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and communicative power. Acts of communication always have effects – influencing
something or somebody. This is true for expressive forms in images, music and all
other symbolic modes. The force of language and linguistic argumentation has for
instance been scrutinized by classical theories of logic, rhetoric and pragmatics.
Further, a series of modern theories of communication, media effects, reception and
semiotics have in various ways thematized the actual or potential impact of mediated
symbolic forms in general. In the previous section on media use, we problematized the
traditional production-consumption dualism that underpins a whole range of models
of communication as a linear chain where meanings are transported from senders to
receivers. Leaning on Paul Ricoeur’s critical hermeneutics, we outlined a less dichot-
omous view of the processes of meaning-production as created in dynamic encounters
between interacting subjects and plural texts in multidimensional contexts. All this has
implications for how to understand the interplay of power and resistance, and, even
more generally, of structure and agency. Here again, we question the common
thinking in terms of essentialized polarities, and argue for opening up a more diverse
and situated set of struggles.
Power breeds and needs resistance, as two sides of the same coin. There is always
a play or struggle between these sides, and none of them can be understood as fixed
essences. Front lines shift between situations, and those who at one time or in one
respect are in a position of power may later or in another relationship be agents of
resistance. Michel Foucault has underlined that ‘power is exercised from innumerable
points’ and is ‘immanent’ in other relationships rather than exterior to them. ‘Where
there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is
never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’, and power relations have a
‘strictly relational character’, depending on ‘a multiplicity of points of resistance’ that
‘are present everywhere in the power network’. 42
These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network … Just
as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes
through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them,
so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and indi-
vidual unities. 43
Power and resistance can thus not be separated from each other, Foucault argues. Nor
is there any privileged source or type of power that explains all others.
Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from
which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development,
we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences,
their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations
of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come
into conflict and strive to negate one another. 44
This book follows that advice, using the last chapter to study some specific relations
of power and resistance that intersect in media consumption. However, we do not follow