Power is chemistry, the unique moments of transformation in our lives

Discover the meaning of life

What is a good life and what does it take to live it? This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy and perhaps one of its most important. Yet, it appears to be pretty easy to answer. That’s because virtually everybody seems willing to have a stab at it. Whether claims talk about values, forgiveness and faith or the importance of stoicism, courage and reflection, or any of the other million-and-one go-to solutions, the good-life, it seems, cannot be too far away. We might wonder if power has anything to do with this, as we examine the meaning of a flower. Well, it might actually be all there is to it. This is as simple as other answers but I accept it’s a lot to take in. So, you might want to read to the end before drawing your own conclusions. The concept of the power-medium offers us a different take on the usual discussions about life. It’s not a real thing. You can’t go out and hunt one down. It’s what sociologists call a ‘synthetic’ framework, a metaphor or thought-model for understanding how power moves around and operates. Its central proposition is quite straightforward. This is that power is not held, stored or exchanged. It is not located somewhere, retained or spent by someone or something. Instead, it is constitutive of society. It defines and regulates life, mediating how we live in a social as opposed to isolated world. Without it, we cannot recognise what it is to live with others. It tells us that power is not a single force and we should stop thinking it is even if it has very specific material effects. Instead, it’s a structured and relational process distributed across all of the systems of knowledge, truth, interaction and organisation that we call ‘life’. It’s all around us, and this makes it easy to spot, but it’s still very difficult to pin down. To help us, the power-medium model has four dimensions, or ways of measuring power’s presence and effect. We can call these power-truth, power-duality, power-settlement and power-uptake. It’s probably important to acknowledge straightaway here that there are other ways of splitting up or ordering the ideas they work with. It might even be useful to add a new dimension or combine two or more of them from time to time. So, remember this is a metaphor, not a collection of particles living in the physical world somewhere which we can isolate and measure. There will always be overlaps and duplications so don’t stress this stuff too much. It’s probably also important to emphasise that the whole idea assumes we believe in a social world, one we must share with other people. From birth we are social beings: dependent on others, responsive to others, affecting others, unable to escape the lives of others. In other words, whoever said ‘… there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’* either had a simplistic view of power or was, perhaps, fixated more on the rhetorical demands and dog whistles of ‘conference season’. The power-medium provides not so much a new or radical analysis of social life but a fresh interpretation of power, one that allows the metaphor of a medium to distil the workings and routes of power more helpfully. Let’s take a look at each of its four parts. Credibility and authenticity Power-truth refers to how certain stories, claims, narratives or structures of knowledge are stabilised as ‘truthful’ within our changing social order and, indeed, why some are not. This doesn’t deal in a ‘truth’ that is absolute, an objective reality that we all understand identically, but as something produced by what I’ll call the institutional, analytical and discursive mechanisms that surround us in society. Power produces the categories by which truth is recognised and validated (Foucault, 1980). So, within modern information-based societies, power-truth is increasingly mediated by algorithmic clustering, technical systems and digital platforms as much as it is by expert or curating institutions. We might see this as the way information is prioritised for our consumption or by what we’re doom scrolling on TikTok, although networks are also physical and informal as well as digital. What counts as credible knowledge is shaped not only by the reliability of the claim but also by its visibility and its capacity for repetition and institutional endorsement. Power works closely with these matters. These media and data infrastructures form the conditions under which social reality is built and stabilised (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). They are what we read, are taught, discuss and react to. They are what we repeat, prevent, live and die for. In the power-medium framework, power-truth, its claims as to what has useful knowledge or repeatable value, is the foundation of power itself. It determines which representations of reality are socially actionable and which are marginalised or excluded. Tension and opposition Power-duality argues that power emerges from binary or tension-based relationships. This sounds a little complicated but don’t be put off by this. They surround everything we do and help us focus on what we want. Simply put, it deals with the way we make key distinctions, such as inclusion and exclusion, legitimacy and illegitimacy, the socially visible and invisible and the central and peripheral. It’s also about the everyday and routine such as the arguments we have and the choices we must make daily. Rather than being incidental, these dualities construct how power is organised and maintained. We must sift, collect, filter and discard if we are to choose. And we must choose if we want to repeat something or decide never to do it again. This idea is consistent with what is usually referred to as society’s dialectical tradition. This is a fancy way of describing the rules around how we talk and listen to each other and how this makes everything relational, negotiated, moving, multi-faceted and unfixed. Life becomes structured through these oppositional positions and fields or loose groupings of power (Bourdieu, 1991). Dominance is maintained not through coercion or control but via these structured oppositions that test for or define what is normal or deviant and discard what cannot be tolerated (Gramsci, 1971). Power-duality is not simply about how conflict comes about. Sociology already has a good grasp on this. It is more the architecture that makes this intelligible or known to us. It stabilises our understanding of power by organising its differences into recurring forms that connect to us. As it does so, it pushes us towards or from systems of governance, classification and social hierarchy that are consistent with what is emerging and which we work to regenerate or reject without coercion. It allows us to think power is one thing even when it operates in ways that actually make it something else entirely. Stabilisation and fixing Power-settlement refers to the processes by which these contested meanings, connections or distributions of power become stabilised into institutions, norms or routines. It is the ‘fixing’ mechanism of the power-medium: the point at which fluid social negotiations become structured as order, routine or common-sense. These are never really settled, despite the definition used here. They are always temporary or contingent. Durkheim’s concept of ‘social facts’ is useful here (1912/1995). He gives us the idea that social rules and structures constrain, promote or acquire durability through their collective reinforcement. These are the common acceptances of social life, the things we take for granted and see perhaps as ‘natural’. The idea of power-settlement also reflects institutional theories around ‘path dependency’. This claims that ideas that stabilise quickly in systems, that acquire traction early, become better at reinforcing themselves over time. Power-settlement is not a permanent resolution and is always provisional. It represents the moment when power’s fixes become durable enough to guide our behaviour, allocate resources or define legitimacy. Legal systems, bureaucratic procedures and algorithmic governance systems all operate as mechanisms of settlement. In this sense, power-settlement is the bringing together of both power-truth and power-duality. It takes the matters we understand as reliable knowledge, and society’s rules and insistences, and converts both into something approaching reality or the ‘must-do’ list for the day. Internalisation and distribution Power-uptake describes how power is absorbed, enacted and reproduced within our social systems. Unlike top-down models of power like domination or coercion, uptake emphasises our individual responsibilities or the way power is distributed widely to construct influence or to repeat it (Arendt). Power persists not just because it is imposed but also by the way it is taken up, sustained and embedded in everything we do. Individuals become the carriers of power. Each of us regulates its presence, reproducing it via the many justifications and explanations we adopt daily (Foucault, 1980). Social structures become embodied within us as natural or instinctive, guiding our perceptions and actions (Bourdieu, 1991). In the modern networked world, this type of uptake is swelled by digital technologies and their dynamics and feedback loops. This highlights how power flows through decentralised junctions and moments, where our own participation or rejection of life’s rules becomes a key mechanism for forming and stabilising it (Castells, 2009). We are all central to this: key actors in life’s micro-dynamics, the exchanges of everyday life, and in the way power uses them to achieve continuity. This is the moment when structures, what they’re telling us, where they want us to be, how they work, become the things we do. Rinse and repeat Taken together, these four dimensions form a circulating and continuing system rather than a linear model of beginnings and ends with a ‘done by’ and ‘done to’ relationship. Power-truth establishes legitimacy, power-duality establishes its relational space, power-settlement stabilises all this into durable forms, and power-uptake reproduces what we do through distributed means. This system is not static. Each component feeds into the others. Uptake reinforces settlement, settlement stabilises truth regimes, truth regimes reinforce dualities and dualities structure the conditions under which uptake occurs. The power-medium is therefore best understood as a recursive or repeating ecology, one that generates similar or incremental outcomes because these tend to be projections of pre-existing positions and its lines of least resistance. This shifts our attention away from power as something possessed or located in a sole leader, single institution or dominant ideological alliance. Instead, it sees power as the very essence of our social reality. It’s something through which meaning, structure and action continually pass. When they do, they will either be regulated, nuanced, adjusted, remodelled or, indeed, transformed. We must all play our part in this process. We decide what it is to be social, to give up isolation and its miseries, to live amongst others, to seek partners and friendships, to pursue a common truth, to harness benefit, to achieve safety, to share our dreams. Power is the way the social world is understood, shared and lived. It is the price we pay for the joys of being together as well as the cause of what drives us apart. To live a good life means accepting power as the manifestation of this social world. Doing so helps us understand ourselves and others more profoundly. It tells us about the people we live with and reveals what we must do if we choose to share our time with them. At this point, the good life or its opposite is shown to us. References Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Castells, M. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Durkheim, É. 1912/1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester Press. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Note. *The remark comes from an interview given by Margaret Thatcher to Woman’s Own magazine. The interview was conducted on 23 September 1987 at 10 Downing Street and an edited version was published on 31 October 1987. Image: Thanks to Markus Winkler This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com [https://drrobdalton.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

A tale of many cities

Every day, and during every minute of it, thousands of us enter the great City of Life. We aren’t always required to pass through its ceremonial gates but if we do we know we must bow to its statues, indulge its formalities and comply with its checks and records. Many more though travel instead through the hundreds upon hundreds of service roads and lesser known routes that keep the City connected to the world around it. They move in and out with fewer eyes upon them but, once inside its boundaries, they too must honour its routines and expectations. Essentials are delivered, trains and buses begin their journeys, news from afar arrives, shutters rise and lights appear one by one in the countless windows, homes, shops and buildings. The City breathes. Nothing dramatic seems to happen. No trumpet announces authority. No visible sovereign commands Life to wake. Infrastructure Somehow, within an hour, millions of complex acts coordinate, coalesce and complete, each requiring precise timing or exact action. The City moves, as must we, by hook or by crook. Yet, all this energy, will and momentum is not attributable to any single ruler, visitor, personality, institution or decree. It exists because countless people have absorbed the directions, demands, implications and expectations of the reality around them. As a result, each knows where to stand, when to stop, what counts as money or favour, which signals matter, what is dangerous, what is respectable and what deserves laughter, outrage, silence or attention. This is power-uptake. It changes all it can touch and decentralises its presence through circulation, routine and habituation. Once embedded like this, power becomes the very point of the City’s existence, its beating heart, its visible expression and it no longer demands enforcement. The traffic lights are obeyed. The queue is policed by patience rather than armed guards. The currency works because people believe in it. The City’s reality becomes what sociologists call infrastructural (Star). Dispersal Some of the City’s routes and roads have become wide boulevards, paved over generations by repetition and institutional reinforcement. Others are alleyways of speculation, rumours or conjecture. Together, they disperse the artefacts of power, bringing us discipline or coercion (Arendt). Power becomes not just insistence or compliance, nor even the illusion of this, but about how the social world shapes the way we recognise and experience reality. A government white paper, the claims of a media billionaire, a scientific study, a challenged custom or even a rumour all operate via this state of dispersal. As a result, we become directly responsible for power’s artefacts and cannot hide when they come a-knocking’. This is because we witness power-uptake and its effects in the moment they are deployed and must decide at that point whether or not they bring something useful to social life. We become a point of power here, not the only one and perhaps not even the most influential but a point nevertheless. Power is not stored exclusively in a palace or parliament. It exists wherever collective action sustains a shared world. It decentralises because no one centre, place, idea or force can possibly micromanage such complexity directly. Instead, the power-medium distributes itself across millions of ordinary acts of recognition and repetition. Potency This suggests that power is most potent not when it confronts opposition but when it embeds itself so thoroughly in social life that it no longer requires much help, observation or regulation. It becomes truth detached from coercion, persuasion or ritual (Foucault). At this junction, power is conceptual, intuitive and instinctive. It is the social compact, an idealised imposition, above rebuke or at least meaningful and acceptable rejection. It is power as consensus and it will remain as this for as long as it represents a type of order we can all live with. Yet, power-uptake is not about diluting stronger claims or whisking-up weaker ones to the point where they achieve common appeal or represent subjective common sense. It shows us instead how some truths are equipped to travel further, gain more adherents or anchor within more settlements than others. Power-uptake wants us to focus on the actions of the social world itself and how these cannot avoid generating or influencing the mechanisms and deployment of power. Power is an act of potential recognition or realisation for us all, when we become part of it, and not just the hidden desires of particular agents, institutions or ideologies. Repetition Some roads vanish because nobody travels along them long enough to keep them visible. Others become permanent because they have become grooves in the social ground. A path survives not because it is true in any objective sense but because enough people continue to walk it. We don’t experience ‘time’ in an identical fashion yet millions synchronise their lives around a shared measurement of it (Zerubavel). Society begins to pulse according to rhythms that feel objective simply because they are collectively repeated. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about power then is not merely that it compels but that it migrates. It leaves the throne room and enters habits, greetings, architecture, assumptions, schedules, jokes, categories, interfaces, rituals and memories. Materials An idea alone possesses limited force but once embedded into repeated practice, infrastructure and expectation, it acquires density. Conjecture becomes architecture. Belief becomes pavement. Assumption becomes institution (Latour). At first all is discourse, no more than the way we exchange or trade ideas. Yet, our behaviour is responsive to its implications, seeking what is efficient, moral, realistic or inevitable. Repeated long and often enough, claims crystallise into social matter. They begin to organise space itself. Offices are built around them. Schools teach them. Algorithms reproduce them. Children inherit their consequences before understanding their implications. This makes the essence of power ineluctable or immanent. In other words, it is a ghost you cannot walk away from. It surrounds us in forms that cannot be grasped yet still demand a reaction that cannot be avoided. It sticks to us. We might feel that this downplays the very real and highly visible material inequalities of life. What of greed, violence or religion? These are forces of power that shape outcomes for us regardless of whether or not we believe the claims that accompany them. Material asymmetries like these still matter because they influence the uptake, direction and meaning of what emerges in social life (Berger & Luckmann) but they are not the true workings of power. They are the aspects of the social world, the realities of our ambitions, that power reveals to us. Power displays the asymmetry at work here and tests if the models of socialisation they generate are acceptable to us or suitable for retention. Ghosts Our City is built by ghosts. Some areas rise from fears long forgotten. Others from dreams nobody now remembers. Entire streets remain because generations chose the same path as their forebearers. Interpretations become hardened into the environment. Each generation deposits layers of language, symbols and routines upon the next. Most people walk across them without seeing much. The buried pipes, cables and foundations are disregarded. Yet the City depends entirely upon these invisible accumulations. The only truly enduring forms of discourse are therefore not the loudest but the most absorbable. A slogan may dominate headlines and then vanish but a subtle etiquette may survive centuries because it has become the point and form of conduct. Power-uptake prefers low visibility. It seeks not obedience but incorporation. It is the very purpose as well as manifestation of everything that is social and the way this connects us together. Surveys All of this is not always easy to spot but the power-medium offers us at least the chance to do so because no matter how well hidden or confused intentions may be they must at some stage become ‘knowable’ if they are to be realised. Resistance also operates within this complex ecology. Protest movements will try to redirect pedestrians, reopen abandoned roads, expose hidden architecture, rename streets, dismantle old assumptions or make visible that which is concealed. Success depends less upon a moment’s visibility than upon whether or not alternative pathways can become repeatable and inhabitable. That is why reality itself will always remain contested terrain. Facts build truth but societies must still decide which facts matter, which interpretations stabilise, which narratives coordinate behaviour and which meanings become durable enough to organise institutions. Our City is discourse. Its skylines are frozen arguments. Its routines are agreements we tolerate or support. Its infrastructures are old memories repeated often enough to become concrete. Each person encounters only fragments of this discourse, local routes, familiar customs, partial maps. However, our repeated participation in City life sustains an immense collective reality that exceeds any individual assumptions. The City survives because people continue waking up inside it and behaving as though it’s real. And in doing so, they aim to make it real all over again. Revelation It is probably fair to conclude overall that this way of seeing power, as tangible evidence of society or the means by which the social world is known and enacted, borrows a little from others (Giddens). Yet, it remains distinct because it sees power as also material, separable, identifiable and capable of much greater modification and management (Arendt). These are matters we bring to power directly by the way we act or, indeed, fail to do so. They show power as reversible when we cannot accept what it entails. Actions may be imposed on us but they are always owned by someone. If we wish to change what is asked of us, then power-uptake will show us where the owners of power exist and what may be done to hold them to account. Power-uptake identifies the places of difference, distinction, denial and division that we live with. It brings together the routes of power and the places from where it’s directed. We all remain responsible for power’s journey because we determine what it all means and the value this then offers us. Treating power as socialisation, and power-uptake as its revelation, offers a lens that is both simple and wide-reaching. It lets us see how power operates not only in prisons and parliaments but in classrooms, kitchens and conversations. Truths do not stand outside of power, they appear as something real because of it. To follow power, then, is to follow the paths by which its implications become accepted, rejected or sedimented into everyday life. In this sense, power is not just the imposition of will or the construction or uptake of truth alone. It is how we understand their presence and reasonings. This is the purpose of power. To make intent visible and to regulate the degree to which this will be enacted. References Arendt, H. 1970. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Star, S.L. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), pp. 377-391. Zerubavel, E. 1981. Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Image: AI. Thanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com [https://drrobdalton.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Let me predict your fortune

Nothing happens unless it does. Yes, this might be one of the most obvious statements about power it’s possible to make, one beaten into second place only by the undissolved inanity of proclaiming ‘it is what it is!’ However, it’s still worth pondering for a moment or two. If power is about securing advantage in some way, or at least avoiding disbenefit, then the point at which this happens, when power is put into service, becomes very important indeed. This is power-uptake. It’s when all the to-ing and fro-ing, all the faffing-around about what might be meant, what’s truth, what can be known, what’s rational, logical, persuasive, coercive or any other embryonic presentation of power, becomes too late to matter. It’s when things happen. It’s when push comes to shove and the road less travelled* is left behind us because the route we took wasn’t that one. It’s when reality has kicked-in. The problem though is that we can’t really say goodbye to all our caveats about power, our pondering on the matter, even at this point of seeming no return. When power becomes action, it doesn’t just sail off into the sunset on its own. It remains connected to the intentions that pushed it from the jetty. It remains as ripples across time. Effects resonate, echos can still be heard, and they have their own consequences. This is not always easy to see. Consider a courtroom. A witness speaks, a lawyer objects and a judge accepts or rejects the testimony. Yet the ‘truth’ of what happened depends not on the evidence as it is known to the witnesses but on the procedures, forms of recognition or institutional acceptance with which it engages, something settled for us many decades ago. The prospects of our children or grand children are tied in this way to how power once worked for our ancestors. It’s shown by what we value, inculcate, prioritise or discard. It is revealed by the demands of the environment we inherit or the implications of our parent’s mental health. It is visible by the reach of our dreams and the limitations of our realities. Here, power is not simply a court direction, a government policy or a healthy genetic history but the enactment of a whole host of social processes through which intention has or will become consequential. Power-uptake brings us to this profound type of reframing and it has several implications. None of them are comfortable but three are worth raising. First, it means that power cannot be avoided after the settlement it was designed to resolve because it remains as a continuing means of discourse, exchange or negotiation. If we accept the presence of the social, the life we share with others, then we must accept too the persistent presence of power. Secondly, power is always provisional. Truths can always be rejected, resisted or overturned because they remain as negotiable items within the social world (Latour). For sure, they can be painful, with real impact, but their work within social life, even when inevitable, is not always what we imagine it might be. Power is always transformation, something becoming rather than made. Finally, whilst reality may exist outside of discourse, or the society we all live in, as ideas that don’t need our permission to be true, they have no effect, no power, without it. Power uptake achieves this. The law of gravity or the logic of evolution, indeed the very principles of the scientific method, have objective meaning only by what they achieve in discourse, by the social order to which they appeal. They are only ideas until power attaches itself to them. Their claims still remain open to falsification of course, to the contrarian confusions of ‘flat-earthers’, ‘rabbit-hole researchers’ and ‘climate change deniers’, but the reason, logic and truth they have achieved has been made possible only through the reverberation and reach of power uptake. There are other matters too that bind to power uptake, matters central to the way we exist, to what we hold dear, to what we live and die for, for everything that holds us to the people we love, the communities we serve and the ambitions we realise. We’ll look at these a little more next time. In the interim, we should hold on to one thing. If we accept the idea of power uptake, its place in the power-medium, we might accept too that we are affected today by a power that hasn’t shown itself yet. There is nothing overly metaphysical about this. It’s really trying to say that what prevails from the power we accept in the present, will have consequences, problems we must encounter, trials we cannot avoid, a future we can presume but not really know for sure. So, it’s probably useful then to see power-uptake as revealing reality to us, as aletheia or ‘unconcealment’ (Heidegger), because it cannot give us all of the story, only an essence or hint of it, at any particular time. It cannot hold dominion over everything that does or could constitute meaning to us as a result nor make this plain and simple to us. It promises only the potential for this to happen at some point. It promises that ‘uptake’ is not the end of the story. This shows that what matters, what is real, what brings actual and present impetus or resistance, is the degree to which power-uptake secures a foothold in social order. We ignore this at our peril. References Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by W. Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. *Note: Frost, R. 1916. The Road Not Taken. In: Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt. Image: Leohoho Thanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com [https://drrobdalton.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Sing a song of ding-dong

We live in dangerous times. Our honour and heritage is at stake, our cultural identity, the acclaim of others, our very place in the modern world, all of this, is in jeopardy. What is right, honourable, worthy of respect is under scrutiny and it might not pass muster. Yes, the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. We don’t have to work too hard to realise that this annual presentation of sometimes cool and catchy but usually very predictable and often very poor pop tunes is more than a spectacle of flamboyant performances, eccentric staging and unpredictable voting. It conceals a dense and dynamic site of power at work. Power analysts likely consider Eurovision a structured arena in which cultural legitimacy, political alignment, symbolic value, and collective identity are produced, contested and stabilised. To understand this type of phenomenon we must get to grips with how power operates in contemporary cultural life, not as force or might but as legitimacy, visibility and belief. So, let’s see what makes Eurovision a ‘hit’. Singing softly Joseph Nye (2004) introduced us to the term soft power. He might as well have coined the phrase after watching Eurovision. He didn’t, in case you’re in any doubt. He would, though, recognise how nation states offer curated versions of themselves through music, language, staging and stories. Performances become vehicles for national branding, projecting images of modernity, tradition, inclusivity or creativity. Success confers prestige, enhancing a country’s cultural standing within what still remains a loosely-defined European identity. Performances function as diplomatic theatre in which nations compete not militarily or economically but symbolically. Eurovision tends to normalise particular aesthetic and ideological values. These are often aligned with Western European liberalism and together build what Gramsci called cultural hegemony (1971). Norms surrounding gender expression, individualism and performative spectacle are not merely displayed. They are validated by the contest. If we participate in the excitement, simply watch the show even, we align with these norms. Thus, Eurovision doesn’t just showcase diversity, it also structures the terms under which diversity is recognised and rewarded. Building a new world … Bourdieu (1991) would see Eurovision as the distribution of symbolic capital. Winning the contest does more than reward a song. It elevates a performance into something with enhanced cultural value. Any distinction we make between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, isn’t really an aesthetic choice in this context. It’s a conclusion we come to through cultural and institutional mediation. Eurovision builds hierarchies, determining which styles, narratives and identities are legitimate in that moment. In doing so, it constructs our emerging idea of Europe itself. This type of building work aligns with post-structural understandings of power. Michel Foucault (1980) for instance argues that power works to continually reconstruct itself. The contest generates stories and ideas about nationhood, belonging and modernity. It defines what is valuable by staging and validating what can be said or shown. Inclusion and exclusion are central here. Debates over participation, perhaps concerning geographical boundaries or reacting to political controversies, reveal that Eurovision is actively engaged in defining the limits of its own cultural universe. This is world building through the medium of song. … and a better one Eurovision does not eliminate political tensions but it does reframe them. Historical alliances, regional solidarities and cultural affinities are expressed through voting and performance. This transforms potential conflict into symbolic expression. The experience acts as a mechanism of political sublimation, a higher and better form of confrontation. It converts antagonism into spectacle. Indeed, participation often signals a desire for inclusion within a broader European or ‘Euro-adjacent’ community, making the contest a subtle instrument of geopolitical positioning. At the same time, Eurovision has become a prominent voice for identity politics, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. The visibility of LGBTQ+ performers and themes over the last decade or so has become a defining feature of the contest. It introduces these ideas as normative or with a moral power, a means where these values are elevated and the prejudices they usually bear de-stigmatised. Eurovision does not simply reflect this type of social dynamism, it participates in its articulation and dissemination. The contest thus operates as a site where cultural legitimacy is intertwined with moral recognition and where a new combination of the two emerges. A great chorus Yet, Eurovision’s power is not restricted to discourse or symbolism. It’s also ritualistic. Each year, millions of viewers, across what now seems like too many countries to count, participate in a shared event. The structure of the contest, semi-finals, grand final and, of course, the voting system, remain broadly consistent despite tweaking. This creates a sense of continuity and expectation. For Émile Durkheim (1912/1995), such repetition constitutes a form of collective ritual that reinforces social cohesion. The contest produces a shared emotional experience, binding us together into a meaningful community. Here, Randall Collins (2004) emphasised the role of interaction, in which shared attention and melodramatic or sentimental synchronisation generate what he calls ‘emotional energy’. We shudder at the glory of our ‘douze-points’ whilst the pain of our ‘nil-points’ is always palpable. Power here lies in the capacity to generate and sustain this collective feeling. Beats and pulses Eurovision operates within a hybrid media environment, one shaped by digital platforms and emerging formats as well as traditional broadcasting solutions. Performances circulate on streaming services, are reinterpreted on social media and gain traction through algorithms, likes and shares. Visibility is no longer determined exclusively by the event itself but by the complex interactions it creates between audiences and platforms and the metrics of engagement they rely on (Couldry and Hepp, 2017). The power of Eurovision lies in the way it can be repackaged to appeal to us and in how it sticks once we touch it. This power forms reality. Making your mind up This ‘coming-together’ or social structuring becomes especially visible in the contest’s voting patterns. The persistence of regional voting blocs has long attracted cynicism and amusement, with countries in the Nordic, Balkan or post-Soviet regions frequently exchanging points. While often dismissed as ‘political’ voting, these patterns can, perhaps, be better understood through the lens of relational or networked power. These ideas talk about the links of interdependence, regardless of whether or not they are physical or digital. Castells (2009) argues that power here operates through these networks, these connections of joint purpose, rather than through single acts or specific moments of expression (Castells, 2009). In Eurovision, outcomes are shaped not simply by the quality of individual performances but by the position of countries within networks of affinity, migration and historical connection. Diaspora populations, shared media spaces and cultural closeness all influence voting behaviour. Power, in this sense, is not possessed but distributed across relationships, heritage and sources of information. What we remember Eurovision controls time. Winning performances are remembered, replayed and integrated into our national and transnational narratives. They become part of a shared cultural archive. Most entries though fail to achieve this, often fading from memory irrespective of their quality. The contest shapes the present, today’s visibility and tomorrow’s remembrance of it, constructing and limiting the cultural meaning we give to all this. Eurovision is not a single form of power but an expression or output of power-medium. It is a structured environment in which very different forms of power, regardless of whether or not they’re symbolic, economic, affective or networked, are gathered and converted into legitimacy. The contest transforms performances into something of recognised cultural value. It turns attention into prestige, and participation into belonging. Its outcomes are accepted not because they are objectively determined but because the contest itself is recognised as authoritative. Eurovision, then, is not trivial. It’s a highly organised system for producing truth. It reveals that power in contemporary society is mediated not simply through domination but via the capacity to define what is seen, what is valued and what is remembered. References Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Castells, M. 2009. Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. 2017. The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Collins, R. 2004. Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, E. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1912) Foucault, M. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. New York: Pantheon Books. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Nye, J.S. 2004. Soft power: The means to success in world politics. New York: PublicAffairs. Image: AI. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com [https://drrobdalton.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The size and shape of power

There are many kinds of ‘power-watcher’, sitting inside their metaphorical hides, awaiting the arrival of their favoured species, recording what each does and wondering where they’ve come from. Some observe from a distance. Others might adjust their seat or viewing position to get a little nearer. Close up, we’d see mating, confrontation and the fight for space. From further away, we’d notice more how power flows through patterns and behaviours, perhaps via global changes and dynamics. This is a bit like varying the lens of the binoculars to see what’s looking back at us at each turn of the dial. Alternatively, we could stay home, study the way power shows itself according to the experts, consider it as a more abstract matter. We’d look at the ground it comes to, the everyday settings it favours. We could record how it interacts with others, note down which species people say are thriving and which are not. None of these approaches is wholly satisfactory. They will either miss something important, smoothing over too many complications and contradictions, or end up with a very long list of ideas and themes that confuse what is going on and stop us from knowing where to look first. There is at least one other option though, one that gives us ‘dimensions’ for power, routes and arrival points for its effects. It allows us to see power’s grasp and reach. It’s interested in what else power might be doing, the ground it holds and the direction it’s going in. There are several ways to pursue this but one idea is particularly helpful. The Steven Lukes dimensional models (1974, 2005) suggest we can measure what power does. They show us how power operates, takes different forms, depending on the circumstances, sometimes without having to resort to coercion or even persuasion. They categorise the way power is understood when it goes about its work and put its methods and effects into one of three very helpful categories. The first dimension deals with what we’ll call ‘decision-making power’. This refers to an ability to make decisions that affect others. We might see this in politics or classical sociology. It reveals power as obvious, shown by behaviour or an expression of will - regardless of whether or not this leads to conflict. This type of power is clear and open and, in large part, unambiguous if not always simple. It may reflect brute force but it may also be subtle, persuasive and compelling. In this category, power is deliberate consent or decision. It may be temporary, conditional or strategic but its nature will be broadly understood by the parties involved and any advantage gained or given up will be apparent in some form if not always willingly or completely. … power shapes our beliefs … it is a power that can reject or build meaning. It escapes scrutiny because it appears to be ‘the way the world works’. Lukes’s second category deals in ‘non-decision-making power’. This involves an ability to set the agenda, restricting or expanding the issues for consideration or up for grabs. This might cause conflicts but prevent others from ever arising. Power here is categorised as control over the means of discourse and discussion, denying and enabling what can be recognised as acceptable or sensitive to negotiation or disagreement in the first place. In this dimension, power is revealed as both recognisable and hidden. It’s a way to control how matters are mediated, prioritised, actioned or resolved. It serves those capable of defining the terms of the negotiation whilst making it difficult for others to recognise alternative claims and ideas. The third dimension is ‘ideological power’. This explores how power shapes our desires and beliefs automatically, influencing what people want and what they think serves their interests best. The first two dimensions, mean power can be seen and evaluated, even when it tries to hide from us. However, this third dimension is a power that is unseeable, even to those who otherwise have the resources to resist it or the potential to use it. It is the power that works to form reality or establish our sense of the world. Here, power deals in ideologies, not just as political or religious codes but as cultural beliefs. It is a power that can reject or build meaning. It escapes scrutiny because it appears to be ‘the way the world works’. This type of dimensional framework shows how power works in any given set of circumstances but all three types may be evident at the same time. A single moment of power might be interpreted exclusively, by any combination or all three. These organising ideas keep our thinking neat and tidy but they do more than this. They also work to direct what we believe is possible when it comes to power. If we find ourselves relying on any of the categories described so far, then we become locked into a single logic or expectation and must then reject ideas that otherwise seem to work perfectly well. Much of what influences us in this respect, is highly localised or specific. Power becomes affected by context, reflecting key moments or popular understandings when we attempt to make sense of it. Dimensional frameworks give us a means to re-categorise power and gauge its impact. The more willing we are to pick up our camera or binoculars, change our angle and focus, the more we will see power’s arrival and routines, understand its seasons and returns, and discover its habits and purposes. It might be a good idea to think about power more often with this sort of hat on, and with our eye glasses at the ready. References Lukes, S. 1974. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan. Lukes, S. 2005. Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Photograph: ATC Comm Photo Thanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com [https://drrobdalton.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]