Power

[Scribbly]

Power is a subject which I've been studying a lot lately, as it is at the heart of two of my modules for my course, and has been a major topic of debate across all three years of my degree. It's also a subject that, despite being talked about a lot, I still don't feel very happy talking about. So, I figure, why not see what you guys think about power too, because hell it can't hurt to get more perspectives on it.

I think the major stumbling block for me is that power is often characterized as being split between structure and agency- the context that a person acts in, and the autonomy of a person. The implication is often that social structures, norms, values and so on have power over a person, and that people often do not have the power to act as they want because of those social structures.

Even attempts to bring it back to agency-centered approaches often seem, in my opinion, not to go far enough. The trouble is that in trying to talk about structures, power becomes something that 'just is'. Undoubtedly, people are effected by their upbringing, their background, and their relative position within society, I wouldn't argue that at all. What I would argue is that we can view these things as being important when we're talking about power. Power, to me, comes packaged with responsibility. If we're talking about power, we're talking about who we give blame or credit to for taking certain actions. If we accept that structures can have power, we are essentially shifting the responsibility from individuals, to nebulous social constructs.

I think the best example of this comes from Steven Lukes's work. He's often talked about as being an agency-centered theorist, but even in his own examples he seems to trip up over where blame should lie for the 'white flight' phenomena, he winds up putting the 'blame' for the situation back on structural issues which come about due to people following their own varied individual interests. Basically, that we can't hold anyone individually responsible for following the community, which seems utterly ridiculous to me.

Social constructs, from the law, to money, to norms and values are, essentially, socially constructed. They only have as much power as we, as individuals, allow them to have, and at the end of the day, individuals must be held responsible for their actions. In the banking crisis, for instance, it wasn't as though sub-prime mortgages simply sold themselves, or CDO's came into being of their own accord, individuals took the decisions every step of the way which led to the situation. They are responsible, they had the power, and they have to take the blame for it. By the same token, our elected representatives have the power to put in place safeguards to prevent it from happening again, and should they not do so, they must take the responsibility for that decision.

Power is, for me at least, something that people have, in a variety of different forms. Structural factors influence how they might choose to exercise that power, but it doesn't absolve them of the responsibility for doing so, and I believe it is within the ability of individuals to reform those structural factors should they choose to do so. Being able to appeal to structural factors is a useful tool for wriggling out of taking responsibility for ones actions, but at the end of the day, things don't just happen, and if your action or inaction led to an outcome, you must accept the responsibility for that, as you had the power to make it happen differently.

... does that make sense? Am I looking at this too simplistically or just stupidly?

[Cramulus]

I think I follow you.

I conceptualize things a little differently.. You draw a division between the agent and the "structure". It puts humans and their responsibility right at the crux of the matter, which is helpful to us here in the material world.

I see a bunch of nodes, nodes which represent different experiences, attitudes, ideas, events in history. (some might call these things Shrapnel, or Memes) They're all networked, all related to each other with varying degrees of strength.

That network exists inside the individual, pulling him and pushing him in different directions. Behavior emerges from the relationships between these nodes and the external environment.



If we zoom out a bit, we see the individual is just one node in a larger network. Depending on where and how far back we're zooming, you might see this larger network as a peer group, or an organization such as a company, country, or religion. Structurally, this network is very similar to the nodal network inside the individual's head. Depending on the relationships between its internal nodes, it also wants survival, money, publicity, compliments, etc etc.



When an individual has internalized part of the nodal network of another organization, it acts with some degree of that organization's "spirit". When you work for a company, that company's "DNA" determines a lot of your behavior. If you internalize the nodal network of a religion, you will tend to act in a way congruent with that religion. Some might say that the individual, the agent, has given up some of his agency and given power to the structure. I disagree, I don't think there was a core agent to begin with, a kernel of "free will" somewhere which is independent of these nodal networks. The individual is just another (smaller) nodal network!



The agent always holds the responsibility though. If you go cap a bunch of school children, you certainly can't say, "Oh, that wasn't me acting, I was merely an agent of all these cultural expressions of violence." Not any less than a good christian who makes a donation to charity can say "Oh don't thank me, it was the good will of christianity acting through me."

but we do have to acknowledge that these networks, these arrangements of ideas, once internalized, do affect human behavior. So they're not totally blameless non-entities. I believe they are actually other forms of organism with their own means of agency. They just don't have singular physical bodies in the same sense we do.

[Cain]

With Cramulus, I think both deserve blame.  To give an example, Nazism wasn't simply a load of individuals who all decided to act really badly at the same time.  There were structural events behind what happened, and while individual agents should be held accountable, there is a structural element at play too.

You may also want to problematise your conception of power somewhat.  In your piece above, I noted you treated power as a commodity or an attribute, as someone one possesses or doesn't.  It could be power is much more complex than that.  This may be of interest: http://ifile.it/yp3u0vj

[Scribbly]

Hmm... interesting ideas.

Thanks for the responses- I'm still thinking of how to respond properly but, one thought immediately occurs. This idea of internalized nodal networks is definitely an interesting one. Perhaps the room for individual agency is in the idea that we, as rational human beings, have the ability- and the responsibility- to choose which nodal networks to internalize. That is, different people select different groups and preferences to identify with for a variety of reasons (which we can see because if that wasn't the case, anyone with your background would be exactly the same as you, which certainly isn't my experience). So the process by which you choose which groups to identify with and which norms to internalize would be free will, or  . Probably not finished on that train of thought.

Thanks for the book, too, Cain. I've run across Foucault before, but not in any kind of detail. I'll have a closer look.

[Cain]

That's one of the better books on the topic.  Some are very, very bad.  You'll probably find some overlap between the book and what Cramulus says as well.  It's always good to challenge the basic assumptions of an argument though, and the conception of power is pretty iconoclastic way to do it.

[Captain Utopia]

"Free Will" could easily become its own topic, not least because many people can't help but freak out when you present them with arguments as to why it is an illusion.

But I'm going to go with perhaps an overly simplified version of power. It's held by those who determine which way to turn the steering wheel on whatever scale/vehicle you choose - from a single country to a chess-club AGM to the entire planet.

In terms of politics, we happily relinquish control because we believe that there is only one wheel of which we grant (temporary!) control to our elected leaders every few years. Whereas we are our own wheels, and we can turn any way we choose. In other words, while raw power is distributed between everyone, it's a sleight-of-mind to trick those people into believing that their "vote" doesn't count. We happily take our minds off our own wheels, go with whatever those leaders tell us the current flow is, and ascribe blame to a faceless crowd.

Example - the Iraq war - I believe it could have been averted if everyone against it had taken it to the wall, but we didn't and instead ramped up our hatred of the Bush cabal.

You could argue that being able to redirect raw power is itself a form of power.. but since that sort of political power can be vanquished with a single scandal, it seems a different variety than the power held by the vast general public who actually do the day-to-day work of getting things done.

[The Johnny]

I think the major stumbling block for me is that power is often characterized as being split between structure and agency- the context that a person acts in, and the autonomy of a person. The implication is often that social structures, norms, values and so on have power over a person, and that people often do not have the power to act as they want because of those social structures.

What you are saying is an institutional reductionism, so to speak.

Disregarding the paradigm you are utilizing, power can be exersiced by anyone, just to different degrees. The deal is that theres "consequences" to those "acts of power" based on the cultural context. One such act of power is killing, you can probably take most anyone and kill them, but then the State would hunt down the person responsable for it.

Power, to me, comes packaged with responsibility. If we're talking about power, we're talking about who we give blame or credit to for taking certain actions. If we accept that structures can have power, we are essentially shifting the responsibility from individuals, to nebulous social constructs.

Power packaged with responsibility? Thats just what its supposed to be, and what everyone buys into and upholds the current exploitation interactions.

Social constructs, from the law, to money, to norms and values are, essentially, socially constructed. They only have as much power as we, as individuals, allow them to have, and at the end of the day, individuals must be held responsible for their actions. In the banking crisis, for instance, it wasn't as though sub-prime mortgages simply sold themselves, or CDO's came into being of their own accord, individuals took the decisions every step of the way which led to the situation. They are responsible, they had the power, and they have to take the blame for it. By the same token, our elected representatives have the power to put in place safeguards to prevent it from happening again, and should they not do so, they must take the responsibility for that decision.

Power and choice? One can only choose to do what is within their reach of their power.

Power is, for me at least, something that people have, in a variety of different forms. Structural factors influence how they might choose to exercise that power, but it doesn't absolve them of the responsibility for doing so, and I believe it is within the ability of individuals to reform those structural factors should they choose to do so. Being able to appeal to structural factors is a useful tool for wriggling out of taking responsibility for ones actions, but at the end of the day, things don't just happen, and if your action or inaction led to an outcome, you must accept the responsibility for that, as you had the power to make it happen differently.

The deal is that the balance of power is soooo slanted. Using an everyday example of my own life: ive run into 2 teachers that deserve to be run out of their positions because of "unethical behaviour" such as picking favourites, having sex with students, changing the entire course we are learning and changing the educational methodology to inneficient techniques. I have tried to round up people to do something about it, but when only 3-4 people are willing to challenge this practices, theres not enough "power" to make the institutional machine respond.

Apathy = slanted balance of power = we all lose.

[The Johnny]

Methaporically speaking:

Institutions are rivers. You are standing beside a river with a paddle.

How much can you possibly change the course of the river with that stupid paddle?

[Cramulus]

Forgiveness for posting potentially tl;dr material, but I wanted to share a chapter from The Art of Memetics which talks about this elusive specter of agency.



The Art of Memetics: Chapter 2 - Agency in a Networked World

Agency, or free will as it is generally conceived, is not truly possible in a world constrained by biological and memetic evolution coupled as it is with constant cybernetic feedback.  The memebearers, us flesh and blood humans acting as repositories for these abstract bodies, are never wholly free in our actions or in control of our world and our selves.  What we find then is that free will is an omega point from which degrees of agency and control are divined in response to the question: To what degree does one have control of oneself given that the individual only exists in relation to a system?  And secondly, to what degree can an individual control a larger system given that there are other controlling factors?

This book explores these two questions.   The first steps then must be to increase our understanding of how these systems work.  We must examine how we are connected to them, what our inputs and outputs are.  We need to look at how we transform or affect the signal.  We need to watch the signals move through the system and see how they transform as they make their way back to us.

A useful understanding is that there are many subsystems, or circuits, within the overall system of the world.  There are many paths that a signal can take through these circuits either serially or concurrently.  The reactions to or transformations of our actions along these multiple pathways can either reinforce each other and increase the effects of our signals or conflict and decrease the effects. The greater the scope of our understanding the greater our ability to release signals that will be reinforced by more subsystems, and correspondingly the greater potential our actions can have toward manifesting change on the world. (Coming up in the appendix of this book we'll delineate specific ways to apply this theory.)Humans in general occupy a mesocosmic position with infinity spiraling out from our "existence as cross-roads." We occupy neither the infinitely small worlds barely detectable through the spyglasses of modern technology nor the astral spaces of dimensionality just barely sensed beyond p-brane theory and arcane mathematics.



Humanity exists between the neurological storms of consciousness and the meaty fleshy bodies that manifest our vital electrochemical fields.  We communicate through and have been conditioned by linguistic convention to look for agents and purposeful action in the world as a result of the behavior of others.

  A lot of that conditioning comes from highly perfected advertising techniques, and marketing is where persuasive and coercive communications hone their effectiveness. 

“A marketer is an artist in human souls.”
- Howard Bloom, The Pitch, Poker, and the Public


A simple psychological trick exists where if one is told two pieces of information separated by a 'but' one is more likely to remember the phrase after the 'but'.  The technique then, widely used by advertisers, is to raise a weak form of the objections to their message at the beginning and to answer with the message they intend to get across.  The purpose of this move is three-fold.  First, even if the marketer's answer would not pass muster rationally if the receiver of the message were to reflect upon it, this method of framing makes it more likely that people will accept the message without reflection.  Second, if the marketer had not raised and then answered the objections, people would likely encounter the objections later.  As a result, objections would be left as the stronger signal.  Third, and most importantly for the marketer, the marketer now gets to frame the debate in terms that bias reaction towards the outcomes they are after.

Knowing there are these kinds of framing techniques naturally raises the specter of agency.  This idea of agency, as already noted, is an illusion.  Perhaps instead look to the ongoing results of the system, the structure, which people are embedded within.  Picture a higher world of linguistic and iconographic interaction, and a lower world of latent archetypes, trends, and social mores, with a middle world between these two, influenced by and influencing the integrity of patterns.  These chains of influence can be modeled as a cybernetic network grafted into the human world, between these layers of different kinds of spaces. This middle world of humanity can be described in many different ways, but the result is that people are all parts in this larger system and are also themselves made up of parts.  No one part of any cybernetic system can control the whole of the system, nor can it fully control itself.  The action of every component of the system is constrained by the circuit of which it is a part.  If memes exist in the cyberspace of our collective minds then we should next look to this hardware that runs this cyberspace. Westerners live awash in memetic content.  We are exposed to a multiplicity of contradictory memes on every facet of our daily lives.  How then do we do anything, come to any decision regarding a course of action?

Traditionally, at least, the answer to this question has been that we consciously decide based on the merits of a particular instance.  Sadly, this appears to be flawed.  We are largely unaware of the instruction we've received from all of the open channels.  Additionally some researchers have proven that action occurs prior to thought, that we carry out rote responses at times a full half-second prior to our minds making a decision in the form of measurable thought energy in the brain. However, the percentage of affect of any given component within a cybernetic system can shift over time as the results of its contributions come back to it over the successive iterations of the feedback loop.   Thanks to the Internet, elements of this feedback loop in relation to the human experience have been exponentially accelerated, making the world infinitely more reactive than it has ever been historically. 

[Captain Utopia]

Methaporically speaking:

Institutions are rivers. You are standing beside a river with a paddle.

How much can you possibly change the course of the river with that stupid paddle?

The problem I have with that metaphor is that institutions rely upon individuals continuing to uphold them - having 3-4 people object to a large institution will be ineffective unless they carry a message powerful enough to resonate with enough of the other individuals.

The problem, perhaps, is that few wish to open their eyes to face the responsibility they hold and instead use the institution as a moral shelter.

[Captain Utopia]

Forgiveness for posting potentially tl;dr material, but I wanted to share a chapter from The Art of Memetics which talks about this elusive specter of agency.

Ooh - thanks for the link! Awesome excerpt.

[Telarus]

Don't have much to add right now except . Good conversation so far.

[Scribbly]

Definitely lots of interesting stuff here. Looks like I'm going to have to add The Art of Memetics to my reading list, too- if only to try and be prepared to argue against it.

It seems to me that a lot of the difficulty in pinning down power comes from the ambiguous nature of the language itself. Cain is right to point out that I'm still working from a description of power which sees it as something which some people have and use over others. Power being concentrated in the hands of individuals rather than being a dispersed network of power relations. That might be too simplistic.

"Free Will" could easily become its own topic, not least because many people can't help but freak out when you present them with arguments as to why it is an illusion.

But I'm going to go with perhaps an overly simplified version of power. It's held by those who determine which way to turn the steering wheel on whatever scale/vehicle you choose - from a single country to a chess-club AGM to the entire planet.

In terms of politics, we happily relinquish control because we believe that there is only one wheel of which we grant (temporary!) control to our elected leaders every few years. Whereas we are our own wheels, and we can turn any way we choose. In other words, while raw power is distributed between everyone, it's a sleight-of-mind to trick those people into believing that their "vote" doesn't count. We happily take our minds off our own wheels, go with whatever those leaders tell us the current flow is, and ascribe blame to a faceless crowd.

Example - the Iraq war - I believe it could have been averted if everyone against it had taken it to the wall, but we didn't and instead ramped up our hatred of the Bush cabal.

You could argue that being able to redirect raw power is itself a form of power.. but since that sort of political power can be vanquished with a single scandal, it seems a different variety than the power held by the vast general public who actually do the day-to-day work of getting things done.

Well, first up, over here (UK) at least we had some of the biggest protest marches in history against the Iraq war, so I'm not sure how much further we could have gone in taking it to the wall other than throwing molotov cocktails around.

Your definition is actually very similar to the position I was trying to take, though. The trouble with it is that it breaks down at an individual level. Presuming that we say that power is in the hands of the people who direct something, logic dictates that you take responsibility for your own life, the choices that you make from day to day- the decision whether or not to 'go to the wall' or similar- are in your hands.

However, take the example of a poor child growing up in a bad neighbourhood, with a poor education and so on... to what extent can they be said to have had power over the course of their life, without the opportunities that are necessary to do otherwise? Do they still have power, or has 'the system' robbed them of that?

What you are saying is an institutional reductionism, so to speak.

Disregarding the paradigm you are utilizing, power can be exercised by anyone, just to different degrees. The deal is that theres "consequences" to those "acts of power" based on the cultural context. One such act of power is killing, you can probably take most anyone and kill them, but then the State would hunt down the person responsible for it.

This is where the problem of language starts to come into it. Power could be argued to be about legitimacy, I think, and that could be a useful distinction to make. The ability to make someone act in a way they would not have done otherwise, with some legitimate authority behind it.

Violence is an interesting case anyway, as the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of it. The question is whether other acts of violence should be characterized as acts of power, or acts of coercion. In many ways, this example is actually highlighting one of the things I find unpersuasive about the structural conception of power- it isn't absolute, at all. One of the key values that culture tries to throw at us from a very early age is the idea that violence is wrong (unless sanctioned by the state), and yet the world is full of violent people and behaviour.

Power packaged with responsibility? That's just what its supposed to be, and what everyone buys into and upholds the current exploitation interactions.

It is very common sense to assume that with an exercise of power comes the necessity to take responsibility for it. This is especially true if you take a definition of power which is simply along the lines that to exercise power is to cause someone to act in a way which they would otherwise not have acted were it not for the interference. Just because it is a commonly held view, however, does not mean that it is wrong.

Power and choice? One can only choose to do what is within their reach of their power.

But what does that statement mean? Are we reducing power to options?

The deal is that the balance of power is soooo slanted. Using an everyday example of my own life: ive run into 2 teachers that deserve to be run out of their positions because of "unethical behaviour" such as picking favourites, having sex with students, changing the entire course we are learning and changing the educational methodology to inneficient techniques. I have tried to round up people to do something about it, but when only 3-4 people are willing to challenge this practices, theres not enough "power" to make the institutional machine respond.

Apathy = slanted balance of power = we all lose.

Perhaps you are looking at your situation in the wrong way, if I can be so bold as to say that. You are looking at the official framework that they are putting you in and trying to influence that.

This is what I mean when I say that I think structures are a way for people to escape taking responsibility for their decisions. Presumably, these teachers have bosses. It doesn't matter if only 3 or 4 of you are motivated enough to try and do something about it, rather than working within the 'official' framework of the system, you should be going to the top and trying to influence those individuals into taking care of the problem. The bosses of those teachers are the ones who have the power to do something about it, not the students, and therefore, they are the ones who need to take responsibility for allowing corrupt practices to go on; they are the ones who can solve the situation, regardless of how much the people at the bottom care.

Methaporically speaking:

Institutions are rivers. You are standing beside a river with a paddle.

How much can you possibly change the course of the river with that stupid paddle?

As FP says, institutions are only as powerful as people allow them to be. They are constituted by individuals. Even institutions as powerful and entrenched as the government itself; the social laws we make don't enforce themselves, and if nobody is willing to force the institutions to do what they were set up to do, nothing happens.

It'd be more fitting to say that an institution is like a gun. It is only when people pick it up and start waving it around that we need to worry.

Fascinating Excerpt

Very interesting... definitely, I'm just not sure how much I can agree with it.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I think the idea laid out is a very interesting one, but, I have a real problem with this concept that 'memes' or structures or norms or whatever you want to call them are in any meaningful sense alive. I especially have trouble with any concept which dehumanizes people as much as these ideas seem to.

I cannot accept that human beings are essentially fleshy robots programmed by their society, and nothing else. I can accept that these factors have some influence over people, I cannot accept that they have absolute influence over individuals. That takes it one step beyond what I can see as plausible. If we are nothing more than a point where various ideas have converged to take form, how can you explain individual preferences, personality and creativity? Someone, after all, created these norms, values and ideas. They did not spring out of the ether.

... or maybe they did. I definitely need to get hold of that book and see what they say.

[Cain]

One of Anthony Gidden's books (cant remember precisely which) has a good take on how agency and structures mutually affect each other.  Individuals affect structures and vice-versa, so they are co-determinating.  Actually, now I think of it, Nicolas Onuf might have something to say on the subject too.  Back in a bit with citations.

[The Johnny]

It seems to me that a lot of the difficulty in pinning down power comes from the ambiguous nature of the language itself.

Yes, but i dont think its too hard to be overcome. "Power: 2. (uncountable) Control and influence over another entity and its actions."1.

Well, first up, over here (UK) at least we had some of the biggest protest marches in history against the Iraq war, so I'm not sure how much further we could have gone in taking it to the wall other than throwing molotov cocktails around.

Perhaps its what it actually needed to be done? Rhetoric only goes so far, and public mobilizations involve economic consequences, that a government can overlook for a certain period of time because the masses dont have the logistics to keep it up for too long to really become threatening to the overall economy.

Power and choice? One can only choose to do what is within their reach of their power.

But what does that statement mean? Are we reducing power to options?

Maybe it could be done. If you dont have the power to influence something, then you dont have power over it. Which in my opinion is never true; one can influence always even if the influence exerted is mediocre and disregardable. Politically speaking.

The deal is that the balance of power is soooo slanted. Using an everyday example of my own life: ive run into 2 teachers that deserve to be run out of their positions because of "unethical behaviour" such as picking favourites, having sex with students, changing the entire course we are learning and changing the educational methodology to inneficient techniques. I have tried to round up people to do something about it, but when only 3-4 people are willing to challenge this practices, theres not enough "power" to make the institutional machine respond.

Apathy = slanted balance of power = we all lose.

Perhaps you are looking at your situation in the wrong way, if I can be so bold as to say that. You are looking at the official framework that they are putting you in and trying to influence that.

This is what I mean when I say that I think structures are a way for people to escape taking responsibility for their decisions. Presumably, these teachers have bosses. It doesn't matter if only 3 or 4 of you are motivated enough to try and do something about it, rather than working within the 'official' framework of the system, you should be going to the top and trying to influence those individuals into taking care of the problem. The bosses of those teachers are the ones who have the power to do something about it, not the students, and therefore, they are the ones who need to take responsibility for allowing corrupt practices to go on; they are the ones who can solve the situation, regardless of how much the people at the bottom care.

Dont you think that the bosses of these teachers are within the "official framework"? Its also an issue about the bureaucratic system in place in which teachers hold their position by "points" by diplomas of courses taken, courses given, and their education itself. To really make anything about it, im talking of some 50 people banding together id say, which is not gonna happen. Add the Mexican corruption to the mix and now its never gonna happen. Here i would call for semantics, i guess my first attempt thru the official means failed and the banding together of 50 people would still be official, because it would be in corcondance to bring the student-representatives of the socials division to take it to a higher "school court" so to speak. Its hard to explain.

Methaporically speaking:

Institutions are rivers. You are standing beside a river with a paddle.

How much can you possibly change the course of the river with that stupid paddle?

As FP says, institutions are only as powerful as people allow them to be. They are constituted by individuals. Even institutions as powerful and entrenched as the government itself; the social laws we make don't enforce themselves, and if nobody is willing to force the institutions to do what they were set up to do, nothing happens.

My stupid metaphor was to portray that usually against the established institution one cannot do much individually, but when enough people get together they can. Just nevermind it.

Fascinating Excerpt

I cannot accept that human beings are essentially fleshy robots programmed by their society, and nothing else. I can accept that these factors have some influence over people, I cannot accept that they have absolute influence over individuals. That takes it one step beyond what I can see as plausible. If we are nothing more than a point where various ideas have converged to take form, how can you explain individual preferences, personality and creativity? Someone, after all, created these norms, values and ideas. They did not spring out of the ether. [/quote]

Subjectivity in the individual (preferences, personality, etc) are molded initially by family, family which itself is influenced by society. Genes and circustances play a part too. Id say that pretty much sums it up.

1. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power)