50. Power

A customary definition of power is: the ability to influence the actions of others, by influencing the options from which they can choose or the choice they make. Such power can be negative in reducing options or by imposing the choice, but it can also be positive in creating more options by offering others new insights, means and room for choice. Power becomes negative when it becomes coercive, eliminating freedom by lock-in or exclusion. A monopoly excludes competing producers and thereby locks in consumers.

The exercise of influence on others is inevitable and happens all the time and everywhere. It contributes to subjugation but also to creative tension and the flourishing of life. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a celebration of that. A debate without power for which Jürgen Habermas strove is an illusion and is undesirable. People need each other’s opposition and opposition also is power. However, power relations must not be pre-determined, institutionalized or unassailable, and there must remain the opportunity of opposition, for the creation of counter-power or escape from power. 

Power arises not only on the level of individuals but also on the level of collectives such as markets, professions, industries, regions, and states. In other words, power is also a matter of systems. In a preceding item (nr. 48) in this blog I showed how people get swept up in collective interests. It goes further. People are carried along in tacit presumptions, notions, visions, habits, practices, norms, values, and expectations that are part of cultures on different levels. These are what Said in his Humanism and democratic criticism called the ‘cultural structures of reference and attitude’, and what Foucault in his technologies of the self called ‘power of habit’. Repression or exploitation are culturally sanctioned and made immune to criticism, expelled from the arena of legitimate discourse. Foucault showed how cultural systems are internalized, how both those who exert power and those subjected to it may take it as self-evident.

What now? First of all, absolute freedom and justice cannot exist. One cannot abolish all limitation of means and possibilities. Everything that enables people to think and act also entails limits to them. One cannot look in one direction and at all others at the same time. That limitation one also imposes on oneself. There is no life without constraint.

How, then, can one escape from negative power? One can try to form countervailing power with arguments or with coalitions. That is the way of democracy. However, often arguments will not work because they go against what is taken as self-evident. Under the Soviet regime critics were seen as lunatics and put away in asylums. In democratic countries one is not imprisoned but simply ignored. Only if one commands a significant package of votes can one command attention. Ultimately, one can step outside and walk a path of one’s own. That is what entrepreneurs, intellectuals and writers do. In the end that was also the way out for Michel Foucault: build your own life as a work of art.