Power in modernity: a discussion among Mark Haugaard, Clarissa Hayward, and Jonathan G. Heaney of Power in Modernity: agency relations and the creative destruction of the King’s two bodies, by Isaac Ariail Reed, with a reply by Isaac Reed

ABSTRACT

In this article, Haugaard, Hayward and Heaney discuss Reed’s Power in Modernity, and the author replies. The exchanges centres on the question of whether power relations should be theorized via Reed’s concepts of rector, actor, other, and project, and on the roles of performance agency in power’s exercise. The contributors discuss several examples of political crises in modernity, including the storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• actor
• agency
• performance
• power
• modernity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I have followed the old-fashion convention of capitalizing King, as in this context it is a form of reification. Reed (2020) also follows this convention.

2. This tendency to focus on Bourdieu’s earlier work is true of many other advocates of ‘projects’ in social theory, for instance Archer, for whom projects emerge from our ‘concerns’ and are used to form our ‘practices’, all of which is mediated by our ‘internal conversations’ (Archer 2007; see also Burkitt 2016).

3. This is not to suggest that there isn’t a rich seam to be mined within what Charles Taylor calls the ‘qualitative view’ of action in Hegel, in which unreflective action is primary, and conscious reflection a secondary ‘achievement’, bound up with the notion of expressivity and the embodied life process (and ultimately, with the all-pervasive activity of Spirit) (Taylor Taylor, [1983]2010). The issue is that aspects of the model of the actor remain somewhat implicit in the book.

4. For example, he suggests that ‘in order to understand the famous paradox of the king’s two bodies analysed by Kantorowicz, you need only make use of house logic: there is the house and there is the king. In other words, to the extent that the house is a kind of body – in the sense of what the scholastics called corpus corporatum, a corporation – belonging to a house means acquiring the logic of the “thought of the house”, devotion to the house, to an entity that transcends its agents … In other words, the very ambiguity of the notion of the house as a reality transcending the individual has to be taken into account in order to understand this transition to the constitution of a transcendent entity’ (Bourdieu 2014, p. 257).

5. ‘The same is true with the act of state: how does the seal, sigillum authenticum, come to have this magic power to transform someone into a professor, for example, by the act of appointment?’ (Bourdieu 2014, p. 298).

6. She writes: ‘The people as nation claimed their right to self-rule as a special, distinct collectivity – but did so in terms that linked nation, republic and sovereignty to people in general, the bearers of universal natural rights … the Revolution established a resonant and enduring myth of the sovereign people in action (Canovan 2005, p. 27).

7. ‘It is not the universal Idea which places itself in opposition and struggle, or puts itself in danger; it holds itself safe from attack and uninjured in the background and sends the particular of passion into the struggle to be worn down. We can call it the cunning of reason that the Idea makes passions work for it, in such a way that that whereby it posits itself in existence loses thereby and suffers injury’ (Hegel, 1955, cited in Taylor ([1977]2012, p. 392).

8. Transcript available at https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/january-6-house-select-committee-hearing-investigation-day-1-full-transcript. Accessed 1 September 2021.

9. Transcript available at: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/politics/trump-january-6-speech-transcript/index.html. Accessed 1 September 2021.

10. See, for example, Hayward (2000, 2018).

11. A video of the full speech is available at https://www.wsj.com/video/trump-full-speech-at-dc-rally-on-jan-6/E4E7BBBF-23B1-4401-ADCE-7D4432D07030.html. Accessed 1 September 2021. Compare with this video, shot from the point of view of the crowd, which foreground the audience reactions. https://www.yahoo.com/now/video-shows-crowd-reaction-trump-172206556.html. Accessed 1 September 2021.

12. In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump referred to undocumented immigrants as ‘bad hombres’ when he claimed, ‘We have some bad hombres here, and we’re gonna get ’em out.’ In August 2019, the then-president invoked an anti-Semitic trope when told reporters: ‘I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.’ One month earlier, he tweeted that Representative Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district was ‘a disgusting rat and rodent infest mess.’ In 2018, he reportedly asked in a meeting about immigration why the US would want immigrants from ‘all these shithole countries,’ such as Haiti and African countries, rather than from majority-white countries like Norway.

13. He made this claim, for example, near the start of the January 6 speech, when he said, ‘Our media … [has] become the enemy of the people. It’s become the enemy of the people. It’s the biggest problem we have in this country. https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/january-6-house-select-committee-hearing-investigation-day-1-full-transcript. Accessed 1 September 2021.

14. See https://cheney.house.gov/2021/01/12/cheney-i-will-vote-to-impeach-the-president/. Accessed 1 September 2021.

15. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXnHIJkZZAs. Accessed 1 September 2021.

16. I would note then that I am trying to address a problem in the making of early modern empires that was laid out with extraordinary precision by John Law (1984), though I propose a very different account of how the problem was addressed, elaborated and, in a certain sense, ‘solved.’

17. In the opening parts of Power in Modernity, I develop the concept of ‘other’ via Orlando Patterson’s external critique of Hegel in Slavery and Social Death, relegating certain debates about Hegel to (long) footnotes. But I think that the articulation of rector-actor-other as a frame for understanding power relations can also be arrived at via immanent critique, as is evident in some of the key readings of Hegel in 20^th century social and political theory. I take this as one of the meanings implied by Jonathan’s perspicacious comment that the book is haunted by Hegel. See in particular Fanon (2008) and Buck-Morss (2000).

18. For example, Bourdieu writes that, ‘in these acts of delegation, something very important happens: power is divided … Power fragments, that is clear, but there’s more to it. We come back to the problem of the mad king that always preoccupied the canon lawyers: the person who countersigns controls, and the king is himself controlled by the person who countersigns … the ministers themselves have an interest in the perpetuation of this routine; they are happy to countersign, but also to be countersigned because they are afraid of being challenged for acts of the king … In other words, they want to guaranteed in relation to both above and below.’ (Bourdieu 2014, p. 300).

19. Bourdieu misreads Kantorowicz as, broadly speaking, a Weberian about the medieval and modern worlds. As I attempt to show in a paper-in-progress, Kantorowicz should be read as a response to Weber, articulated in the idiom of his generation of German letters. This idiom was deeply concerned with precisely those aspects of modernity – sometimes labelled as ‘political theology’ – that Weber had disavowed, at least in his more ‘rationalist’ moments.

20. The power of the grotesque in politics, and in communicating the inevitability of sovereignty through the absurdity of the leader who wields it, was addressed by Michel Foucault himself. See discussion in Power in Modernity, pp. 249–250.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Haugaard

Mark Haugaard is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He is the founder editor of the Journal of Political Power, published by Routledge, and the book series, Social and Political Power, with Manchester University Press. He has published extensively upon power and his most recent publications includes: The Four Dimensions of Power: understanding domination, empowerment and democracy, 2020, Manchester University Press.

Clarissa Hayward

Clarissa Hayward is a Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and Co-Editor of the American Political Science Review. Her most recent book, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2013), was co-winner of the American Political Science Association’s prize for the Best Book in Urban Politics. She is also author of De-Facing Power (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and she is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled This is What Democracy Looks Like!

Jonathan G. Heaney

Jonathan G. Heaney is a lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Science, Education and Social Work, and an Associate Fellow of The Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast. He has written on power and emotions, emotions and nationalism, and his ongoing work combines theoretical work on state power and emotions (the ‘emotional state), a critique of dominant approaches to nationalism from an emotions and embodiment perspective (‘embodied nationalism’), as well as more empirical analyses of the deployment of emotions as a new form of capital or power within political fields (‘emotional capital’).

Isaac Ariail Reed

Isaac Ariail Reed is Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (University of Chicago Press, 2020), as well as the co-editor of Social Theory Now (with Claudio Benzecry and Monica Krause) and The New Pragmatist Sociology (with Neil Gross and Christopher Winship).