From a letter to friends, June 24th, 2026

[...]

I felt that I didn't give a good sense of my weird upcoming project idea. [...]

"What I didn't convey is that the thing I want to explore in it is the construction of what Graeber and Wengrow call "social liberty," naming the pre-contact understanding of freeness in embodied relationship and persuasion over command that they gather from indigenous research into America, as the new land was originally called before it became synonymous with settler colonial empire.

I"want to do this at the same time that I am working out pre-Pythagorean reasoning, something I associate with Ionia before the term "philosophy" was coined by Pythagorus in an inward turn to disembodied, timeless truths.  In that pre-Pythagorean world, figures like Xenophanes and Thales practiced reasoning alongside observation, engineering, poetry, and ritual shorn free from oracular or authoritarian command.  The imprisonment of the world in timelessness and the imprisonment of the body in asceticism was not yet co-extensive with philosophy.

The idea is to work out the construction of isonomia as democracy in an American context, with increasing depth through institutional traditions and scales.

[Reconstuction 1 confronts state violence.  Reconstruction 2 faces domestic violence.  3 names intellectual violence.  4 expresses social abandonment.  Reconstruction 5 unworks ecological, social, and cultural erasure.]

Anyway, that's the idea.  And the form is a kind of fantasy -- a fictive retelling of stories as to how they could have gone in imagination to realize their possibilities, retelling decision points like one of those Cortazarian or children's books that unfolds at decision points (with kairos).  Then, after the retelling, perhaps I will have a coda to each reconstruction to reflect on its meaning and ideas, briefly.

I want it to be a light book -- about 100 pages in print, maybe 50 thousands words.  And I will be going back to one of my funky OA publishers that I love.

J.

Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p. 503: "Over the course of these chapters, we have ... talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey the commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones."  

The emphasis they make on indigenous American social liberty coheres well with their social anarchist perspective.  But it is coherent with the isonomia of Ionia as Karatani understands it in Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy.  In fact, Karatani makes (1) a condition of isonomy in Ionia, whereas (2) emerges from what became called the "philosophical" tradition as reasoning (rather than obedience).  (3) is more complex in Ionia yet is a live current through most of the Ionian philosophers in different ways, especially in Heraclitus in his opposition to empire and even in Pythagoras in his internally created inner reality and cloistered school.