Power Flashcards
(23 cards)
What is power, according to Arendt (1970) ?
Power is the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name.
It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country. All political institutions are manifestations and materialisations of power.
What is the relationship between power and violence, according to Arendt?
- Power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence to a point can manage without them
- Power and Violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in powers disappearance. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.
- Violence can always destroy power, but power can never grow out of violence.
What, according to Arendt, is the relationship between power and violence, specifically as it relates to government
- In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority only lasts as long as the power structure of the government is intact- that is, as long as commands are obeyed.
- Everything depends on the power behind the violence.
- No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed
- Tyranny is the most violent and least powerful of forms of government
- Power is the essence of all government, but violence is not
- Power needs no justification but needs legitimacy. Violence can be justifiable but never legitimate
- Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost
In what ways are Arendt’s views on power similar and different to Lukes’?
Different in three ways, as Arendt believes:
- Power isn’t something that one individual agent possesses
- Power can’t be instrumental (aimed at achieving the particular ends of a particular group)
- Power cannot be understood solely in negative terms as “power over.”
Shares belief with Lukes that power and violence is incompatible but for different reasons
What are some criticisms of Arendt?
- Racism in America major blind spot for Arendt - “Serious violence occurs when black power movement protests”
- Arendts theory of power only works in a context where everyone is equal, but this is not the reality because institutionalised racism.
In what context did Fanon write wretched of the earth (1965)?
The French invaded Algeria in 1830, established a settler colony however Arabs permanently outnumbered white colonists, so the French maintained their military and political supremacy in Algeria through an apartheid–like, system of racial segregation.
Fanon worked in psychiatric ward in Algeria in the 1950s – dedicated himself to the cause of ending colonisation
What are some of the key points in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth?
- Colonised world is divided into two; colony is controlled by violence and the threat of institutional violence is normalised
- The Colonised learn to stay in their place
- Violence is not pre-modern; the modern system of colonial power is violence
- Colonial violence structures and restructures the internal world of the colonized, creates outer conformity and inner resistance
- Taking resistance from dream to reality requires violence
- Violence is a cleansing force which rids the colonised of their inferiority complex
- Violence organized as resistance against colonialism introduces, “the notion of common cause, national destiny, and collective history into every consciousness.”
What does Fanon say about Power and Violence in the ‘Concerning Violence’ chapter of ‘Wretched of the Earth’?
Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon; the replacing of a certain species of men with another species of men
In colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world… will be claimed and taken over by the native when… he surges into forbidden quarters. The settler has shown the colonised the way he should take if he is become free as they have never stopped saying that the only language, he understands is that of force. The colonised man finds his freedom in and through violence
International opinion is formed solely by the Western press.
What does Fanon say about what will happen in a newly independent nation in the chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in ‘Wretched of the Earth’?
In a newly independent nation, the national bourgeoisie takes political control, and they slide right into the place of the exiting colonial power – this is harmful for future of Africa
Underdeveloped like their nation, the national bourgeoisie know nothing about actual economics, and they run a limited economy and keep all the profits.
Under this system of neocolonialism, the peasant masses continue to suffer in much the same way they did under colonial rule, and conflict between the classes grows.
Government must be decentralized, moved to rural areas, and run by the peasant masses; African unity can only be achieved through the upward thrust of the people, and under the leadership of the people, that is to say, in defiance of the interests of the bourgeoisie
What does Fanon say in ‘Colonial Wards and Mental Disorders’?
Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’
Because colonialism teaches the colonized that they are evil and even subhuman, the colonized are always questioning reality, leading to a number of psychoses including depression and anxiety disorders. At the same time, because the colonial world is a violent world, people living in it may have post-traumatic disorders in which they develop homicidal tendencies or are predisposed to psychotic breaks. Refugees, those who have been sent to internment camps, and those who have been tortured also exhibit a number of psychological symptoms. Fanon concludes by arguing that getting rid of colonialism will get rid of the source of these neuroses and pathologies, and therefore will liberate the “personality” of man in addition to his nation.
What assumptions do Fanon’s thoughts reveal are shared by Lukes, Arendt, and Foucalt?
All three thinkers reject violence because each theorizes power from an epistemological perspective that assumes a polity which:
- has ostensibly abandoned violence as its primary means of control
- is presumed to be at least capable of working in the best interest of its subjects.
How does Foucault (1983) think power is exercised
-The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others.
-Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures.
- Power is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.
- The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.
- Freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised
- The definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions
What, according to Foucault is the relationship between power and violence?
Violence is not power
- Foucault cares about power as a productive force
- Foucault cares about a particular kind of resistance; For Foucault a relationship predicated on violence aims to prevent the object of power from acting. This is not power for Foucault. power recognises that the other person can act.
- Foucault distinguishes between power and violence because he thinks violence is premodern
- Power acts upon the actions of others whereas a relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things
However, the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consensus and violence are the instruments or the results, they do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power.
What does Foucault mean by a subject centered conception of power?
Conception of subject:
- Morally autonomous subject who thinks and acts and makes reasoned judgements about the world.
- Second part of definition implicit in word ‘subject’: to be subjected
- For Foucault, you cannot understand the first conception of subject without the second.
- Power makes individuals subjects because we are subjected
What are some criticisms of Foucault?
Foucault’s understanding of what constitutes the “modern Western state” elides:
- The reliance of developing, modern European states on imperialism,
colonialism, and slavery.
- The ongoing use of violence to discipline subjects in settler colonies like French Algeria, South Africa, and the United States well into the twentieth–century
Why does Foucault think that violence can never play a role in the process
through which human beings are made subjects?
What is Foucault’s Panopticon example and what does it illustrate?
- Prison plan with central tower and backlit cells, prisoners cannot see jailor but know they are always potentially being watched.
- They modify their own behaviour.
- Jailor doesn’t need to be present; his action and intensions don’t matter. Power now about relation between individuals.
- “…the major effect of the Panopticon” is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”
What are Lukes’ three Faces of Power?
Face One: Decision making. A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.
Face Two: Agenda Setting. “A had power over B when she is able to set the agenda for a decision-making process.”
Face Three: Preference Shaping. “A may exercise power over B by influencing him into believing something against their interests
How does power work, according to Lukes?
- There is always an agent that we can identify who is exerting power over someone else and power is always negative
- Power can be ascribed to those whose actions (or inactions) affect the interests of others, whether intentionally or unintentionally and these people should be held responsible. If actors have the agency to limit the actions of others, then they are powerful.
- The powerful are those actors (individual or collective) who can reasonably be held responsible for limits imposed on the freedom of other actors.
- Agents can have power that they never exercise, and they can have power the effects of which they do not intend.
Why should we have an agent-centered conception of power, according to Lukes
- The importance of the notion of responsibility to claims about power makes power an agent‐centred concept.
- Retaining the link between power, agency, and responsibility is important as it enables us to keep in focus the very question of the difference that agents can make to outcomes and to cast a critical eye on attempts by powerful agents to escape their own responsibilities by ‘blaming the system.’
- We have a need to assign responsibilities, and doing so involves identifying the powerful. Link between power and responsibility.
- If we think of power, as Hayward suggests, in structural terms, then we may lose sight of those particular agents who are responsible for the constraints we analyze and review
What does Lukes say about structural constraints and power?
- The concept of power should remain attached to the agency that operates within and upon structures
- Those who can contribute to remedying injustices, perhaps by working to change the institutional framework, but who did not contribute to causing them, are, to that extent, responsible and thus powerful.
- The impersonal, socially generated, and remediable constraints that limit people’s freedoms and opportunities and shape their interests do not have to be identified as sources of power to be objects of attention and contestation.
- There is a distinction between ‘structural constraints and constraints caused by the autonomous actions of ‘the powerful’.
- The fact that they – politicians and officials, for example – will in turn be subject to significant constraints, such as the imperatives of competition and the interests they are elected or appointed to represent simply shows that their power as agents (in this case to remedy injustice and unfreedom) is limited by the structures – the constraints and opportunities, roles and norms – within which they operate.
How does Power work, according to Hayward?
- Power is about structural constraints that help shape those relationships between people.
- Power is exercised collectively through institutions
-Structural constraints also have social origin - Such constraints often are not produced, through a simple causal chain, by the action or the inaction of readily identifiable ‘bad men.’
- Structures are more than just meanings and expectations. They are relatively durable meanings and expectations, sustained by systems of reward and sanction, which make some forms of action, if not impossible, then highly improbable, and others, if not inevitable, then exceedingly likely.
- Structures do not determine action, then, but they produce predictable patterns of action.
- The actions of the dominant significantly limit the fields of possible action of the dominated, and they do so in ways that are not inevitable, that need not be.
Why does Hayward think it important to focus on structural constraints in a discussion about power?
- Because constraints typically identified as ‘structural’ are social in origin, and because their effects are very often amenable to change, they are relevant to the normative project that drives the power debate. That project is badly served, her claim is, when those who study power fail to analyse and to evaluate structural constraints on freedom that are significant, inegalitarian, and remediable.
- Structural constraints are relevant to the critical project that lies at the heart of the power debate: the project of identifying, evaluating, and elaborating methods for changing differential remediable social constraint on freedom.
- Even when those who share political responsibility for creating or perpetuating relations of domination are not at fault in a moral sense, their political responsibility obliges them to attempt to understand, and to act collectively to change, the processes and institutions through which, together, they exercise power
- those who oppose significant social constraints on freedom should study and should criticize codified and institutionalized human actions that create patterned asymmetries in the social capacity to act.
- If we think of power, as Lukes urges us, in strictly agent‐centric terms, then we may overlook some subset of significant and remediable social constraints on human freedom.
What did Said (2003) argue?
- All the main outlets are, however, controlled by the most powerful interests and consequently by the very antagonists one resists or attacks, it is also true that a relatively mobile intellectual energy can take advantage of and, in effect, multiply the kinds of platforms available for use.
- The intellectual’s role generally is dialectically, oppositionally to uncover and elucidate the contest I referred to earlier, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible.
- “Imagine the person whom you are discussing—in this case, the person on whom the bombs will fall—reading you in your presence.”
