What is Power?

1. What is Power?

2. What is Power? • The capacity to affect other people’s behaviour? • The capcity to act on the world (to make planes fly, crops grow, etc.)? • The capacity to decide

3. Types of Power • Economic Power - control of resources, wealth • Military Power - access to weaponry, capacity to use it • Political Power - access to the machinery of the state (law, police, etc.) • Ideological Power - capacity to determine what is widely accepted as good and true • Technological Power - Power to act on the material world

4. ‘Economic Determinism’ • Access to Resources and the capacity to decide how they are deployed is the key to all other forms of power • Economic power is the goal towards which all other forms of power are deployed This is how Marx’s view of power is often characterised, and is the mode associated with ‘classical’ or ‘vulgar’ ‘Marxism’

5. A more sophisticated Marxian View • All material resources are themselves the products of social action, of collective labour • Power therefore lies in the capacity to organise social action • Ruling elites normally control the institutions which enable them to organise collective action for their own benefit. Example: What is a corporation? It’s a system for co-ordinating the collective labour of a large group of people • Less powerful groups can seek to challenge their power by trying to re-organise collective action in their interests. This is the view which probably more closely resembles that put forward in Marx’s own writings, and represented today by thinkers such as Hardt & Negri

6. Discourse ‘Discourse’ is a widely abused term, but an essential on. Its contemporary usage in Cultural Studies is largely derived from the work of Michel Foucault, who uses it (quite loosely) to designate specific sets of meaningful practices: I. e.sets of beliefs and the social behaviour associated with them • A ‘discourse’ is a set of meaningful practices • A set of ways of talking and thinking about a particular topic • A set of practices informed by that way of thinking and talking\ • Particular discourses shape all of our assumptions about the world and so shape our behaviour Examples: if we believe that • our sick friend is possessed by evil spirits, or has been infected by a virus • the sovereign has been appointed by God to rule over us or that government’s should be elected • homosexuality is a disease or a lifestyle choice we will behave differently in either case.

7. Power/Knowledge Is an important term which emerges in Foucault’s later work (especially The History of Sexuality Volume One) • ‘Knowledge’ is the name for those discourses which are accepted as true and acted upon accordingly • Power is the capacity to create knowledge, to describe the world in terms which are accepted and acted upon • Power is the capacity to define the situation Examples -The capacity to decide what constitutes a crime -The capacity to decide what characterises a ‘normal’ healthy person -The capacity to decide what kinds of qualification will get someone a job POWER / KNOWLEDGE is the name for this capacity

8. Performativity Is a term originating in J.L Austen’s How to DO Things With Words, and deployed by Judith Butler in conjunction with Foucault’s concepts of discourse and power/knowledge Discourse can be understood as performative because it makes real that which is describes.Butler says that gender discourse is performative because -Every time we say ‘men are from Mars women are from venus’, or act on this assumption, we help tomake it true, while statements like these are only true as long as people keep making them and acting on them So discourse is power/knowledge insofar as it comes to inform and organise social behaviour This does not mean that social behaviour changes easily - for example it can take centuries for the discourses governing the ‘truth’ of gender in a given society to change. On the other hand, under the impact of combined economic, technological ideological and political changes, such transformations can be quite rapid.