Three Freedoms
I recently finished reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s fantastic new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, in which they begin to re-write the genealogy of human sociality from the Paleolithic through to the present. The book spoke to me a great deal because I had organized a group of artists and thinkers to clumsily navigate similar ground over the course of fifteen seminar sessions between July 2020 and February 2021.
Reading Graeber and Wengrow’s book was like finding a map showing me how to get to my desired destination with ease, but only after I had already made it to my desired destination via a difficult and roundabout route. Graeber and Wengrow adeptly point out all the wrong turns and dead ends that I had to discover for myself. I was terribly frustrated with my own unnecessarily difficult journey while reading Graeber and Wengrow, but I was also relieved that they had given me a fine map that I might use to guide others.
This is the first of several dispatches in which I will “read-in” passages from Graeber and Wengrow’s book in the hopes that they might help others find better ways into my (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project.
What do I mean when I use the term “freedom”?
I have been asking myself this question again recently, inspired by the passage below from Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
[W]e are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle […] [W]e [are] instead talk[ing] about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (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.
… [T]he first two freedoms — to relocate, and to disobey commands — often [act] as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one.
When I have used the term “freedom” in my writings, I have almost exclusively been referring to the third freedom that Graeber and Wengrow identify in the passage above, “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.” My preferred term for Graeber and Wengrow’s third freedom is “the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds” — this is because what Graeber and Wengrow call a “social reality” is roughly equivalent to what I have been calling a “world”.
Now, I must admit that I was a bit taken aback by Graeber and Wengrow’s claim that the freedom to migrate and the freedom to disobey often serve to supplement the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds. I had always proposed the reverse: the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds serves to supplement all other freedoms, including the freedom to relocate and to disobey. Going even further, in keeping with Jacques Derrida's usage of the term “supplement”, I had always proposed that the freedom to disobey and to migrate are only ever meaningful when these freedoms both enable and are enabled by the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds.
The stories of undocumented refugees and migrants in our present world of suffering bears witness to my proposition. Undocumented refugees and migrants are those who have taken direct action to realize their freedoms by disobeying border laws and migrating to new lands. When they arrive in new lands, however, the powers-that-be in those lands are such that they prevent the undocumented from (de-/re-)constructing worlds in these new lands. The powers-that-be force the undocumented to fit themselves into established roles in a world that is more or less ready-made for them. All those who have undocumented family and friends in the United States, for instance, will know that the undocumented are by no means excluded from social reality here in the United States. Rather, they are included in a subordinate position that precludes them from actively participating in the (de-/re-)construction of social reality here in the United States. To be more pointed, the United States runs on the labor of the undocumented, and subordinate positions in the social reality of the United States are ready-made for the undocumented when they arrive here. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement service (ICE) does not exist to prevent people from disobeying border laws and from migrating to the United States without proper documentation. Rather, ICE primarily exists to ensure that people who disobey and migrate to the United States without documentation can only ever occupy the places that are ready-made for them in the United States and that they cannot exercise the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds while living here in the United States. In so doing, ICE effectively renders the direct exercise of the freedoms to disobey and to migrate meaningless.
Putting the example of the undocumented aside, however, I think that Graeber and Wengrow point out something that I really have been missing all along. They point out that the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds is itself meaningless without the freedoms to disobey and to migrate. All three freedoms mutually condition one another: the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds is only meaningful when it enables the freedoms to disobey and to migrate; the freedom to disobey is only meaningful when it enables the freedoms to migrate and to (de-/re-)construct worlds; and the freedom to migrate is only meaningful when it enables the freedoms to disobey and to (de-/re-)construct worlds. These three freedoms will be confluent with one another or they will not be. There is no freedom to be had when the (de-/re-)construction of worlds results in the construction of a world in which one can neither disobey nor migrate.
Recognizing that the freedom to (de-/re-)construct worlds is entangled with the freedoms to disobey and to migrate, I am now much better able articulate what imperialism is and how it is that imperialism ought to be countered.
My dispatches have, thus far, mostly focused on one imperialist power formation above all others — that is, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. As I have defined it, imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is a power formation that maintains itself by inhibiting confluences of creolizing, communizing, and queering processes. Point for point, I hold that creolizing processes run counter to white-supremacy, that communizing processes run counter to capitalism, and that queering processes run counter to patriarchy. Attentive readers will have noted, however, that I have been leaving one term un-countered, and they will likely have asked themselves, “But, generally speaking, what runs counter to imperialism?”
Thinking with and through Graeber and Wengrow, I would like to propose that an imperialist power formation is one that inhibits peoples’ capacities to meaningfully exercise the freedoms to disobey, to migrate, and to (de-/re-)construct worlds. Ay, and that which runs counter to imperialism is that which nurtures and activates peoples’ capacities to meaningfully exercise the same three freedoms.
Imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy happens to be the pre-eminent imperialist power formation on our planet today, but it is only one species of the broader genera of imperialist power formations. Imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy works to ensure that white men profitably engaged in capitalist enterprise (and those who serve them as proxies and redeemers) are given the greatest leeway to exercise the freedoms to disobey, to migrate, and to (de-/re-)construct worlds. In turn, all others are given far less leeway to exercise the three freedoms, with the least leeway being given to black, brown, and indigenous women who are engaged in providing for social subsistence.
This order of things is not only plainly horrible to me, it is also impossible to justify this order of things when one realizes that black, brown, and indigenous women engaged in providing for social subsistence have been responsible for many, if not most, of the remarkable social and technical inventions that have nurtured life on our planet ever since, well, the “Dawn of Everything”. It is worth quoting Graeber and Wengrow as they make this point with respect to the beginnings of agriculture.
Nobody, of course, claims that the beginnings of agriculture were anything quite like, say, the invention of the steam-powered loom or the electric light bulb. We can be fairly certain there was no Neolithic equivalent of Edmund Cartwright or Thomas Edison, who came up with the conceptual breakthrough that set everything in motion. Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred. In fact, as we’ve seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.
Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation — recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically — and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other).
Today, we are being told that the innovations and inventions that will “save the environment” will emerge from state and corporate bureaucracies formed by the well schooled and the well financed — by “Green Meritocrats” and “Green Entrepreneurs” with eco-modernist pretensions . This is one of the most insidious conceits of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
First, it needs to be said that being both well-schooled and well-financed very often means being either a rich White businessman, or a proxy for rich White businessmen, or a redeemer of rich White businessmen. Second, it needs to be said that state and corporate bureaucracies formed by the well schooled and the well financed have given us two and a half centuries of unsustainable innovations and inventions: fossil fuel exhausts, un-recyclable plastics, hazardous chemical spills, radioactive wastes, desertified landscapes, expanding dead-zones in our oceans, and stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Third, and most importantly, it needs to be said that sustainable innovations and inventions have, since time immemorial, tended to be the handiwork of unschooled women meaningfully exercising the freedoms to disobey, to migrate, and to (de-/re-)construct worlds while being engaged in providing for social subsistence.
How can anyone seriously propose that state and corporate bureaucracies formed by the well schooled and the well financed will “save the environment”? State and corporate bureaucracies formed by the well schooled and the well financed have been complicit in ethnocide and ecocide for at least two and a half centuries now, and it behooves us to compare the ethnocidal and ecocidal track record of these bureaucracies to the track record of unschooled women engaged in subsistence activities — women who have been responsible for many millennia of sustainable inventions and innovations. Reflecting on how it is that people have come to champion state and corporate bureaucracies as saviors, Arundhati Roy remarks,
We ought not to speak only about the economics of globalization, but about the psychology of globalization. It's like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That's what is happening. We are being asked by the [states and corporations] that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism — [states and corporations] that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries — to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.
Instead of championing bureaucracies formed by the well schooled and the well financed, my suggestion is that we “save the environment” by enabling women engaged in subsistence activities to meaningfully exercise the freedoms to disobey, to migrate, and to (de-/re-)construct worlds — and that we do so without discriminating against any woman because of race, nationality, or schooling.
Many will tell you that my suggestion is preposterous. This is because imperialist patriarchs, their proxies, and their redeemers have successfully endeavored to convince people(s) that women engaged in subsistence activities are of little or no importance to the “advancement of civilization”. Imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has an ideological history that spans five hundred years, but imperialist patriarchy, minus the white-supremacy and capitalism, has an ideological history that spans five millennia. The basic argument against giving more freedoms to women engaged in subsistence activities runs as follows: the “advantages” of imperialist patriarchies must have some natural correspondence with a reality beyond dispute because imperialist patriarchies have stubbornly persisted in oppressing women engaged in subsistence activities for five millennia.
Before you hastily dismiss the potentials of women engaged in subsistence activities, however, I implore you not to forget three things. First, do not forget that women engaged in subsistence activities have been resisting imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy for the past five hundred years. Second, do not forget that women engaged in subsistence activities have been resisting imperialist patriarchy, minus the white-supremacy and capitalism, for the past five millennia. Third, and finally, do not forget that many people(s) have lived relatively free lives for millennia without submitting to imperialist patriarchies thanks to the efforts of women engaged in subsistence activities. You might take some cues here from Graeber and Wengrow in this regard, given that they wrote the Dawn of Everything without forgetting these three things.
[We asked ourselves,] what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others? In the process, we often found ourselves surprised. We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age (which is effectively what we have been doing here), they represent the vast majority of human social experience.
Social theorists have a tendency to write about the past as if everything that happened could have been predicted beforehand. This is somewhat dishonest, since we’re all aware that when we actually try to predict the future we almost invariably get it wrong — and this is just as true of social theorists as anybody else. Nonetheless, it’s hard to resist the temptation to write and think as if the current state of the world, in the early twenty-first century, is the inevitable outcome of the last 10,000 years of history, while in reality, of course, we have little or no idea what the world will be like even in 2075, let alone 2150.
Who knows? Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies — say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction — will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?
With all of the above in mind, I would now like to re-articulate the aims (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project in more pointed terms. In and through this project, I am trying to discover what we can do in our time, the present, to (re-)construct a world in which imperialist power formations are historical curiosities and the freedoms to disobey, to migrate, and to (de-/re-)construct worlds are decisive.
