Power and meaning

This volume is the tenth of the Journal of Political Power. The very first issue of this Journal opened with an article co-authored by Steven Lukes and Clarissa Hayward (2008). Similarly, this volume opens with an article co-authored by Lukes, in collaboration with David Jenkins this time, entitled ‘The power of occlusion’.

Jenkins and Lukes open with the following observation: ‘To not be right is one thing, but to be told that what one says or believes is ‘not even wrong’ is an even harder pill to swallow’. This is followed by a discussion of Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams 1995), where the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for the meaning of life and the universe, and replies that it is ‘42’. We, the readers, do not know the meaning of life or the universe. Yet, we do know that the answer cannot be ‘42’. That is not even wrong, it is so wrong as to be unquestionably wrong. The answer 42 has a startling effect upon the reader in much the same way that quotation from the (purported) Chinese Encyclopaedia, which Foucault quotes in the opening of the Order of Things (Foucault 1970, p. xv). It unsettles the reader, because we do not understand how it is possible to think that.

The third dimension of power covers epistemic elements of domination, which includes a broad range of phenomena. Lukes and Jenkins theorize the phenomenon they are describing as category mistake, drawing from the work of Gilbert Ryle. Being influenced by Kuhn, I tend to think of this phenomenon also in terms of the paradigms that inform social life. These are not just the big scientific paradigms but, also, the paradigms of everyday life. As emphasized by Goffman (1971) and Weber (1978), in their accounts of various forms of action, all social situations entail a local interpretative horizon, which is made to count for a given situation. Who gets to decide which system of meaning counts also determines what is considered locally reasonable. In that sense, to use Jenkins and Lukes’ example, Hayek’s claim that the economy is a spontaneous order and therefore cannot include justice is an attempt to validate a paradigm that would make the welfare state appear an irrational or inappropriate social construct or a category mistake. The capacity to exclude by rendering invisible, Jenkins and Lukes refer to as the power of occlusion. Emphasizing spontaneous order is a will to power through occlusion, with the aim of making social justice invisible, and irrational.

As argued by Haugaard and Pettit, in ‘A conversation on power and republicanism’, establishing the dominance of a local paradigm, or system of thought, is a complex process. Those whose interests are served by that paradigm must somehow convince the less powerful that the interpretative horizon in question represents the natural order of things. When a social norm is interpreted in this manner, social actors conclude (mistakenly) that this is the only possible description of things, and that there is a perfect correspondence between concepts and reality. They reach that conclusion, even when it is contrary to their interests to do so, and thus become compliant in their own domination, in the desire to remain rational.

To accomplish this interpretative incorporation, techniques of reification are often required. Nature, science and religious belief are the most common armoury for these defensive (status quo) or offensive (in the case of social change) strategies. It is precisely in this manner that the science of economics reproduces the perception of the market as some kind of natural spontaneous order.

The problem with the critique of other people’s systems of thought is that this often entails the critique of other people’s cultures, which opens the critic to the charge of ethnocentricity. Socialization into a patriarchal culture entails the internalization of all sorts of values that naturalize the differences between men and women. As argued by Pettit in this issue, one of the republican normative conceptual devices for evaluating this kind of inequality is the eye-ball test. This test is a metaphor for an equal interactive speech situation, concerning status, in which neither social actor has to act in a deferential manner because they can both look the other in the eye. However, as pointed out by Haugaard in response to Pettit, there can be a tension between wanting all women to pass the eye-ball test and respecting the socialization of others, or cultural diversity.

An extreme example of the conundrum is to be found in Mona Lilja, Mikale Baaz, Michale Schulz and Stellan Vinthagen’s paper on organized and everyday resistance. In Kampuchea (now Cambodia) the communists correctly identified that the traditional practice of arranged marriage was a source of patriarchal domination, antithetical to the egalitarian principles of Marxism. However, in its place they did not introduce voluntary marriage but, rather, forced marriages under the dictates of the Khmer Rouge, according to socialist principles. So, in Pettit’s republican vocabulary, one form of arbitrary domination was simply replaced with another.

While there may have been everyday resistance toward both forms of marriage coercion, that resistance received a significant boost when these forced marriages were branded a violation of human rights by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an organization set up to deal with the war-crimes and injustices of the Khmer Rouge regime. Interestingly, once these forced marriages were re-inscribed in the language of human rights, this increased everyday resistance to them. In their analysis of the phenomenon, Lilja et al. make the point that not only is the move from everyday resistance to organized resistance (as perceived by Scott in his work on power and resistance – Scott 1990), but the move can also occur the other way: from organized resistance to everyday resistance.

Further to the above argument (and Scott’s), building upon Lukes and Jenkins, it seems to me that part of that move is also tied to shifts in paradigmatic power, which entails changes in occlusion. The organizational change, or creation of organization, resulted in a shift of meaning. The arranged marriages of the Khmer Rouge shift from being similar to traditional arranged marriage, thus part of the natural order of things, to something else: forced marriages that violate human rights. This is a paradigm shift, as it entails a totally different view of the individual. Both traditional society and communism value society above the individual, while liberal human rights discourse (and republican theory) starts from the individual who makes choices, and has a right to do so, as part of their freedom. Consequently, the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the community is considered a crime against that individual. In neither the paradigms of traditional society nor in communism does the crime against the individual make any sense. It is invisible or occluded.

This process suggests a feedback from organization to something like consciousness-raising. Such a conclusion is at variance with Scott’s (1990) hypothesis that the subaltern actor does not suffer from ideological incorporation, but is closer to Lukes’ characterization of the third dimension of power (Lukes 1974) and Haugaard (2003). Following Scott (1990), we can assume that there was everyday resistance to Khmer Rouge arranged marriages, as indeed there is to arranged marriage in most traditional societies, but this resistance increases once new meanings are furnished. Resistance is going to be much weaker without a way of looking at the world that legitimizes the resistance. By providing meaning to the resistance, resistance becomes reasonable behaviour. As part of an alternative view it also becomes something that points towards social change, as a possible alternative reality. In this case a change in paradigm makes something visible, which is the flipside of occlusion. Making invisible, also entails making visible, in much the same way that the constraining element of structure is the flipside of the enabling aspects.

This reminds me of a recent account of arranged marriage among the Bedouin, in the film Sand Storm (Zexer 2016), which I am accepting as anthropologically reasonably accurate. In the film the main protagonist, Layla, is coerced into an arranged marriage, after she expresses her love for a classmate at the local University. Layla puts up stiff resistance but in the end, when she could have got her way, by eloping with her boyfriend, she backs off. Layla does not meet with her boyfriend at an agreed rendezvous, although she comes close to it, but instead returns home and acquiesces to the arranged marriage, although that decision makes her miserable. That moment when Layla shifts from resistance to acquiescence is portrayed as one of huge emotional turmoil. I would argue that Layla was ultimately not successful because she did not have an alternative vocabulary to express her resistance. In the local system of meaning, which Layla would have been socialized into, she was dis-honouring the family, motivated by selfish desires. In contrast, compliance would be considered an altruistic act. I would hypothesize, counterfactually, that if Layla had had stronger socialization in a different system of meaning she might have followed through with her defiance. If she had been more exposed to the language of human rights, and concomitant concept of the individual, she would not have felt guilt at marrying whom she desired. Or, if exposed to republican thought, above, she would have regarded her family’s response to her love as a form of arbitrary domination, which it was normatively desirable to resist.

Intuitively, the forced marriage of the Khmer Rouge and traditional arranged marriage strike republican readers as instances of arbitrary domination. However, what specifically makes these acts arbitrary domination? In their article, ‘What is Arbitrary Power?’ Samuel Arnold and John R. Harris delineate the essence of arbitrary power. There are three possible perspectives on this: first, according to Lovett (2012a, 2012b), power is arbitrary if it is unconstrained power-over; second, according to some of Pettit’s recent work, power-over is arbitrary if it is uncontrolled by those subject to it; third, power is arbitrary if it does not track the interests of those subject to it – the latter was the position of Pettit’s earlier work (Petit 1997).

The above examples of coerced marriage would not necessarily fail the first test criteria of arbitrary power. It might well be the case that Khmer Rouge marriages were constrained by the objective application of the principles of some variant of Marxism. In the case of Layla’s situation it was clearly according to known and shared tradition. Thus, neither would be arbitrary, in the sense of contingent, power. However, such a conclusion is unsatisfactory because it goes against our intuitions. The fact that these cases entail resistance by the less powerful suggests that this intuition is not simply observer-centred ethnocentric bias.

However, forced marriage would fail the second test, as those subject to Khmer Rouge Marxist and traditional marriages would have had no say in the process. This fails what Pettit refers to as the tough-luck test (2014). In contrast to the above examples, if we lose in a democratic election it is our tough-luck, not arbitrary domination. Being on the losing side in an election is not an instance of arbitrary domination because those subject to power participated in the election. However, what about tyranny of the majority? At first sight, that appears to pass the tough-luck test. However, upon closer examination, it can be argued that being consistently in a minority means that you have lack of control, thus tyranny of the majority fails the tough-luck test. But, as observed by Arnold and Harris, is it lack of control that really makes tyranny of the majority objectionable? A thought experiment throws doubt upon this: imagine that the minority are racists and that the majority hold or enact policies or laws based upon egalitarian principles that are objectionable to the racist minority. Would we find the fact that the majority prevails objectionable? No, and the reason is that what makes tyranny of the majority objectionable is that it usually fails to track the interests of citizens. Typically the majority wish to dominate the minority. However, when the egalitarian majority tracks the interests of those subject to power, it is no longer arbitrary domination. Hence, the essence of the absence of arbitrary domination, or republican freedom, entails tracking the interests of those subject to state power. The latter is a position that Pettit also held in his earlier republican work (Pettit 1997), but appears to jettison.

Tracking the interests of social actors is a complex process, especially in a world of contested meanings. This ambivalence can be seen in Bohdana Kurylo’s article, ‘Pornography and power in Michel Foucault’s thought’. She begins with an ideal type of the feminist account of pornography, as characterized by radical feminists, including Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Within this framework, pornography is form of subjectification of women, as abject, desiring domination and consequently legitimately dominated (Dworkin 1981). According to this framework the existence of pornography does not track the interests of women, and thus constitutes arbitrary domination according to the third criteria. However, this is contrasted with Foucault’s genealogical theorization of the subject. Foucault characterized pornography as an imaginary universe in which social subjects construct and examine their sexualities. Unlike in real sex, where reality impinges upon the possible, the world of pornography becomes a place where ideal types of sexuality can be constructed. This both gives pleasure and also entails a process of self-subjectification, whereby social subjects come to identify with the ideal type sexual social constructions. Thus, this is a form of self-domination but with different implications from the radical feminist perspective.

The feminist view suggests that prohibition is a liberation of women from oppressive portrayals, while the Foucauldian perspective suggests that prohibition is part of the hide-and-seek process of discovery and social construction of sexualities. For Foucault (1978), prohibition does not occlude, or make invisible. On the contrary, prohibition makes the search for (so-called) perverse sexualities meaningful. The stated aim of prohibition and the effect of prohibition are in fact opposite. Prohibition is not occlusion but, on the contrary, makes what is prohibited visible.

The creation of subject identities through the binary of the permitted vs. the forbidden ties into the power of the law to create the state of the exception, which in turn constitutes the relationship between subject and abject. In his article ‘Pouvoir constituant betrayed: a model of abjection in power relations’, Michael Murphy dwells upon Agamden’s account (Agamden 2002) of the constitution of Muselmanner in the German concentration camps. For Agamden, following Foucault, the power of the modern state is that of constitutive power: making social subjects. However, the flipside of subject formation is the exclusion of a whole set of modes of being-in-the-world, which become beyond the law. The Muselmann is the ultimate non-subject who is abandoned by the law. The inability to interact with others marks the border between human and inhuman, between social subject and pure abjection.

Pure abjection suggests being acted upon. However, if we take seriously the self-constitution of subject formation, even in situations of extreme powerlessness, then we must take seriously how social actors perform abjection. In this respect Warren TenHouten’s paper, ‘Social dominance hierarchy and the pride-shame system’ is particularly illuminating. TenHouten argues that pride and shame are opposites, the former reflecting social dominance and the latter social submission, or powerlessness. Pride is made up of two emotions, anger and joy. The proud individual has a sense of social satisfaction that comes from having achieved a dominant position in a competitive struggle that requires anger, which results in a feeling of superiority. Simultaneously, the proud, dominant individual feels positive self-evaluation in comparison to others, which results in joy. In contrast to the proud and dominant, the dominated social subjects feel shame at their abjection. They feel defeated in competition, which results in fear towards others, and sadness or depression at their failure.

Arguably, this account throws interesting light upon extreme abjection. The inmates of the camps knew when fellow inmates became Muselmanner because the latter became incapable of interacting with others. When spoken to, they would simply avert their gaze. In other words they became incapable of social agency. This could suggest a deep and profound shame, caused by extreme trauma, in which the social subject simply wishes to disappear, to crawl under the carpet, or for the ground to swallow them up.

Muselmanner typically did not die solely of physical causes. While emaciated, they were often not in significantly worse physical state than others. However, once they had lost the capacity to be human, they died within a few days. Their trauma had so enveloped their being-in-the-world that they were no longer capable of meaningful interaction. They could be compelled to do physical tasks, such as digging, but they could no longer reproduce that essential quality of being human, which is speaking, thus creating meaning. Viewed from the outside, they appeared as non-interpretative beings, living in a purely physical present (see Levi 1991).

If the extreme of powerless is meaninglessness, then its opposite – agency – entails meaning. This is where the duality of self-subjectification lies. On the one hand, self-subjectification entails a loss of freedom as the self makes him or herself into a signifier. However, that is a condition of possibility of agency. Its opposite is shame and meaninglessness. The anger component of self-creation is an interesting phenomenon. When humans create they both destroy and make new. The gardener destroys the weeds, while making new. The carpenter destroys a tree to make a cabinet. The creative destruction of self-creation involves anger, yet meaning. What springs to mind is the gardener who labours in an overgrown wilderness, and after her labours, tired, as the day moves into dusk, she sits down, expecting to be overjoyed by her creation but instead sees only her own violence. In a sense, affectively powerful art does precisely that: it conveys meaning, while at the same time makes us uncomfortable, because it does not entirely occlude the violence, or anger, that went into its creation. Thus, what is made manifest, through occlusion, is still there as a trace, which unnerves the observer.

Mark Haugaard
School of Political Science and Sociology,
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland