Cut!
Power is taken and given. I’ve held both ends of the stick. It’s a worldview which views everything in competition and threat to each other, and everything gets reduced to strategy and tactical planning. I’ve felt the need to plan and organise things like veins that wrap around my skin. I’ve dreamed about board-game or strategy-based games, where I command an army and make moves to defend and dominate against other players. Power doesn’t exist in a rational consciousness though: I’ve had dreams which convince me it’s linked with the most intimate and personal ideas of ourselves. In one dream, I was Cleopatra and I watched a Byzantine emperor eye every one of my carefully sensuous moves.
Friedrich Nietzsche used the analogy of Apollo and Dionysius to explain the critical dilemma the individual self faces in dealing with his shortcomings and meaning-creation: to choose the path of Apollo, god of the state and representative of hierarchical organisation and power; or, to choose the path of Dionysius, the god of wine and representative of hedonism and creative spontaneity.
More on Nietzsche later. But suffice to say, power is an inexhaustible topic - but worth touching on for reasons that will be explored. This essay will discuss power, the personal dilemmas it creates, and how it relates to our understanding of social issues we face in today’s society.
Power is difficult to touch on, because it has many definitions. This essay will first touch on its personal dimension, which has helped to generate a field of self-help books written to deal with power play which happens in a lot of interpersonal environments, through personal training.
According to Sun Tzu, mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. This resonates with many realist theorists and should be held as a defence of political realism; realism is a serious intellectual task, and should not be understood as holding power for the sake of power. Power is a disciplinary task, which hones skills of self-awareness, respect for knowledge and applied skills.
This is understood by theorists like Robert Greene, who seriously covers topics as wide-ranging as classics, anthropology and politics to condense stories into supporting examples of life lessons.
One proponent of realism is Niccoli Machiavelli. Machiavelli argued for value pluralism, as interpreted by Isaiah Berlin: to get outcomes you want, sometimes you play either the cunning fox to avoid traps, or the fearsome lion to scare off wolves. This suggests an interesting metaphysical theory: the importance of positive and negative strategies where participation or withdrawal is needed to succeed overall. This is similar to advice given by Sun Tzu, who says ‘he will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight’.
These thinkers are similar because they describe the profile and subjectivity of the ideal statesman: rational, authoritarian and decision-making. But it is wrong to prescribe their philosophy to the rest of society, because their perspective is unique to their role.
Indeed, discussion about power could appreciate Hegel’s analysis. Hegel argued that power is a dialectical struggle between master and slave; human phenomenology, history and development of society can be reduced to this single struggle. Between the struggle of master and slave, the master exploits the slave’s productivity, but the slave is the one with consciousness because the slave produces for the master and learns to use his creative skills to create products of his consciousness. As a result, the master teaches the slave and the slave learns how to desire, according to a Lacanian reading.
Georg Wilhelm Hegel was interested in how slave consciousness could accept servitude and submission. Hegel argues this had multiple stages: stoicism, where the slave understands the world divided into subject and object; scepticism, where the slave grows unconvinced of previous dogma due to unequal power dynamics; and unhappy consciousness, where the slave grows split between the ideals of his consciousness and the power dynamic of his social reality.
Hegel argues this is resolved through the absolute ideal, which the collective consciousness helps to enact into reality. Only when we live in a society which gives humans the most freedom in their consciousness can we live with this absolute ideal.
A Hegelian understanding of power helps us to understand phenomenological accounts of power, as constructive of wider dynamics in dialectical discussion with each other in a master/slave paradigm.
However, this discussion on power could appreciate a deeper understanding of Master as also the Other. Emmanuel Levinas speculates about the role of the Other in the Judeo-Christian tradition as invisible yet omnipotent. Levinas argues that the first task of philosophy is ethics because our existence is owed to our relationship with the Other; we have a personal responsibility towards the Other because it is embedded in our consciousness and ontological existence. Thus, Levinas helps to explain how power is embedded in our understandings of ethics rather than something opposed; as we ourselves exist only because of power, so we use our power to contribute towards empowering others.
An important issue is the intrapersonal/interpersonal divide. According to Jean-Jacques Lacan, the individual psyche is a metaphysical reality and cannot be denied; the id is real, and bundled with antagonism and competition with the Other.
Lacan’s understanding of the intrapersonal/interpersonal divide has been applied to film studies. It is worth asking, why are we attracted to film stars? Lacan answers this by arguing that the intrapersonal ego projects onto the film star its ego ideal, how it imagines and fantasizes it can be. However, this creates interpersonal distance which can frustrate the codified subject and later lead to backlash and jealousy directed at the star.
According to Richard Dyer, stars are a solution to a social dilemma because their image symbolises and resolves a social contradiction. For example, Marilyn Monroe is seen as sexy but innocent (and didn’t threaten men) which was contrary to the perception of women as the femme fatale.
Thus, power is also constructive of wider social subjectivities as byproducts of social tension and attachment patterns.
Power could also be understood as instances of wider discursive practices. Jacques Derrida argued for his theory of differance, which used the analogy of sentences to explain how meaning is context-situated and informed by the reader’s background knowledge. In a sentence, the meaning of the sentence is only ‘discovered’ in retrospect at the end of the sentence. However, the sentence can be separated into individual units of words which allow for meaning to proliferate freely. Thus, a sentence creates ‘differance’ in two ways: it defers meaning, and makes meanings different from each other despite the same sentence.
This suggests the possibility of a totally power-driven society; if power is generative of meanings, this creates infinite possibilities which may lead to collapse of existing stabilising institutions which regulate and discipline meaning. According to Baudrillard, this is a process of the semiotic irrupting into the symbolic; the symbol is destroyed in the endless, immanent interplay of semiotic signs. Thus, the real implodes into the virtual; it is no longer possible to recognise the real from the virtual, because the virtual has overtaken the real as the main source of social action. Thus, related to Guy Debord’s thoughts, the spectacle replaces meaningful political participation.
Overall, this essay can make several conclusions. Firstly, power is a disciplinary and realism is an approach which understands the spiritual and metaphysical limits this imposes on theories of human understanding. Secondly, power can be understand in relation to phenomenology and the master/slave dialectic, which creates different subjectivities. Power could be understand as relational, as debt relations to the Other which creates ethical responsibilities and obligations; or could be understood as constantly deferred, which creates resignation and stagnation that removes meaningful political participation. The overall conclusion however is that power does not exist in a vacuum: understanding of power should be contextualised in phenomenology, ethics, psychoanalysis, semiotics, frameworks which have been used in this essay.
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I’m guilty of taking power trips.
I like dominating others. It makes me feel like control and I can squeeze the small, vulnerable child out of me when I tell others how they should think or feel.
I’m not aware of it all the time. But when it happens, I get drunk on power.
In those moments, I’m the most narcissistic megalomaniac person in the world. But I’m also the loneliest, never able to trust others, and I know deep inside it’s not sustainable to feel this way.
I want to use that power to make everyone who ever crossed me bow down. But moving on, I’m going to treat power carefully - with an open palm, closed fist approach. Sometimes it’s just better to have empathy for others.












