Each of us is legion. None are singular, no identity is pure. Within every one of us swarms multitudes, all the possible modes and models of the self. When we come together with each other we are an uncountably vast host, greater than the night sky, but each of us alone is a bustling solar system of occult variations.
From our multitudes, our vastness, emerges power. In every contact between humans, power is made manifest from differentials of circumstance. Whether it is given, taken, or shared it is always being held somewhere. Whether it is being consolidated or challenged, it is always in flux, cycling through creation and destruction, transforming and being transformed. Power is immanent in human relations, infinitely fluid, and inescapable.
Power is not limited to just relations between humans. It is also in the human relation to the living and unliving world. Having a house increases my power relative to the power of the world trying to kill me — those earthly extremes of winter cold and summer heat we might call planetary surface conditions. But building a functional house is a big job. Having a hammer increases my power to build a house that will stand strong against the weather, which in turn further increases my power relative to planetary surface conditions. Different kinds of power interact with each other, feed into and catalyze each other.
If I have a neighbor who wants to build a house but doesn’t have a hammer, a new and different kind of power relation is introduced. The increased power I have established relative to planetary surface conditions becomes a power differential between two individual people (each of whom host multitudes). Perhaps my neighbor has a tool that I do not though, that can do jobs that a hammer cannot. A scythe, say. Now, if we are prepared to work as one, our mutual power will be greatly amplified indeed.
This instrumental relationship to power, which is true for hammers and houses, holds true for all other technologies too. Cars. Phones. Clothing. Robots. Weaponry. Each is generated in very specific detail by a particular set of technological power effects, and in their turn they become generators of those same power effects. They reproduce the conditions of their own production. The same principle also holds true for less tangible technologies, like algorithms, or machine learning, or language itself. Power pre-dates all these things. It was there first, and it has seamlessly incorporated every technological innovation into its operation.
A tool is a moral agent in its own right exactly because it is inextricable from the exercise and expression of power.
Power is an inevitable effect of the interaction of humans with technology. It is most always the point of any given tool that it generates a power differential. Technology and people grow into haphazard improvised networks with each other. The moral character of the self becomes bound up with the functioning of a complex web of technologies that have implications extending far beyond our sight, much less our control.
The interior difference of our already multitudinous selves is multiplied by the manifold moral implications of the technologies we have access to. The tattered map of consensus moral landscape in use for centuries tears open to reveal a much bigger and more complicated picture.
Animals are a part of this bigger picture. Power relations are an emergent property of every human encounter with an animal. Horses and dogs are tools for different kinds of labour. Cows are tools for making milk and beef. Like hammers they are made instruments of human power. The power dynamic that exists between human and livestock or human and zoo animal is so taken for granted as a part of the natural order that it is almost unrecognizable as an actually existing power differential between living social creatures. Despite this near-invisibility, the human-animal power relation is always there. Were you to run into a mother grizzly one day in the woods, it might be easier to perceive when reversed.
Along with the humans, and the technologies, and the animals, a squalling choir of ghosts haunt the networks of power, so ubiquitous in their ambiguous presence as to be unremarkable. Every expression of power is a haunting in its own right. The colossal wreck of Rameses II might lie shattered and half-sunk in testament to power’s transience, but the defiant hubris of the king of kings’ cold passion did, after all, endure the fleeting millennia. Other kinds of legacies survive their own mortality. There are many spectres, and if we are open to hearing them, their whispers will reach us when we need them most.
There is a kind of liberation in understanding that if we are to make peace with the past, the dead must speak. It is power that makes us un-free, but power also wells up from the difference between those who apprehend their part in its design, and those who do not. Power springs from understanding the ways in which we are deployed to the ends of power as dispirited instruments, like hammers, or like dogs. The ethereal traces of those who have gone before us are inscribed upon every component of the machinery of power. As we grow enmeshed in the networks of social order, these ghosts become parts of our selves and of our understanding.
It is impossible to grasp the moral implications of power without becoming haunted oneself.
We might say that power binds all living (and unliving) things. It transcends our desires, and our will. It preceded us, and will outlive us. It ripples upward and outward from every contact between people. The presence or absence of social power surrounds each of us like an unseen bubble of electromagnetic field around a smartphone. Billowing and washing this way and that, bathing everything we touch and painting everything we see with meanings and values specific to us. Registering. When people come together to combine their power in solidarity, these fields meld, and swell, and brighten, but they are still unstable and desperately ephemeral. Power is cumulative and contingent. Power is both the function and the outcome, the abstract and the concrete that emerges from any and every differential of circumstance between beings who already contain multitudes of warring difference within themselves.
This permeating ubiquity of differential power — always being everywhere, in everything — can be disturbing, to say the least. Some people end up with power they don’t want and never asked for, or that they come to loathe. Some want power they don’t have and are dying from the lack of it. The distribution of power is not fair, and given that, it is easy to come to see power as the problem. To hold any kind of power is immoral, it might seem, in a world where so many are powerless and oppressed. Power, and the drive for it, is responsible for every atrocity, every enormity, every human evil. Power imaginable only as domination. The only hope for any kind of ethical existence, therefore, lies in cutting oneself off from power.
That means breaking all the hammers. Driving off every horse and every dog. Stopping speaking entirely, becoming a hermit. Not getting involved. I don’t want to use these tools anymore. I understand the tool as morally tainted so I discard it. Yet the power relations generated by that tool remain, because that tool was only the product of those relations of power in the first place. Throwing it away changes nothing. The power does not reside in the tool, or in the wielder, and it never needed either of them. Power dwells in the social.
Power lives in the invisible spaces between people, and that means that power lives, partly, in stories.
Stories about power and morality are stories about means and ends.
Where power becomes an end in itself, the gathering of power simply for the sake of having more power, then it can only be unambiguously evil in its effects. Red in claw and dark of heart, the definition of pure domination. If only evil were so cartoonish. Nobody sets out as the villain of their story. Nobody thinks that their own fight to assert their own power is a fight for power as an end in itself. They have some better end in mind and power is the means to achieve it, because at the most basic level, power is means, and means is power. When you have the means to do something, you have power. You have a hammer.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This is a glib summary of technological determinism, but the underlying truth it touches on is not limited to technology. The same principle also applies to all kinds of power. The specific constraints of the power we wield define the kind of uses we can put that power to, and very often our power does not extend to changing the things we most want to change. In agony and in anger we turn the power we do have against anyone and anything in reach that frustrates us. Wherever we find purchase, cause a reaction, have an effect, we must be winning. Even if that effect is limited simply to hurting other people in ways that do nothing to help us or anyone else.
The ground shifts and the exercise of power becomes the end in itself. Those of us who imagine ourselves only to be serving justice, or upholding order, or resisting domination, find ourselves exercising power not as a means to our original end, but for power’s own sake, because the exercise of power is power. Both function and outcome. We cannot stand aloof from power, but we must always guard against the corruption of power. So, what is left?
How to turn the sublime power of the social toward ends that don’t cause more harm than good?
Empathy is the condition of a connection between people that can imagine power as a means rather than an end. It is only a condition mind you, not a guarantee, and empathy is a cruel thing to demand from those dispossessed by power. Those who are the beneficiaries of the networks of power that run throughout the world must put themselves in the place of those whom are subject to power effects that they are not. Try to project your understanding, and your perspective, beyond the confines of your own individualized experiences of embodiment.
Fictionalize yourself. Reach out with your feelings.
Power belongs to and derives from the social connections between people, and because of that enmeshment, any use of it has the capacity for both good and evil. Directing harm at the person, the dispirited instrument of power working against you, is to allow the structures and systems that shaped them and who wield them as a tool, to escape unscathed. Worse, with each blow struck the logic of these systems of power is ramified, their victory extended. Any hand or voice raised in violence represents a surrender to the terms under which power is exercised upon us. Any moment in which we refuse to turn our power against others in an act of coercive force is a fleck of light in the general darkness. A single glimmering of a single star in the wide night sky.
To understand this cosmic scale of the imbalance of power, and the terms by which it operates, as rendering us individually powerless, is to collapse in convenient defeat. We are meaning-making multitudes. Impure human imbroglios of robot, animal, ghost, and fragments of each other. Power moves through all things, and all things partake of it, and each of us is connected to every other person and thing through it. Power does not belong to its wielder, it is only ever borrowed, and this is the first condition of the moral ends of power.
Not to use power as a weapon, but to nurture hope for a fairer world as long as we last. To make what meaning we can of our place in the lives of others and to leave some map or model or story of the world for those who follow. Something that says I was here, and this is what I came to understand, and then to let go.
The Last Jedi, starring Lupita Nyong’o and John Boyega, directed by Rian Johnson, was released on December 09, 2017.
