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.
