Abstract
As Raewyn Connell has argued (1997), sociology—that is, that which has come to be considered “classical sociology”—developed among liberal bourgeois men of the metropole (in U.S. and European cities) at the height of modern imperialism. As such, sociology’s canonical “founding fathers” employed a distinctly imperial gaze and commitment to colonial methods of abstraction. Elizabeth Povinelli, author of Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism, is also located in a discipline—anthropology—whose epistemological and methodological origins and continuing trajectories are imbricated with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Sociologists, anthropologists, and decolonial thinkers across, beyond, and against disciplinary thought will be interested in Povinelli’s newest interrogation of what she terms the “ancestral catastrophe of late liberalism.”
Between Gaia and Ground is organized into five main chapters and includes a useful glossary with which readers can refer to a variety of the concepts she mobilizes to build her argument throughout the book, some of which emanate from her prior works, such as Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011) and Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016).
In the first chapter, “The Four Axioms of Existence,” Povinelli names and interrogates “a set of discursive phrases that could be considered so widespread and authoritative as to constitute something like four axioms of existence” within what she casts as “contemporary critical thought” (p. 15). This chapter frames the book’s main preoccupation with the way in which dominant forms of critical thought—those that begin with an ontological claim and then move into historical analyses—reproduce colonial forms of reason (even if unwittingly). Povinelli names the four axioms in the order in which they are often invoked, with the first typically treated as the most foundational, as follows: (1) “the entanglement of existence”; (2) “the distribution of the effects of power and the power to affect a given terrain of existence”; (3) “the multiplicity and collapse of the form of the event”; and (4) “the violent roots of Western liberal epistemologies and ontologies, or, what I have called geontopower, in the history of colonialism and slavery” (p. 15).
Moving swiftly through a wide range of thinkers’ engagements with elements of these four axioms (Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, among others), Povinelli makes the case—in the theoretical and imaginative company of Nikhil Anand, Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, and Ursula Le Guin—that ontology matters only to the extent that it directs us toward altering the present and ongoing racial and colonial catastrophe. In other words, Povinelli seeks to “make irrelevant and inoperable all ontological questions that do not begin and end in the history of power” (p. 23). She challenges readers to attend not to abstraction, but to the ongoing catastrophe of colonialism—whether in Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock, or on Ogoni lands—with the vital question, “What do we really care about?”
After grounding Between Gaia and Ground in the claim that centering historical and ongoing relations of racism and colonialism (in lieu of ontological abstractions) is vital to producing critical social thought, Povinelli introduces us to her concept of “toxic late liberalism” in a chapter so titled. As the climate crisis suffuses popular consciousness globally and as settler colonial governments, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, begin to acknowledge the stealing of lands and enslaving of bodies that lie at their origins, this chapter offers a vital theorization of late liberal governance, lest we be wishfully lulled into a metanarrative dream that wealthy, liberal states are finally (!) pursuing paths to repair, sustainability, and justice. As Povinelli notes, they are most certainly not—at least not as long as late liberalism is bound up with extractive capitalism (and it always has been), which needs ever new “spatial fixes” at frontiers at which violence, dispossession, and social devastation are produced to feed the extractive machine. Instead, late liberal states mobilize “the apology” (p. 41) as a key discursive feature—a tool for acknowledging past harms in such a way that nevertheless legitimates their own ongoing relations of rule.
Particularly compelling is the metaphor Povinelli uses of the horizon and the frontier, which stand in for liberal norms and facts, respectively. The horizon is “liberalism’s governmental imaginary, its means of bracketing all forms of violence as merely unintended, accidental, and unfortunate consequences of liberal, democratic unfolding” (p. 41). Liberalism’s actual harms—the facts of its violence—are found at the frontiers. The colonized, the dispossessed, and the poisoned who live at the frontiers are those who “live liberalism as a fact” and know that it “depends on its violent production and appropriation of frontiers and its disavowal of this violence as constitutive of its history and present” (p. 49). This chapter is rich in its theorization and illustrations.
In exemplifying the toxicity of both the ancestral catastrophe of colonialism and late liberalism, we encounter W. E. B. Du Bois walking the streets of Brussels circa 1936, observing copper architecture in the city, as he ruminates on the “full monstrosity of colonialism” (p. 49) that produced such a cosmopolitan European city out of Congolese devastation. And yet Povinelli argues that the colonial conceit that toxicity could be sealed off, kept elsewhere—in the Congolese copper mines, far from the gleaming streets of Brussels—is eroding in the period of late liberalism. As middle-class and wealthy residents of the global North can no longer contain the toxic byproducts of extractive capitalism elsewhere at the frontiers, they look to the horizon and see the coming climate catastrophe. But as Povinelli argues, the catastrophe is not coming, it is ancestral—as the Dene, the Ogoni, and the Karrabing already know. I recommend “Toxic Late Liberalism” as a stand-alone chapter in a graduate or advanced social theory course, if the entire monograph cannot be accommodated. With it, there are a range of films from the Karrabing Film Collective (of which Povinelli is a part) that would be illustrative companions to such an interrogation of liberalism.
In her third chapter, “Atomic Ends: The Whole Earth and the Conquered Earth,” Povinelli takes on the writings of Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of totalitarianism in atomic mid-century Europe is receiving renewed interest among scholars and environmental journalists grappling with ecological devastation and climate change. This chapter offers a clever distillation of Arendt’s key arguments in The Human Condition about labor (animal laborans), political action (zoon politikon), and work (Homo faber), among other ideas in her work. Within her vast body of work, Arendt distinguishes between colonialism (of the Americas and Australia, of which she was uncritical) and European imperialism (within Africa and Asia) in such a way that leads Povinelli to argue that Arendt’s “transit through colonial and imperial worlds was simply that: a transit between two Europes” and to conclude that “Arendt never cared about the worlds that existed between leaving and returning to the Western tradition. These other worlds mattered insofar as they explained how the West became untrue to itself and could perhaps regain its truth” (p. 76).
Defenders of Arendt accuse her critics of a retrospective reading, yet Povinelli illustrates that during the years in which Arendt was writing (the 1950s) there was an explosion of decolonial and Black radical thought—that of Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, and many others—as well as ongoing Indigenous resistance to (or survival of?) settler colonial violence in Australia. Through her discussion of Arendt, Povinelli is able to convey how western epistemologies such as hers place Indigenous peoples outside the human condition—and in doing so, Povinelli nudges the reader convincingly toward the ideas, instead, of today’s Indigenous and decolonial thinkers (Glen Coulthard, Vine Deloria Jr., Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and others) as tools for grappling with the entangled possibilities for solidarity and survivance in toxic late liberalism.
In “Toxic Ends: The Biosphere and the Colonial Sphere,” Povinelli moves from the 1950s preoccupation with nuclear annihilation of the prior chapter to the 1960s and 1970s, when concerns about environmental catastrophe were ascendant, as were Indigenous and Native struggles against mining, pipeline construction, and other settler colonial extractive incursions. In another comparative analysis, Povinelli examines how First Nations Dene communities (in North America) and Karrabing members (in Australia) imagine modes of relationality among people, land, and more-than-humans that refuse and resist settler colonial law, its doctrine of terra nullius, and the sovereignty of property. She contrasts Indigenous and Native relational ontologies with the emergence of deep ecology, as seen in Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Located within the anxiety of the coming ecological catastrophe, western deep ecologists like Bateson evade a grasp of the ancestral catastrophe and the modes of relation that emerge from within the struggle against settler dispossession. Environmental and climate sociologists should pay particular attention to this chapter.
“Conceptual Ends: Solidarity and Stubbornness,” Povinelli’s final substantive chapter, introduces a set of political concepts—embankments, tailings, and strainings—meant to address the current predicament, caught as we are between the violences of late liberalism and rising forms of illiberal governance, both enmeshed in extractive capitalism. In her words, “So here we are, stuck between supporting what never meant to support us [liberalism] and holding back a rising tide of xenophobic cruelty” (p. 113). After reviewing the more often analyzed concepts of precarity, solidarity, grievability, and autonomism common in Left Western critical thought, Povinelli briefly introduces her concepts of embankments, tailings, and strainings, ideas I find compelling and for which I hope more explorations are forthcoming in future work. What is clear is that such political concepts are Povinelli’s gestures toward new political imaginaries of decolonization, and ones that challenge what she terms geontopower (the distinction between life and nonlife that operates within settler late liberal governance in its management of difference and markets and thus suffocates Indigenous existence). Her assemblage of these new conceptual tools is motivated by this question: “What if the task of political thought and action in the West was not to find a way of making its specific history a common history that was then shoved down everyone’s throat?”
For sociologists whose discipline was formed through a western imperial gaze, with its epistemological commitment to abstraction and the discovery of universal social laws, Povinelli’s challenge is a vital one.