Part 4: Agency and Cognition

Political Cognition

In the preceding chapters action, motivation, and mental life were touched upon. A number of themes are repeated throughout when we look at human action: ideas, awareness, the conscious vs. the unconscious, intention, judgments, values, and norms. In specifically political thought, ideas have always posed a central question: what role do ideas and ideology play in political action? That is, to what degree do political ideas motivate? Are they necessary in order to accomplish political ends? And what function do they play within the causal chains that produce political action?

There are two pieces to the problem. First, what is the relationship between simple thought and action? Second, what is the nature of specifically political ideas? These issues have often been called the problem of political consciousness. Consciousness here is thought of as having overt awareness and intention of the political framework that the person wants to put into place. Within this framing a division was formed between those who believed that such consciousness was a prerequisite for action and those who saw such consciousness as secondary to actions. Realistically, most people fell somewhere in the middle seeing it either as a product of action, something that gradually develops, or a back and forth between the two.

This division is most pronounced in the Marxist tradition due to their focus on the relationship of ideas to capitalism. Leninists traditionally saw revolutionary consciousness coming from a socialist minority, if not from the upper classes, who had the free time for the study of Marxism and would bring these ideas to the proletariat burdened by the daily routine of capitalism.[112] Conversely, a broad swath of leftist opposition to official Leninism identified with alternatives to this model. Martin Glaberman and CLR James, dissident exTrotskyists in the United States, proposed the transformative potential of action that precedes shifts in consciousness in the working class. Council communists emphasized the spontaneous activity of the class that could lead to radicalization in practice, even asserting that workers were only potentially radical within the factory walls. EP Thompson argued in the Making of the English Working-Class that class consciousness is a process developed across time in experiences rather than a thing or an ideology one adopts.[113]

This problem in many ways is influenced by issues within the most popular

forms of Marxism, where the dynamics of capitalism themselves creates the working class who are given their revolutionary potential by their position within relations of production. With workers failing to consistently develop socialist ideas, Marxist thinkers then wrestled with a series of models for why this happens. Anarchism came at things from a different angle as its ideas about class and revolutionary potential were more open. Libertarians saw radicalization as a rather specific process of the local context of the revolutionary subject and involving both the conscious cultivation of libertarian ideas and the transformative potential of struggle within and against capitalism.[114]

The initial framing itself starts off on the wrong foot, however. Consider a person who believes in the need to abolish the death penalty, subscribes to a legislative agenda to achieve that end, has all the resources necessary to start taking those actions, but never in life takes up the cause. In the sense of thought, the person has political consciousness concerning the death penalty. There is the awareness, thinking, ethical elements, and intent. Yet still, the person never moves to act upon those. This case is not merely speculative, because a lots of people do live like this. A number of factors can disassociate someone’s will to implement their plans: weakness of will, distractions, alienation, depression, lack of interest, other priorities, feelings of helplessness, and so on.

In this case, we would not really think that the person has political consciousness in the strong sense, because they never act on it. The action validates the mental content of their beliefs, and specifically their intent and ethical commitments. To will something and think that it’s the good or right thing to do carries with it some commitment to action. In extreme cases, if someone never acts at all, it casts some doubt at least on the depth of belief. It certainly is possible to hold things one fails to act upon, but political consciousness is a stronger kind of thing. It is one we expect to have some causal force beyond a mere speculative commitment. There appears to be an action component of consciousness.

For these reasons, consciousness is a bad framing of the issue.[115] Consciousness reduces the role of political ideas to their role as part of experience as a subject, reasoning, and decisions. Recall that this is a similar and consistent mistake that came up earlier in our inquiry. As agents, we come at the world through our experience as reasoning subjects making choices. Beyond that conscious experience as agents, there is also an interaction with the world that makes up political subjectivity.

A better way to approach the problem is thinking of it as a form of cognition. Cognition is a concept of mental processes. Cognition involves mentation, but not necessarily always conscious mentation or awareness. Cognition is likewise connected to behavior. While consciousness is fundamentally about experiences of phenomena, cognition straddles the line between thought and thought embodied in the behavior and activities of agents. Roughly speaking, cognition is a broad enough concept to let us get at the problem looking at the experiences, awareness, and activity of agents. Political cognition is a series of processes both conscious and unconscious (or exhibited) through patterned activity and mental content. It is the synthesis of internal life that is acted out.

With the death penalty example, consider now an activist who does participate in associated activity, such as letters to senators, rallies, reading publications, and so on. We have a few components. There are the person’s convictions about what constitutes undue killing, the role of society and prisons, beliefs about justice, and alternatives to dealing with criminals. These constitute the normative and ethical states associated with the ideas. Additionally, there are ideas about how changes might occur, actions that are warranted, and the beliefs that make up the implementation of their vision. Lastly, there are the activities themselves that both reflect the thinking and are themselves a component of what it means to hold such beliefs and convictions.

Political cognition then is a systematic relationship between thought, activity, and values in an agent. Here the previous discussion helps us understand how it develops. In a certain respect it is no different from how people come to form ideas in general. Taken another way, political cognition is a very particular sort of facet of mental life. It isn’t simply ethical positions, because within it, it contains both an analysis of the existing social world and certain practical commitments to changing it. Likewise, it’s not merely a series of practices because of the necessary ethical commitments and beliefs inherent. There appears to be two factors bearing down on the situation.

First, there is mental life and the thinking of the individual. Reflection on the death penalty certainly has a role to play in bringing the agent to act, form beliefs, and maintain various desires and intensions. Reflection can change behavior, alter beliefs, and bring about new forms of thought and relationships to others. This is evident in simple ways. If I find myself biting my nails unconsciously, becoming aware of that fact can allow me to stop my behavior. It’s also true of larger scale beliefs. Consider people watching television in the

1950s who witnessed the brutal repression of civil rights activists by State and mob violence. The overt awareness of brutality and repression made conscious by the perception of the images of violence led to changes regarding segregation and racism in some.[116] Conscious beliefs like “the world is round,” “capitalism is wrong,” or “this world is an illusion,” can have a deep influence on the course of history. Occupy’s “1% versus the 99%” certainly had, in whatever complicated scheme we want to cook up, a causal effect on the events of history. Thoughts can make things happen. The act of reflection certainly can then have the power to transform tacit beliefs, values, and ideology alongside behavior.

Second, there is the force of history acting upon individuals. Our thinking often is changed not by our conscious reflection, but rather by the imposition of external forces on our minds. Advertising is a particularly obvious example of this. Many of the cultural associations with smoking (relaxation, rebellion, being hip, and so on) are directly related to the interventions of the industry through advertisement. Typically, people did not think they would start smoking to be cool. Unconscious elements can shift people’s motivational states without their awareness. Or consider the role that the illness of a loved one plays in changing people’s beliefs about right and wrong. The TV show Breaking Bad immortalized this example through the protagonist, who turns to the underworld of the drug economy to fund his chemotherapy when he finds no other options. Faced with utter deprivation, many people come to reevaluate the morality of using whatever means at their disposal to help their loved ones, though this is typically not through issues so explicitly reasoned out.

In the world of politics, a riot is yet another example of these external forces apparently acting upon cognition rather than the other way around. Whatever the process is of the readiness to riot, it is largely facts about the situation and crowd that tell us about a riot, rather than the explicit conscious reasoning of individuals—though this isn’t to diminish the role of the deliberate aspect of rioting. In most riots, the actions of the rioters likely go against whatever conscious political beliefs the individuals hold. Perhaps some rioters are ideologically prepared to wage urban warfare for their cause, but for the majority this is likely not the case except in exceptional historical moments of prolonged social war. For the purposes of argument, consider only those who act against their political beliefs based on the force of the moment to draw a lesson. This is where, historically, the division has been laid. Is cognition a distraction while the real forces that move political action are objective facts about societies in conflict? Without overt cognition will change forever be displaced by deception, recuperation, and inertia? There is a parallel gap between social emergent forces and agency in the realm of political cognition, just as with power, action, and motivation.

Thoughts

Whatever theory we desire should capture these facts then: conscious reflection can cause political changes in the world, and largescale forces sometimes act against the apparent thinking of political agents. The first piece of the puzzle is to question the conceptualization of thoughts. In much discussion of political ideas, thoughts are considered as timeless entities that can appear and disappear at will. There’s a logic to this. You can think the same thing I’m thinking (more or less) and these thoughts can be thought of whenever we like. I can think, “I like kittens,” a hundred times over any day of the year I like, and you can think it too.

This is a limited picture of human thinking, however. Thoughts are not only passing elements that catch our eye like magnificent clouds that blow through at random. Thoughts are more like a continuous stream, each feeding into one another, and all bound together in an enormous thread stretching back into time. Thoughts have history. My love of kittens is a complete entity, but it is tied to a number of other thoughts, experiences, and concrete physical things in the world. There are the pleasures I’ve experienced, thoughts I’ve had about myself, and the kinds of things I like, e.g. kittens, books, and so on. Thoughts themselves reflect facts about the world, my own history, and my conscious relationship to my memories/experiences/self-conceptions.

It’s perceivable when we consider the difference between two people in the 1950s—a Southern white and a foreigner who think “segregation is wrong,” that there is a similarity between the two thoughts, yet relevant to understanding the thoughts in the two people is an understanding of the history of the person in relation to their thought, and the relationship of that person to the history of the world they exist in. The white Southerner came to have that thought in a different way than the foreigner, and the meaning (both in terms of significance and literal meaning) of the thought is different.

By understanding thoughts as historical entities, acted upon by physical and social forces, we begin to dissolve the apparent fork between thought and action in the political domain. This is because political cognition is an emergent product of the interaction of individuals with their political world. That is that the cognitive states of individuals emerge out of complex systemic interactions between agents, their biology, and emergent forces in the world on a number of levels (interpersonal, social, and high level emergent structures). These thoughts do not stand outside of that causal world, however. Thoughts themselves create changes within agents that then create shifts in the world.

The problem with cruder ideas about this is that it is difficult to conceive how shifts in thinking can have such force. Reflect on the earlier discussion of people being motivated to follow through with their ideas. It is clear that there are gaps between thought and action, internal life and weight of force on our whole beings. Recall the concepts of disproportionate causation and equilibrium from emergence. Our naive view of causality is that of billiard balls hitting each other and creating observable and measurable shifts. Most causation isn’t like this, and especially not our thoughts. Throwing a ball into a hurricane produces a different trajectory of the ball than on a windless day. Thoughts likewise have different causal impact based on the total context they act upon (if they become instantiated). Anti-militarist actions during World War I had a different context than during the Vietnam War. Our thoughts are filtered through a specific social context of action (and the experiences of the agent previously), and have their effect based on their place both within us and history.

Our thoughts are then emergent products of history, and likewise history is partly an emergent product of our thoughts. Seeing this as a system that grows and adapts with emergent properties gets us out of the chicken or the egg analogy that plagued much thinking on the matter. People fought segregation both because of changes in their political cognition and their political cognition changed because of changes within society (and later with their actions). The concept of cognition itself helps us understand this by providing a relation between thought and action. Rather than seeing them as wholly separate entities acting on each other, cognition shows us the way in which our agency and consciousness is systemic and constantly changing in parallel with and as a part of the world. We are responding to the world and at the same time creating new worlds, with our thinking and action transforming and representing these facts at the same time. We hold these relations to ourselves as well as to others and the world.

Note that power is key within this dynamic. In the last chapter, we saw that power functions as an internal experience, sets of abilities, relations between agents, and as an emergent force between groups. That form, power’s ability to move between levels and spheres, is reflected in political cognition. Existing channels, networks, and transmissions of power form roads that our cognition travels down and acts upon. In many ways, power relationships are the basic building blocks of society, though fluid ones that are constantly being recreated.

Our mental life flows along these webs of power, changing them, responding to them, and recreating power both internally and in our social relations. So people do not support democracy or monarchy because of timeless abstract considerations. People come to consider such issues because there are a series of channels that they interact with in society: people discuss them; there are institutions and organs that project them; they have experiences with emergent power structures; and they reflect on the various intersections of these facts in their life. Power is at the center of political cognition, because it is a force that shapes and guides the way our thought flows and is the ultimate underlying field of struggle. There is a key to understanding political cognition in power.

Liberatory Cognition: The Weight of the Present Against the Future

The problem of political cognition then is ill-framed, placed in a trap of false dichotomies. Armed with emergence, we see the problem is not how cognition and ideology have a role in the abstract, but rather what role? The real problem for libertarians lies in understanding critical cognition or political cognition applied against the existing order. Specifically, when looking at a critique not simply of elements of society, but rather a systemic critique of the fundamental socio-political order present society is founded on. How is it that such a society could be dismantled in spite of the fact that an overwhelming majority of people do not have such political cognition? With people living and thinking the way they are, how is a transformation possible? There are many aspects to these issues, but let us take them up from the perspective of the cognitive element.

It can seem unlikely that the majority of people could become consciously revolutionary in the present conditions. The world we inhabit isn’t one that pushes people automatically to radically embrace a fundamentally new social order. The opposite is true. Elaborate and exhaustive resources are brought to bear on the entire population to contest and ensure the direction and habits of people’s thinking and actions. The State and capital control information networks, education, and have massive resources for intervening to prevent the spread of radical ideas even without directly dictating content or needing to coerce obedience. Foucault’s later lectures tried to map out the shift towards the modern State and techniques of governance along these lines.[117] The potency of the State stretches far beyond its immediate functionaries, police, and soldiers through its adoption of large sectors of social life that previously were provided by the community or voluntary activity of organizations. State funding and carefully cultivating relationships of permission, privilege, and punishment for political opposition penetrate daily life through the organs of organized social activity. Our schools are built around their priorities. Churches are regulated and given special status for owning property and exemption from taxes in the United States, thereby creating relationships of dependency and implied consequences for opposition.[118] The media consistently reproduces the limits of debate in line with the interests of the powerful without needing any central censure.[119] When there are breakdowns in the unity of social institutions behind the State, there is infrastructure that puts limited reforms on the table. The system can repress (and will), but it can also integrate and internalize oppositions and demands through responding to the needs of its opponents.

This may seem innocuous. Logically, any society would seek to reflect and consciously reproduce its values and structural bases. States are not different. For the critical libertarian thinker, the problem is different. In broad brush strokes, the critical thinker identifies exploitation and oppression as the core of systemic critique. Yet it is precisely authority and hierarchical relationships that are reproduced, engineered, and guarded by the forces of power acting on society. This occurs not only through official institutions of power like prisons, schools, military, police, and political parties, but also through other institutionalized sites of ideological reproduction like think-tanks, the institutionalized left and right, academia, hospitals and mental health facilities, workplaces, and neighborhood organizations.

Workplaces are engineered for social control not only of the behavior of workers, but also of their thoughts. Media is constructed around the ideology, finance, and control of the perspectives of the various factions of dominating power. More than institutions imposing this upon us, we see immense networks of social relationships that in subtle ways transmit and reproduce authority, hierarchy, and oppressive social relationships throughout society. Families, churches, hospitals, prisons, schools, and daily life are richly decorated with all the marks of power and ideology being transmitted through our interactions and thoughts. How we break from this, not just as individuals, but as a whole society, is a profound problem and proves even more problematic for people working towards a more libertarian society. That is, how can huge numbers of people voluntarily shift not only their thinking, but also come to act against immense powers?

Yet if a majority of people aren’t committed to liberatory struggle and society, it doesn’t seem possible (or desirable) that a minority could impose revolutionary change on an unwilling majority. It is not possible because society would not be libertarian if it were imposed, and unlikely simply because dismantling hierarchical power seems to require a component of intentional collective action. A new society must be constructed, and the freedom and equality that libertarians seek require the active creativity and effort that can only come from the dedication of countless individuals, rather than the watchful labor under gun, whip, camera, or other means of economic and political coercion. There is no trick, no institution, nor any daring act that could guarantee this.

If society must be rebuilt on a freer and more equal basis, it implies a great deal of thought and voluntary activity. This is the same voluntary activity that seems so difficult today in light of authoritarian social relations and ideology. Here we have a tension: the need for transformation and the emergent social forces working to maintain an equilibrium in society that prevents the spread of such cognition. This tension often led people to seek shortcuts through putsches, imposition of new social orders, or the magical thinking of fate. Malatesta warned against believing that a mere victory by political activists could bring about a free society.

We have undertaken the task of struggling against existing social organization, and of overcoming the obstacles to the advent of a new society in which freedom and wellbeing would be assured to everybody. To achieve this objective, we organize ourselves and seek to become as numerous and as strong as possible. But if it were only our anarchist groupings that were organized; if the workers were to remain isolated like so many units unconcerned about each other and only linked by the common chain; if we ourselves besides being organized as anarchists in a federation, were not as workers organized with other workers, we could achieve nothing at all, or at most, we might be able to impose ourselves...and then it would not be the triumph of anarchism, but our triumph. We could then go on calling ourselves anarchists, but in reality we should simply be rulers, and as impotent as all rulers are where the general good is concerned.[120]

Space for Criticism

One reply to that tension is to look to ruptures or extreme political events. Sometimes the course of historical events can sweep up whole societies, and changes in conditions can open up spaces. Societies in crisis lose equilibrium, disorder increases, and cognitive space is available to question fundamental elements of society that were normally assumed to be functional and necessary. Certainly, some of those environments may facilitate transformations of some sort or another. Looking for alternatives as systems lose political credibility could lead to people seeking out liberatory possibilities. This may be a partial answer to these issues as it identifies spaces where such transformations might or might not occur.

It’s important to recognize other alternative courses. Similar environments, breakdowns in the ability of ruling powers to rule, also open space for deeply repressive and authoritarian potentials, or more innocuously for forms of reformism that reshape society to address immediate needs, while leaving the fundamental social ills intact. All the failures of the social struggles of the 19^th and 20^th centuries suggest the dangers and limits of history simply delivering liberatory cognition. Ruptures may provide some special opportunities, but also may provide dangers without guarantees. Fascism in Germany arose in the country perhaps with the largest and most organized socialist left. Likewise, the Great Depression in the United States built up a long-term momentum to save capitalism via the New Deal and the Second World War, which created one of the most sustained periods of capitalist regrowth in history. To avoid dystopian futures or getting merely channeled into new circuits for capitalism and power, we need to look further.

Reflect on what a rupture is. A rupture, in political terms, is some kind of fundamental break or explosion from the dominant order of how struggles normally happen. We could say more, but the key aspect here is that a rupture is a sharp shift. It’s surprising. You go from A to Z in a sense. Ruptures exhibit emergent behavior in which the situation is not easily traceable to the individuals in the moment or in previous moments. If it is discernible, it’s only in retrospect and it is largely rough and speculative.

A political strategy that relies on waiting for such moments faces an epistemological problem brought to light by emergence. We don’t have a good way of knowing what leads up to these events, knowing when they occur (except in more grand exhibitions), or even understanding the processes within them. Complexity and action at a series of different levels of analysis limit our thinking as protagonists. We’re coming at political struggle as people trying to figure out what to do. Ruptures do not greet us that way. Ruptures are complex phenomena existing across different planes—political whirlwinds.

A few things can be taken from both this and the preceding discussion in this text. We don’t know in what way our present actions will or won’t contribute to any potential situation that might give us opportunities. This means that there is no neutral position regarding activity outside ruptures. Waiting for them, trying to create them, or step-by-step trying to walk towards liberation all have their own outcomes, though not easily predictable ones. We can make good assessments and plans as agents from our limited perspective, while recognizing we will not necessarily be in positions to understand our place in history along the way. The best way to view this scenario is that we do our best to find ways to intervene, reflect, and adjust to our environment with humility. Awaiting ruptures is one form of action; a form that may actually prevent some ruptures from occurring that might otherwise have taken place, and can impair us from responding should they occur. That is, alongside an understanding of potentials from any historical moment (ruptures or otherwise), we need an active understanding of our agency.

It’s worth saying that our actions in more difficult mundane situations carry not only the potential loss of opportunities, but hidden dark alternatives as well. Failing to take the right course of action day-to-day may also put us into positions in which when opportunities arise, we find ourselves organized against them. This is why in many instances forces of the left, such as many unions, political parties, and NGOs, find themselves opposed to combative social movements—having rooted themselves in the power relations of existing capitalism, they become thrown off balance when the dividing lines shift. That can push forces for progress into conservative or even reactionary roles in radical political events. Indeed, the early history of fascist movements was filled with socialists, Marxists, and some anarchists forming their first militants in the face of what would become a world revolutionary wave surrounding the events of 19161921. History is filled with radical oppositions become ruling tyrants—a historical hangover that haunts us today in places like Cuba, South Africa, India, and China.

Next, the inherent dangers within the breakdown of social order mean that our forces are not merely up against a single unified oppositional order, but rather they are up against an infinite set of potential opposing, supporting, and overlapping forces that may or may not be generated from struggles unfolding. This is different from a conception of history in which the forces of good do battle with the forces of evil to set the stage for a new humanity. Actions produce new forces and new questions that we cannot anticipate based on our position both as sentient beings and within the complex networks of social systems that we grow and adapt to. There is not then a linear march against the present order, nor is there any safety in its destruction. Victory is uncertain (especially in an era of ecological devastation), and any belief that we can just go forward and maintain ourselves intact through small struggles is hopelessly naive. The best we can do is set out towards the libertarian alternative responding as best we can along the way.

Another way of conceiving the cognitive transformation necessary for libertarian society is through shifting conditions for the growth of libertarian thought. While we may not globally be able to dismantle the reproduction of authoritarian ideology, this does not mean that there are not factors (nodes, points, and relationships) that we can contest and change. Ruptures are examples of largescale openings, but small-scale ones exist as well and likely are more important in creating the conditions in which libertarian forces could grow, sustain, and reproduce. Consider the “I am the 99%” meme where individuals uploaded photos of themselves with a sign describing their troubles and the phrase “I am the 99%”. People came to take up, develop, and reproduce the meme as a series of images linking their experiences with features of the system. Through relationships of art, social media, design, and sharing, new forms of cognition were being transformed and transmitted through huge numbers of people relatively rapidly. In a way, this was part of a rupture. Yet the example is tangible and proximate in a way that speaks to more run-of-the-mill questions. That reflection of others’ lives that speaks to the experiential reality of millions itself caused further thoughts and actions as people were carried into the streets. In infinite ways throughout society the transformations of ideology occur and lead to shifts that we do have access to.

Ruptures and these transmissions of power and thought then are on a continuum, but not a linear continuum. Ruptures are emergent out of countless contestations, reformulations, actions, and reflections. We lack the comfort of knowing the effect of our actions, and yet there is also the potential for our actions to have unknown causes, effect that is far out from where we had anticipated and has at times radical and disproportionate influence. We live in the realm of those social transmissions, and within our daily lives and struggles there are countless places where we may work as political agents to transform our situation.

Those struggles can give us space for the flourishing of a critical cognition in a number of ways. In doing so, we put into practice our politics, and we test it. Additionally, we can develop a praxis through successes and challenges. Those moments may have an indirect impact that can resonate in the lives of those involved well beyond the present. Society is such that seeds planted today in immediate struggles can possibly become roots that grow forests of liberation. More strongly, sometimes our contestations can have direct impact on individuals and groups, and at times facilitate the development of ruptures.

Critical cognition can be thought of as developing through the interaction

of conscious and non-conscious processes throughout society. This cognition develops in parallel to activity against the system. Evolving alongside political action, it emergently produces countless breaks, transformations, and potentials both at small-scale and large-scale levels. Thus, the roles of intervention and historical forces are inherently fuzed, with agents playing a special, though limited, role in realizing them. Neither the patient planner can will such changes into existence, nor can we sit back awaiting that they be inevitably carried to us.

Fundamentally organized around power as the central plain that cognition grows around; the task of the radical is to try to root their actions in their historical moment as agents, while preparing to adapt to an uncertain and unpredictable future. In this way, we can see that the problem of liberatory cognition is that of political agency navigating the tangles of our lives. This poses an alternative to views of history as being written by a divine playwright versus radicalism as a form of personal enlightenment.

Looked at this way, the field of liberatory cognition is wide open. We have much to gain from exploring spaces for the transformation of cognition. That is, what environments is it most likely to grow in? Where are places we can challenge the transmission of ideology? Which actions open up that space? What role can ideas play in interpreting events and actions?

These are not timeless or universal questions, but rather they are things to be settled in the lived political struggles of particular contexts. With an understanding of emergence and power, libertarian thinkers can set out to open up these channels and create new thinking and practices around the possibilities for change that stand before us.

Action

Having explored the problem of what revolutionary cognition is and how it comes to be obtained, other problems present themselves. Setting aside whether or not someone is engaging in such cognition, we can ask what it looks like when it comes to have force. How does cognition translate into action? There is overt conscious cognition, and yet there are other cases that are more ambiguous— people who do not consider themselves militants who break from the inertia of the present order and take action that sets them against immense forces. There are a number of cases to consider:

1. The youth who picks up revolutionary teachings, despite a lifetime’sindoctrination of the evils of such thinking.

2. The crowd that comes into the streets because of the brutality of theState, and charges into machine gun fire to bring down a regime.

3. The workers who repeatedly engage in illegal strikes against management, the State, and the union despite willingly and overwhelmingly having signed contracts not to strike.

There are certainly more examples we could consider. Yet there is a parallel here between the cases. At their core they involve a specific type of motivation in their actions. Liberatory political motivation is a motivation of a specific sort. It is not the motivation to merely act, but rather to act against the present order (and potential future orders) in spite of the weight of history, the mechanisms of order of the present, and the ill consequences of the present towards a better potential future. In these instances, the actions of the participants also weigh against common sense of their day and even the normal reasons for acting.

Action itself seems quite simple, but explaining what exactly it is and its function has created puzzles that have sustained philosophers for millennia. To understand how it is that radical situations can come to have motivational force for actors, we need to understand both motivation and action.

The first relevant distinction is between actions and events. Consider the act of urination. On the one hand, someone getting up and urinating in a toilet is a clear action. Now consider incontinent people who urinate on themselves. This is not an action. Why is that? It may be an action in the sense that someone does it, but it is no more an action than other things that happen to us. No one would argue that my liver processing sugars is an action I carry out, since it happens whether or not I like it. Happenings to us may be external like rocks falling on us, or internal like losing control of our bladder muscles and having an experience of incontinence. The difference between incontinence and urinating is that someone does the latter and not the former.

What distinguishes (in part, or at its simplest) action from events is that there is someone, an agent, who intends to do something or another. A lot of ink has been spilled to distill the correct formula that captures only actions and not events, but a rough-and-ready distinction like that is fine for our purposes.

The common way of explaining actions appeals to people’s intentions and things about the world. This is enshrined in the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” It is a joke because it’s obvious that if the chicken crossed the road, it in some sense intended to do so. Actions have intentions and reasons to act.

Consider further distinctions. Though all action is intentional, not all action is consciously intentional. In other words, if I unconsciously increase my speed on a bicycle in the rain, the fact that I was not aware that I did so does not change the fact that I, as an agent, intentionally did so. By accelerating in the rain, I sought to get to my destination and out of the rain more quickly, and the acceleration brought me my aim. Conscious awareness of action then is not necessary for us to act.

Similarly, it’s possible for us to act against our conscious reasons for acting, and to do so intentionally. Think about the weak-willed cheater who wishes to remain faithful to a partner, but sleeps with someone in spite of consciously willing instead to go home. The act of infidelity exhibits the agent’s intention to have sex, in spite of consciously willing otherwise. Conscious intentional action is then only a smaller subset of action, and many psychologists believe it is perhaps even a small minority.

There are a number of problems that contradict the intuitive idea of action. First, consider groups. If we understand action via the intention and reasons of an individual, then how do we understand groups? Groups carrying out acts together would have to be understood in some way as the product of the intentions of individuals in combination. The problem becomes that there is no distinction between a group, as in a cohesive band of individuals acting in concert, and a collection of individuals who happen to share an intention.

Take the example of a group stuck in traffic after an interminable wreck. Imagine one scenario in which there is a group of drivers who all decide to honk in unison and express their collective rage. Now think of another scenario in which the same drivers independently honk, and happen to honk in unison. What are the differences between these two in terms of agency? One could say that part of the difference is that groups intend to act together. You could try to stipulate that intentions involve the method by which they’re achieved. Still this fails to capture the difference between a group of drivers who honk together, and a collection of individuals honking. An organized honking group is one thing. Individuals who happen to honk together or who join in honking out of anger are different. That is, the group agency has different forms, and those forms are not just facts about each individual’s intentions. There seems to be something more to being a group than the sum of intentions of individuals. Group agency is emergent and takes different forms based on different processes.

Taking the point further, reflect on the fact that group agency is supposed to derive from the intention of individuals since this is what agency is supposed to be about. Yet, often, groups acting consciously in concert have contradictory intentions. People in the course of the group act come to take part in a group action, but contradict the group intention in the midst, and yet remain a part of the group and the act. For example, consider a band of kidnappers who set forth to hold some unlucky person ransom. Different members of the band have their respective roles, but one kidnapper gets cold feet and questions his role. He is assigned to shoot the bodyguard to facilitate the grab. The kidnapper then fails to shoot the bodyguard and laments his role in the act, vowing to have no part of the bounty or take any part in the aftermath. The robber still engaged in the kidnapping with the band, and though he lost his intention to hold the person ransom, ended up being a part of a kidnapping. Setting aside the judgment of the kidnapper (who would be culpable nonetheless for the crime), we see that it is still the case that this band, of which the kidnapper was a part, did in fact take such an action. This shows that group agency can permit contradictory intentions. This is true to some extent, though we can imagine that if enough individuals fail to intend to complete the act, such actions would fail. Still, this case shows how group agency is not a matter of simply the collection of individual intentions, since contradictory intentions are permissible. Group agency is an emergent force that is greater than the sum of individual intentions, and takes on its own behavior beyond the intentionality of its constituting members.

The second problem with the intuitive account understanding of action arises from our understanding of our mental states. Remember that action was proposed to be about beliefs, desires, and intentions—mental states of an agent.

There are clear supporting reasons for this. When grabbing a glass of water, we do need to understand a desire to drink, beliefs about what it would take to drink such water, and facts about beings that can will something to be so and carry it out. Part of what group agency raises points to another lingering issue though: the way in which things outside ourselves, external matters, relate to our intentions. Take the cases of the two groups of honking people. Relevant to understanding the differences between an individual intending to honk, a collection of individuals honking, and a group honking in concert are not merely facts about the internal mental life of the individuals, but also occurrences and context in the world outside those individuals.

If group agency is in fact more than the simple sum of the intentions of the individuals contained in the group, then likewise the account of the actions of such groups is more than the sum of their mental states. At the very least we can say that in some instances we must appeal to external context as an explanation of action in order to make sense of it. Or in other words, the mental states of individuals are incomplete (though necessary). Part of the content of the individual’s mental states are things in the world. This was indicated by the account of cognition in the previous chapter. Thoughts are mutually constitutive states of mental states, relationships, and features of the objective context that make up the world of the agent. In group agency, the states of the individuals define the action of the group in a complex and dynamic fashion not wholly understandable in terms of facts about the individual alone. Thoughts themselves are emergent, and the feedback between agency and action in societies produces new emergent forms of agency.

To clarify we can introduce a number of distinctions to clarify the cases. Imagine that the same group of people honking in traffic instead happen to accidentally honk at the same time. We might call this an unintentional group event, as it is not an action in the sense that no one intended to do anything as a group. In the situation in which individuals honk together intentionally out of frustration, the group action is done unconsciously (without identification with the group). This would be a form of unconscious intentional group action. When the honkers act as a group, perhaps a coordinated honking flash mob of rage, this could be called conscious intentional group action.

In summary, intuitive ideas about action fall short on a few accounts: mental states are insufficient to explain actions, and understanding agency requires looking not only at individuals, but also at more complex configurations such as groups. Recognizing the shortcomings of the intuitive account yields some points to reflect on. First, action concerns agents and their mental states, but is not reducible to those facts. Second, groups can have agency that is greater than the agency of the individuals. Third, the relationship between awareness, intention, and successfully completing an action depends greatly on the situation (the agent, context, and other agents). Without proposing a theory of action itself, which would take us far from our task, we can assert that agency is relative, that there are emergent products of the interaction of individual agents with the world and other agents, and that nonmental facts are necessary to understanding the actions of agents.

Motivation

Now let us return to motivation. Given a rough sense of action, what bearing do these issues have on motivation? Like the intuitive account of action, the intuitive understanding of motivation runs into some problems. Similarly, we typically think of motivation as being a product of reasoning and determined by our mental lives. We can contemplate this as part of a naive psychology of our lives as subjects, wherein the conscious mind is the driver and our mental life is the core of our personhood, actions, and decisions. These ideas are not totally crazy. Many of the most important things that happen in one’s life do fit this picture. Yet with motivation there are again some key things missing.

Unconscious motivations are fairly obvious. Advertising certainly uses techniques aimed at motivating agents to act without their awareness of having been motivated by outside forces. Indeed, when we are so moved, we feel as though we motivated ourselves to seek out whatever they are trying to sell us.

In fact, the problem is deeper. The line between what is a conscious and unconscious motivation to act is extremely blurry. For instance, sex is one area where such forces are notorious difficult to pull apart. There are clear cases of unconscious motivation towards sex, such as people being manipulated into acts because of instinctual sexual desires they are unaware of. People use flirting to influence decisions in unrelated matters like when people dress sexy and flirt to land jobs or seek non-sexual favors from people they know are susceptible. Likewise, there are conscious sexual motivations in which agents think to themselves that they ought to do some act in order to attain sex. At what stage is sexual motivation about conscious thoughts and intentions versus unconscious ones? Our conscious ideas about someone else influence our perception of their sensuality. That appeal becomes an unconscious force, which in turn can influence our thinking and motivation about that person. The line in practice is quite fluid.

Or take a more mundane example: do depressed people who binge on ice cream do so by unconscious or conscious motivation? From the conscious side, depressed people likely do have the thought, “I want to eat ice cream,” and are motivated by its pleasing aspects in some broad sense or another. Yet, surely unconscious elements are at play here as well. Depressed people seeking gratification have connections to such activity through socialization related to food and eating, advertising and group behavior associated with ice cream and sweets, and even chemical processes perhaps incentivizing behavior on some level. In practice the gap between the thoughts that motivate eating the ice cream and unconscious forces that push the agent towards the thoughts are hard to pull apart. This is because those unconscious forces are the kinds of things that make us who we are.

Our dispositions and motivations as agents are clearly shaped by our own internal mental processes. Yet at the same time, it is our relationship and reaction to the world that intrinsically shapes those thoughts in a feedback cycle. This is true first because the nature of our thoughts refer to and are partly defined by external things and relations. It is also true because unconscious elements in our mind may influence conscious elements, and vice versa. The causal chains between conscious mental activity, unconscious mental activity, and the world are complex. They exhibit, in sum, emergent properties that produce motivations and actions of the individual in a complex and adaptive manner.

This bucks how we normally think about our actions. We don’t think about the sum context upon which our decisions and drives are produced. One could speculate this is largely connected to our awareness of our experiences as agents having made such decisions. It feels as though we arrive at decisions and act on our own somehow. Of course, there are counterexamples, such as when we fail ourselves by doing against our best intentions what we decided not to. Emergence gives us an out though, because at the level of organization of an agent, it may be true that our experience of mental life is valid as such, while likewise being constituted by external factors that mutually produce those experiences. Emergence should be taken not just in terms of levels, but also as showing that particular decisions of individuals, motivations, or courses of action coevolve in the environment in which they occur and in the relative context leading up to that event.

Such a discussion clearly parallels concepts of free will. While getting into that mire would take us far afield, it’s worth recognizing that however we understand it, similar concepts are involved. There does appear to be on some level a will that has causal power. People have a mental life that, for all intents and purposes, does seem capable of causing actions to occur. Likewise, those actions are understandable in terms of some complicated account of the total of causes that made any particular action occur. And with emergence those causes must be understood as producing novel properties, such as wills that are both causally bound by the world, and containing an experience of what it is like to be an agent. This debate can become torturous and ultimately a distraction. The argument here merely requires acceptance of both will and the causal chain that determines our actions.

A Metapolitics of Motivation

Let us summarize then. Typically, we think of motivation as largely a conscious reasoned process determined by our mental lives. Our decisions based on motivations are thought to be relatively context neutral, arising from our decisions and dispositions. In the above arguments this view has been problematized, and an alternative understanding proposed.

In political thinking specifically, we see variants of these views. On the one hand, it is proposed that people act and are motivated politically by use of their reason or rationality. On the other hand, there are suppositions that base instincts and interests drive political action. Based on the above account, any such distinction should be questioned thoroughly. The division between conscious and unconscious motivations is untenable in practice from a political perspective. If it’s not easily distinguishable how much rational versus arational processes motivating us contribute to action, any theory that bases a political program for action on such distinctions will be prone to getting it wrong.

Next, consider the context relativity of motivation. The death of a loved one can make some acts, self-destructive behaviors, motivational that otherwise wouldn’t be. Likewise, politically, it is actually quite profound that motivations should be relative. This speaks to situations in which people become swept up into political action when they might not have otherwise, both in terms of the possibility of such acts and their limitations.

Taking a concrete example, think of popular attacks on police stations following the killing of a community member. While conscious reason may play some role, the interplay between perception, conditioned experiences with power and police, reactions to the responses of others, and the scope of political participation all interact to produce a complex (emergent) situation. Here group agency, emergent behavior, novel forms of power, and cognition interact to produce situations that may not have existed earlier and that are not reducible to any of the individual components. Such examples illustrate the insufficiency of the intuitive account, and the role of power, emergence, and an emergent approach to cognition and motivation in helping us to make sense of the intervention of political forces within concrete circumstances.

Motivation then reflects both the historical context of the actor, the power relationships that the actor stands in, and the emergent forces acting upon the agent. At the same time, the agent is bound within a system with recursive feedback wherein the actions of the agent themselves can change those power relationships and the context for action. There can be said to be a complex interrelation between the motivation of agents, their actions, and the political context. Traditional political thought, including most of the historic left, tends to reduce these questions to intention, leadership, and morals, or negate them altogether. However, the social, individual, and objective context are relevant for the unconscious and conscious decisions made by political actors.

Here we can return to the fundamental question of how it is that radical acts, breaks, and ruptures can come to have motivational force for political agents. More importantly, how is it that people in general can come to act in a liberatory manner against the dominant order, whether in a rupture or otherwise? Like the answers to similar quandaries throughout the book, the framework laid out shifts the problem from universals to the specificity of our biological and historical moments.

Motivational states are relational. They reflect processes both conscious and unconscious within a broader social systemic context. As cognition is built upon the latticework of power relationships in social systems, motivation traces the curves of action through the paths of the mind of the actor, constantly redefining itself and acting within the social world. Motivation is not then a matter of raw force or raw will, but rather a matter of history.

Motivation is emergent from the mind of the agent, but comes to be so only relationally through the reference and power of forces outside the individual. These features interact, shift, and influence each other in a constant process. Motivation is not fixed then, but constantly changing us, changing our actions, and being changed by our experiences. Utilizing a theory of power and emergence, we can understand such situations in terms of the social relationships of the agent, their abilities and the abilities of those they stand in relation with, a physical-historical context of action, and (emergent) agency produced via the interaction of agents with the world and each other. Such events are understood in terms of agents, context, emergent properties, and power. In one way, we could question altogether why it would be that motivation would be a problem at all. If we seek motivation to act on liberatory lines, the problem is not how any such motivation is possible, but rather how motivation to do this or that act can be. Emergence and power provide maps that lead us out of determinist and reductionist thinking and that situate motivational problems within the concrete forces and moments they occur.

The solution to the role of motivation in liberatory acts is then a matter of the relation of the act to the actors in the context of the trajectory of history and struggle. We do not have abstract formulas for this. Just as with liberatory cognition, the work of the radical in terms of motivation is to look to the struggles, acts, and actors for answers. The complexity of living systems bars us from creating off-the-cuff blueprints for, say, revolutions or even post-capitalist societies. Still, looked at from this perspective, theories can be created that help us better understand how people can act against dominant orders. In what context might immigrant communities in the US take up struggle directly against immigration authorities? How could factory seizures become motivational for the mass unemployed in this country today? Can ghettoized communities repel the effects of prison society and drug organizations to create a collective neighborhood order? With a theory of motivation, the steps to take up these questions within the spaces we find ourselves in are in front of us.

These conclusions came from the investigation of motivation to act that was broken down into thought and action through cognition. Non-mental factors and unconscious mental life have a strong role in the production of motivational states of actors. Motivation then arises out of the emergent relationship between will, context, and unconscious mental states within the agent. From a liberatory perspective, motivation to engage in radical acts does not come from indoctrination, pure reason, or generalities, but instead is a feature of different contexts and populations responding to the world they are adapting and responding within. Here the theory returns to the beginning of the arguments. Agency and action are activity shaped by the interdependence between an individual’s role and social forces that are at the same time forming and formed of our actions.