The choreography of power

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.ReferencesArendt, 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 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

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’.ReferencesArendt, 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.ReferencesGiddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.Image: SHEVTS 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

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 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

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.ReferencesDahl, 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 LachThanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.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 lifeDoing is power: Let’s think about what that meansThe necessity of power: How power recognises, reinforces and reacts to social lifeThe 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

Most of us still think of truth as something like reason or logic, as derived from a reality that sits outside of the social hurly-burly. It’s something solid and consistent. It can’t be challenged because it must always be the case regardless of the circumstances. The problem here is that nothing could be further from the … well … truth.Even a cursory review of history, such as the one we took last time, shows truth as malleable. It never sits still and is always on the move. It’s linked to where we live, what we experience and what culture and ideology are telling us. It’s also more than one state, meshed together, one where power, truth and knowledge operate in partnership, dependent on each other.Is truth temporary?In general terms, history tells of an increasingly productive but highly potent power-truth, two separate things that always work together. Over the years, it has given us greater knowledge about the world but we’ve had to accept more invasive and strictly policed levers of control and compliance in order to get it. No, it’s not always clear who the gatekeepers and controllers of this might be. Now, modern society seems to be asking us to add ‘information’ to our power-truth-knowledge relationship. This is something less than knowledge, un-purposed data that derives meaning only from the context or interpretation placed on it and therefore capable of supporting contrary ideas in the same moment. Together, the coming together of these four different things is making social life very complicated indeed.Regardless of how these things are joined or even if they’re not, it would certainly seem logical for any emerging construction of truth to continue to ensure power retains the capacity to change opinions, formulate purposes and reveal preferred or selected consequences. At the very least, there’s money to be made here.Whatever is going on makes power ubiquitous but also very opaque or covert. The power-truth partnership operates within the power-medium. This means it does try to show us who the bad guys are but it often doesn’t give us much of substance to pin on them. This is because it seems to work with what experts call ‘diffuse accountability’. In other words, it acquires its value or potency from a variety of sources and it leverages control through highly networked, rapidly formed, and equally rapidly dissolved mechanics and outputs.Power can then make some truth temporary, something reliable or useful only in the moment and not necessarily in the next.Truth is painfulWe are seeing the importance in discourse of networks and digitised relationships and associations. These are complex and more difficult to spot than we sometimes imagine but we can think of them perhaps as those enabled by X, Instagram or Facebook. These technologies have great power.They use information currencies in ways that are extremely transient or nascent. On the one hand, they work algorithmically to satisfy our impulses and instincts but, on the other, they’re still the go-to entry point for many making more studious or thoughtful enquiries about the world around us. This allows us to interrogate the power-truth relationship in the belief it’s something reasonable and dependable even when it offers a place too for the most fanciful or objectionable claims.Indeed, these opposites are permitted to account for themselves on equal terms. It’s ‘us’ who must do the work needed to test their veracity, repeatability and value. Many networked systems don’t offer this any more.Most of us seem to think that this extra work is too much trouble. We’re told that answers to society’s most challenging questions are reducible to 280 characters and that the substance of these can be verified simply by the quantity of screen impressions or the likes generated by the page we’re looking at.All truths are presented as probabilities with identical degrees of significance. The power-truth arrangement tells us we should be capable of understanding social order, ecology or neuroscience at the touch of a button when real understanding is actually more dependent on the places we go searching for it and the amount of time we spend there.Comte’s positivism (1848), his faith in the scientific method, has always put this type of effort, the discomfort of complexity, above the beguiling reassurance of the simplistic and this remains well justified today. Science has never been so nuanced, interconnected, ambiguous or open-ended or less like simple answers or common sense.Truth emerges ‘before our very eyes’Our relationship to the power-truth partnership is now increasingly tethered to modern technologies that value these highly distributed relations. It’s an arrangement that has no central order or single controlling lever but where patterns seem to appear from the interactions created within the whole.Power here lies in the capacity to identify, connect, filter and navigate these vast relational webs and the currents they afford. Truth is what emerges from these patterns of connection and interaction and it forms in a state first that is more probabilistic than absolute. These might be individual encounters or a small collection of them. They are likely to have little intrinsic power on their own and they’re often no more than fleeting, sometimes little more than imagined.Truth circulating within networked technologies becomes opportunistic, capable of rapid change and reformulation, pulled towards matters of greater density, and power is access to what these more easily designated ‘mini-truths’ can be shaped to represent or suggest. This shifts our power-truth-knowledge-information concoction from control, discipline and prediction to something like capacity for adaptation, resilience, and hitting small but multiple targets.We may be moving from a modernist idea of truth as stable, controllable and universal to a late-modern or post-digital idea of truth as something emergent, contingent and negotiated across divergent and complex networks. This poses new difficulties and uncomfortable consequences, ones we are yet to get to grips with fully or even acknowledge in many instances.Truth has realityAt the moment, we may still feel power is aligned to forms of objective knowledge, positivism, and reliable and repeatable prediction. We should not be complacent about this nor let it go without a fight, and we’re certainly in one.This is because our systems and technologies of knowledge now allow subjective or untested experiences to represent themselves as order even when they are no more than a sort of highly isolated, dissonant, rare, significantly prejudicial or almost meaninglessly atomised interpretation of a singular reality.This micro or personalised power, which in the past would’ve been filtered from discourse by the reach of expert curation or throttled at birth by the weight and tests of reliable study, can now be easily identified, utilised rapidly, commodified and shared.At any point after this, this singular truth can be more easily adopted and exploited through the power-medium, presenting itself as valid even when it is no more than momentary, incapable of proof and even when modernist forms of ‘truth’ state it actually has no sense or persistent veracity.Truth is balanceHistory tells us that the ‘enlightenment’ notion of truth gave us clarity and universality but often erased complexity when it did so. The systems era gave coherence and expanded explanatory power but often imposed rigid controls that constrained useful relativism or difference. The information era offered improved efficiency and prediction but tended to show dissonance as no more than echos or noise in the machine. More recently, the idea of emerging networks and complexity offers us all greater flexibility and inclusiveness but currently risks relativism and instability.The form of truth we too often adopt today, it appears, seems to be less about a carefully consolidated, aggregated and authoritative account. Instead, it is a product of divergence, multiplicity and loosely collectivised contradictions. It is a series of wayward iso-facts. It is not treated as complete ignorance or prejudice because it can be validated via technologies capable of curating a supportive reaction in compelling quantity, even when it is nothing more than subjective or individual experience.Yet, this does not force us to accept it, to make truth somehow more capricious, shifting, rudderless or regressive. Truth remains repeatable, so that the more remarkable a claim, the more its truth must be tested and shown to prevail (Truzzi).In the digital arena, it is vital that truth remains what is vigorous and sturdy, what succeeds across contexts. It is not our instincts, fears, lusts or applause and it is certainly not the capacity to express or corral these into a single, universally expressive moment across many people despite what our technologies can deliver.Truth must survive multiple perspectives, multiple data streams and multiple scales. It can be electrifying but it’s usually slow, incremental, diverse and demanding. We have to ask if we want our truth to become less like a noun, a fixed object, and more like a verb, acting relative to different states and conditions.It’s probably useful for it to be a bit of both and perhaps it’s important to allow this. The point is that we can’t discard one simply to allow the other to prevail.Truth is never satisfyingWe might be best minded then to think of truth today as something that’s resilient to circumstances. Truths are not the eternal and unquestionable categories of old but designs robust enough to persist across different sites of analysis and negotiation in the power-medium.We’re shifting from truth as a fixed order or highly managed system to truth as circulating information with an emergent property of objective value to us. It is the speed and significance of this emergence we must worry about, testing this and being watchful until reliability is established.Such a shift reflects not so much a change in our ontological preferences but a reconfiguration of how power-medium shapes what humans count as true in the first place and probably always have done.This will not be an easy transition for those of us who disdain what is no more than localised, aberrant, opinionated or self-reverential. Yet, we must learn to tolerate this as the flotsam and jetsam of the currents and energies we wish to examine and rely on.Neither will it suit those who demand instant clarity. They must learn anew the value of expertise and critical thinking and accept complexity as the hallmark of reality. They must tolerate the never truly satisfying presence of ambiguity and uncertainty.Perhaps it is this which the power-medium is trying to reveal to us.ReferencesComte, A. 1848. A General View of Positivism. Translated by J. H. Bridges. London: Trübner and Co. (Reprinted 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Truzzi, M. 1978. ‘On the extraordinary: An attempt at clarification’, Zetetic Scholar, 1(1), pp. 11–19.Image: Brett JordanThanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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

Do you enjoy thinking about the big questions in life? What are we here for? What’s the point of it all? Is this all just a simulation? You know, that sort of thing.Most of us too often skip rapidly to the end here, rushing to whatever conclusion we come to without asking ourselves the most important question of all: how will I recognise truth when I come across it?There are experts around to help us of course and they’ve come up with a whole galaxy of ways to see the universe, depending on the truth we’re most comfortable with, how we get the knowledge that works with it and the way we go about finding things out.However, they mainly talk about two opposing ideas: ‘realism’ and ‘constructivism’. The first sees truth as something sent to us from outside of the universe, another place, which we then discover. The second makes it something we construct to help us solve problems and make sense of the world we encounter.The first brings us coherence, correcting our indiscipline and fancies. The second asks us to work coherently as we muddle through it all. The arguments for each of these very different ideas are pretty compelling and will keep turning you around until you’re dizzy if you let them. So don’t worry too much about the details here.There’s only one thing you need to remember at this point. Regardless of which option you go for, there can be no truth without the power to decide the route you take to reach it.This relationship, between choice and truth, remains potent, dynamic, alternating, one of moving goalposts, shifting definitions, and emerging exceptions as the conditions and contingencies of time dictate. Indeed, history shows this somewhat repeatedly and clearly (Carter).Truth must be the ‘real world’In the earliest recorded societies, truth was not the abstract matter we believe it is today but a narrative form of lived experience, an expression of the ‘real’ world (Vansina). Our understanding of this world was not always clear. Cosmologies, myths and ritual performances functioned as both explanations of everything that surrounds us and the preferred way to social order.Truth was inseparable from power because it permitted cohesion, a coming together, a sharing of bonds and the forming of something better than isolation. Other people became the means through which reality was established, the verification of something more than our own personal imagination, fear or confusion. This bound communities through shared stories of origin and destiny. To question truth was to risk exclusion from these sources of validity and protection. One’s belonging, indeed life or very sanity, hinged on reaffirming, living ‘true’ to, this joint narrative.In this sense, truth was not tested against critical criteria, objective tests we could all sign-up to, but lived through ritual, embedded in a collective memory and enforced by custom.Truth is faithAs human communities formed, larger collectives stratified, and more sophisticated forms of association and compliance (Service) were developed. The mythologies of the past became strained, wayward, viewed as unregulated or unresponsive to the surveillance needed to safeguard social cohesion.Truth as power became increasingly anchored instead to a more direct, pervasive and supernatural observation and sanction. Kingship, priesthoods, and religious law claimed authority by aligning with this divine order and approval.Truth was revealed as the word of gods or the embodiment of cosmic balance. Power here could then become exercised as legitimation. Rulers could govern because their authority expressed the divine will of our supernatural overlords.The truth–power nexus took on an institutional character, visible in temples, priestly direction and the intertwining of sacred texts within legal codes. Truth could not be open to negotiation. After all, its authority was transcendent, beyond what we can challenge.In medieval Europe (Southern) and much of the Islamic world (Nasr), this encouraged the systematisation of truth through natural philosophy as well as theology. Thinkers sought to reconcile revelation with reason, producing frameworks that located truth within both a divine disposition as well as logical consistency.Power here became interpretive. It lay in who could read, comment on and define the meaning of sacred texts. Institutions such as the Church or the madrasa became custodians of this truth, shaping not only religious belief but political legitimacy, education and law.This synthesis exposed many tensions, moments when philosophy strained against orthodoxy, but the central relationship between truth and power endured. Truth was authoritative because it was rooted in the sacred and its guardians were able to hold power over others through their interpretive monopoly.Across these pre-Enlightenment eras, the truth–power relationship rested less on verification than it did on authority. Truth was not understood as something separate from power but as its visible expression. This might be the king’s decree, the priest’s blessing or the scholar’s explanation. What mattered, what was understood, was not that truth was distinct but that it existed in a sort of joint coherence, moving us sometimes in ‘mysterious ways’.Truth is reasonableThe Enlightenment, considered by most historians as covering a large chunk of the 17th–18th centuries, ruptured this cosy coterminosity. Truth came to be defined instead by reason, observation, and categorisation, and power could no longer be justified simply by the apparent choices offered to us by a sacred authority or through the ‘reality’ of revelation.This awareness required a new alignment with new criteria, one embracing rationality, legality and expertise. The Enlightenment did not sever truth from power. Instead, it rewired the connections so that they could respond more sensitively to the rational and its institutions.Yet it did establish truth as a means to classification. This is more far-reaching than it sounds and it speaks to the power to choose both the boundaries and pecking order of what can be known or, more importantly, acted upon by something more than spiritual authority.The most obvious illustration of this way of thinking is probably shown by an increased interest in order and taxonomy. It was the time of the first encyclopaedias and natural histories. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a physician and biologist, may be partly responsible for this development in knowledge. He brought together and codified our system for naming living things and is considered ‘the father of modern taxonomy’ (Calisher).Truth became illustrative of this categorical clarity, the ability to name, classify and situate phenomena within a more general or universal scheme. Power is then able to appeal to the reason or logic of such schemes and, in turn, enable authority, mostly that of the state, to manage similar ordering systems such as censuses, taxes, maps or libraries.The implication here is that what constitutes truth must be clearly defined and located inside a stable hierarchy. This is all well and good, of course, for those who control the lists or sit at the top of the pyramid but categorisation is a brittle and bureaucratic form of truth that’s often tested to destruction by radical change, dynamism and the realisation of interdependence.Truth is observedMuch of this power-truth relationship anticipated and required somewhat strict epistemological compliance. In other words, it relied in large part on an implied natural order or a pre-selected determinism, one worked out in churches and learned gatherings rather than observed in laboratories or on the mortician’s slab. It was often all we had.The arrival of the industrial revolution and the early modern period, let’s say during the 19th and mid-20th centuries, allowed power-truth to become more finely tuned, more responsive to observation, systematic and capable of greater granular distinction. It was a period of radical discovery and scientific advance in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and chemical sciences.Auguste Comte (1798-1857) believed the scientific method that evolved and its way of establishing reality should become central to more areas of human endeavour, replacing almost completely our dependence on theological and metaphysical preoccupations.Truth here became more about relationships, interconnections and processes, not something restrained by classification. Truths became systems, often sharing components from alternative frames of reference that were working towards opposing purposes.Power was manifest through our relative ability to regulate and manage these systems, such as factories, social institutions, even our own bodies. Truth was what could be modelled as a whole from these interdependent parts. Using common historical shorthand, it marked a shift from ‘naming’ to ‘explaining.’ Truth makes many pointsThe late modern or post-war era, usually understood as emerging in the mid-20th century, established truth as control over discourse and as the communications capacity needed to do this. This is a complex modification.In some ways, it extends to its fullest the power to regulate and manage the systems of truth established in the previous decades. It involved the concentration of, and greater control over, the technologies of knowledge.Power developed this as capacity to shape and build ideology, validate positions and even commodify or sell meaning. Technology, however, made this more reliant on data, particularly in terms of what it reveals and what it can be designed to exploit or imply.As systems expand this sort of reach, or restrain previous forms, the power-truth relationship has adjusted itself. Truth still remains bound to system effectiveness, say in terms of feedback, stability or the potency of outgoing signals, but power becomes increasingly expressed through the strength of the system’s use of surveillance, its capacity for prediction, and the identification and management of risk and uncertainty.Data and information, and its probabilities and relationships, have become central to this (Shannon), serving even socially embedded or well-worn ideologies and positions (Wiener). Truth has become what can be transmitted, measured and stabilised against the noise it encounters, marking the completion of a sort of shift from systems as ‘wholes’ to systems as ‘flows’.This is a little complicated to get to grips with but, to use a common example, its about the difference between, say, power as newspapers or television news programmes on the one hand and modern digital systems that influence us via single moments or by the collective effects of numerous but more marginal and diverse points of contact.We have a problemOver the last century, we have seen radical developments in communications, their engineering and technology. They have had, perhaps, a more profound effect on the relationship between truth and power than anything that came before.Yet, there’s something else happening to truth today which the power-medium is revealing and it might just be the most important challenge faced by those who think truth should be repeatable and consistent. There’s too much to cover here but we’ll talk about this next time.ReferencesCalisher, C.H. 2007. Taxonomy: what’s in a name? Doesn’t a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Croatian Medical Journal. 48 (2): 268–270. PMC 2080517. PMID 17436393.Carter, E. 2009. Faith, Power, and Knowledge: Political Theology and the Foundations of the Modern State. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39(2), pp. 387–419.Comte, A. 1848. A General View of Positivism. Translated by J. H. Bridges. London: Trübner and Co. (Reprinted 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Nasr, S.H. 1968. Science and Civilization in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Service, E.R. 1975. Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: Norton.Shannon, C. E. 1948. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3–4), pp. 379–423.Southern, R.W. 1995. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Volume I. Oxford: Blackwell.Vansina, J. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Wiener, N. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Image: Alexas FotosThanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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

It might be Friday 13th but it's power that's doing all the cursing, hexing and fatalism not magic or the supernatural. 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

The ‘Oscars’ is usually a fabulous evening. Actors, directors and movies are nominated and judged, winners announced and careers transformed. What could be easier or more joyous?Yet, beneath this simplicity lies a remarkably dense accumulation of power, working its plots, finding its heroes and villains and marvelling in its special effects. The Oscars don’t simply reward cinematic achievement. They help reproduce cinema as a valued social reality.They determine which films are visible, which are remembered and which are endowed with lasting cultural legitimacy. They show that power operates not through coercion but via an ability to confer legitimacy, organise attention and stabilise belief (Weber, 1978; Foucault, 1980; Bourdieu, 1991).Why the Oscars are ‘the final word’Centre stage here lies a peculiar form of authority. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences possesses no legal power. It can’t compel audiences to watch particular films nor can it force its judgements on us.Yet, its decisions are accepted globally as, more or less, definitive. When a film is declared ‘Best Picture’, it’s rarely treated as an arbitrary or subjective assessment. It’s more than a claim, it becomes a cultural fact, at least in that moment.Somehow, ‘Moonlight’ becomes more worthy than ‘La La Land’ and ‘How Green is my Valley’ a finer technical achievement than ‘Citizen Kane.’ It’s not certain if these claims still hold water or were ever true in the first place.All this reflects a form of legitimacy grounded not in coercion but in collective recognition (Weber, 1978). The Academy’s power lies not in force or even reason and critical logic but in our social acceptance of its role. Nothing more.Its decisions transform opinion into recognition and recognition into a form of cultural reality. The award doesn’t simply describe excellence. It defines it, solidifies and constitutes it (Berger and Luckmann, 1966).Economic and structural powerThe resources needed to secure this cultural reality aren’t distributed evenly. Major studios, including the Walt Disney Company, Universal Pictures and streaming platforms such as Netflix, possess the means to promote their films in ways that suffocate the efforts of smaller companies.Their marketing activities work to shape the field of visibility within which Oscar judgements occur. Films that are heavily promoted become familiar, familiar films become discussable and discussable films become more plausible winners.In this way, economic capital transfers into symbolic opportunity (Marx, 1867; Bourdieu, 1986). Structural and economic power operates here not by dictating outcomes directly but by organising the conditions under which outcomes can become possible (Lukes, 2005).The Oscars don’t somehow stand objectively outside of the industry they judge. They participate in its reproduction. Successful studios accumulate further prestige, enhancing their ability to attract talent, finance projects and secure better recognition. Power circulates and stabilises itself through this type of effect (Bourdieu, 1993).The power to create valueThe abstract and intangible is perhaps the most profound form of power exercised by the Oscars. Winning an award doesn’t only reward success, it transforms the meaning of the film, the capacity of its actors or the skills of its creators. They become more adept, better skilled, because they are allowed to take home a piece of gold plated bronze.A film that wins ‘Best Picture’ acquires a different ontological status. In other words, it represents a more definitive form of truth about what constitutes good film making. This is about more than the here and now. It affects the standing of those that came before and guides the potential of those movies yet to be made.The label ‘Oscar winner’ allows content to claim a piece of cinematic history. It enters educational curricula, critical discourse and cultural memory. This transformation demonstrates that a film’s value can’t be just intrinsic or even known by a rational assessment of its many parts. It’s something institutionally negotiated and conferred (Bourdieu, 1991).The Oscars function as a mechanism of social ‘consecration’. They elevate particular works above others, establishing hierarchies of cultural significance (Bourdieu, 1993), assigning preferences for ‘lost works’, manipulating retrospectives, killing careers or breathing new life into them.Ritual and beliefThe Oscars derive much of their influence from ritual. We might welcome a different host every few years but the ceremony remains highly structured, predictable and repeated in much the same way annually. This repetition stabilises belief in the legitimacy of the system (Durkheim, 1912/1995).The ritual also transforms what are institutional choices into a more collective experience, something we feel part of. This sharing of emotions reinforces belief in the institution’s authority and legitimacy (Collins, 2004). The ceremony doesn’t merely announce value every 12 months. It performs and stabilises it and makes us part of this.Through this ritual, power becomes naturalised. The hierarchy of winners appears meaningful and legitimate rather than dependent on very temporary circumstances (Durkheim, 1912/1995) or the uncertain and shifting sands of cultural and symbolic meaning.Networks and platformsIn recent years, the structure of cinematic power has undergone significant transformation. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon have challenged traditional models of distribution.These platforms possess unprecedented control over cinematic visibility. Their recommendations and content preferences shape audience attention through algorithmic selection systems.Power operates via these ‘network’ positions, this juxtaposition of such things as content, platform choice, scheduling, price, availability and affordability, and through the control of data predicting viewing habits and preferences (Castells, 2009).The Academy is keen to be part of this complex cultural cauldron. It recognises content to support its own visibility, encouraging more interest in its decisions and legitimacy. Cultural authority emerges here via a love affair between institutional and technological systems (Couldry and Hepp, 2017) allowing us to think outcomes are organic and natural rather than highly regulated and fabricated.Memory and timeFinally, the Oscars exercise power over time itself. Winning films are preserved, revisited and integrated into cultural history. Films that do not receive recognition often fade from collective memory.Institutions shape not only present recognition but our remembrance of it (Assmann, 2011). Power can then operate across time by restructuring this cultural memory, a reminiscence constantly in a state of reordering itself, reshaping our reflections of previous cultural choices and effecting the value we now place on them.The Oscars as a power-mediumThe Oscars reveal that power operates through legitimacy, visibility and belief. The ceremony converts institutional authority, economic resources and cultural alignment into a merged, sometimes untidy but, nevertheless, highly potent regime of truth (Foucault, 1980; Bourdieu, 1991).The ceremony shows us that power in modern cultural life operates not through coercion or ownership but through an institutional capacity to confer legitimacy, organise visibility and stabilise a shared belief in something we interpret as meaningful.By concentrating symbolic authority, economic influence and affective attention into a single moment, a ritual we return to every year, the Academy Awards function as ‘power-medium’, one that converts industrial position, narrative alignment and network visibility into cultural truth.This shapes not only which films succeed but what we understand cinema itself to be.ReferencesAssmann, J. 2011. Cultural memory and early civilization: Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London: Penguin.Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Bourdieu, P. 1986. ‘The forms of capital’, in Richardson, J. (ed.. Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. New York: Greenwood, pp. 241–258.Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bourdieu, P. 1993. The field of cultural production. Cambridge: Polity Press.Castells, M. 2009. Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Collins, R. 2004. Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. 2017. The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.Durkheim, E. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press. Original work published 1912.Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. New York: Pantheon.Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A radical view. 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Marx, K. 1867. Capital: A critique of political economy, Volume I. London: Penguin.Thussu, D.K. 2007. International communication: Continuity and change. London: Hodder Arnold.Weber, M. 1978. Economy and society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Image: Oscars.orgThanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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

We might think all we have discovered about power so far is that it’s always coercion, just in a form we find difficult to spot. Yet even this idea, although very sensible in some respects, begins to run into problems the more we think about it.One reason for this is that political scientists, the ones who use normative or classical ideas about power the most, can’t really ignore the overwhelming significance and influence of the very different organisations and social systems that surround us in life. There are many of these, and they’re more than just the arms of government.These embrace all that is ‘structural’, all the ideas, traditions, cultural codes and meanings in the world we find ourselves working to as well as the more obvious and everyday structures we support, like our politics, what is good for our health, the best places to put our savings (if we have any), the schools we send our children to or the wishes of judges and churches.Sure, all these have a coercive effect, on top of all the other things they do for us, but they also tend to resist clarity or common sense about what coercion is doing or where it is taking us. They complicate matters and don’t always operate in the way we think they do, or indeed should.This is because structures like these aren’t really set up to deal with individual will or agency. By definition, they’re concerned with socialisation and social activity, reflecting at least several sources of coercive force if that’s where we still want to put our definition of power.They also deal in the uncertain, ill-formed, emerging, abstract or nebulous. They deal with what might be there as much as what is actually the case.They must respond to resistance and contradiction but can only do so on terms that reflect their own unique circumstances, operating systems, area of interest or reach.They become entities that are actually independent of the people and ideas they comprise, with their own demands and success criteria, strengths and weaknesses, and, at the end of the day, with their own will to exist, prevail through the bad times or pack-up altogether.They are, at best, machines of compromise limited by their purpose, design, effectiveness and management. As a result, these structures become power centres in their own right dealing in the shared and social effects of the power they were set up to regulate or encounter.So, if our definition of power is still attached to the idea of force, this must at least be in a form that engages with a shared intent, harnesses joint enterprise, and deals in consensus, compromise and imperfection. This is something very different to individual will or direct influence.Structures ask us to arrange power in an order, one that works alongside other things, forms sub-systems of independent purpose and operates coherently alongside very different topics, expectations, means of communication or social priority.In other words, these structures require us to see power as something more than the ability to exploit, say, a boss and worker relationship or submit to the strongest owner of the biggest stick.They become something discursive, meandering, popping-off in unexpected directions, operating in the capricious and shadowy worlds of language, knowledge, precedent, tradition and culture.Further, if we give power a structure, a way of working for us or against other structures, this will tend to, perhaps must, reveal to all what we say should give us authority, acceptance or legitimacy in the first place. The rules of the game become shared and subject to the complexity and counterpoint this invites.It also makes power dynamic and capable of change. It must work a deal in one place to achieve something else in another. This sets hares running and bubbles rising to the surface, disrupting what is settled far away or even with no connection to what was started.Power becomes a balloon animal, shaped into place by a clown. It expands in one place so that it can be modelled differently somewhere else. It is pushed and pulled with no apparent intention until a design becomes visible. Even then, this doesn’t really look like what was promised. We may or may not ask for our money back.Power has no more than a synthesised will and intent, something constructed as it goes along by many other people and circumstances and with an effect relative to the will and intent of others to deny it. It must do more than what we want and achieve less than we intended.At this point, we can see that power may have very little to do with coercion. Maybe nothing at all. This is because, for coercion to exist, it must be directed by intention, be a means to a declared end. In all instances, power must remain a conscious and deliberate act regardless of whether or not it is understood only by one or by many.Yet, if we examine the world around us, think about our own lives and the powers they work to, we see that our journey appears as much fashioned by marginal or poor choices, accidents, disaster, automation, mistakes, limitations, circumstances, misunderstandings and coincidences and a whole host of other invisible and equally baffling experiences.These have force but they have no intent. They have capacity but no plan or design. Indeed, they might just be the most powerful things we ever encounter but they embrace no will or desire. They can’t coerce because they are without any real means to guarantee anything. Yet, they still change us profoundly nevertheless.This is the real power of the social world, its serendipities, contingencies and happenstances, and it is the form we seem to neglect most when we think about power.So, we must look to where all this takes us for definitions, beyond a simple acceptance of coercion or normality and the degrees to which these are possible or enforceable even if we can’t ignore such things either.Surely, if we do this, we’ll find a cause, an explanation, for power we can work with? Of course, if we’ve discovered anything so far, it’s that power will ask us to be disappointed at some point or another.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

Reality television is too often dismissed as trivial entertainment, nihilistic or without meaning. This is more than a little harsh. Indeed, it might just provide us with a very useful way to examine the complex workings of power.The Traitors is a good place from which to do this. It combines formal rules, the control of information, asymmetric intelligence, editorial mediation and intense interaction between contestants, and all within a closed and highly regulated system. Power in The Traitors doesn’t just operate through authority, compliance, falsehood or domination. It’s distributed across rules, roles, conversations, surveillance and performances. This shows how power changes its shape, from something possessed or imposed to something performed, and as always at work.Structure and formalityThe Traitors is governed by explicit rules, such as the selection of participants, concealed ambitions, nightly ‘murders’, round-table banishments and the business of identifying or deceiving others. From the classical perspective on power, these rules operate as a form of legitimate authority.Weber’s analysis of authority is very helpful here (1978). He would see the game’s power structure as primarily rational-legal. Authority is vested in its impersonal rules rather than in individuals. Indeed, contestants must always consent to these as a condition of participation.This makes the host less of a sovereign or commanding figure and more of a referee, and certainly not a representative of the audience. All parties work to reinforce the legitimacy of the system they have signed up for and not to somehow prioritise popularity or merit nor even to reassure the viewers that these will prevail.From a normative perspective, the rules here produce order, cohesion and purpose. Parsons’ view of power (1967), as a generalised capacity to secure collective goals, is evident. Both ‘faithfuls’ and ‘traitors’ feel they can ‘win’ within the agreed framework. The confrontation that follows shows not as an aberration, as an error, but as purpose, as the true name of the game.All of this reminds us not to be too beguiled by the degree of consensus on display or, indeed, that rational agreement is possible in the first place. This isn’t what’s on offer. While all participants accept the rules, they don’t occupy equal positions within them. The knowledge gained by contestants isn’t shared fairly between traitors and faithfuls. Structural inequality lies at the very heart of the premise.This inequality resonates with Lukes’ ‘three-dimensional’ view of power (2005). The traitors’ advantage is not just the ability to decide who will be murdered. It’s a product of the agenda they follow and work to. They also benefit from the programme’s ideological tone, one where suspicion divides and fragments. This serves them, the few, rather than the majority.The most effective traitors are those who hide this type of structured authority and edge within the everyday and routine, making their influence appear trustworthy rather than controlling. The stories we believe and who writes themOf course, the formal rules of The Traitors’s closed society are pretty obvious once we’re used to them. They are overt and knowable. However, a second, less visible layer of power is also pursued by the programme’s producers, editors and directors.Post-structural accounts of power, particularly those associated with Foucault, are quite useful here. Foucault’s concept of power as productive (1977), as always on, always working to create something, highlights how meaning, identity and truth are being constantly constructed through and around us.Through editing, music and camera angles, the programme produces specific narratives of suspicion, guilt, innocence and betrayal. These are directed at us, the observers. They tell tales, delude us, lay down red-herrings and set hares running. They don’t construct updates or review positions in an even-handed or objective manner.The ‘single’ interview or ‘private’ conversation is a key technology of power here, allowing us to eavesdrop on what we think of as personal. Contestants are invited to articulate their thoughts, fears and strategies, creating a conversation that seems private and authentic but which, in reality, is no better than highly selective.This also resembles what Foucault describes as the modern compulsion to confess, where subjects participate in their own governance by narrating stories about themselves (Foucault, 1978), testing their own relative position and justifying their policing of others.Importantly, these confessions within the programme cannot really reveal truth. They are deliberate, chosen, curated, sequenced and juxtaposed to produce a dramatic coherence not something interested in reality. Editorial power operates by shaping what we recognise as intelligible or credible motivation. We often allow ourselves to be co-conspiracists in this ruse, somehow knowing this is happening but enjoying the result regardless.Surveillance is central to the fantasies we construct. Contestants are watched, not only by cameras but by one another. This produces a panoptic effect in which individuals regulate their own behaviour because they are always anticipating scrutiny from elsewhere (Foucault, 1977).The knowledge that every gesture may later be reinterpreted as evidence of deception or not encourages a sort of hyper-reflexivity, a state of persistent anxiety, where contestants become overly sensitive to their own actions as they review those of others. This regulates compliance, making the power needed to do this diffuse, something operating through anticipation and self-discipline and not just through direct coercion.From an actor–network perspective, power isn’t found solely in the show’s contestants or directors. It resides in its sets, games, schedules and even audience participation. Power is distributed through all of its physical and material components and all of its symbolic and cultural expectations. The round table, the sealed envelopes, the castle setting, even the soundtrack, all contribute to this, stabilising demands and beliefs (Latour, 2005). These non-human cogs in the machine help align emotions, expectations and decisions, making power an effect of this type of interaction rather than a resource held by any single person, role or institution at any particular time.Power as behaviour, twitch and reactionPower rests not just in the ‘big picture’, in the grand and compelling demands of life. It can be traced too to the way we live with others, to the deeply personal and to the ingrained habits we have when we interact with each other.The Traitors can be analysed using this approach to power via interactionist and relational theories. For instance, Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis (1959) is very good at doing this.Contestants engage in continuous impression management, carefully controlling their actions ‘front stage’, as it were. These are performances in themselves but they’re also an attempt to represent, conceal or reinterpret what’s happening ‘back stage’, in their own personal and private world.Accusations at the round table function as high-stakes displays in which credibility, emotional control and narrative coherence are decisive. They deal not just in what is believed but also in what contestants themselves feel must be shown to others. These displays build justification or credibility first, thus making honesty or deceit no more than a second choice. Bourdieu’s views about what he called habitus and symbolic capital illuminate why some traitors and faithful are more persuasive than others. He describes a world in which power is mainly symbolic, operating through culture and ideology, through our habits and behaviours.Individuals bring pre-existing characteristics quite literally to the table. These are shaped by class, profession, gender and cultural competence. These may influence how confidently they speak, how they interpret suspicion and how they are understood and pigeonholed by others (Bourdieu, 1984).Symbolic capital, such as perceived levels of intelligence, moral authority or emotional warmth, is then converted into power before our very eyes. This allows some contestants to shape group decisions in ways that others can’t. Importantly, power in ‘The Traitors’ is unstable and highly reversible. Alliances shift, reputations collapse and authority can evaporate rapidly. This aligns with post-structural views of power as temporary, as reflecting inherent instability rather than predictability.Even ‘traitors’, despite their structural advantages, must remain vulnerable to the persistent exposure this brings. This shows that power must be continuously enacted and reaffirmed. It must persist rather than only exist and can’t just be any simple overbearance, coercion or persuasion we experience at any specific moment.So …The Traitors provides a laboratory for analysing contemporary forms of power. Classical and normative theories help explain the role of rules, authority and inequality within the game’s formal structure but this is not all we find.Post-structural accounts are needed to reveal how power operates through conversations and ideas, surveillance and editorial choices. It is this that shapes what contestants and audiences perceive as truth.Interactionist and relational perspectives show how power is realised not by rules but through life’s everyday performances, as grounded in the symbolic capital we can command.The Traitors shows us that power is about more than the capacity to shape meaning or influence interpretation, even to sustain credibility under conditions of uncertainty. It shows that power operates through visibility, performance and narrative and not just through the loudest voice or biggest stick.It’s often difficult, if not impossible, to second guess what’s happening in The Traitors or to decide who is going to win. As such, it might represent as good a definition of power as any to be found in the text books.ReferencesBourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin.Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin.Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A Radical View, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Parsons, T. 1967. Sociological Theory and Modern Society. New York: Free Press.Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.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

Romantic love is perhaps the most deeply felt of all human experiences. It seems to be something spontaneous and emotional and is certainly pretty resistant to reason or logic.Yet few human behaviours are as heavily patterned, ritualised or institutionalised as love, particularly when it arrives via the annual demands of Valentine’s Day. 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