Power Without Agents: 1 Asymmetry, Endurance, and the Stabilisation of Constraint

Power is usually imagined as something that someone has.

A ruler, an institution, a class, a system — even when abstracted, power is still treated as possessed, exercised, or deployed. Someone decides. Someone benefits. Someone is responsible.

This series begins from a different observation:

Much of what governs our lives persists without anyone deciding it, intending it, or even endorsing it.

Power, in these cases, does not act.

It endures.

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From Ethics to Power

The previous series showed how ethical burden survives the removal of subjects. Obligation persists. Repair remains necessary. Exhaustion accumulates — even when blame is misplaced or refused.

Power emerges when this ethical asymmetry becomes structurally stable.

Not when harm is done once, but when:

• the same roles absorb breakdown repeatedly

• the same positions must adapt

• the same futures remain unavailable

• the same repairs are demanded without authority

Power is what happens when repair becomes one-sided and permanent.

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Power as Stabilised Asymmetry

Power is not the creation of inequality.

It is the maintenance of asymmetry over time.

An asymmetry becomes power when:

• it survives revision

• it resists renegotiation

• it is treated as background

• it is insulated from challenge

No coercion is required.

No malice is necessary.

The asymmetry simply becomes how things work.

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Why Agency Is the Wrong Lens

Agency-based accounts of power ask:

• Who imposed this?

• Who benefits?

• Who could change it?

These questions matter politically. But analytically, they miss the phenomenon.

In temporally thick systems, power often outlives:

• its origin

• its justification

• its beneficiaries

• even its recognition

Power persists because binding persists, not because someone keeps choosing it.

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Constraint Without Command

Power operates through constraint, not instruction.

It does not tell actors what to do.

It determines:

• which responses are possible

• which adaptations are expected

• which failures are tolerable

• which repairs are realistic

This is why power is often invisible to those who benefit from it — and exhausting to those who must adapt.

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Endurance as the Signature of Power

The signature of power is not force but endurance.

Where:

• resistance fades

• alternatives become unthinkable

• change is framed as disruption

• suffering becomes normalised

Power has stabilised.

The system does not need to defend itself.

It no longer needs justification.

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Neutrality Revisited

Power most often appears as neutrality.

Not because it is neutral, but because neutrality is how asymmetry hides.

To say “this is just how it works” is to:

• foreclose ethical revision

• protect existing bindings

• transfer burden to those already adapting

Neutrality is power’s preferred grammar.

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What This Series Will Do

This series will examine power as a semiotic and temporal phenomenon, not a moral one.

We will explore:

• asymmetrical readiness

• enforced adaptation

• the production of silence

• who absorbs breakdown

• how resistance appears without subjects

We will not look for villains.

We will look for stabilised constraint.

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Where We Go Next

The next post will focus on a central mechanism:

Who adapts — and who doesn’t

Because power does not require obedience.

It requires only that some positions remain flexible while others remain fixed.

That is where endurance becomes domination.