Q.O.P. Notes (20) Introduction to Part Two: “The Social Evasion of Power”

Brandon Avery Joyce
20 min readSep 16, 2024

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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 solely by chauvinists. 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 categorical 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 and thriving 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. 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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