Power

Power comes from the Latin potere, potis esse. In it I hear a capacity of being. I have never understood how planting a knife in a belly, or threatening to in order to be obeyed, would increase a capacity of being (mine or the other’s). Anyone can do it; it’s the easy way. What remained was to make it seen.

This essay extends the ontology of passage by proposing a definition of power: making a passage possible, without taking it.

I. The kitchen table

A kitchen, evening. Edgar sits down across from his father, a man who looks like him, more worn. He has come to tell him what he is. The father says nothing. He stays there, calm. He lets it come, receives.

Ask yourself: where is the power at this table? The inherited answer would say: nowhere. No one constrains, no one imposes, no will bends the other. And yet all the power in the scene is on one side: the father’s. Not because he could punish, but because he is the one holding the threshold. Edgar’s sentence can only be said if someone makes the spot crossable. One word too many, an eyebrow, a wince, and the passage closes for years. The father performs, in silence, the purest act of power there is: he opens a passage he will not take. He is not the one who crosses. Edgar is, and the crossing belongs to Edgar. The father only made it possible.

Now the counter-scene, which everyone knows. An executive: title, budget, team, signature. Every decision goes up to him, every initiative waits on his sign-off, every meeting fits itself to his calendar. Ask what, inside his perimeter, comes about without him. The day he leaves, the boxes, a Friday evening, nothing remains either. Not one practice that holds, not one move laid down without his shadow. Sure, he had the position. Did he have power?

The whole question of this essay sits in the gap between these two scenes: the father with no attributes who opens everything, the executive equipped with everything who opens nothing. The executive produces effects everywhere and makes no cause appear; the father, in silence, adds to the world a cause that does not belong to him.

Weber calls power the chance of imposing one’s will in a relation, even against resistances. Foucault moves that power into the apparatuses that produce conducts. Arendt detaches it from violence and has it born of concerted action. These thoughts describe constraint, the production of conducts, acting in common. And they describe less well a more discreet operation: someone makes another’s move possible, without commanding it, without performing it, and without appropriating it. That operation is what I here call power. The lineages will be settled further on; first, the thing itself.

II. The two-clause definition

Power is making a passage possible. Without taking it.

Making a passage possible. Power does not consist in performing another’s move, nor in making him perform it. It consists in making practicable the spot where his move can be born, pass, and leave a trace. The schoolteacher in whose class a question, even a dumb one, can be asked; the boss to whom disagreement gets said in the meeting rather than at the elevator; the doctor with whom a fear finds its words; the father in the kitchen. The clause already rules out two things. Doing it for him is not power, because nothing is crossed by the other. Constraining is not power either, because the move produced is not a crossing but an execution, and it stops with the surveillance. Domination produces effects; power makes causes appear.

Without taking it. This clause is what gives the whole its edge. The one who opens can still take the crossing back: claim gratitude for it, keep a right over what follows. As long as you cross in the other’s place, as long as you decide the destination, he remains your effect. For him to become a cause (an origin of moves you did not foresee), you must stop being the author of what he does. To open, in the full sense, is to add to the world a cause that does not belong to you.

Yet withdrawal must not be confused with absence or self-erasure. Laissez-faire also produces things “without you,” but nothing settles there, because no one was holding the threshold. Where withdrawal holds, absence lets things rot. And the opener can act, speak, answer, be transformed in turn. The father in the kitchen is present in the scene; he is even its condition. Let’s say it. Whoever holds a threshold remains someone.

III. The criterion

From the definition comes the criterion, and it holds in one question, to be put to anyone who holds a position, a title, an authority, a classroom, a kitchen table:

What has come about, without you, thanks to you?

Something you neither did, nor dictated, nor crossed, and that could not have come about if you had not held the threshold. The answer measures real power, and it is often cruel to high positions, generous to positions nobody looks at. The night nurse, the schoolteacher, the elder who puts a hand on a shoulder have, by this measure, more power than entire org charts. I believe we all felt it but couldn’t find the words to say it clearly. That may now be done.

The principle behind it: you do not judge a might by what depends on it, but by what becomes capable of no longer depending on it. Power is measured by the independence it makes possible; captation, by the debt it maintains.

If someone exhibits growing dependence where this criterion reads power, or durable emancipation where it reads a bottleneck, I will be wrong. The two predictions have the same nerve. Living power produces independence, and independence is dated after the fact.

IV. Power and its signs

One: unforeseen moves come about around you. New things you had not ordered. Where everything that happens was prescribed, there is no power: there is control, its poor substitute.

Two: traces settle that do not bear your name. Practices, decisions, bonds that hold and that no one attributes to you; a usage people have followed for years without knowing anymore where it came from.

Three: you can be contradicted without fatal cost. The threshold stays open in your direction too, and the passage you opened can serve what you would not have chosen. The real price of the last disagreement says more, here, than all the speeches about the open door.

Four: your absence does not make the maille* collapse; and survival is not enough: the new keeps appearing there, settling there, being taken up there.

* Maille (French): a stitch, a single loop of knitting or of chain mail, the smallest place where the thread passes and holds. The word names the local place where a move can enter, be received, and change what follows. See The Maille.

A single test condenses the four: what happens when you are not there? Everyone already has the natural experiment it requires (your two weeks in August, at minimum). Nothing moved? You are a bottleneck. Everything ran and nothing was born? You left behind a procedure. Everything held, and new things were born? There were thresholds, and they belonged to others.

Signs, like all signs, can be imitated. A skilled captator stages the unforeseen, leaves traces lying around without his name, tolerates tamed contradictions. One mark cannot be counterfeited:

Around a living power, people dare to fail.

Attempts that cost something and were not punished, carried by people who could survive without them. The Gauge builds the theory of it, and its operating note the test.

And the reverse reads relatively simply. If everything goes through you. If every decision, every piece of information, every authorization hangs on your sign-off, then you do not have power, you are a bottleneck. The bottleneck has every appearance of power. Everything converges toward it. It is also its negation. A point in the fabric where other people’s passages have to strangle.

V. Captation

Captation is a counterfeit of power. A living thing perverted. The false power that opens and takes. The mentor who does it for you, the parent who clears every obstacle from the child’s path (and steals from him, one by one, all his crossings), the guru who opens thresholds whose every crossing feeds him, the manager who “gives people their chance” on condition of remaining the author of every success.

A son is preparing for a difficult exam; the father gets involved, rereads every paper, organizes the review sessions, calls two useful contacts, clears everything. The son passes. At the dinner that follows, the father tells the story. The method, the calls, the nights. And the table congratulates him, the father. The son smiles, says thank you, and confusedly feels that something has just been taken from him that he couldn’t name. He succeeded, but he is no longer quite the author of his success: the paternal narrative has converted him back into an effect. Captation confiscates the origin.

You think you have become an origin; you are still mine.

The trap is that little in the scene is easy to attack. Each of the father’s moves had the form of help. That is what makes captation harder to see than the deaths of power. Passages really do happen there. There is motion, there are crossings. But who do they belong to? If they all flow back up to the opener (in obligatory gratitude, in dependence, in glory), the threshold, far from being a gift, was a tollgate.

Hence a precaution about the instrument itself. The father at the dinner answers this essay’s question very well: the method, the calls, the nights. There is what came about thanks to me! But answering for yourself is already signing, and the need to sign was the symptom. The question is put to those who crossed, or after the departure.

VI. The lock and the dissolution

Power can stop opening in two ways, familiar in this grammar.

It can lock up: the position from which nothing opens anymore. Micromanagement, the authority that can no longer stand being crossed, the founder whose sign-off is the house’s only threshold. Everything holds, nothing gets through: the death the critique of power knows by heart.

It can also dissolve, and that death wears the clothes of progress. Empowerment without thresholds: everyone can propose everything, comment on everything, co-build everything (workshops, consultations, participatory platforms), and nothing gets decided, nothing settles, nothing commits. Passages were multiplied by removing what makes a passage count: resistance, cost, irreversibility.

And there is dead power: the intact position that no longer opens anything. It is the same law — form outlives transmission — read from the side of positions.

VII. The main objections

“You are redefining the word: real power constrains.” In ordinary usage, yes: we will say a dictator has power. In this grammar, he has force, means, a might of constraint. The word is Weber’s, and I leave it to him. That might is real, sometimes immense, and it produces effects; it makes no cause appear. There remains the case that would make the concession tempting: necessary constraint. The parent who holds the child back at the edge of the road closes a passage, and does well. Necessity does not change the nature of the move: holding the child back is constraint; teaching him to cross the road without you is power. The definition by opening is not the edifying version of power; it is its condition of possibility, which the version by constraint presupposes without naming it — every domination that lasts recruits the activity of those it governs, that is La Boétie’s theorem, and recruiting is not opening: it is taking.

“Your accomplished power is indistinguishable from the deepest domination.” The objection has a name: Lukes’s third face — the power that shapes preferences, so well that the dominated man wants, of himself, what was expected of him, and the people say “we did it ourselves.” Feature for feature, the picture looks like mine. What separates them? A deep domination produces autonomy inside the corridor it has prepared. The dominated man does, of his own accord, what was expected of him, and nothing else. A living threshold can bear that the cause it made possible become something else (the move that thwarts the opener, the failure that costs). Date the last move that displeased the opener without costing its author his place. That, a perimeter of manufactured preferences does not have. Finally, the held threshold can bear being discovered. Let Edgar learn, years later, that his father’s silence was deliberate, and his crossing is not taken back from him. A manufactured preference bears badly learning where it comes from; that is why that power prefers secrecy.

“Withdrawal is a luxury of the mighty. And who opens the opener’s thresholds?” The objection would stand if the power to open followed the hierarchy of positions; the criterion shows the opposite: the night nurse, the schoolteacher, the silent elder hold more thresholds than many boards of directors. And the criterion requisitions. If that is where the thresholds are held, that is where the means and the protection must go. As for the opener? Either he was opened, or no one did it and he swore not to repeat the lack; the chain does not need a first mover, it needs, in every generation, holders. There remains what lies upstream, where the objection is right. No threshold rests on nothing. I am not purifying the origin; a conquest gets capitalized, and every crossing then pays interest. Or it gets amortized. The holder then absorbs the cost of his own arrival and bills it to no crossing. At bottom, power is amortized might. And amortizing does not absolve: a conquest can be settled in the order of power without being discharged in the order of justice.

VIII. Lineages

Weber holds the most operational definition ever written (might as the chance of making one’s will prevail, even against resistances) for what it measures: domination, its legitimation, its apparatuses. I do not refute it; I refuse the same name for domination and for the operation that makes a cause appear. The dividing line reads all the way into the word resistance: might is measured by the resistance it defeats; power, by the resistance it can let live, because a threshold is made of a right resistance. Foucault, who taught everyone that power does not lodge only in the forbidden, dissolves the bearer into the apparatus, and makes local diagnosis impossible. This grammar keeps a bearer, not out of nostalgia for the sovereign subject, but because the threshold is local and someone holds it. Where everything is power, nothing can be repaired anymore; where every threshold has its holder, every closure has its address.

Arendt is the closest. She made the decisive move by uncoupling power from violence, which is not its extreme degree but its substitute when it fails. And her power is born when men act together. The gap is double. Her power is simultaneous and collective. It dissipates with the concert. Mine is asymmetric, discreet, and deferred. There is one who opens and one who crosses, the opening can be invisible (a few grams of silence at a kitchen table), and the measure comes after, in what holds without the opener. And nothing, in her grammar, distinguishes the living concert from the charismatic captation that resembles it feature for feature.

Socrates practiced the move first. The maieutics of the Theaetetus is the oldest formulation of the two clauses: the midwife barren in wisdom, who brings other people’s thoughts into the world without conceiving any himself, and who sorts what is born (148e–151d). Down to the sorting, it is all there; and Athens, by condemning him for corrupting the youth, judged that he was taking where he was opening. The trial of Socrates is the first litigation over the second clause.

Vygotsky, with Bruner, measured the move half a century before it was defined here. Scaffolding in the zone of proximal development: opening for the child a passage he could not cross alone, then removing the scaffold as he holds. These are the two clauses operationalized; and the scaffolding that does not withdraw, which that literature documents as preventing learning, is captation quantified in the classroom. Winnicott holds the tenderest version of withdrawal when the good enough mother fails gradually, and it is her measured withdrawal that makes the child grow.

There remains a cumbersome neighbor: the managerial discourse of empowerment and the “servant leader,” which resembles this thesis the way its promotional version would. But that discourse celebrates the opening of passages without ever thinking their counterfeit: the opener remains the author of every crossing, autonomy is measured in engagement obtained, not in independence given back. The criterion here (what comes about without you, thanks to you) turns against it: it makes it a case of soft captation.

And the old Chinese master said everything about withdrawal: the highest Master is unknown to the people, and when his work is accomplished, “the people say: ‘We did it ourselves.’” Here, withdrawal stops being a wisdom and becomes a diagnosis.

For me, this definition began at a kitchen table.

And the conclusion

If freedom is the event where someone appears as a cause in his own move, power is the operation by which you make possible the appearance of another as a cause. The real power of a life reads in the thresholds it held and that still hold without it. By this measure, unknowns are powerful, and the powerful are bottlenecks. I know of no first-person test. Whoever holds a threshold acts without knowing, in the present, whether he opens or takes, and the father in the kitchen himself will only know after years what his silence was.

Power is not possessed. It opens, and is measured by the causes that begin after you.

“What has come about, without you, thanks to you?”