Power is usually imagined as something exercised: decisions made, rules enforced, sanctions applied. From within a relational frame, this picture is misleading. The most consequential power in stable systems is rarely visible, rarely dramatic, and rarely experienced as coercion.
Power operates latently, through differential access to the cuts that structure intelligibility.
1. Power Without Command
In well-coordinated systems, very little needs to be ordered. Participants already know what counts, what matters, and what will be recognised. Compliance is not demanded; it is assumed.
This is not because individuals are passive, but because the field of possibility has been pre-shaped. Action that aligns with existing cuts flows easily. Action that does not struggles to register at all.
Power, here, is not command over others, but control over the conditions under which action becomes intelligible.
2. Access to Cuts
Not everyone relates to the system from the same position. Some participants have privileged access to:
-
the distinctions that organise evaluation,
-
the criteria that determine legitimacy,
-
the timing and pacing of change.
Others encounter these cuts only as constraints already in place.
This asymmetry is often mistaken for differences in talent, effort, or merit. In fact, it reflects positional access: who can see, modify, or exploit the system’s organising distinctions, and who must simply navigate them.
3. Why Power Feels Deserved
Latent power is especially durable because it masquerades as competence. Those with greater access to cuts appear fluent, strategic, and authoritative. Their actions “make sense” because the system is already aligned to recognise them as such.
Meanwhile, those with less access are experienced as:
-
struggling,
-
resistant,
-
or lacking insight.
The system interprets misalignment as individual failure, rather than as evidence of asymmetrical positioning.
4. Gatekeeping Without Villains
Latent power does not require bad actors. Gatekeeping often occurs through routine practices:
-
review processes,
-
curricular design,
-
funding criteria,
-
professional norms.
No one needs to intend exclusion for exclusion to occur. The system does the work automatically, sorting variation into what can be taken seriously and what cannot.
This is why appeals to goodwill or fairness rarely disrupt entrenched asymmetries. The issue is not attitude; it is structure.
5. Seeing Power Relationally
Once power is understood as differential access to cuts, several things become clear:
-
power is systemic, not personal;
-
it persists even when individuals change;
-
and it cannot be dismantled by moral critique alone.
Intervention must operate at the level of reconfiguring intelligibility — altering which distinctions matter, which variations are recognisable, and who can participate in shaping them.
6. The Unsettling Implication
The most unsettling implication is this: many of us benefit from latent power without ever noticing it. Fluency feels natural. Recognition feels earned. Authority feels deserved.
Seeing power relationally means relinquishing the comfort of innocence. It requires acknowledging that stability is not just something we inhabit, but something we help reproduce.
Conclusion
Latent power is the quiet consequence of stable coordination. It resides not in overt control, but in unequal access to the cuts that organise possibility.
In the next post, we will examine how these cuts can sometimes be reconfigured — not through confrontation, but through subtle shifts that alter what the system can recognise. That is where subversion becomes strategic rather than merely critical.
No comments:
Post a Comment