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
