This article was published in IntrepidEd News on 28 December 2023.
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.—Friedrich Nietzsche
I used to teach Global Politics. One of the throughlines of the course was the concept of power. We started the year off with over-simplified distinctions between hard, soft, and smart forms of power. We examined the different ways that state and non-state actors exercise power. We looked at the symbols of power and the norms that upheld power: constitutions, treaties, the UN, statues, rituals, titles, medals, the media, discourse, and so forth. We thought about authority and influence. Power ran through the entire course.
While there are many entry points into the concept of power, one thing I never stopped emphasizing was that power is relational. No one holds power; it is something that takes fluid form in the in-between. I have written elsewhere that agency is relational too. Power and agency are intertwined. Yet the former falsely evokes notions of control, while the latter is mistaken for freedom.
One question that comes up often in the media I consume is “who has the power?” This is usually part of a foray into critical literacies and unveiling systems of oppression, or perhaps reading into dominant narratives. The idea that history is written by the victors is at least as old as Thucydides, and most K-12 history classes tell the stories of kings, presidents, and people in charge. Understanding the sources of power is the basis of critical thinking, but these sources aren’t discovered in a person or thing. Power is materially and discursively created in space and time.
In 1938, Mao Zedong famously said that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The word grow evokes a dynamism rather than a static state. This in itself is relational—the materialization of power through the discourse shared between the participants. Now, quoting historical figures whose policies led to the direct and indirect murder of tens of millions of people is often a deal-breaker, so let’s focus on the concept itself. It’s not the man holding the gun who has power, it’s the relational and contextual experience that exists within the environmental conditions of that moment, (structurally) coupled with the collective and individual interpretations of the experience by those participating in it. In other words, it’s all about what’s going on in-between the actors (actants, really) in the story of the moment (the assemblage).
What is the political context? What is the legal context? What are the individual memories that will influence the behaviors of the participants—the gun holder and the person at whom the gun is pointed? What are the sounds and lighting that create affect, that is, the feelings and the emotions that arise (sunny, rainy, night, dawn? How does this change the experience)? What is the motivation of one and the other? What are the risks? There are an infinite number of questions through which we appreciate what is happening1. The point is that the man with the gun doesn’t have power, the relationships that create and are created by context distribute power. Sometimes power is created through symbols, such as a police badge, a job title, or a certificate—this is authority.
This is why the concept of “empowerment” is so misplaced. We do not own power, able to hand it out or hoard it at will. No one can give anyone else power; power is relational and generated and regenerated at the fluid boundary where the individual and the environment meet. Power channels possibilities for action. It is the same with agency. Agency is not given, it is enacted within specific conditions. We don’t give people power or agency because neither are ours to give.
The man with the gun has no power over me, but the conditions (in which he, the gun, the political situation, etc. exist) make it so that the probability of me acting a certain way is higher than if the conditions were different (say, no gun or maybe a camera is filming the scene). I still have the freedom to act in any way I want. I could scream and charge him—I have that freedom—but I appreciate what might happen if I do and that might influence my choices, and channel the possibilities for my actions. There is never a binary between fate and free will.
Power is the energy that forms the actors in the stories we tell. The actors of these stories are the forms connected by power. Alter the flow of energy, and the actors change. In other words, power takes on a dynamic and mutable form (actors) within the relationality of the stories we share, the stories that connect us to one another. I remember having a long, flowing, and light conversation with a man one day. It was only later I found out he was a state senator. How different would our conversation have been had I known this before? We would have been different actors in a different story.
Culture is the enactment of our collective story2 and the boundaries within which power is channeled. Power is not something we own, that we carry around in our pockets. It exists in the in-between of the imaginary3.
Malcolm X said that “power, real power, comes from our conviction which produces action, uncompromising action.” The conviction to live by different stories, with different protagonists, antagonists, plots, and twists. We share these stories with others, and when we enact these stories together, we create a new culture.
Here is the rub: telling stories is an exclusionary process. Since we cannot possibly include all voices in the stories we tell—there are an infinite number of possible actors (actants) in every story: human, other-than-human, more than human—we face the ethical choice of whose to include and whose to exclude. How might we justify leaving voices out? How might we be okay with these exclusions, which we cannot avoid? How might we open spaces for others to include the voices we have left out? New stories will have new actors, but since we can’t include all the actors, we will have to exclude some, deliberately or unconsciously.
Telling stories is a process of mattering. Who matters? What matters? When we tell stories, we make ethical choices about who to bring in and who to leave out. We cannot bring in all of the voices. The voices themselves only come to exist once we recognize them. The in-between power increases the probability that we notice the voices, listen to the voices and include the voices. What happens to all the voices we ignore? That is the ethical response-ability. This isn’t just about the human world; what happens to the “voices” in Nature?
Matter is malleable. Energy creates particles of matter. Matter can be created from other particles, and disintegrate into other particles or kinetic energy.
When we always tell the same stories—the old stories, the meta-narrative—we perpetuate the power relations of old where the same actors matter. New stories reconfigure power relations by spotlighting new actors connected through newly noticed power relations4.
The challenge is that so many stories we tell today borrow from stories we have been told our entire lives. The collection of these stories makes up our paradigms. We belong to certain communities, and these communities are held by common ideas, values, and languages. We will not shift paradigms, we will not create new cultures (the enactment of stories), and we will not bring forth a new world without new stories.
“Culture” comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱewH-, which means “to care for”, and is of the Latin word cultura, which refers to the cultivation of crops. “Civilization” comes from the Latin civilis, which refers to citizens or the state. The PIE root that gave rise to civilis is keiəw, which means “to lie down or settle.” It will be noted that our language already creates the lenses through which we might consider any peoples who have not settled into cities and cultivated lands (pre-Neolithic) as uncivilized. Our tendency to hierarchize and colonize runs deep and far. I hope we overcome these challenges with love and understanding, reconciliation, and effort.
Telling new stories and enacting them means nothing less than creating new cultures. When we create new cultures, we can create new civilizations. This might be the beginning of an ecological civilization.
I work in a school, so I’ll look at it through the lens of school, but this is a call for our collective imagination to find one of the infinite number of entry points.
Maybe in school, this means excluding the part where grades are valued, where we have to stay indoors, where assessment is individualized, where the same curriculum is delivered year after year to millions of young people. Maybe it means excluding high-stakes exams that have nothing to do with what takes place outside of school, or perhaps the idea that learning only counts if it happens between 8:30 and 3:30. Maybe it means excluding rewarding intellectual compliance and tick boxing.
Maybe in school, this means telling stories that include (that is, matter, value, shift power toward) curiosity, contribution, dialogue, and emergence. Maybe they include things other than getting kids ready for the workforce. Maybe they are all about averting ecological breakdown and bringing forth an approach to the world that values all life.
No one has power over us, it is in the in-between of our relationships that power flows. I am not so naive as to believe it’s easy, but as a historian, I appreciate how when enough people come together we can revolutionize power relations. Statues, banners, symbols, and plaques have come down all over the world, and that which once held prominence in the meta-narrative no longer holds sway. Power is always temporary. That which was once revered is not reviled.
At the time of this writing, COP 28 is upon us (it might be over by the time you read this—how did it turn out?). Held in a country whose economy is based on fossil fuels, without the heads of state of the two countries with the highest emissions of carbon (US and China), COP 28 is, in the words of UN Secretary-General Guterres, where “we can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.” Even this quote, meant to rally, spotlights stories of god-like humans who save the world, neglecting to include the “voices” of the lives of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish lost between 1970 and 2016 (68% in population).
We are so used to Hollywood stories, where the hero swoops in, transforms, and rights the world again. We are not in a movie. The future may not turn out the way we want it.
We can come together into new bodies, transformed energy that diverts power away from the old bodies. Collectively powerful enough to reject the old narrative, to reject old forms of power, to bring forth new possibilities, and new civilizations.
Every day, participating in the writing of new stories with small acts of resistance, individual ripples that find confluence in other ripples and become a wave, growing into a tsunami that washes away structures of power that we thought were permanent.
These small acts of resistance: a conversation, a decision, a stand against injustice, a moment spent listening to the voiceless.
Our conviction is that we are uncompromising actors in the writing of our collective stories.
1 Let us remember the words of Werner Heisenberg, “What we observe is not Nature, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
2 I am drawing on Daniel Quinn here. As a social scientist and educator who has grappled for many years with the idea of culture, trying to pin it down, Quinn’s simple and dynamic understanding of culture was an eye-opener.
3 I want to be clear that I am not arguing for a Structuralist way of seeing the world. On the contrary, it is the fluidity that interests me and the dynamic, living coupling between the whole and the part (the holarchy). The nestedness of all living systems creates new relationships with boundaries that are constantly re-drawn.
4 We don’t even have to write new stories from scratch; we can participate in the natural evolution of their authorship, diffract old stories to create new ones.. Existing power relations are not permanent. There is no stasis in Nature, in fact there isn’t even equilibrium. Energy always changes form, and living systems take on available energy in what Erwin Schrödinger termed “negentropy,” until their inevitable death.
Coconut Thinking 