Sprocket 1: Power
Power has been defined in various ways within philosophy. However perhaps all these definitions come down to a relatively simple idea. One has power when one can ensure (by whatever means) that the world re-forms around (in some way) one’s ideas or powers of conception. This definition has then two distinct aspects. On the one hand it ties ideas to a world. To be powerful is therefore to claim or rather demand, that one’s ideas are somehow effected in that world. It is to have the right to embody. On the other hand this process installs something, a person or an institution as the end point in a process. Something happens in the world, or a myriad of sliding events occurs, and yet somehow all those events are owned in some way and at some point by a thing (person or conversation or even another event). The possession of power therefore in a sense marks a point of transition. That is the point at which sequences of happening are all (in some sense) wrapped up or located within an individual: Thence power is personified in a government’s enforcing of a policy, and then being judged according to the results of this policy.
Traditionally in philosophy, power was understood in only one way. Power’s model was the body. The silent body was the perfect Kingdom, full of docile elements or individuals or organs, all of whom were consumed within the common good, and all of whom perished if there was any rebellion or strife (the world of Hobbes’ Leviathan and also Plato). States and man were then taken in the analogy to be the same. A state was meant to personify the will of the ruler, in the same way that the body reflected the will of a mind. Thence the mystery of the unity of the state, was subsumed within the wider mystery of the unity of the mind. The ruler was akin to the soul of the state, and everyone and everything should obey them.
From such a perspective, the state would, in so far as it was a state, bear the hallmark of the ruler running right through it. That is its citizens ought to understand exactly how their actions reflected the overall will of their king, at each and every point of their actions, in the same way that the elements of the body, in so far as they act for the body, constantly act in its interest. This model then had the advantage of explaining disease and rebellion in one throw: to rebel or to have disease was when the organs of the state or the body, were misaligned, and failed to reflect the will: doctors, judges, and the army played then similar roles in righting these wrongs…
While to a large degree this ‘big man’ model of power has been occluded in modern times, the very basic idea is surely still with us: i.e., it is still one of the things that power is or that we assume it to be. That is the idea that power is the right of the conscious mind to personify its will within the physical world. A right that starts with a body, and then extend outwards, beyond that body and into the whole world. This model has the perennial joy of simplifying everything. A ‘nice strong ruler’, with a strong sequence of desires, and constant set of ideals, makes everyone know where they are. They can (as Hobbes’ citizen) rest assured that the will and thoughts of the King (or the ruler or the Man) are enough to make the world easy. In the light of that certainty they can then continue a life. Likewise on behalf of the ruler there is something really rather nice in pretending that one really can do things. One wants power to be this easy - to be as easy as thought. Citizens and rulers conspire therefore to pretend that it really might all be that simple; as of course do critics. If the world is difficult or complicated, then knee jerk criticisms are difficult. Most critics need to pretend then, that the ruler can actually do something about affairs or do something differently. They therefore have no vested interest in pointing out that the rulers (or indeed themselves the critics) cannot. We tend therefore to be caught up in a system which although clearly too simple, is beyond really easy criticism or slapdash/too quick critics (for instance the world of copy deadlines), as to criticise it makes the world too scary a place. One ends up therefore with politicians such as Gordon Brown: A man who wants to claim the credit of everything (good), and yet is caught up in events (which he then whines about); While we, looking on at him, wish he would ‘do something’ or act in some way to make it all go away; or failing that just resign. Problems become personalized, and beautifully simple – change the leader or the party, and something at least is different. The game of power becomes another very toxic opiate we take in order to avoid the problem of actually having to think.
Foucault added to this, a second definition of power, taking as his model of the state, not the body or mind, but that of an army. He suggested that power needs also to be understood in all the tos and fros of human relations. That is society is actually full of relationships where one individual has the power to require another individual to speak or to act or to reveal something about themselves. Moreover these actions will allow the wielder of the power not merely to control, but also to learn something about the world; knowledge that they will then use in some way. Power is therefore given by the demand that another confesses to something, quite as much as in the way that one acts once that confession is given.
What is more, what knowledge about human society always codifies are power relations, and this is so for two reasons. On the one hand the individual who attempts to understand (any human relationship) is in a sense always caught up in power relations which bind them to the state. That is, there are always requirements to do this or that at certain stages (school, initiation rites, work, college, etc.) or to assume certain facts about the state. The units therefore which human science starts with, the only units it has, are people nested within powers of the state. But secondly, all knowledge which humans amass about their society are not uncharged. On the contrary the state takes up these relations and feeds them back into how it acts, and what it does. A state or to be more accurate, institutions of a state, take knowledge and use it to build their own power relations. Knowledge is therefore born within one series of relations, and yet then becomes instrumental in advancing another. What is more this advancement will always be a double faced one. That is, in advancing a certain body of knowledge, the powers of whatever institution that is the custodian of that knowledge, are also advanced and propagated.
These two theories of power differ in two main places. On the one hand, Foucault argues that critical to his theory of micro power is a feedback relationship between what the power does and how it is understood. One’s action has a response and one then understands that response and so acts again. While in contrast the older ‘macro power’ relations (of state as body) deny that there need be any complexity here. - Relations and the world ought simply to reflect the will of the ruler, and if they do not then they are somehow wrong. It is Foucault’s genius therefore, to make a science out of that being wrong (and to suggest that one’s mind is composed of it). On the other hand each of these theories understand a very different ‘terminal place’ for power relations. The macro account has then to end in a person: Power therefore embodies a person directly. Power happens in a sense when personal ambition and state ambition become confused, one with the other. In the Foucaultian model, the power relations end with an institution that seeks to advance its aims through these relations, but also with a body of knowledge that that institution dances to and holds to be self evident. Institutions (colleges of surgeons or societies of lawyers) therefore advance not only an institution but also a way of understanding the world and a set of power relationships that reflects this understanding.
However there are surely more variations than these two. If one takes the second of these differences, that of exactly how and where knowledge relates back to the powers that helped fashion it, it is clear that we have at least two more variations.
Firstly there is the rather traditional model of the shareholder. The shareholder exists as a permutation of the terminal point. A shareholder is an individual who might be thought of as either a monarch or an institution. Be that as it may, their will is always thought to be to increase their overall profit. That is they are defined as having necessarily the desire to make money (desire that is of course different from their company actually doing well). Those desires for profits then invade the entire company. The company needs to be a dividend making machine (in some sense). What is therefore known about the company’s practice, and what is allowed to be known by the public, of that practice, is then defined in the light of this profit making. Knowledge that will increase overall profits becomes acceptable, while that which might undermine the company or suppress its ability to make money are dismissed or marginalized. All kinds of abuses are of course hidden here. Not only can the company pollute or exploit under the ‘rules’ of such a system, but also a system that encourages both greed and secrecy, is likely to create a bonus and expense driven culture, as the executives treat themselves as very special ‘shareholders’. Companies will therefore express in their work, and upon their workforce and within the wider world the perceived will of the shareholder to make a profit. The shareholders are ultimately the people for whom the money is working. It is their greed that drives the company on, their desire. They become then the collective (if utterly blind) god for the company. Or better, a simple abstracted desire, that of greed, becomes the muse (Mammon) for the enterprise.
Secondly, one might permutate the terminal point of power in a slightly different direction. Much of current ‘celebrity’ culture is defined within the idea that it is possible to have an individual wrap up an entire sequence of disparate lives. A celebrity takes on the role of a divinity. That is, they become the living personification of an entire series of thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams of a population. One is encouraged to think that although one has not ‘made it’, the world must be alright because someone somewhere is ‘living’ the dream and sharing it in some way with oneself. The game of being a celebrity becomes then the game of somehow muscling into and becoming able to reflect the blind hopes and dreams of myriad people. Those people then need to feel a part of the celebrity, and so the latter becomes powerful by virtue of others using them to think with. The power of celebrity culture is therefore the power to name thoughts, and individualize feelings. One becomes a celebrity in becoming the name which invokes a thought in people. An odd power, as one can never get too out of step with one’s fans. The minute then, that one gets too far ahead (or behind or elsewhere) of one’s fans, then the entire edifices crumbles. But however as long as one remains caught up within them, and yet able to personify (and so crystallize) that which they wanted to think (and yet could not think without your words) the power is real enough. Celebrity is therefore in a sense the art of creating ‘Godlets’. That is, little sparks of divinity whose role it is to invade the mind, and make things seem resolved and simple. Celebrity therefore makes thoughts external, or externalized (this is the role of Twitter and the media) and easy for others to take up and use, and so open currency within a celebrity culture (one become a celebrity in having external thoughts that others relate to).
Alternatively one might shift the feedback of power and knowledge, while keeping the roles of instructions or individuals relatively constant. In the former case what then happens is very much an event. Take the current violence in Iran. The story is really about what will happen. That is what institutions, what powers will be created. We are therefore at the moment at which powers come into being. The powers are then caught up with a battle of the medias and knowledge. On the one hand, one has the world of the protesters who are using both ‘new’ technologies but also ‘old’ media organizations (the BBC Persian service) to communicate one to the other. Such communication is not about truth, and not really about what is happening, but is rather about effecting a resistance through a sequence of ‘known’ facts such as where and when vote rigging happened or how many people have been killed, as a set of reactions to those facts. On the other side one has of course the traditional figures of the Iranian Revolution, who use their old methods of chanting and mass (and violent) organization to enforce their will. These two battle it out on the streets. But they also fight by appealing to the other, and in deriding their rival’s means of communication and the knowledge that it creates. The conflict is therefore very much a modern conflict. Different powers and different means to communicate those powers, flex their muscles one to the other.
Alternatively (and at a very different level) if one keeps an individual as the terminal point of a power (rather than institutions), then one in a sense breaks into the mysteries of conversation. That is, crisscrossing all conversations are numerous nano-power relations; we persuade, we appeal, we demonstrate, we argue, we interrupt, we complete. All these non-elements and non-states are over in the flicker of an eye or the curl of a lip. Conversations are then in themselves never about individuals as such. They are always far freer than that. Proper conversation runs relatively free. And yet the individual haunts it. We want the talk to be such that we as a person are the wrap into which the conversation is later put into another mind, (in memory) and are thought of in a certain manner. A conversation might then be relatively free and open, and yet the container into which that conversation is put, never really is. The power relations, the ‘non-relations’, the flickers, will therefore always be drawn at some point, or will be related back to, some individual; an individual who might not be present as such (that is so long as we are not talking about ourselves) and yet who will all the same be present or haunting, the conversation.
Power loses then its cogency. Or rather it becomes a series of axes, each coming out of the other. Within such axes, myriad different powers can emerge, as one changes the mechanisms for its expression, of the terminal points which one envisages it serving. Power is not a thing as such or even merely a property, it is rather a sequence of interrelated things, each of which relates to the others and yet which can always be understood in isolation to them all. The six powers outlined here are therefore, not at all exhaustive, they rather represent an example of how two alternative powers can create others. They are meant of course then to provide an irritatant or stimulus to inspire others to come up with more. For what is the point of a sprocket but to serve as a provocation? A desire to design one’s own little machine or whirl of action, a fact that is a power in itself.
