Power is often treated as force, domination, or possession: something exercised by agents over others. Even when refined into structural or discursive accounts, power is still typically framed as an effect exerted upon a field that already exists. This framing misses the deeper operation.
Power is not primarily about control over outcomes. It is about control over the cuts that shape what outcomes can appear at all.
1. Why Power Is Not a Thing
Power is not an object, a substance, or a capacity that some actors simply “have”. It is a relational asymmetry that emerges within coordinated systems. Specifically, it is an asymmetry in who can:
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establish cuts,
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stabilise them through sedimentation,
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revise them when they no longer hold,
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or ignore breakdowns without consequence.
Power operates at the level of possibility-shaping, not merely action-constraining.
2. Cuts as the Site of Power
Recall that cuts determine what distinctions are operative, what counts as relevant, and what trajectories are available. To have power is to have privileged access to this level of articulation.
Those with power can:
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define what is intelligible and what is noise,
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decide which breakdowns register as problems,
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and determine which forms of coordination are treated as normal.
Those without power are forced to coordinate within cuts they did not help shape — often expending continual effort just to remain intelligible.
3. Structural Power and Constraint Inertia
Power rarely announces itself. Its most durable form is constraint inertia: the persistence of sedimented cuts that no longer require active enforcement.
When constraint systems are deeply sedimented:
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alternatives become difficult to articulate,
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deviations appear irresponsible rather than innovative,
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and breakdowns are individualised rather than treated as systemic.
This is why power often feels invisible to those who benefit from it. The field remains intelligible for them.
4. Resistance as Recutting, Not Opposition
Resistance is often imagined as opposition to power — refusal, protest, or counterforce. But within a relational frame, resistance operates differently.
Resistance becomes effective when it rearticulates the field of intelligibility:
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when new distinctions are made operative,
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when previously ignored breakdowns are rendered salient,
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when alternative cuts begin to coordinate action.
Pure opposition leaves the cuts intact. Recutting changes what opposition can mean.
5. Power Without Moralisation
Understanding power as differential access to cuts does not require moral condemnation, but it does enable precision.
Power is not evil by default. Constraint asymmetries are inevitable in complex coordination systems. The ethical and political question is not whether power exists, but:
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how rigid or revisable the cuts are,
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who bears the cost of maintaining intelligibility,
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and whether recoordination is possible when breakdowns accumulate.
This keeps critique grounded in coordination dynamics rather than moral accusation.
Conclusion
Power is not best understood as domination over others, but as privileged participation in shaping the conditions of intelligibility. Those who control cuts control trajectories of possibility.
Seen this way, power is inseparable from politics and ethics alike — not because it corrupts them, but because normativity, coordination, and possibility all operate at the level of cuts.
In the next post, we will turn to pedagogy, where power often hides behind benevolence, and where the shaping of possibility is most explicit: Pedagogy as Possibility-Shaping.
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