On entanglement

EBD: What we call “the mythless myth of modernity” denies the truth of entanglement; it is instead predicated on human dominance and mastery of the nonhuman world. This mythless myth of modernity is an accomplice to both capitalism and liberal democracy in the modern era; both appeal to scientific authority and progress to justify their hegemony and domination.

Entanglement implies that “political” or “democratic” activity is not exclusive to the human species. In Earthborn Democracy, we describe entanglement as pointing to how human flourishing depends on cooperation. Our bodies themselves are examples of this cooperation, as recent research on the microbiome has revealed. The example of the body also points to how entanglement is the precondition but not the guarantee of flourishing—entangled life is also ridden with conflicts, distortions, pathologies, and tensions.

One formative interlocutor in the thinking that became Earthborn Democracy was Anne Norton. Her recent work, Wild Democracy: Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law advances a powerful argument about democracy’s unpredictable and episodic nature. It also touches on themes of the uncontrollable demos, the deficiencies of institutions, and the expansive possibilities of political theorizing. To close this special issue on Earthborn Democracy, we invited Anne Norton to a dialogue about wildness, entanglement, and democracy.

Our first question stemmed from a comment by Norton in response to one of the essays in this special issue. There, she suggested she had a theory of materiality to accompany what we would call a political theory of entanglement. We asked her to say more about her theory of materiality.

AN: My approach to entanglement is very simple. Human beings are material, fleshly things. The world is not outside us. We are always taking it in, letting it flow through our bodies, letting it out again. All the senses bring the world within us, and in all our acts, we move through and in and upon the surrounding world. Is this a binding? That suggests capture and constraint, but there is so much sustenance, sensuality, power, and pleasure in this entanglement, I cannot see it as a binding. One could see it as a destiny, a duty or a calling. I think that is closer to the way Wendy Brown has recently spoken of our relation to the material world. She also sees it as an imperative. That is ethically inescapable and I think it is central to your aims. Earthborn Democracy calls us to pleasure and play, as well as to exploration and ethics.

EBD: The subtitle of Earthborn Democracy is “a political theory of entanglement.” We understand “entanglement” as naming the condition of being earthborn(e): that the lives and the fate of human societies are intertwined with the agency of what David Abram calls the more than human world. We posit that political theory has historically operated in either ignorance of or innocence toward this state of entanglement. (Lars Tønder has recently argued that this is the situation of social science more generally.) Alongside many others challenging the narrowness of anthropocentrism, we argue in the book that democratic theory and political theory writ large need to begin from an acknowledgment of the earthly, interdependence of life. Grasping this truth means relinquishing—or, at minimum, deeply reconsidering—longstanding concepts and norms of human autonomy, sovereignty, and individualism.

AN: This is a place where I differ from you and Max Tomba and others I admire. Autonomy, sovereignty, and individualism are far more appealing to me than community. Community is admirable and attractive to those who have always belonged or wanted to belong, not to those on the periphery, or those heading happily toward the frontier, the unknown, the other. I’ve learned from Ibn Khaldun, however, that it is an error to think of these as opposites. One can see this by looking at our bodies as well. We do belong, in David Abram’s beautiful words, to “the commonwealth of breath” but we also inhabit separate solitary bodies. We are always both a part and apart. Where is the collective unconscious if not in the individual? Tomba points out that one virtue of appeals to the past is that a presence in the past proves that a democratic form not only could exist but has existed and so increases faith that it could exist again. That has strategic force, but I would like people to be able to dare what they think has never been.

On Wolin, democracy, and institutions

EBD: Early in Earthborn Democracy, we acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, someone whom we never met but who played a formative role in our early thinking about democracy. In Wild Democracy, you describe Wolin as a “great democrat” and point to an earlier piece you wrote on Wolin, “Evening Land,” where you explore the Wolinian idea that, in your words, “the practice of democracy is the practice of loss.” What has been Wolin’s influence on your thinking in general? And more specifically, how do you see your understanding of democracy as both continuous with and discontinuous from Wolin’s?

AN: For me, democracy is fundamentally joyful, excessive, always wanting more, always giving with open hands. Wolin taught me to see the practice of democracy as the practice of loss more vividly, but I have not lost my sense that democracy is daring toward impossible joy. I was writing about and for Wolin in “Evening Land” and so that essay held both longing and the driving desire to go into the unknown.

EBD: Turning to institutions, in Wild Democracy, you employ the language of rights in a distinctive way for democratic theorists, claiming them for the people as opposed to criticizing them as binding or limiting (as, say, Marx does in On the Jewish Question). Yet you also critique liberalism for its misleading identification of institutions and democracy, writing that “institutions alone cannot insure the people rule.” Are rights distinct from institutions—and if so, why? And is there such a thing as a democratic institution—or are all institutions in an agonistic, if not antagonistic, relationship with the power of the people?

AN: I hold to the language of rights because it declares that people can make demands outside all institutions, political or social. These democratic demands are grounded in the body, in the needs and possibilities of living, embodied, people. They are fundamentally earthly. I am suspicious of all institutions. I think they are supplements in the Derridian sense, they add only to replace. Many anarchists, especially outside the US, see anarchism as inextricably tied to mutual aid and collective action. I don’t. Institutions of all kinds—villages, cooperatives, states, constitutions, religions, laws—offer forms people can choose, but I resist the idea that they are necessary and refuse the idea that they should aim at permanence. In your terms, I belong to the archetype of democratic flight, flight from but also flight to, flight as seeking, and flight for the pleasure of flight.

EBD: In an essay we wrote in the run-up to composing Earthborn Democracy (“The Democratic Unconscious”), we used the language of the “democratic play pen” to describe how Sheldon Wolin theorizes ancient Athens as a site of democratic experimentation, transgression, and recreation. We also took inspiration from Norman O. Brown’s idea (via Freud) of polymorphous perversity, to describe an orientation toward playful exuberance, creativity and (re)birth. Earthborn Democracy allowed us to explore these ideas further.

AN: Norman O. Brown was—is—part of a current I thought had vanished but I now see that it was just running underground. R.D. Laing and the film-maker Ken Russell also seem to me to be part of this fierce, playful, unleashed psychoanalytic drive. They were pushed underground I think by an insistence on correctness and propriety, especially around sexuality. I miss that daring so much. I see more possibilities in modern than in ancient Athens, and in the playful and practical elements of recent protests: from the dancing inflatables of Portland to the Gaza Flotilla.

Weber once said that it is mistakes that advance theory. Daring people make mistakes and they—or others—push past them regardless. Exploration, theorizing, arguing are pursuits that can be—that I think naturally are—playful, joyful, festive, carnivalesque.

EBD: As we see it, democracy is earthborne—all democracy is borne by the earth in the sense of being carried and sustained by this. This means the earth is responsible for democracy; democracy depends on earthly existence. All earthly creatures live in the flow of life; to be in the flow of life is to be in dynamic interrelation, which is a site of play and dynamic adaptation. This informs a democratic outlook or sensibility that is playful in itself. The basis for rewilding democracy in your language is by attuning to the deeper patterns of improvisatory and playful democratic innovations presented by David Graeber and David Wengrow’s monumental Dawn of Everything. The record they reveal provides a basis for imagining other social and political realities, overturning the teleological and punctiform historical story of modernity.

AN: I hadn’t read Dawn of Everything when I wrote Wild Democracy, but you are quite right, we were working on the same things, often surprisingly so. Perhaps this is because I have a deep intellectual debt to some anthropologists—Turner, Sahlins, Kapferer. That is a disposition I shared with Jim Scott as well as Graeber and Wengrow. Perhaps it comes from living with people beyond the West, with different modernities. There are many people in the West who for one reason or another, are not only Western, differently Western, or perhaps not Western at all. I increasingly think that “the teleological and punctiform historical story of modernity” is a vast myth encompassing not only intellectual but also ordinary epistemologies. So much is served by this enveloping myth: capitalism, industrialization, rigid work habits, the sanctification of work, and the denial of play; colonialism and the imposition of imperial forms and thought; the bounding of states and peoples; and the legitimation hierarchies.

On rewilding

EBD: In Earthborn Democracy, we connect this attunement to the deep history of species to the contemporary crisis of democracy by pointing out that democracy is experiencing habitat loss. Does wild democracy require habitat preservation? Is there a tension between the anarchic core of democracy, as you see it, and habitat preservation? What work does the wild do in your understanding of democracy?

AN: After this conversation with you I will certainly say Wild Democracy is about rewilding. Tending calls up the garden, the rewilding of democracy is the political equivalent of restoring a prairie or a meadow. It depends, as so much in nature does, on letting things be. When liberalism’s garden—that very orderly seventeenth-century garden—becomes capitalism’s agribusiness, that excess of order destroys habitat and starves the very growth it seeks to expand. All good gardeners tell you not to clean up too much.

We need to rewild ourselves. Forget leaders, forget hierarchy, judge laws, judge rules, live the life you think best for yourself, and let others live as they choose. Get a little dirty. Get sweaty. Be the animal you are. Do the right thing. Earthborn Democracy takes up Graeber and Wengrow’s recognition of recurrent patterns of community, collectivity, mutuality. Like Graeber, I am drawn to anarchy more than to any order. Communities can be repressive, totalitarian, bastions for unchallengeable order. The wild in each of us can stand against this. Community and individualism are not properly opposed. Self-reliance and independence can exist in concert with collective action and solidarity, they can nurture and defend each other. Is there a place in your thinking for the one who refuses to act as the community expects, who interrupts the rituals and rewrites the myths?

We should keep the wild spaces, the open unpossessed commons. We should keep the wild in us: the transgressive, the disobedient, the playful, the ungoverned and ungovernable. I have some ideas about that, many are in Wild Democracy, but I have more to say and still more to learn. What are we to do with the economic realm? The pathologies of contemporary “democracies” are nothing to those of that tyrannical, all—too—governed space. It is there that the most dangerous threats to the earth are found. What is to be done? How much do you have in common with the Diggers? ***

EBD: These wonderful observations and provocations push us to complicate our notion of habitat. We have thought about habitat restoration along the lines of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Restoration is nonlinear and not a matter of sovereign control. It’s not a state-making project, as James C. Scott would put it: it can’t be pursued in those legible, controllable, manageable terms—it requires a different set of dispositions. A partisanship to democracy requires attunement to the wildness within us—as a sensibility and a set of senses. Attuning to this wildness also entails humility about what we can accomplish and awareness of how our pretensions or assumptions often obstruct restoration’s taking place.

Acts of refusal can open the door to re-interpreting rituals and myths. Bonnie Honig reads Antigone in this way. Graeber and Wengrow begin their account with refusal—Graeber elsewhere calls culture itself “creative refusal.” We see refusal as a central part of democracy, one that has been obscured from view in modern forms of democracy with these forms’ emphasis on a bounded people, constitution, parameters of acceptable political behavior (hat tip to Wolin’s “Norm and Form”). Graeber and Wengrow, Wolin, and contemporary theorists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson inspire us to expand on refusal as an essential chord in the song of democracy. This is why we argue for an archetypal form of democracy. These archetypes help us to explain what Wolin describes as the “recurrent aspiration” for democratic life, connecting the disparate and episodic moments of democratic experimentation across space and time. What else can explain this but a transtemporal form that is embodied in specific instances—whether you call this form a “morphic field” (per Rupert Sheldrake) or the “collective unconscious” (per Carl Jung). What do you think of that?

AN: I think it is true. There is such power in saying no. Have you ever seen a child who has just learned to say no? Often that “no” comes out of anger, but it also comes out of and leads to power and joy. That refusal is a claiming of oneself as powerful and as full of jouissance as that of Lacan’s child before the mirror. Saying no can make for solidarity and community. One can find past and future forms of democratic life in it. Massimiliano Tomba has done terrific work on the importance of the past to revolutions. (Insurgent Universalities, Revolution and Restoration) But saying no also gives you to yourself. Saying no makes possible dissent and flight and so freedom and discovery. The democratic depends on both.

I don’t know what I think of the “morphic field” or “collective unconscious.” I loved reading Jung decades and decades ago, but I sometimes felt a certain uncomfortable insistence on a dogma. Perhaps one could say “Here is something—a story, an image—make of it what you will.” Or one could ask “Is this yours? Do you claim it or refuse it?” Perhaps once can love the alien without making it one’s own. For me the recognition of fallibility opens into freedom: to curiosity, to wonder, to exploration, to questions.

On questions of storytelling

AN: I reject the distinction of fiction and philosophy that Habermas once insisted upon (I hope he has changed his mind.). What are Plato’s dialogues? What is the social contract? Whitman, Langston Hughes, and T.S. Eliot wrote philosophy in poetry. One can paint history (David, Kiefer) one can paint theory. I don’t know what I am, but I would rather be a poet or a prophet than a storyteller. The other objection I have to thinking about storytellers as distinct is that it tends to conceal the amount of storytelling done in ostensibly scientific prose.

In that respect I am completely in accord with your call for more capacious archives. I would underline the magpie sensibility here: take whatever stories you please, people. You are not bound by disciplinary or national or “civilizational” boundaries. This should be an unbounded archive with more labile categories, fewer disciplines. We need to be more capacious and undisciplined readers. That is very much part of what I have seen in Earthborn Democracy.

Myth is a still more promising and dangerous category. Myth is more organic. Myths often have no author, where there is an author they are often taken from the author and revised in circulation. Perhaps that makes myths more democratic. The myths I know are rarely democratic in their content. There are those to be sure, of those who rob the rich to pay the poor, of deities forced into exile or flight, of those whose power is revealed in a time of need. More often they are full of kings and heroes, of princesses and women won by men, of warriors and trickery. There are other pressures than popular circulation at work on myth. What is the role of the reader, the teller and re-teller in the making of myths?

EBD: We endorse your capacious archive and sensibility toward stories and storytelling. Our work is undisciplined: we were explicitly trying to think and to write outside of the norms of conventional academic arguments and style. (We even wanted to write more mythically, but the Muses gave us what they gave us.) Your work is inspiring in this regard for its epigrammatic and poetic incisiveness.

We turn to myth because we see myth and ritual as a call and response between image and action. Rituals shape and inform myths, making stories come alive in ways that transform the stories themselves. “Myths are lifeless without ritual.” Perhaps democratic myths seem in short supply because democratic practices need more ritualization? We actually argue that when examining democratic practices now—especially grassroots, direct actions at the local level—you cannot miss their ritualistic characters. They are often unconscious rituals, but they both enact and make sense within broader myths that participate in what we name (but do not invent) as earthborn democracy: myths about our entanglement and the necessity of cooperation for collective flourishing.

Here we need to say more about the archetypes. The three democratic archetypes we theorize in the book—flight, sociality, and politicality—name the patterns and forms that democratic action takes or realizes; these archetypes in turn inform the myth of earthborn democracy. Archetypes are often seen as static and conservative, but they are living and dynamic forms in our understanding. The rituals make the meaning; all who participate in these rituals are the meaning makers. This speaks to your question about the reader, the teller, and the re-teller in the making of myths.

AN: You do work outside academic arguments and style! That is very successful and it is a brave and good thing. When your work was first sent to me I was doubtful and full of questions. I felt resistance to it, so I told myself to cowboy up. You have the daring we need in the academy. You are going beyond gathering and recovery in building a more capacious archive, you are writing and inventing.

When you gather myths and rituals you gather promiscuously, transgressively, as you please. That challenges the boundaries of the ethnostate as well as the stultifying and now almost invisible myths and rituals of the modern order. Weber described the supposedly scientific practices of the social sciences as “shamanism.” He did not mean it as a compliment. He saw how much of methodology is ritualistic. Political theory and rational choice carry myths within them: the social contract and the battle of the sexes, for example. I would argue that the Invisible Hand is a myth, and a powerful one. What is money? In the early chapters of Capital value appears in the form of the eucharist. Which is the myth? Which myth is salutary?

There is a lot to be gathered from common practices. There are rituals. There are evocations. I cannot sing, but I hear America singing, I hear Bella Ciao. I heard Obama singing Amazing Grace unexpectedly. I hear union members singing Solidarity Forever like a sacrament. I know who and what I will see at a protest: the drummers, the generally boring and often unintelligible speeches by so-called leaders (stop this, the people present are enough), banners and signs. I know a little of why people go forest-bathing, or ice-fishing, why they tap maples for sugar, take saunas, or simply build a fire in the wilderness. There are things to be gathered from solitude, things to be learned from fire. These practices are earthier and more connected to the sacred than is often acknowledged. Are they rituals? I think so. Perhaps we live on and in and from an unacknowledged soil of rituals.

On death and dissolution, the going under

AN: I have much more thinking to do about Earthborn Democracy. At this moment in my reading and thinking, the most compelling aspect of Earthborn Democracy is the entanglement and the re-opening of ideas about our relation to other material things. We haven’t many models for this. Like you, I have gone into indigenous/tribal thought for mine. I was told recently that the Haida sculptures of the dancing bear refer to the belief that when Haida die and find that they have been reincarnated as a bear, they dance for joy. I love the idea that it might be fine, perhaps even better, to be something other than human. Doesn’t this follow from the respect we owe the other earthborn? But also, isn’t it fascinating to think about? These are questions people explore in stories, often in children’s stories, that have been carefully sequestered from anything acknowledged as theory or philosophy.

One of the claims being made seems to be that we should accept cycles of decay. But any cycle of decay is also a cycle of regeneration. How do you escape the mythic drive to resurrection, the Christian one to be sure, but also the myths of Osiris and Persephone? How do you escape the model, common from Aristotle to Hegel (and more in each direction) that sees people born, growing into strength and fading into death? That model often carries with it the idea that the dogness of the dog is the full grown dog in the prime of life, not the puppy or the old dog by your feet. Indefensible. All are dog. And if one thinks of people, how much more difficult it becomes. The idea of cycles escapes the linearity, but I think it falls prey to thinking of child/youth/sprouting as imperfect, incomplete, at best only on the way to something and aging and death as decline. The idea of a prime or true form remains. How can one escape that? What would it mean to rethink our own mortality or our own dissolution as a good?

Are these reconsiderations among the aims of earthborn democracy?

EBD: We love these reflections. Presenting an earlier version of Earthborn Democracy, we faced a strident response from a critic who insisted that earthborn democracy was antihumanist in the sense that it did not prioritize or prize human life as apart from other animal life, as somehow more important or valuable. This is the modern faith: humanity is at the center of the universe. We agree with how you read the Haida story: it may be better to incarnate as animal than as human and if we can cross and return from the human and non-human boundary—as other Indigenous stories, like the Tlingit Salmon Boy story, Aak’wtaatseen, often illustrate—we might see the wisdom of other species and bring it into human life.

What happens to democracy when we embrace not just entanglement but cycles of decay, as you suggest? In this special issue, Jessie Croteau explores precisely this, pointing out that fermentation and compost illustrate how decay is also the basis of regeneration. So earthborn democracy is also earthdeath democracy. Prioritizing the prime of life and judging early and later life as lesser also risks overlooking the interconnections of life and death. Political life becomes aimed at what you call the prime or true form, precluding play and experimentation and improvisation. Here we also draw on Norman O. Brown, who emphasizes how health requires connection with the parts of ourselves and desires we have been compelled to disavow. What this means for us is that all parts of the human experience—or all seasons of the dog’s life, as you put it—are part of the experience. It’s the priority given to the prime of our lives that is the problem. Because it means prioritizing some parts of our lived experience—the physical strength of our prime years, for example—over others, which include an appreciation of what is lost, what changes, what grows old beautifully, and what it means to share these experiences with others in a community. If we only focus on the prime examples or years, we cultivate a kind of oblivion to the knowledge of other seasons.

AN: Thank you for the Salmon Boy story. Many of the indigenous stories I have learned—like this one—teach both a different way of thinking and different practices. These are not always easy, but many are beautiful and some are necessary. Your work aims at this double learning of theory and practice.

There are other indigenous stories that point to a connection between animals and humans, stories of hunting. These also point to parts of ourselves we have been compelled if not to disavow, to put in question. For many people, a recognition of the being, the worth, the learning of animals speaks powerfully against killing or eating them. Hunting seems to be understood differently in many tribes. There people speak of the relation of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten, as one of kinship and respect. That seems to be at the heart of the Salmon Boy story. I do not fully understand this. Yet I can see how one comes to respect the prey. In eating no less than hunting one should confront one’s own animality as well as one’s dependence on the other.

On the wild in us

AN: There is an old—and very brief—work by David Graeber called “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You” Graeber asks ordinary things like “do you cross against the light?” and “do you wait your turn in line?” There is much that is already wild in us.

How much of your work aims at showing people what is earthborn, earthy, in them?

EBD: We aim to show what is earthly and earthborn in our readers. But more than “showing” our readers, we wanted to bring readers into experiencing their earthly natures—to feel them, to sense them, to smell, and taste them. This requires a process of unlearning our habits and predispositions, a process which we describe as attunement.

We also try to elicit this attunement in the form of our writing itself. For us, it was important for our writing to be invitational and this involved breaking with the argumentative, critical approach of much of recent political theory. You mention wanting to be a poet or prophet. Could you say more about both the rhetorics of democracy and the forms that we need at this moment in history?

AN: One form, it is a very simple one, is to speak less of The People and more of people. The people is an abstraction, a myth that like all myths, can enlighten or obscure. People are common, present in the flesh. People, the people we can touch, are part of a living commons.

Entanglement is an intellectual commons for us. We can all say more about the earthly senses. Last year I was thinking about the genocide in Gaza. I was asked to write about silencing, but I began to think about the neglected senses, not sight and hearing, but smell and taste and touch. Those are often closed to us in politics, but what happens when we think of carrying the weight of a dead body blown into bits? of smelling explosives and blood as they soak into the earth? The same questions come in relation to people living precarious lives at the edges of despoiled rivers, or the loss of shade and the scent of trees in deforestation. The senses give us ethical imperatives as well as sensation. You are driving people to these sources of learning.

If we touch grass, get dirty, smell dirt and rain and dry grass in the sun, we take these things not only into our bodies but our minds. Perhaps we take them into our souls. Perhaps, you might argue, the earth takes us into its soul. Perhaps this is as true when we smell hot asphalt in the sun or touch the cool breast of a marble sculpture.

If we think of the senses we can ask who sweats, whose feet hurt. We can learn why it matters to ride the subway and smell other people. We can see why it might matter to stand in line to vote, or how singing drove the Civil Rights movement. People were at once together and apart, hearing and singing collapsed into one. They felt the song in their bodies. When people walk, preferably unguarded, among people on the streets, they speak to each other more directly and more profoundly than when they are raised above them.