There are two ways to know something: by description and by acquaintance. What we know by description are things that we have read or heard about; what we know by acquaintance are things that we have experienced ourselves. Descriptions can only be made at a distance which acquaintance requires direct involvement. At first encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans, the parties often danced as a way to get to know each other. In Europe, kings and diplomats danced for the same reason. However, colonialism requires knowledge by description, and thereby an entirely different attitude to the world. A world described in books and in research reports is far easier to control and to exploit.

This chapter offers a theoretical overview of the modern world system: a system ordered by states rather than nations. The normative acceptance of the unit and design of the state internal to this, the interstate system, proscribes that people should live sedentarized lives within clearly demarcated state borders, governed by statebearing nations ruling over them. Sesame Street’s adaptation of the interstate system, in turn, meant that Israeli citizens (Jewish and Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) were bound to their street-state, Rechov Sumsum, and later, Sippuray Sumsum, and Palestinian citizens (Palestinians citizens of the non-state institution of the Palestinian Authority), to Shara’a Simsim, and later, Hikayat Simsim. If citizens crossed one-street-state into the other, the assumption was that they would necessarily return “home” to their own bordered street-state.

In this chapter I present a new theoretical proposal based on the distinction among several modes of production of law that operate in society in articulation with as many modes of production of power and knowledge. The main features of this framework are the following. Capitalist societies within the world system are constituted by six structural places, six basic clusters of social relations, which define the horizon of relevant determination. This horizon establishes both outer limits and possibilities, thereby allowing for a minimalist order, a chaos-friendly order, an ordering principle that operates through complexity, fragmentation, hybridization and, above all, through constellation. My argument is that the political character of social relations of power does not lie in one particular form of power, namely citizenplace power (domination), but rather in the aggregate power resulting from the constellations among the different forms of power in different social fields. Similarly, the legal character of social relations of law does not derive from one single form of law, namely from citizenplace law (state law), but rather from the different constellations among different forms of law. Finally, the epistemological profile of social relations is not provided by one specific epistemological form, namely the epistemological form of the worldplace (science), but rather by the different constellations of knowledges that people and groups produce and use in concrete social fields.

In this chapter, I argue that the conversion of modern law into scientific state-centered law went hand in hand with the conversion of modern science into a hegemonic rationality and a central productive force. I concentrate in the gradual process whereby modern law came to be dominated by science and the state. I claim that in this process law lost sight of the tension between social regulation and social emancipation that was imprinted in its roots in the paradigm of modernity. The loss was so thorough and irreversible that the recovery of the emancipatory energies called for in this book must involve a radical unthinking of modern law. The first section analyzes the original imprint of the tension between regulation and emancipation in modern law, selecting three of its major moments: the reception of the Roman law, the rationalist natural law, and the theories of the social contract. In the second section, I analyze the historical process by which this tension was eliminated by the collapse of emancipation into regulation, distinguishing among three periods of capitalist development: liberal capitalism, organized capitalism, and disorganized capitalism. Finally, I state the major topics for the unthinking of law in the transition between social paradigms.