What is a good life and what does it take to live it? This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy and perhaps one of its most important. Yet, it appears to be pretty easy to answer.

That’s because virtually everybody seems willing to have a stab at it. Whether claims talk about values, forgiveness and faith or the importance of stoicism, courage and reflection, or any of the other million-and-one go-to solutions, the good-life, it seems, cannot be too far away.

We might wonder if power has anything to do with this, as we examine the meaning of a flower. Well, it might actually be all there is to it. This is as simple as other answers but I accept it’s a lot to take in. So, you might want to read to the end before drawing your own conclusions.

The concept of the power-medium offers us a different take on the usual discussions about life. It’s not a real thing. You can’t go out and hunt one down. It’s what sociologists call a ‘synthetic’ framework, a metaphor or thought-model for understanding how power moves around and operates.

Its central proposition is quite straightforward. This is that power is not held, stored or exchanged. It is not located somewhere, retained or spent by someone or something. Instead, it is constitutive of society. It defines and regulates life, mediating how we live in a social as opposed to isolated world. Without it, we cannot recognise what it is to live with others.

It tells us that power is not a single force and we should stop thinking it is even if it has very specific material effects. Instead, it’s a structured and relational process distributed across all of the systems of knowledge, truth, interaction and organisation that we call ‘life’.

It’s all around us, and this makes it easy to spot, but it’s still very difficult to pin down. To help us, the power-medium model has four dimensions, or ways of measuring power’s presence and effect. We can call these power-truth, power-duality, power-settlement and power-uptake.

It’s probably important to acknowledge straightaway here that there are other ways of splitting up or ordering the ideas they work with. It might even be useful to add a new dimension or combine two or more of them from time to time.

So, remember this is a metaphor, not a collection of particles living in the physical world somewhere which we can isolate and measure. There will always be overlaps and duplications so don’t stress this stuff too much.

It’s probably also important to emphasise that the whole idea assumes we believe in a social world, one we must share with other people. From birth we are social beings: dependent on others, responsive to others, affecting others, unable to escape the lives of others.

In other words, whoever said ‘… there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’* either had a simplistic view of power or was, perhaps, fixated more on the rhetorical demands and dog whistles of ‘conference season’.

The power-medium provides not so much a new or radical analysis of social life but a fresh interpretation of power, one that allows the metaphor of a medium to distil the workings and routes of power more helpfully.

Let’s take a look at each of its four parts.

Credibility and authenticity

Power-truth refers to how certain stories, claims, narratives or structures of knowledge are stabilised as ‘truthful’ within our changing social order and, indeed, why some are not.

This doesn’t deal in a ‘truth’ that is absolute, an objective reality that we all understand identically, but as something produced by what I’ll call the institutional, analytical and discursive mechanisms that surround us in society.

Power produces the categories by which truth is recognised and validated (Foucault, 1980). So, within modern information-based societies, power-truth is increasingly mediated by algorithmic clustering, technical systems and digital platforms as much as it is by expert or curating institutions.

We might see this as the way information is prioritised for our consumption or by what we’re doom scrolling on TikTok, although networks are also physical and informal as well as digital. What counts as credible knowledge is shaped not only by the reliability of the claim but also by its visibility and its capacity for repetition and institutional endorsement.

Power works closely with these matters. These media and data infrastructures form the conditions under which social reality is built and stabilised (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). They are what we read, are taught, discuss and react to. They are what we repeat, prevent, live and die for.

In the power-medium framework, power-truth, its claims as to what has useful knowledge or repeatable value, is the foundation of power itself. It determines which representations of reality are socially actionable and which are marginalised or excluded.

Tension and opposition

Power-duality argues that power emerges from binary or tension-based relationships. This sounds a little complicated but don’t be put off by this. They surround everything we do and help us focus on what we want.

Simply put, it deals with the way we make key distinctions, such as inclusion and exclusion, legitimacy and illegitimacy, the socially visible and invisible and the central and peripheral.

It’s also about the everyday and routine such as the arguments we have and the choices we must make daily. Rather than being incidental, these dualities construct how power is organised and maintained.

We must sift, collect, filter and discard if we are to choose. And we must choose if we want to repeat something or decide never to do it again.

This idea is consistent with what is usually referred to as society’s dialectical tradition. This is a fancy way of describing the rules around how we talk and listen to each other and how this makes everything relational, negotiated, moving, multi-faceted and unfixed.

Life becomes structured through these oppositional positions and fields or loose groupings of power (Bourdieu, 1991). Dominance is maintained not through coercion or control but via these structured oppositions that test for or define what is normal or deviant and discard what cannot be tolerated (Gramsci, 1971).

Power-duality is not simply about how conflict comes about. Sociology already has a good grasp on this. It is more the architecture that makes this intelligible or known to us. It stabilises our understanding of power by organising its differences into recurring forms that connect to us.

As it does so, it pushes us towards or from systems of governance, classification and social hierarchy that are consistent with what is emerging and which we work to regenerate or reject without coercion. It allows us to think power is one thing even when it operates in ways that actually make it something else entirely.

Stabilisation and fixing

Power-settlement refers to the processes by which these contested meanings, connections or distributions of power become stabilised into institutions, norms or routines.

It is the ‘fixing’ mechanism of the power-medium: the point at which fluid social negotiations become structured as order, routine or common-sense. These are never really settled, despite the definition used here. They are always temporary or contingent.

Durkheim’s concept of ‘social facts’ is useful here (1912/1995). He gives us the idea that social rules and structures constrain, promote or acquire durability through their collective reinforcement. These are the common acceptances of social life, the things we take for granted and see perhaps as ‘natural’.

The idea of power-settlement also reflects institutional theories around ‘path dependency’. This claims that ideas that stabilise quickly in systems, that acquire traction early, become better at reinforcing themselves over time.

Power-settlement is not a permanent resolution and is always provisional. It represents the moment when power’s fixes become durable enough to guide our behaviour, allocate resources or define legitimacy. Legal systems, bureaucratic procedures and algorithmic governance systems all operate as mechanisms of settlement.

In this sense, power-settlement is the bringing together of both power-truth and power-duality. It takes the matters we understand as reliable knowledge, and society’s rules and insistences, and converts both into something approaching reality or the ‘must-do’ list for the day.

Internalisation and distribution

Power-uptake describes how power is absorbed, enacted and reproduced within our social systems.

Unlike top-down models of power like domination or coercion, uptake emphasises our individual responsibilities or the way power is distributed widely to construct influence or to repeat it (Arendt). Power persists not just because it is imposed but also by the way it is taken up, sustained and embedded in everything we do.

Individuals become the carriers of power. Each of us regulates its presence, reproducing it via the many justifications and explanations we adopt daily (Foucault, 1980). Social structures become embodied within us as natural or instinctive, guiding our perceptions and actions (Bourdieu, 1991).

In the modern networked world, this type of uptake is swelled by digital technologies and their dynamics and feedback loops. This highlights how power flows through decentralised junctions and moments, where our own participation or rejection of life’s rules becomes a key mechanism for forming and stabilising it (Castells, 2009).

We are all central to this: key actors in life’s micro-dynamics, the exchanges of everyday life, and in the way power uses them to achieve continuity. This is the moment when structures, what they’re telling us, where they want us to be, how they work, become the things we do.

Rinse and repeat

Taken together, these four dimensions form a circulating and continuing system rather than a linear model of beginnings and ends with a ‘done by’ and ‘done to’ relationship.

Power-truth establishes legitimacy, power-duality establishes its relational space, power-settlement stabilises all this into durable forms, and power-uptake reproduces what we do through distributed means.

This system is not static. Each component feeds into the others. Uptake reinforces settlement, settlement stabilises truth regimes, truth regimes reinforce dualities and dualities structure the conditions under which uptake occurs.

The power-medium is therefore best understood as a recursive or repeating ecology, one that generates similar or incremental outcomes because these tend to be projections of pre-existing positions and its lines of least resistance.

This shifts our attention away from power as something possessed or located in a sole leader, single institution or dominant ideological alliance.

Instead, it sees power as the very essence of our social reality. It’s something through which meaning, structure and action continually pass. When they do, they will either be regulated, nuanced, adjusted, remodelled or, indeed, transformed.

We must all play our part in this process. We decide what it is to be social, to give up isolation and its miseries, to live amongst others, to seek partners and friendships, to pursue a common truth, to harness benefit, to achieve safety, to share our dreams.

Power is the way the social world is understood, shared and lived. It is the price we pay for the joys of being together as well as the cause of what drives us apart.

To live a good life means accepting power as the manifestation of this social world. Doing so helps us understand ourselves and others more profoundly. It tells us about the people we live with and reveals what we must do if we choose to share our time with them.

At this point, the good life or its opposite is shown to us.

References

Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Durkheim, É. 1912/1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Note. *The remark comes from an interview given by Margaret Thatcher to Woman’s Own magazine. The interview was conducted on 23 September 1987 at 10 Downing Street and an edited version was published on 31 October 1987.

Image: Thanks to Markus Winkler

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Every day, and during every minute of it, thousands of us enter the great City of Life. We aren’t always required to pass through its ceremonial gates but if we do we know we must bow to its statues, indulge its formalities and comply with its checks and records.

Many more though travel instead through the hundreds upon hundreds of service roads and lesser known routes that keep the City connected to the world around it. They move in and out with fewer eyes upon them but, once inside its boundaries, they too must honour its routines and expectations.

Essentials are delivered, trains and buses begin their journeys, news from afar arrives, shutters rise and lights appear one by one in the countless windows, homes, shops and buildings. The City breathes.

Nothing dramatic seems to happen. No trumpet announces authority. No visible sovereign commands Life to wake.

Infrastructure

Somehow, within an hour, millions of complex acts coordinate, coalesce and complete, each requiring precise timing or exact action. The City moves, as must we, by hook or by crook.

Yet, all this energy, will and momentum is not attributable to any single ruler, visitor, personality, institution or decree. It exists because countless people have absorbed the directions, demands, implications and expectations of the reality around them.

As a result, each knows where to stand, when to stop, what counts as money or favour, which signals matter, what is dangerous, what is respectable and what deserves laughter, outrage, silence or attention.

This is power-uptake. It changes all it can touch and decentralises its presence through circulation, routine and habituation. Once embedded like this, power becomes the very point of the City’s existence, its beating heart, its visible expression and it no longer demands enforcement.

The traffic lights are obeyed. The queue is policed by patience rather than armed guards. The currency works because people believe in it. The City’s reality becomes what sociologists call infrastructural (Star).

Dispersal

Some of the City’s routes and roads have become wide boulevards, paved over generations by repetition and institutional reinforcement. Others are alleyways of speculation, rumours or conjecture.

Together, they disperse the artefacts of power, bringing us discipline or coercion (Arendt). Power becomes not just insistence or compliance, nor even the illusion of this, but about how the social world shapes the way we recognise and experience reality.

A government white paper, the claims of a media billionaire, a scientific study, a challenged custom or even a rumour all operate via this state of dispersal. As a result, we become directly responsible for power’s artefacts and cannot hide when they come a-knocking’.

This is because we witness power-uptake and its effects in the moment they are deployed and must decide at that point whether or not they bring something useful to social life. We become a point of power here, not the only one and perhaps not even the most influential but a point nevertheless.

Power is not stored exclusively in a palace or parliament. It exists wherever collective action sustains a shared world.

It decentralises because no one centre, place, idea or force can possibly micromanage such complexity directly. Instead, the power-medium distributes itself across millions of ordinary acts of recognition and repetition.

Potency

This suggests that power is most potent not when it confronts opposition but when it embeds itself so thoroughly in social life that it no longer requires much help, observation or regulation. It becomes truth detached from coercion, persuasion or ritual (Foucault).

At this junction, power is conceptual, intuitive and instinctive. It is the social compact, an idealised imposition, above rebuke or at least meaningful and acceptable rejection. It is power as consensus and it will remain as this for as long as it represents a type of order we can all live with.

Yet, power-uptake is not about diluting stronger claims or whisking-up weaker ones to the point where they achieve common appeal or represent subjective common sense. It shows us instead how some truths are equipped to travel further, gain more adherents or anchor within more settlements than others.

Power-uptake wants us to focus on the actions of the social world itself and how these cannot avoid generating or influencing the mechanisms and deployment of power. Power is an act of potential recognition or realisation for us all, when we become part of it, and not just the hidden desires of particular agents, institutions or ideologies.

Repetition

Some roads vanish because nobody travels along them long enough to keep them visible. Others become permanent because they have become grooves in the social ground. A path survives not because it is true in any objective sense but because enough people continue to walk it.

We don’t experience ‘time’ in an identical fashion yet millions synchronise their lives around a shared measurement of it (Zerubavel). Society begins to pulse according to rhythms that feel objective simply because they are collectively repeated.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about power then is not merely that it compels but that it migrates. It leaves the throne room and enters habits, greetings, architecture, assumptions, schedules, jokes, categories, interfaces, rituals and memories.

Materials

An idea alone possesses limited force but once embedded into repeated practice, infrastructure and expectation, it acquires density. Conjecture becomes architecture. Belief becomes pavement. Assumption becomes institution (Latour).

At first all is discourse, no more than the way we exchange or trade ideas. Yet, our behaviour is responsive to its implications, seeking what is efficient, moral, realistic or inevitable.

Repeated long and often enough, claims crystallise into social matter. They begin to organise space itself. Offices are built around them. Schools teach them. Algorithms reproduce them. Children inherit their consequences before understanding their implications.

This makes the essence of power ineluctable or immanent. In other words, it is a ghost you cannot walk away from. It surrounds us in forms that cannot be grasped yet still demand a reaction that cannot be avoided. It sticks to us.

We might feel that this downplays the very real and highly visible material inequalities of life. What of greed, violence or religion? These are forces of power that shape outcomes for us regardless of whether or not we believe the claims that accompany them.

Material asymmetries like these still matter because they influence the uptake, direction and meaning of what emerges in social life (Berger & Luckmann) but they are not the true workings of power.

They are the aspects of the social world, the realities of our ambitions, that power reveals to us. Power displays the asymmetry at work here and tests if the models of socialisation they generate are acceptable to us or suitable for retention.

Ghosts

Our City is built by ghosts. Some areas rise from fears long forgotten. Others from dreams nobody now remembers. Entire streets remain because generations chose the same path as their forebearers. Interpretations become hardened into the environment.

Each generation deposits layers of language, symbols and routines upon the next. Most people walk across them without seeing much. The buried pipes, cables and foundations are disregarded. Yet the City depends entirely upon these invisible accumulations.

The only truly enduring forms of discourse are therefore not the loudest but the most absorbable. A slogan may dominate headlines and then vanish but a subtle etiquette may survive centuries because it has become the point and form of conduct.

Power-uptake prefers low visibility. It seeks not obedience but incorporation. It is the very purpose as well as manifestation of everything that is social and the way this connects us together.

Surveys

All of this is not always easy to spot but the power-medium offers us at least the chance to do so because no matter how well hidden or confused intentions may be they must at some stage become ‘knowable’ if they are to be realised.

Resistance also operates within this complex ecology. Protest movements will try to redirect pedestrians, reopen abandoned roads, expose hidden architecture, rename streets, dismantle old assumptions or make visible that which is concealed.

Success depends less upon a moment’s visibility than upon whether or not alternative pathways can become repeatable and inhabitable. That is why reality itself will always remain contested terrain.

Facts build truth but societies must still decide which facts matter, which interpretations stabilise, which narratives coordinate behaviour and which meanings become durable enough to organise institutions.

Our City is discourse. Its skylines are frozen arguments. Its routines are agreements we tolerate or support. Its infrastructures are old memories repeated often enough to become concrete.

Each person encounters only fragments of this discourse, local routes, familiar customs, partial maps. However, our repeated participation in City life sustains an immense collective reality that exceeds any individual assumptions.

The City survives because people continue waking up inside it and behaving as though it’s real. And in doing so, they aim to make it real all over again.

Revelation

It is probably fair to conclude overall that this way of seeing power, as tangible evidence of society or the means by which the social world is known and enacted, borrows a little from others (Giddens).

Yet, it remains distinct because it sees power as also material, separable, identifiable and capable of much greater modification and management (Arendt). These are matters we bring to power directly by the way we act or, indeed, fail to do so.

They show power as reversible when we cannot accept what it entails. Actions may be imposed on us but they are always owned by someone. If we wish to change what is asked of us, then power-uptake will show us where the owners of power exist and what may be done to hold them to account.

Power-uptake identifies the places of difference, distinction, denial and division that we live with. It brings together the routes of power and the places from where it’s directed. We all remain responsible for power’s journey because we determine what it all means and the value this then offers us.

Treating power as socialisation, and power-uptake as its revelation, offers a lens that is both simple and wide-reaching. It lets us see how power operates not only in prisons and parliaments but in classrooms, kitchens and conversations. Truths do not stand outside of power, they appear as something real because of it.

To follow power, then, is to follow the paths by which its implications become accepted, rejected or sedimented into everyday life. In this sense, power is not just the imposition of will or the construction or uptake of truth alone. It is how we understand their presence and reasonings.

This is the purpose of power. To make intent visible and to regulate the degree to which this will be enacted.

References

Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon.

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Star, S.L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377-391.

Zerubavel, E. 1981. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Image: AI.

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Nothing happens unless it does. Yes, this might be one of the most obvious statements about power it’s possible to make, one beaten into second place only by the undissolved inanity of proclaiming ‘it is what it is!’

However, it’s still worth pondering for a moment or two. If power is about securing advantage in some way, or at least avoiding disbenefit, then the point at which this happens, when power is put into service, becomes very important indeed.

This is power-uptake. It’s when all the to-ing and fro-ing, all the faffing-around about what might be meant, what’s truth, what can be known, what’s rational, logical, persuasive, coercive or any other embryonic presentation of power, becomes too late to matter.

It’s when things happen. It’s when push comes to shove and the road less travelled* is left behind us because the route we took wasn’t that one. It’s when reality has kicked-in.

The problem though is that we can’t really say goodbye to all our caveats about power, our pondering on the matter, even at this point of seeming no return.

When power becomes action, it doesn’t just sail off into the sunset on its own. It remains connected to the intentions that pushed it from the jetty. It remains as ripples across time. Effects resonate, echos can still be heard, and they have their own consequences.

This is not always easy to see. Consider a courtroom. A witness speaks, a lawyer objects and a judge accepts or rejects the testimony.

Yet the ‘truth’ of what happened depends not on the evidence as it is known to the witnesses but on the procedures, forms of recognition or institutional acceptance with which it engages, something settled for us many decades ago.

The prospects of our children or grand children are tied in this way to how power once worked for our ancestors.

It’s shown by what we value, inculcate, prioritise or discard. It is revealed by the demands of the environment we inherit or the implications of our parent’s mental health. It is visible by the reach of our dreams and the limitations of our realities.

Here, power is not simply a court direction, a government policy or a healthy genetic history but the enactment of a whole host of social processes through which intention has or will become consequential.

Power-uptake brings us to this profound type of reframing and it has several implications. None of them are comfortable but three are worth raising.

First, it means that power cannot be avoided after the settlement it was designed to resolve because it remains as a continuing means of discourse, exchange or negotiation. If we accept the presence of the social, the life we share with others, then we must accept too the persistent presence of power.

Secondly, power is always provisional. Truths can always be rejected, resisted or overturned because they remain as negotiable items within the social world (Latour). For sure, they can be painful, with real impact, but their work within social life, even when inevitable, is not always what we imagine it might be. Power is always transformation, something becoming rather than made.

Finally, whilst reality may exist outside of discourse, or the society we all live in, as ideas that don’t need our permission to be true, they have no effect, no power, without it. Power uptake achieves this.

The law of gravity or the logic of evolution, indeed the very principles of the scientific method, have objective meaning only by what they achieve in discourse, by the social order to which they appeal. They are only ideas until power attaches itself to them.

Their claims still remain open to falsification of course, to the contrarian confusions of ‘flat-earthers’, ‘rabbit-hole researchers’ and ‘climate change deniers’, but the reason, logic and truth they have achieved has been made possible only through the reverberation and reach of power uptake.

There are other matters too that bind to power uptake, matters central to the way we exist, to what we hold dear, to what we live and die for, for everything that holds us to the people we love, the communities we serve and the ambitions we realise. We’ll look at these a little more next time.

In the interim, we should hold on to one thing. If we accept the idea of power uptake, its place in the power-medium, we might accept too that we are affected today by a power that hasn’t shown itself yet. There is nothing overly metaphysical about this.

It’s really trying to say that what prevails from the power we accept in the present, will have consequences, problems we must encounter, trials we cannot avoid, a future we can presume but not really know for sure.

So, it’s probably useful then to see power-uptake as revealing reality to us, as aletheia or ‘unconcealment’ (Heidegger), because it cannot give us all of the story, only an essence or hint of it, at any particular time.

It cannot hold dominion over everything that does or could constitute meaning to us as a result nor make this plain and simple to us. It promises only the potential for this to happen at some point. It promises that ‘uptake’ is not the end of the story.

This shows that what matters, what is real, what brings actual and present impetus or resistance, is the degree to which power-uptake secures a foothold in social order. We ignore this at our peril.

References

Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row.

Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

*Note:

Frost, R. 1916. The Road Not Taken. In: Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt.

Image: Leohoho

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We live in dangerous times. Our honour and heritage is at stake, our cultural identity, the acclaim of others, our very place in the modern world, all of this, is in jeopardy. What is right, honourable, worthy of respect is under scrutiny and it might not pass muster. Yes, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us.

We don’t have to work too hard to realise that this annual presentation of sometimes cool and catchy but usually very predictable and often very poor pop tunes is more than a spectacle of flamboyant performances, eccentric staging and unpredictable voting. It conceals a dense and dynamic site of power at work.

Power analysts likely consider Eurovision a structured arena in which cultural legitimacy, political alignment, symbolic value, and collective identity are produced, contested and stabilised.

To understand this type of phenomenon we must get to grips with how power operates in contemporary cultural life, not as force or might but as legitimacy, visibility and belief. So, let’s see what makes Eurovision a ‘hit’.

Singing softly

Joseph Nye (2004) introduced us to the term soft power. He might as well have coined the phrase after watching Eurovision. He didn’t, in case you’re in any doubt. He would, though, recognise how nation states offer curated versions of themselves through music, language, staging and stories.

Performances become vehicles for national branding, projecting images of modernity, tradition, inclusivity or creativity. Success confers prestige, enhancing a country’s cultural standing within what still remains a loosely-defined European identity. Performances function as diplomatic theatre in which nations compete not militarily or economically but symbolically.

Eurovision tends to normalise particular aesthetic and ideological values. These are often aligned with Western European liberalism and together build what Gramsci called cultural hegemony (1971).

Norms surrounding gender expression, individualism and performative spectacle are not merely displayed. They are validated by the contest.

If we participate in the excitement, simply watch the show even, we align with these norms. Thus, Eurovision doesn’t just showcase diversity, it also structures the terms under which diversity is recognised and rewarded.

Building a new world …

Bourdieu (1991) would see Eurovision as the distribution of symbolic capital. Winning the contest does more than reward a song. It elevates a performance into something with enhanced cultural value.

Any distinction we make between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, isn’t really an aesthetic choice in this context. It’s a conclusion we come to through cultural and institutional mediation.

Eurovision builds hierarchies, determining which styles, narratives and identities are legitimate in that moment. In doing so, it constructs our emerging idea of Europe itself.

This type of building work aligns with post-structural understandings of power. Michel Foucault (1980) for instance argues that power works to continually reconstruct itself.

The contest generates stories and ideas about nationhood, belonging and modernity. It defines what is valuable by staging and validating what can be said or shown.

Inclusion and exclusion are central here. Debates over participation, perhaps concerning geographical boundaries or reacting to political controversies, reveal that Eurovision is actively engaged in defining the limits of its own cultural universe. This is world building through the medium of song.

… and a better one

Eurovision does not eliminate political tensions but it does reframe them. Historical alliances, regional solidarities and cultural affinities are expressed through voting and performance.

This transforms potential conflict into symbolic expression. The experience acts as a mechanism of political sublimation, a higher and better form of confrontation. It converts antagonism into spectacle.

Indeed, participation often signals a desire for inclusion within a broader European or ‘Euro-adjacent’ community, making the contest a subtle instrument of geopolitical positioning.

At the same time, Eurovision has become a prominent voice for identity politics, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. The visibility of LGBTQ+ performers and themes over the last decade or so has become a defining feature of the contest. It introduces these ideas as normative or with a moral power, a means where these values are elevated and the prejudices they usually bear de-stigmatised.

Eurovision does not simply reflect this type of social dynamism, it participates in its articulation and dissemination. The contest thus operates as a site where cultural legitimacy is intertwined with moral recognition and where a new combination of the two emerges.

A great chorus

Yet, Eurovision’s power is not restricted to discourse or symbolism. It’s also ritualistic. Each year, millions of viewers, across what now seems like too many countries to count, participate in a shared event.

The structure of the contest, semi-finals, grand final and, of course, the voting system, remain broadly consistent despite tweaking. This creates a sense of continuity and expectation.

For Émile Durkheim (1912/1995), such repetition constitutes a form of collective ritual that reinforces social cohesion. The contest produces a shared emotional experience, binding us together into a meaningful community.

Here, Randall Collins (2004) emphasised the role of interaction, in which shared attention and melodramatic or sentimental synchronisation generate what he calls ‘emotional energy’. We shudder at the glory of our ‘douze-points’ whilst the pain of our ‘nil-points’ is always palpable. Power here lies in the capacity to generate and sustain this collective feeling.

Beats and pulses

Eurovision operates within a hybrid media environment, one shaped by digital platforms and emerging formats as well as traditional broadcasting solutions. Performances circulate on streaming services, are reinterpreted on social media and gain traction through algorithms, likes and shares.

Visibility is no longer determined exclusively by the event itself but by the complex interactions it creates between audiences and platforms and the metrics of engagement they rely on (Couldry and Hepp, 2017).

The power of Eurovision lies in the way it can be repackaged to appeal to us and in how it sticks once we touch it. This power forms reality.

Making your mind up

This ‘coming-together’ or social structuring becomes especially visible in the contest’s voting patterns. The persistence of regional voting blocs has long attracted cynicism and amusement, with countries in the Nordic, Balkan or post-Soviet regions frequently exchanging points.

While often dismissed as ‘political’ voting, these patterns can, perhaps, be better understood through the lens of relational or networked power. These ideas talk about the links of interdependence, regardless of whether or not they are physical or digital.

Castells (2009) argues that power here operates through these networks, these connections of joint purpose, rather than through single acts or specific moments of expression (Castells, 2009). In Eurovision, outcomes are shaped not simply by the quality of individual performances but by the position of countries within networks of affinity, migration and historical connection.

Diaspora populations, shared media spaces and cultural closeness all influence voting behaviour. Power, in this sense, is not possessed but distributed across relationships, heritage and sources of information.

What we remember

Eurovision controls time. Winning performances are remembered, replayed and integrated into our national and transnational narratives. They become part of a shared cultural archive. Most entries though fail to achieve this, often fading from memory irrespective of their quality.

The contest shapes the present, today’s visibility and tomorrow’s remembrance of it, constructing and limiting the cultural meaning we give to all this.

Eurovision is not a single form of power but an expression or output of power-medium. It is a structured environment in which very different forms of power, regardless of whether or not they’re symbolic, economic, affective or networked, are gathered and converted into legitimacy.

The contest transforms performances into something of recognised cultural value. It turns attention into prestige, and participation into belonging. Its outcomes are accepted not because they are objectively determined but because the contest itself is recognised as authoritative.

Eurovision, then, is not trivial. It’s a highly organised system for producing truth. It reveals that power in contemporary society is mediated not simply through domination but via the capacity to define what is seen, what is valued and what is remembered.

References

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Castells, M. 2009. Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. 2017. The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Collins, R. 2004. Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Durkheim, E. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1912)

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Nye, J.S. 2004. Soft power: The means to success in world politics. New York: PublicAffairs.

Image: AI.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com

There are many kinds of ‘power-watcher’, sitting inside their metaphorical hides, awaiting the arrival of their favoured species, recording what each does and wondering where they’ve come from.

Some observe from a distance. Others might adjust their seat or viewing position to get a little nearer.

Close up, we’d see mating, confrontation and the fight for space. From further away, we’d notice more how power flows through patterns and behaviours, perhaps via global changes and dynamics.

This is a bit like varying the lens of the binoculars to see what’s looking back at us at each turn of the dial.

Alternatively, we could stay home, study the way power shows itself according to the experts, consider it as a more abstract matter. We’d look at the ground it comes to, the everyday settings it favours. We could record how it interacts with others, note down which species people say are thriving and which are not.

None of these approaches is wholly satisfactory. They will either miss something important, smoothing over too many complications and contradictions, or end up with a very long list of ideas and themes that confuse what is going on and stop us from knowing where to look first.

There is at least one other option though, one that gives us ‘dimensions’ for power, routes and arrival points for its effects. It allows us to see power’s grasp and reach. It’s interested in what else power might be doing, the ground it holds and the direction it’s going in.

There are several ways to pursue this but one idea is particularly helpful. The Steven Lukes dimensional models (1974, 2005) suggest we can measure what power does. They show us how power operates, takes different forms, depending on the circumstances, sometimes without having to resort to coercion or even persuasion.

They categorise the way power is understood when it goes about its work and put its methods and effects into one of three very helpful categories.

The first dimension deals with what we’ll call ‘decision-making power’. This refers to an ability to make decisions that affect others. We might see this in politics or classical sociology. It reveals power as obvious, shown by behaviour or an expression of will - regardless of whether or not this leads to conflict.

This type of power is clear and open and, in large part, unambiguous if not always simple. It may reflect brute force but it may also be subtle, persuasive and compelling.

In this category, power is deliberate consent or decision. It may be temporary, conditional or strategic but its nature will be broadly understood by the parties involved and any advantage gained or given up will be apparent in some form if not always willingly or completely.

… power shapes our beliefs … it is a power that can reject or build meaning. It escapes scrutiny because it appears to be ‘the way the world works’.

Lukes’s second category deals in ‘non-decision-making power’. This involves an ability to set the agenda, restricting or expanding the issues for consideration or up for grabs. This might cause conflicts but prevent others from ever arising.

Power here is categorised as control over the means of discourse and discussion, denying and enabling what can be recognised as acceptable or sensitive to negotiation or disagreement in the first place.

In this dimension, power is revealed as both recognisable and hidden. It’s a way to control how matters are mediated, prioritised, actioned or resolved. It serves those capable of defining the terms of the negotiation whilst making it difficult for others to recognise alternative claims and ideas.

The third dimension is ‘ideological power’. This explores how power shapes our desires and beliefs automatically, influencing what people want and what they think serves their interests best.

The first two dimensions, mean power can be seen and evaluated, even when it tries to hide from us. However, this third dimension is a power that is unseeable, even to those who otherwise have the resources to resist it or the potential to use it. It is the power that works to form reality or establish our sense of the world.

Here, power deals in ideologies, not just as political or religious codes but as cultural beliefs. It is a power that can reject or build meaning. It escapes scrutiny because it appears to be ‘the way the world works’.

This type of dimensional framework shows how power works in any given set of circumstances but all three types may be evident at the same time. A single moment of power might be interpreted exclusively, by any combination or all three.

These organising ideas keep our thinking neat and tidy but they do more than this. They also work to direct what we believe is possible when it comes to power.

If we find ourselves relying on any of the categories described so far, then we become locked into a single logic or expectation and must then reject ideas that otherwise seem to work perfectly well.

Much of what influences us in this respect, is highly localised or specific. Power becomes affected by context, reflecting key moments or popular understandings when we attempt to make sense of it. Dimensional frameworks give us a means to re-categorise power and gauge its impact.

The more willing we are to pick up our camera or binoculars, change our angle and focus, the more we will see power’s arrival and routines, understand its seasons and returns, and discover its habits and purposes.

It might be a good idea to think about power more often with this sort of hat on, and with our eye glasses at the ready.

References

Lukes, S. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan.

Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Photograph: ATC Comm Photo

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When scientists talk about power, you know proper scientists like physicists and chemists, they tend to say it’s something like the degree to which we can rely on a given supply of energy. If we have enough of this, we can change things, putting what happens to work in ways that help us.

Yet, that doesn’t mean that chemists, for example, think that’s all there is to it. They spend a great deal of time pondering what happens when change occurs. They’re more interested in these single moments of power and how they transform one substance, one entity, into another. We have much to learn from them.

This process of change is often quite predictable but it’s never even-handed. It doesn’t give chemicals and molecules equal chance. It allows them to work in proportion to their energy state and to the conditions in which they are expected to operate. The outcomes are often far from set or stable or they might only be so for moments too small to measure.

Similarly, power-settlement doesn’t ask us to expect or rely on neutrality when it comes to establishing social order. It must reflect existing imbalances. Indeed, it makes these visible, even when we don’t notice them. It deals in the mechanisms of inequality. It provides an opportunity for these to be seen and tested but offers no guarantee that they will change.

Power-settlement isn’t interested in establishing legitimacy. It is concerned instead with what is practical and whether or not arrangements can endure. Indeed, it can show legitimation as questionable when the settlements it gives us are considered unhelpful, allowed grudgingly or adopted under duress.

It is about what is provisional, the idea that social order is never fixed but constantly negotiated. It treats power not as the will or intention of the strongest but as the capacity to stabilise conflict into arrangements that, however temporary, hold fast at least in that moment. This makes it a little different to other common ideas about power.

Many of our key thinkers have a view on this. It’s worth looking at a few of them.

For Giddens (1991), the endurance of power relied on it establishing routine and legitimacy in social life. Social practices persist when we accept, often tacitly, the validity of the rules and resources that structure our conduct. This gives us what he called ontological security, or an ability to understand right from wrong, and it is this which underpins the stability of everyday life.

Power-settlement doesn’t require this type of legitimacy and looks more directly to what endures instead. Settlements may be grudging, fragile or even widely regarded as unjust but they might still function as stopping points, helpful only in that moment, unguided by the authority that permits them, separate from the common values and rituals we otherwise rely on, because they allow social life to proceed.

This difference isn’t trivial. It shifts our focus from who benefits from social life, and in what way, to the practical and pragmatic endurance of the arrangements that allow this. Power-settlement isn’t really concerned with the justice or logic of these arrangements. It’s the place at which society doesn’t quite exist, a place without interests or favour.

Giddens’ writings (1984) acknowledge that domination and resistance are integral to the structuring of social systems but he tends to frame these in terms that reflect the repetitive reproduction of the order that brings them about.

By contrast, the power-settlement perspective sits more comfortably with opposing theories on how things become acceptable, such as Mouffe’s insistence (2000) that settlement is not consensus but a provisional management of conflict. Where Giddens stresses integration and continuity, the power-settlement perspective emphasises impasse, asymmetry and the unfinished nature of social business.

It brings something distinctive too to the way we treat violence and coercion. Hannah Arendt (1970) argued that violence is instrumental but never foundational to power. It’s the means to power but not really the reason for it. The power-settlement account is consistent with this, suggesting that coercion may spark or sustain disputes but power is in the endurance of the arrangements that allow it.

Giddens, by contrast, stresses the importance of the social system as a whole. It’s a place where violence, resources and domination are folded into social order, indistinguishable. It’s where coercion and legitimation make order together, in unified combination. He is less clear about where each of these authors starts and the other begins because he doesn’t have to be. They become the same thing.

Power for Giddens, and indeed for Foucault, is a Möbius strip of external social reconstruction. Never ending and always beginning. ‘It is what it is’ once more, apparently, and we may as well take no personal responsibility for our violence, thuggery, greed or selfishness. I feel Arendt’s beady eye on them as she tells us we can stop hitting other people any time we like.

Power-settlement wants us to be dissatisfied with Giddens and Foucault, to focus on the junctions of power instead. It wants us to consider power’s stopping and starting points, the locations from where it is stripped from or folded into the social practices that rebuild society in their likeness.

For Rawls (1971), social order is grounded in a sort of overlapping social consensus about the principles of justice, even when this is provisional and incomplete. The power-settlement idea supports this type of pragmatism but doesn’t want us to fall into the trap of thinking that social justice is somehow normative or no more than the majority view.

It isn’t necessary for ‘settlement’ to be anything like fairness or justice. It must only give us functional stability. Indeed, arrangements that persist across very different or unconnected perspectives do so without having to agree anything approaching shared meaning or common values (Star and Griesemer 1989).

These might be the type of settlements that favour, say, the use of taxes to bail out incompetence and greed in the global banking system yet then react against much smaller and more carefully considered investments in public services designed to bring greater help to the economy for longer.

In this respect, power-settlement is far from abstract. It offers us the ability to study real events, such as a strike resolved, a treaty signed or a contract enforced. It asks us not to be concerned exclusively with the way social practices are rebuilt. It stresses too the idea of provisional ‘resting points’, highlighting the observable markers of conflict where the power-medium pauses and reshapes.

The power-settlement view builds on previous ideas around negotiation but it shifts our focus towards how social life is persistently punctuated by settlements and that these need not be legitimate, consensual or even particularly stable.

Power as settlement is not just about the rules and resources that structure action. It’s also about its stopping points where disputes are contained, often uneasily. It talks about an endurance without consensus, a stability without legitimacy and an order without closure.

In doing so, it gives us a different type of analytical window, shedding light more on the fragile, contingent arrangements that sustain social life. It provides fresh metaphors for understanding how order is achieved not through domination, reconstitution or legitimised consent but through the provisional or resting points of conflict when we take a breath before carrying on.

It captures the fragility and resilience of the arrangements that shape everyday life, the contracts, treaties, rules and routines that allow people to continue, even in the face of disagreement.

Power is not simply the act of imposing will, it is more the making and remaking of the often minor and transient settlements that hold social life together if only for a moment.

References

Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by C. Gordon. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Rawls, J. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. 1989. ‘Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects’, Social Studies of Science, 19(3), pp. 387–420.

Image: Filiberto Giglio

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Politicians frustrate us. Often with very good reason. When we hold them to account, test what they have to say, they sense danger or embarrassment at every turn and answer a different question from the one they were asked. This never goes down very well and doesn’t really seem to get us anywhere.

So, those of us who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, should we, even though, of course, we do. Indeed most of the descriptions of power we recognise seem to skip entirely very important questions about how each of us lives with answers that make no sense whatsoever.

We looked at some of these last time, the so-called dualities of power. These make completely opposing claims about power or ignore the presence of matters which undermine everything they stand for.

To get around this, these descriptions tend to restrict themselves to the very specific conditions in which they operate or can be found. Caveats surround them like landmines.

We’re then left to work out who selects the settlements about power each prefers, who benefits most from these or, indeed, what potential exists for alternative or less confrontational or even more beneficial transactional strategies within the rules each sets. We are invited to ask why power prevails, why it is necessary in the first place and, indeed, what we should make of all this as a result?

It isn’t too difficult to imagine these situations, when we don’t quite accept the rules. Do we insist that police let us into a restricted area when we live within it and our front door is no more than a few feet away? Probably not. Should we stop smoking when it damages nobody but ourselves? Well, perhaps sometimes. Why should people be allowed to take pictures of us just because we’re in a public place? Erm, I’m not sure.

Just what do we accept? The answers we’ve come to usually talk about force, fear and flight; rights and responsibilities; instincts, instructions and insights; or involve tales of greed, strength, resources and resistance.

These matters have absorbed sociology from its inception and there are as many accounts of power in this respect as there are sociologists to describe them (Scott). Each individual account remains keenly promoted or robustly denied. However, we tend to forget too often the process and place of settlement in this. This is a shame.

The idea of settlement forces us to focus on the arrangements, compromises or balancing acts that bring disputes to a pause and give us order in social life (Rawls). This is not a particularly radical suggestion but it is sociological ground mainly travelled through rather than visited.

Most descriptions of settlement are subdued, told what they must be by the reasonings of much bigger or dominating descriptions about the power they restrain or hold in check. They remain functional only within the logical demands of their parent and are rarely seen as useful on their own (Star and Griesemer).

The ‘power-medium’ idea asserts something rather different from this, taking issue with the view that settlement must always be fashioned by the diverse considerations imposed on it.

Yet, it doesn’t give us a way to harmony or consensus (Mouffe). It’s not the utopian resting place for a conflict dissolved. Instead, it shows the pragmatic reality of a conflict managed.

Every settlement carries asymmetry, where some parties gain and others don’t. What is mostly forgotten as a result is that settlement is actually no more than the point, a temporary resting place, at which a provisional halt is reached.

Therefore, if we describe power as settlement, we can shift our attention away from, say, the forces of coercion or persuasion to the processes by which disputes congeal into social arrangements. This may be a less flamboyant or glamorous purpose for power but it is, nevertheless, pretty significant because it’s always in play yet deals only with the temporary or fleeting.

Industrial disputes offer good examples of this type of persisting impasse. Employers and workers may strike, bargain or litigate but, eventually, agreements are reached. Contracts may be signed, pay scales adjusted and grievances resolved. These outcomes are never final but they provide enough stability to reorganise social production and prevent continued disruption.

In international politics, peace treaties, ceasefires and border agreements all embody these types of transitional settlement. They rarely reflect full justice or parity. They offer a fix, a line, a boundary, a recognition that allows social life to continue.

They show power not so much as defined by the social but as an essential if conditional desire to achieve it in the first place. Settlement becomes a mechanism by which the social world is permitted to exist.

This type of framing or claim has several important consequences. Firstly, and perhaps most distinctly, it highlights the provisionality of power (Giddens) whilst stressing that settlements are not permanent victories but pauses in an ongoing struggle, always open to renegotiation or redesign.

Secondly, it decentralises what Arendt (1970) called ‘violence’. This asks us to stop saying ‘… it is what it is …’ and to take more responsibility for the collective manifestations of injustice we live with. These are, quite literally, in our own hands. Coercion may initiate cruel or brutal settlements but power here is only what allows these to endure.

Thirdly, it suggests that power is as much about maintenance as it is about conquest. It is the ongoing labour of our institutions, norms and agreements. It is our ability to deploy all this that brings disputes to rest and we forget this too often.

Of course, this risks reducing power-settlement to stability, neglecting power’s dynamic and transformative dimensions but it’s clear too that settlement is precisely where more disruptive forces meet and where they cannot be neglected.

Every power-settlement carries within it the possibility of fracture, renegotiation or reversal. It cannot deny the presence of such matters and we must recognise more often the importance of this to what we consider ‘normal social order’.

References

Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt.

Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan.

Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Rawls, J. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Scott, J. 2001. Power. Cambridge: Polity.

Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. 1989. ‘Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects’, Social Studies of Science, 19(3), pp. 387–420.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com

As you’re reading this, you’ve clearly not been frightened off by the prospect of dealing with difficult questions. Questions like: ‘how can something be two very different things at the same time?’

I must admit, all of this power-duality is intellectually messy. A bar of soap, great for cleaning up our thinking but really very difficult to keep a grip on.

So, as a little incentive to keep you reading, if you make it to the end, I’ll claim something that I believe has never been described before in the entire of history of power analysis. Go on, you know you want to!

In the last two Substacks, we’ve been looking at the idea of power-duality, how single definitions of power often work in ways that actually oppose themselves, ending up as something they can’t really be. Two sides of the same coin but each unable to face the other.

Anthony Giddens (1984) was very interested in this idea of power-duality but he had a very different take on it compared to other thinkers we’ve covered in the previous parts of this series. In The Constitution of Society (1984), he describes a sort of ‘duality of structure’ operating in society.

This tells us about how the mechanisms of society are far from unified and separate meaning to project different themes at different times.

His thinking is more about giving us some scaffolding or empirical reality to trace and detail the complexity of the truth-power relationship. The conclusions still offer up their own troubled places. These describe how social rules and resources can both constrain and enable action.

In reality, it can be almost impossible to locate where one of these effects starts and the other ends. We know structures are doing this to us, we just can’t pin down why or where very easily.

For Giddens, power was not separate from communication or truth. Instead, it was a product of society’s structures, woven into the very conditions of the interaction they are required to have on us as we go about our business.

Here, agents within social life, such as the rules and institutions we rely on, our cultural cogs or ideological indentations, make what he calls ‘validity claims’ which are then mediated by the asymmetries of power that exist already.

This adds nuance to the truth–power relationship, highlighting the dual role of structures as something that both constrain as well as enable agency.

It could be argued, and perhaps convincingly so for many, that this tends to show the power-medium we have talked about as little more than a re-description of this structuration theory. After all, both perspectives reject the idea of power as a sort of currency, unaffected by the circumstances it finds itself in.

Both see a power formed unevenly and always in a malleable state. Both models show power as relational and reproductive, mediating interaction and making power capable of constructing or maintaining the levers of social reality.

Similarly, the power-medium, like Giddens’ idea of structuration, is not something imposed on truth or power but the way social action becomes possible. In this sense, and in both cases, stability and transformation arise from the same generative mechanism.

However, power-duality within the power-medium remains distinctive, different from what Giddens describes. For instance, Giddens says power emerges through the way structure and agency work together, via how they interact. It runs through social systems reproducing or rejecting these structures as it does so.

However, the power-medium, treats power not as a property of this type of interaction but as the medium through which even structuration itself occurs. It is inter-structural, where power is the connective tissue between orders, systems, or interpretive domains generally not the structures themselves.

Power here is not relational but translational. It operates as the medium that allows different structural logics, whether these be economic, linguistic, technological or normative, to interact and even to transform one another. It is not the will to do so, not the impulse that combines agency and structure which structuration permits. It is what allows us to see and do this.

Admittedly, this is a level of ontological abstraction or generality beyond even Giddens’ model but it remains one anchored too in social practices and institutions. Giddens gives us a theory of structuration. The power-medium gives us a theory of mediation. They occupy different, if complementary, planes.

This further abstraction of power is not a weakness of the power-medium account so long as it remains operationally grounded. The idea of duality in the power-medium is capable of illuminating how power functions as connective tissue in real, multi-systemic contexts, like digital infrastructures, ecological interdependencies or transnational governance.

As important as the views of Foucault, Habermas and Giddens have been to the way we think about society, they have also left us with the challenge of being a lot clearer about truth and power when we come across them, and certainly about the transactions they talk about or the instances they imagine account for real life.

Yet, this must also presume a lesser known state, certainly a place of a less travelled analysis. It’s one that frightens sociologists. It means seeing power as a place, a procedure, an elemental entity in society and something that exists only in combination with other matters, and as all of these things at the same time.

Power can only be convened, translated or realised by a declaration in favour of a social existence, by an acceptance of our mutual interdependence and a determination to live a social as opposed to isolated life. Power tests only for a relationship with others and imposes just one rule as a result. Whatever we want must be declared and knowable, even if this is difficult or nigh on impossible for others to see in practice.

Power places us all first on not so much an equal footing but with a shared obligation. The nature and function of the relationship we are prepared to accept here is what remains to be agreed. Only then can power become something like a negotiation or transaction, a product of society’s structural routes and byways described by Giddens.

This is not the type of settlement for truth and power we usually find helpful, want to pursue or have much chance of accepting without caveat. To find it, we need to ponder more carefully the accepted descriptions of the truth-power relationship. We must ask, just how and why power locks to truth in the first place or where it sits when it is waiting to do so?

Our vision here is always a little blurred and changes each time we take a look. The unresolved tensions between power dualities points to a need for a broader understanding of power. The power-medium is able to accommodate paradox, agency and contest because it does not insist that what emerges always requires resolution.

It is the means through which different certainties, frictions and doubts can be reviewed, essential distinctions clarified and contingent moments of accord reasoned into being. It is the socialisation of what ideas demand of us, settling a means to understand or live with them.

Power becomes the means by which we present socially what otherwise would not be knowable. Yes, I understand this is a definition for power and that I have resisted making one until now. It’s just that someone needed to say it and I can’t find anyone who has been so explicit about this before. If you think I am wrong about this, please let me know.

References

Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Image: SHEVTS

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Those of you who enjoy my writing - and I remain amazed and delighted that some people do - will not need this but, before I go further, I must offer a substantial health warning. I’m sorry but this Substack will be even more difficult to get through than usual.

Not the most encouraging of starts. You have my permission to take a day off if you need one, and who wouldn’t. However, to explain, I’m doing this to describe more fully how the power-medium works. So, at least my intentions are good even if my editing skills aren’t.

It continues the discussion on power-duality, which we started talking about last time. This is power as containing stuff that, according to its own rules, its own logic, simply shouldn’t be there. Sounds a little mad I know, and I suppose it is, but, thankfully, society has found people with large brains capable of helping us.

Last time, we talked a little about Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. They have different views about power-duality. Foucault (1980) says that power is both integrated with truth and also no different from it, at the same time. Habermas (1984) argues that truth is a rarified or perfect state separate from power but also that it isn’t because truth must always be shaped by power.

Bonkers eh? Well, that’s boffins for you. Yet, each of these two positions has persuasive qualities too, which we’ll go into shortly. It’s just that they’re far from problem-free.

Habermas took direct and fairly robust issue with Foucault’s dual account of power. He claimed it operated as a ‘performative contradiction’ (1987).

In other words, keeping ‘Le show Foucault’ on the road, allowing power and truth to be constituent parts of something so integrated that the two things can’t really be separated, means performing the equivalent of intellectual cartwheels. Habermas tended to ignore his own obligatory gymnastic routines but we’ll come to that later.

Habermas argued that to see the existence of different regimes of truth, a central plank of Foucault’s account, we must be able stand at an objective vantage point. From this we could then see the circumstances of these regimes or where differences meet or become unimportant.

However, Foucault denies the existence of any such thing. There’s no vantage point, he says. Instead, we are all in it together, tainted by the dynamic prejudices and preternatural relations his model insists upon us.

In other words, on one hand, truth and power exist in a harmonious state whilst, on the other, they’re also busy resolving the innumerable distinctions and differences that exist between them.

Foucault was content to live with this type of outrageous dissonance. He was known for his diligence and eye for detail but he could be very erratic with those unable to match his speed of thought. However, this dissonance was often a ‘McGuffin’* too far even for his most ardent supporters.

Nancy Fraser (1990), for example, treated Foucault’s account of truth–power as deeply historical. It was something she could look back on and examine fruitfully with perspective but she couldn’t see how his domain both allowed for and denied the existence of competing regimes.

Her solution was to invent something called perspectival dualism. This recognised we were inside regimes but still had just enough agency to occupy marginal positions amongst them, places from which we could criticise the dominant truths we are reacting against.

Ian Hacking (1999) leaned instead into Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ method, liking how specific ‘styles of reasoning’, such as highly positivist explanations of statistical probability or even the scientific method itself, create their own truths as logical consequences or constructions.

Foucault’s paradox was the price we had to pay for all the good stuff his theories otherwise came with. Hacking stressed that we don’t need a universal standpoint to compare regimes, only a willingness to trace how each constructs reality or displaces rivals.

Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982) stressed that Foucault’s project was not about solving the paradox on which it was built but establishing a way to inhabit it. Foucault’s ‘genealogy’, his analytical style, serves us well because it’s a means to destabilise the assumption that truth is timeless and reliable.

The ambiguity that we are fixated on, that of being inside a single power construct yet able to write about its multiplicity, is a deliberate methodological stance, not a flaw to be fixed somehow.

This sort of response is the intellectual equivalent of ‘get a life will you!’ or ‘don’t stress the small stuff.’ Yet, it is some ‘stuff’ and some ‘small’. It has the character of a ‘fingers-in-the-ear apologetic’. It’s done little to stabilise Foucault’s apparent logical fallacies. He remains though perhaps the biggest of the big hitters when it comes to trying to describe what power is or does.

So how does the power-medium deal with this type of ‘don’t look too deeply please’ logic? Well, simply. It remains broadly unaffected by such arguments because it doesn’t rely on them to do its job.

This is because its purpose is to provide a pathway not simply to resolution but also to understanding, one capable of allowing for the contingent nature of any power settlements or descriptions.

Indeed, duality is important to the power-medium as it shows important sites of contention and negotiation and how competing positions might be identified or managed through their socialisation.

If Foucault’s model risks collapsing into paradox, then Habermas’ alternative is vulnerable to a simpler but different kind of critique.

Post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida (1982) challenge Habermas’ categorical yearning for a separation between truth and power. Derrida argued instead that meaningful communication must always be affected by power asymmetries and linguistic instability. There’s just no way around it.

He believed that language itself is shaped by something he labelled ‘differance’. Lovers of ‘franglais’ will already know that this translates as ‘difference’ but it’s actually more of a catch-all phrase that brings into play matters with deferred or contextually emergent meanings.

This sounds complicated but it mainly refers to the sort of unavoidable ambiguities or ‘gotchas’ that undermine the possibility of something purely neutral or power-free occurring in the way we choose to talk and listen to each other.

The very existence of the power-medium means that what one person takes from a word, what it conjures or represents, is different from what another might take. This establishes the existence of the rules of thought or the conceptual obligations placed on us and which generate fuzziness or interference as a result.

Habermas’s demarcation of ‘communicative rationality’, his idea of truth living in a free state outside of power, is also seen as highly utopian and overly abstract. Critics argue it overlooks the entrenched structural inequalities of social life, particularly those of gender, race, and class.

These skew even-handed participation in discourse and distort what might look like consensus or valid opinion. If we fail to engage with these embedded power relations, ironically the very essence of Foucault’s multiplicity, the communicative ideal of which Habermas is so proud, risks obscuring how domination works.

Duality is accepted as a form of negotiation within the power-medium. It delineates the boundaries, strengths and weaknesses of different claims and requires them to justify their place as a fixed or accepted reasoning, even inside a world of material injustice or, as in this case, one dealing specifically with power.

The opposing fears, contradictions and overlaps laid bare by power-duality seem to be of most concern to political theorists. Chantal Mouffe (2000) emphasised how conflict and dissent are intrinsic to democratic life, not aberrations within it.

We must confront that which is contrary to our beliefs and values directly because this is a consequence of politics, it is the challenge put to us by the power-medium. By claiming a route to rational consensus, Habermas’ model may inadvertently suppress legitimate contest in favour of a superficial or unachievable stability.

If ‘communicative action’ is shown to have distortions like this in its make-up then, as an ideal, it should be obliged to offer up an ’equaliser’. This might be something able to intervene to restore rational discourse when too many hidden weights and magnets force things off course (Flyvbjerg). Habermas was never really interested in doing any such thing.

So, we are left with two versions of power that defy logic as well as simple explanation. Capable of confusing or settling both sides of an argument that, seemingly, can never be resolved.

Contemporary sociologists are often accused of dismissing the idea of ‘grand theory’, something capable of explaining convincingly the matters which affect us all regardless of our nationality, ethnicity, wealth or where we live. Given our experiences of power so far, the insurmountable problems we encounter when we ask ‘what is truth,’ it’s easy to see why this might be the case.

Yet, we should not be so quick to retire from our search for power. We might be crawling to a useful understanding of power. Indeed, part three of this series might convince you of this.

References:

Derrida, J. 1982. ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–28.

Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Flyvbjerg, B. 1998. ‘Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for civil society?’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 92, pp. 1–33. DOI: 10.3167/004058198782485513.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester.

Fraser, N. 1990 ‘Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, Social Text, 25/26, pp. 56–80.

Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hacking, I. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Note * McGuffin. This is a plot device in film and literature that serves as a catalyst for the action, motivating the characters or driving the narrative forward. It’s been in use for nearly 100 years. It can mean an object of some sort but it might be an event that the characters have to deal with. It’s generally insignificant in itself. The word was popularised by filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock but he did not originate the term. This honour goes to his friend, Scottish screenwriter Angus MacPhail. The use of McGuffin today remains the same as it was in the 1940s and 50s when Hitchcock was making it more commonplace. Examples of MacGuffins in film making include a briefcase in Pulp Fiction and the treasure in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Image: SHVETS

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It’s too easy to picture power only as domination, as something that allows an Emperor or a President to give commands or to keep other people in their place. Indeed, classical sociology often sees coercion as the abiding intention of power, as its centrality, as something imposed (Weber) even when it isn’t noticed as this (Lukes).

Put simply, this gives it the capacity to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t (Dahl). As a result, we tend to ignore the fact that it actually comes in many more varieties than this. Indeed, power mostly isn’t domination or coercion and as compelling as their hold on us feels, they paint only one representation of power.

We are constrained too by caprice, the indifference of surveillance and the nuances of custom. We are imposed on by the needs of systems, responsibilities and services. We are held in check by rules, language and knowledge. We must keep promises, honour debts and forget trespasses.

All involve the giving and taking of power. As a result, most modern accounts have very different takes on power or see very different reasoning at work. These allow power to have hidden purposes, covert contrivances and unthinking and incalculable consequences.

Power becomes very complicated, consisting of a number of moving parts. We’ve talked before about the power-medium, a place where our thoughts and desires become socialised. But there’s also another issue at work here which makes all this even more befuddling. It’s that power might be exclusively one thing but exclusively not this at the same time!

This is a little bonkers when you think about it. After all, this is not a description of contradiction where we might recognise an opposing force or opinion and react to it. Instead, it’s asking us to deny the existence of something even when the rules of logic and reason that have lead us to that conclusion also say it still exists.

You may be feeling slightly dizzy at this point or be about to give up. Don’t. Indeed, many philosophers and sociologists believe such things are possible because power operates with duality. This is not easy to explain but I will have a go.

We can probably accept that power will assert, or always involve, the uptake of truth, no matter how this truth is reasoned, formed, fabricated or evolved. This is the moment when statements, claims, ideas or descriptions become understandable or stimulate actions consistent with this.

If this moment exists, so too must the moment before it, when understanding or action wasn’t required. It’s the moment when power and truth haven’t decided the direction in which they’re going. It’s where power-truth has a choice, operating with options, with possibility but no effect. It might become something but in that moment we cannot discern what this will be. In other words, it has a duality.

The idea of duality is not completely deranged. We have accepted its existence in physics for knocking on a hundred years or so*. It’s the view that some things only qualify as existence when they obtain a fixed state. Before that, they have a ‘superposition’, no single state but with the potential to become any one of many. This fixed state only forms if we look to see if it’s there.

Similarly, power-truth is always around us, ready to do what it’ll end up doing. We only become aware of its presence when this shows as influence or effect, perhaps changing the trajectory and potential of something else. Before this, it was in a ‘superposition’, capable of showing up anywhere in our power universe.

In sociology, this idea of power-duality has been developed somewhat. It emerges in many places, more than can be reasonably acknowledged here, but these can be illustrated to some degree by the opposing places formed by Michel Foucault’s belief that power and knowledge are intertwined as truth (1980) and Jürgen Habermas’ thoughts on what he called ‘communicative action’ (1984).

These conjure worlds dominated by two very different types of reasoning. We’re free to select either, of course, depending on what suits us best but, plot spoiler, neither really resolves the tension between power and truth and nothing they say reduces the arena in which the power-medium operates, the place where power-duality is resolved into one state.

Both of these modern-ish accounts argue, in contrasting ways, that what counts as knowledge is shaped by power and its relations. However, they then go on to explore very different ground. Summarising the thoughts of two of sociology’s most influential thinkers is dangerous territory but worth travelling to.

Foucault argued that truth can never be neutral and is bound instead to what he called ‘regimes’ of authority. Note the plural. These seem to operate in an homogenous as well as interconnected fashion at the same time. In other words with a duality. Power and truth become inseparable, leading to both intended as well as unintended systems of advantage and disbenefit.

This is a little like the world’s most potent energy drink, consisting of parts so compromised by the presence of each other that they’ve become indistinguishable. We are shown the recipe on the label, we know its parts exist separately, but we can’t really identify the ingredients as we drink what they’ve become.

Habermas (1984) saw truth not as ‘constitutive’ in this way or as completely integrated with power but as something outside of it. Truth was a product of the rational, achieved through non-prejudicial discussion working under conditions of ideal speech.

He thought that partiality and deception existed but only as lies, ignorance or misinformation. These acted as distortions or imperfections in the way truth is represented.

On the one hand, this seems simple with no duality in sight but, on the other, he felt too that what we recognise as ‘perfect’ truth is actually shaped by society and that power settles this for us. Therefore, power and truth must have duality, as with both a potential to emerge in opposing forms as well as a single rational or preferred existence.

Here, truth is a bit like a verdict reached in court. Everyone can speak, the rules are impartial and the strongest argument wins. Yet the court’s rules of evidence and reasoning were written and agreed by people beforehand so the system that decides the truth remains a product of any imperfection this brings.

In other words, there must be plenty of duality about still, plenty of potential for different claims to truth to exist at the same time.

Foucault and Habermas both seem to confirm the presence of a power-duality even though neither really makes this claim. Indeed, they largely argue the opposite. Foucault says power and truth are the same thing, beyond separation. Habermas says that truth exists separately from power.

Foucault contradicts himself when he recognises a place for competing regimes of power because these are plural and therefore by definition, not the same. Habermas contradicts himself when he says logic and discussion determine truth because its different states, even its ideal form, are pre-configured by power.

Habermas’ ideas honour a place for reason in truth. We must thank him for this. They permit us the ability to distinguish it from delusion or misrepresentation regardless of when or where it was encountered. This makes discourse heroic, capable of filtering and sanitising that which is somehow wrong.

If we talk and listen to each other in an honest and balanced way, we can protect ourselves from the strangely too convenient, wholly subjective or selectively destructive. He re-establishes truth as objective and a matter capable of withstanding any power deployed to protect or corrupt it.

However, he also requires ‘truth’ to operate in a single state. In other words, we have to know what something is if we want to argue about it. This must leave behind a previous superposition, a place where it had only the potential to be what it eventually became. Power here is not an intrusion upon truth but the means through which it can be known, formed into a discrete entity, in the Habermas universe.

Foucault was strangely silent on the implications of superposition and a great deal of his thinking on this comes to us via the rationalisations of others. On the one hand, his writings see truth and power as different expressions of the same force meaning he might seem to accept duality. Yet, he also remained anxious to establish power and truth as existing without distinction, meaning he was rejecting the idea that they could be two things at once.

Foucault saw truth as made in the moment of expression, as an avatar for a power that establishes meaning. This need not be directed or intended but truth and power work hand-in-hand as partners, products of trajectory and consequence as much as anything else. This sounds a little like the power-medium but don’t be fooled by this.

These dualities, superpositions, are accommodated within the power-medium because it allows for their socialisation, as matters accepted by and negotiated within culture and social practice. This means power and truth are never settled. They are always in the process of change.

The Foucault account tends to nullify or constrain the power-medium. This is probably wise but only in the sense that it should not be mistaken for truth or knowledge. Instead, it is the means through which these become a single state. It is the door, the force, through which the potential of superposition resolves itself into substance, something meaningful.

The power-medium accepts duality, is fuelled by it. It’s capable of generating the homogeneity demanded by Foucault whilst allowing the reason and logic central to Habermas’ search for rational effect. It resolves into specific entities all that is formed in the universe we know as society.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks. The bad news is that there are two more Substacks on this topic to come. Yes, I know. The world is a complicated place and is made more complicated every time we think about it. So, let me know what you think or even what’s stopping you from thinking. I’ll try to explain myself further.

References

Dahl, R.A. 1957. The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2(3), pp.201–215.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester.

Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Image: Ron Lach

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Note: * The term superposition has several different meanings in science. It was probably used first in geology by Nicolaus Steno in 1669 to describe how sedimentary rock forms in chronological layers or sequences. It was also adopted by Daniel Bernoulli in 1753 to illustrate the movement of vibrating particles. It’s probably best understood today in the context of quantum physics and was first proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1926. This tells us that a particle can operate in two states at the same time right up to the point it is measured or observed. It then collapses into a single state.

You might be interested in:

We must breathe: Power is the medium of social life

Doing is power: Let’s think about what that means

The necessity of power: How power recognises, reinforces and reacts to social life

The wind and the rain: To live socially is to live immersed with others. This makes power a little like the weather

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com