact a basic premise of modernity — Graeber and Wengrow would argue that it goes back as far as humans have been around — the problem is really just that it isn’t distributed widely enough. Whether this is due to the sovereign state or the imperial nature of capitalism, or both acting in tandem, isn’t addressed by G & W.

That said, the freedom to move is not necessarily congruent with the needs of an ecologizing society, one in which commitment to places is at least as important as capacity to move between places. The freedom to claim and defend places is in this sense as valuable as the freedom to move.

The freedom to disobey authority, or civil freedom (civil rights): As with the previous freedom, in emphasizing this one G & W show themselves to be liberal modernists, even as they argue that libertarian principles like this one predate modernity by many millennia.

There’s no doubt that freedom to disobey authority is of paramount importance when authority is irrational and unjust. But might there not be forms of authority that are rational, just, and desirable — the authority of a constitutional republic ruled by laws, for instance, which has made certain decisions based on deliberative, democratic processes (for instance, gun laws) and needs to have them upheld?

The freedom to disobey authority is therefore as important as the freedom to wield authority, which means both to exercise and to contest it. In today’s world that freedom is connected to the informational power discussed above and, less directly but no less powerfully, to charismatic power.

The freedom to shape reality, or ontological freedom (which combines freedom of thought and religion with something we might call “freedom of life practice”): This one most obviously combines the obverse of the second two forms of power, informational and charismatic. Shaping reality is something that is done collectively, through the experiences that constitute one’s world and that enable one (and one’s community) to inhabit it.

This is arguably the most important form of power in terms of its relevance for transforming a society, in the way that contemporary society must be transformed if it is to become culturally and ecologically viable. (It’s what this blog is most focused on.)

So, where does this discussion of these six forms of power and/or freedom get us?

Three ecologies

Michel Foucault would argue, and I would agree, that all of these are forms of “power/knowledge” — all are potentially enabling and potentially disabling depending on how and by whom they are wielded.

The freedom to move is the freedom to get away from the physical power of authoritarian diktat. The freedom to disobey authority is that as well, but with an informational element in its resistance (i.e., the freedom to break free of bureaucratic strangleholds). And the freedom to shape reality combines material freedom, informational freedom, and the charismatic power of ontological vision (the latter too often considered purely within the realms of “religion”).

They can all perhaps be grouped into three categories: the material-bodily (physical power, freedom and capacity to move), the informational (bureaucratic power, freedom to disobey), and the experiential (charismatic power, ontological freedom).

These, in turn, could readily be mapped against my post-Guattarian “three ecologies“: the material, the social (with its arrangements of the social world), and the mental-perceptual-medial (which is located in the details of experience). And here’s where I find G & W’s categories coming up short, for the simple reason that their emphases are, in a word, anthropocentric: they lack an integration of the ecological within the theoretical frames by which they interpret the world. The ecological is, in turn, connected to the technological, the demographic, and other material determinants, all of which get short shrift in the volume (as Walter Scheidel argued in Foreign Affairs).

Their three forms of state power and three freedoms are primarily focused in the area that I call “social ecology” — the relational networks by which societies are constituted as differential fields of agency. Some people have more power, while others have less. Institutional forms of power (as found in states, for instance) institutionalize those power differentials so that power is not only wielded by some people over, or at the expense of, others. It is also held and passed on within tightly regulated class formations, with informational/bureaucratic systems supporting these persisting structural inequalities. Charismatic politics can in fact scramble these inequalities in strange ways, though in more centralized societies they tend to support them. The three freedoms, in turn, are about the capacity to resist those centralizations or “hoardings” of power.

All of that is important for us to consider in a world where inequality runs rampant. But none of those categories directly address the relations between people and the extra-human worlds on which we depend and within which we are — very problematically at the moment — enmeshed.

The dimensions of power and of freedom G & W describe do take materially embodied forms, with borders, prisons, surveillance systems, et al. contributing to the “material ecologies” of the world. But at this point in history, when ecological relations have become crucial for us to rectify, it’s also imperative for us to understand how they are enfolded within human social systems in complex ways. The relations between intra-human (human-to-human) power relations and extra-human (human-to-nonhuman) power relations, if you will, are necessary for us to understand. (I’ve been trying to argue this since 1997, so it’s a failure on my part that I haven’t been more successful.)

Similarly, informational power, whether that of centralized authorities (states with their bureaucracies) or other forms — top-down in the case of corporate surveillance capital, bottom-up or lateral in the case of social and political movements — includes systems of information by which humans manage their own relations with each other. But it also includes systems of information by which humans manage their relations with the larger, extra-human world. This is done locally, nationally, and globally. It can be done in top-down fashion — by governments and elite-driven, highly technological “worldwatching” institutes — or through nested networks of governance arrangements within which local and national communities participate in multiple ways. (Or both.)

And the two sets of relations — the human-to-human systems and the larger, human-to-nonhuman systems — are not independent of each other. They are intertwined, and understanding that mutual enfoldment is crucial for understanding how to shift human society to more ecologically viable forms. Thinking “social ecology” — relations of power between people organized in groups, nations, and so on — alongside and as intimately entwined with “material ecology” — relations of dependence between technologically equipped cultural groups and institutions and biophysically organized ecosystems — is, in this sense, necessary.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, comes the “charismatic” power of ontology, that is, the experiential dimension of power.

Charisma, in its many forms, from the glamorous to the sublime, is what keeps people fascinated, and sometimes enraptured, by others — who may be humans (heroes, movie stars, pop idols, populist politicians) but not necessarily (as with animals, such as the ones depicted on the walls of Paleolithic caves, and with divinities of all kinds, which may or may not be “ecologically embodied” in material phenomena). Charisma motivates movements that can change and even revolutionize societies. Life-changing experiences do that for individuals, and when these happen collectively, they can rearrange the ontological fabric of the world.

G & W point to these kinds of powers — in their many references to ritual, play, creativity, and the like — and to some of the moments when such “ontological rearrangements” appear to have happened: for instance, when urban populations abandoned their city-states (as in Mesoamerica or Cahokia) because, G & W surmise, they no longer supported the elites that ruled them. The details are blurry, as they tend to be with this sort of thing. But revolutions, devolutions, and radical transformations do happen, and their causes and impacts can and should be studied.

In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that the most promising way in which humans might come to reinhabit the world in a viable and sustainable way in the coming decades and centuries is through the kind of “ontological rearrangement” Foucault famously foresaw at the end of Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things). (“If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”)

Such rearrangements are difficult, if not impossible, to predict in advance. The general rule is: you won’t know they are happening until they have already happened. You may sense you are living in revolutionary times, but their ultimate destination can hardly be known in advance.

But we can prepare for them and learn how and where to pay attention so that they can become visible, audible, and sensible to us. That requires attending to those “perceptual” and “medial ecologies” — the ways by which we receive and respond to the world through our technologically enhanced sensoria.

That ontological differences are at play today is clear, once we shed our cultural lenses and follow the “ontological turn” where it leads. (G & W aren’t necessarily on board with the ontological turn as it’s been promoted thus far, but they are at least in productive dialogue with it, holding out important caveats to some of the claims the ontologists have made. There is, in any case, more than one ontological turn going on. Social justice and ecological relations are both very much at play in the one I have in mind.)

All of this suggests that visionary experiences — experiences that shift their bearers’ perception of the world and radically redistribute the sensible — are important for enabling the kind of perceptual and cognitive rearrangements that facilitate social and material revolutions.

That’s an argument for another time, and it’s one that G & W, I think, are naturally attuned to, but it’s not laid out in this book.

The Dawn of Everything, then, requires a volume two (and perhaps three and four). Any sequels would take their argument about human freedom as its starting point (whilst recognizing the conditions not of our choosing), and would understand the “dawn” to be not one that occurred in some distant past, but one that is occurring now. In Kairotic time.