Becoming Genealogical: Power and Diverse Economies

Abstract

The community-economies approach eschews explanatory frameworks premised on structural analysis, arguing that such approaches prematurely foreclose the progressive potential of existing ethically oriented economic practices and enterprises. Several scholars have argued, however, that to activate the political potential and broader significance of noncapitalisms, it is necessary to trace their articulations with far-reaching political assemblages. To explore this point, this essay examines the genealogical orientation of some diverse- and community-economies research in conversation with the Nietzschean tradition of critical, constructive analysis and the notion of power as ontogenetic. It encourages a reinvigoration of the genealogical approach to diverse and community economies, emphasizing an assemblage-inflected understanding of genealogy as an ethos or mode of becoming rather than an analytic. This can enable diverse-economies research to confront power in all its forms without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that such a focus too often engenders.

Key Words:

• Assemblage Thinking
• Community Economies
• Diverse Economies
• Genealogy
• Friedrich Nietzsche

Acknowledgments

This essay was written primarily during the 2019 Community Economies Writing Retreat in Bolsena, Italy, with support from the Julie Graham Community Economies Research Fellowship. We wish to warmly thank Sabrina Aguiari and Punti di Vista, our host at Convento Santa Maria del Giglio, and our colleagues from the retreat for their feedback and constructive criticism on earlier drafts. In particular, we owe much gratitude to Kath Gibson, who not only gave generously of her time as we developed this essay but has supported our work more generally over the years, and to Stephen Healy and Tuomo Alhojärvi, both of whom spent considerable time engaging with the essay during the retreat. Finally, the manuscript was much improved thanks to the insightful and thorough comments from three anonymous reviewers. All errors and oversights are of course our own.

Notes

1 While Nietzsche occasionally referred to non-European peoples, he was primarily concerned with the development of European systems of thought and culture. See Wainwright (2010) for a postcolonial foray into Nietzsche’s thought.

2 Of particular importance in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is the dynamic relationship between established configurations of power, or “molar” formations with a relatively stabilized identity (such as a class), and the emergent “molecular” currents that both nourish molarities—classes are “fashioned” or “crystallized” from what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 213) identify as “masses”—and constantly threaten their stability and coherence, opening “lines of flight” to alternate futures. “Existential territories” are modes of ordering the world so as to sustain life; they are characterized by the interplay of molar and molecular forces. See Sarmiento (2020) for further discussion.

3 Philosophies of power often distinguish between types of power in various schema. Spinoza, for example, points out the distinction between potencia and potesta, or “power to” (capacity) and “power over” (Lukes 2005). Other thinkers add the concepts of “power with” and “power within” (see Allen 2003; Mathie, Cameron, and Gibson 2017). Nietzsche’s writings, however, focus on a typology of power that is both more molecular and more fundamental, in which power (or more specifically will to power), as the ontogenetic source of the World, is the differential element of existence/being/becoming, the engine of difference, the immanent force that accounts for change, development, growth, and the apparent fact that the universe is not a singularity, but that is also composed of constituent parts that are themselves not only different from one another in certain respects but constantly differentiating. Difference, in this way of thinking, is expressed in both quantitative and qualitative forms that emerge as relational forces—the active and reactive (see also Deleuze 2006). Some forces are greater in quantity than others, and this difference is expressed qualitatively in that these forces are stronger, dominant, and expansive. Nietzsche calls such forces by several names: active, noble, master, etc. Their counterparts are quantitatively lesser and can, in terms of their quality, only be reactive, base, and slavish relative to active forces. Of central importance here is the notion that each of these elemental forces can only exist in relation to the other: an active force provokes a reactive response, and something can only be reactive in response to something else that is active. Genealogy then, at its most fundamental level, is the art of interpreting the relations between active and reactive forces. It is important to clarify here that despite the seemingly binary nature of this typology of forces, Nietzsche’s philosophy is staunchly nondualistic and is opposed to the notion of fixed essences. The active can become reactive, and vice versa, and any given assemblage is fraught with an ever-shifting array of active and reactive forces. Genealogy is thus concerned with multiplicities, even when binary oppositions appear to be salient.

4 Of course, relational configurations can (and often do) constrain actors and outcomes, but this does not logically preclude the idea that constraining relationships are also generated by power. Thus, by the term “generative” we do not refer to power as a process that is essentially positive, enabling, or liberating.

5 See Prytherch (2007) and the response from Woodward, Jones, and Marston (2008).

6 For further discussion of the political and ethical problems of reducing black experiences to victimhood at the hands of totalizing structures, see McKittrick (2011).