Patterns of power and the (sociological) imagination

The last year of the 2010s begins in a world struggling with multiple complex and fuzzy conflicts marked by unclear and complicated power relations. While there is perhaps nothing new under the sun regarding the geopolitical fuzziness and devastatingly deadly power games constantly at play at the expense of millions of civilians, the political turbulence within numerous polities comprising of unpredictable voters and, into the bargain, unpredictable leaders, has quickly become part of the new normal in Europe and the US. Unpredictability is not only a synonym for moodiness, but describes too the various institutional domino-effects and collateral impacts of turbulent political leadership that we repeatedly witness in different national and local contexts.

The crisis of representative democracy, in the headlines for a good four decades now, appears to constantly unfold new layers of disappointment for citizens. The promises of participative democracy for some, and populist movements for others, to mention but two aspects, respectively prove unable to fulfil expectations of wider, more equal, or simply different distributions of power. The decline of traditional working-class jobs with the accepted allegiances between them, as well as paralyses in welfare-state protections that had come to be regarded as traditional, make it much more difficult for ordinary citizens to trace how power circulates in the societies they live in and to know what it is reasonable to expect or demand of these societies. Not least, the machinations of gargantuan-scale social-media manipulators on the one hand and cabals of ultra-rich individuals on the other are deliberately designed to disrupt patterns of political imagination among contemporary populations.

The first issue of the EJCPS’s sixth volume can be described, without being specifically intended as a special issue, as thematically centred around different aspects and dimensions of power. Power, of course, is a concept right at the thematic core of cultural and political sociology – to an extent to which it is possible to say that cultural and political sociology always deals with power in some regard. At the same time, power is an overwhelming topic, both conceptually and in its mundane forms, and thus addressing it in novel ways is laborous and requires intellectual courage. The latter is not lacking, we find, in the articles in this issue.

In their robust manifesto, Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman propose a new direction in which social theorists can sharpen their tools to understand questions of agency, power, and modernity. At the core of their suggestion is the idea of the different roles of the actor in situations of power, or, as the authors more radically put it, the distinction between action and agency. By dismantling the action-by-individuals and agency-of-individuals node, the authors address the eternal social-scientific struggle to satisfyingly define the relation between structure and agency, reminding us of the importance of considering in any given case what project is being aimed at, and how ownership of projects crucially affects the power constellations at hand. This reminder, emerging from a re-reading of Hannah Arendt in particular, leads to the recognition (and conceptual novelty) of the three figures of Rector – who has the project –, Actor – who acts on behalf of the latter, as a legitimate delegate –, and Other, the outsider, and potentially an obstacle to the project in question. These figures are proposed as inherent to power relations and challenge us to revisit social-theoretical conceptions of power. It is in the intertwining chains of rector-actor-other relationships that the authors locate their new promise to understand social power, and they do so with an intriguing array of examples from historical and contemporary power relations. Building on Lukes, Foucault, and Bourdieu with regard to dimensions of power in social theory, and on Coleman and Pateman on the overarching social-theoretical questions of actor intersubjectivity and mutual recognition, and finally arriving at Kantorowicz’s account of state power by way of the logic of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, Reed and Weinman invite us to reconsider the established understanding of the transition to modernity. Using the rector-actor-other lens, they explore examples of governance reflecting these ‘two bodies’, the concrete body (of the king, and later, in modern democracies, of the people) and the symbolic one (the sacred figuration of the king’s power, or of the ‘people’), from the French revolution to the current crisis of present-day republicanism. This opens new windows for illuminating the complex power relations in contemporary societies, and the increasingly common deadlocks of ‘democratic governance’ in a number of polities.

Certainly, this bold effort to redefine of social theory leaves many questions open, as Reed and Weinman also acknowledge. In order to facilitate this fascinating and worthwhile debate further, we asked Professor Risto Heiskala to write a first comment on Reed and Weinman’s article, which he did, with depth and precision. Sympathetic to the overall ambition of the manifesto, Heiskala suggests that we recognise a few restrictions to its scope of application, and ends with a discussion of the theme of the King’s two bodies as applied to contemporary Europe. Rightly, Heiskala points to the vulnerabilities affecting the European Union at the moment, seeing it as ‘incompletely defined’ but still subject to bitter disputes about its future direction. He underlines the need for an effective European public sphere, characterised by accessible public media and forums for discussion, within which innovative types of legitimacy could be built, ‘new solutions based on recognition and solidarity’. It will be far from easy to construct a public sphere of this kind, but, Heiskala says, if this does not happen, it is hard to see who will defend Europe’s democratic values in the future.

Heiskala is certainly pointing to a multi-layered problem. He counters contentions about the ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe by explaining the legislative and executive structure of the European Union, and of course it is correct to do this. Nonetheless many politicians, as well as non-politicians, perceive this system as distant and tortuous: ‘We have the laws made for us by people in Brussels whom we didn’t elect’ (David Davies, M.P. (Con.); Sky News, 17 December 2018). Davies must know that this is not technically true, as Heiskala shows it is not, but in the absence of the vibrant public sphere he calls for it is often felt to be true, and not only by people in Britain.

Part of the European public sphere needs to be composed of an imaginative space in which political debate is close to citizens’ lived experience and they can enjoy taking part in it. Otherwise, the public imagination remains prey to political fantasies such as those described by Fintan O’Toole in his Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018). Sympathetically but devastatingly, O’Toole analyses the delusion that portrays the United Kingdom as both victor and victim, devastated by foreign exploitation. ‘The problem is that the whole gesture is based on something imaginary: an enormous overstatement of the power of the EU in the governance of England’ (2018, p.192). Symbolic power like this cannot be countered merely by pointing out its misguidedness. It needs lives to be lived in an alternative reality. In seeking to understand the complexity of Brexit, or the French yellow-vest protests, for that matter, with their complex demands associated, by and large, with the sentiment of democratic deficiency, the framework suggested in Reed and Weinman’s article opens promising new directions.

In one sense the next article shows how difficult debate can be even when all the actors accept the overall reasonableness of a particular project. Pertti Alasuutari, Hanna Rautajoki, Petra Auvinen and Marjaana Rautalin address the Single European Sky (SES) initiative and the problems faced in implementing it, from a neo-institutionalist perspective. They show how the decoupling of principles and practices – as put forward, for instance, in world society theory – among multiple levels of actors translate into a limbo of constant transformations of a project, and hence to difficulties in stabilising any one outcome of such an institutionalisation process. Questions of delegating authority – and different types of authority –, as well as the power to implement measures are at the heart of this problematic too, even though the authors’ viewpoint differs from those in the previous texts. Analysing supra-national policy-making ‘as an evolving discursive process’ that various actors strive to steer in defence of their own respective positions, the article sheds light on the complexities of power and capacity in multi-stakeholder harmonisation projects. Actors’ persuasive uses of different sources of authority display the ways in which they attempt to protect their interests, impacting as they do so on the whole SES project.

Caroline Patsias, Julian Durazo Hermann and Sylvie Patsias explore a comparative puzzle of citizen participation and politicisation, and show how local group styles that link with national political cultures direct the ways in which citizen groups pursue and perceive politics. Exploring case studies from France and Canada, and the respective civic and empowerment styles dominant in the cultures that have evolved within these citizen groups, the authors show how crucial the intertwinements of political culture and local context are in understanding differences in citizen participation, even despite seemingly similar participative devices. The two groups studied believe in and emphasise citizens’ right and capacity to power, but they interpret the means to power very differently. This has consequences for their efforts to politicise issues, and for the elisions between politicisation and avoiding politics that characterise both groups. It also places them at different positions on the scale of political action, as well as within local power games.

Our reviews in this issue point to often-horrific interactions between power and the imagination, with Vincent Druliolle’s review of Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era – ‘the “dark side” of the well-intentioned and complex idea of Never Again’; then Rebecca Dolgoy on Sodaro’s Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence . Dolgoy agues that Sodaro explores ‘the tension between affect and effect’, confronting the fact that all the efforts by memorial museums fail to correlate with reductions of violence in the present. Indeed, Dolgoy contends that these museums constitute political projects that fail adequately to confront the precariousness of our political systems and their vulnerability to manipulation. It is fitting, given the questions raised in these reviews, that we can also include Gábor Tverdota’s review of the edition by Meja and Kettler: The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim. Since this is ‘the first companion book dedicated to the work of Karl Mannheim’, Tverdota urges a resurgence of interest in this author and in the sociology of knowledge in general as ‘the organon of the self-formation of humanity in the context of modernity’.