Circuits of Power and Control

Fundamentals

In the past, power has been thought of structurally as a matter of different levels and types of control, most notably in Steven Lukes’s 1974/2006 Power: A Radical View. Rather than see power as a structural phenomenon, the central insight of the circuits model is to conceptualize it in a post-structuralist mode as a series of distinctly patterned flows. The most relatively simple circuit entails flows of transitive power, where one agency seeks to get another to do what they would not otherwise do. Power in this sense usually involves fairly straightforward episodic power, oriented toward securing outcomes. The two defining elements of episodic power circuits are agencies and events of interest to these agencies. Agencies are constituted within social relations; in [Page 116]these social relations, they are analogous to practical experimentalists who seek to configure these relations in such a way that they present stable standing conditions for them to assert their agency in securing preferred outcomes. Hence, relations constitute agents that agents seek to configure and reconfigure; agencies seek to assert agency and do so through configuring relations in such a way that their agency can be transmitted through various generalized media of communication, in order to secure preferential outcomes. All this is quite straightforward and familiar from one-dimensional accounts of power.

Episodes are always interrelated in complex and evolving ways. No “win” or “loss” is ever complete in itself, nor is the meaning of victory or defeat definitely fixed as such at the time of its registration, recognition, or reception; such matters of judgment are always contingent on the temporalities of the here-and-now, the reconstitutions of the there-and-then, on the reflective and prospective glances of everyday life. If power relations are the stabilization of warfare in peaceful times, then any battle is only ever a part of an overall campaign. What is important from the point of view of the infinity of power episodes stretching into a future that has no limits are the feedback loops from distinct episodic outcomes and the impact that they have on overall social and system integration. The important question is whether episodic outcomes tend rather more to reproduce or to transform the existing architectonics—the architecture, geometry, and design—of power relations? How they might do so is accommodated in the model: Through the circuit of social integration, episodic outcomes serve to either more or less transform or reproduce the rules fixing extant relations of meaning and membership in organizational fields; as these are reproduced or transformed, they fix or refix those obligatory passage points—the channels, conduits, circuitry of extant power relations. In this way, dispositional matters of identity will be more or less transformed or reproduced, affecting the stability of the extant social relations that had sought to stabilize their powers in the previous episodes of power. As identities are transformed, then, so will be the social relations in which they are manifested and engaged.

...