Page 197 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

POWER

same time the word retains much of its force as a term from ordinary
language.
The latter usage derives from theories of political economy, which
understood power as emanating from the monarch – a single source of
power, the exercise of which was founded on threat of death, both
internal (execution) and external (war). Monarchical power did not
have to be exercised by a monarch – the system still worked when
‘abstracted’ to, for example, the law(internal) and the state (external).
Fundamentally this concept of power was based on scarcity; there
was not enough of it to go around. If you wanted it, you had to take it
from someone who had it. If you didn’t have it, you were confined to
your ‘lack’ of it by repression (ultimately, fear of death). This
conceptualisation probably remains at the heart of the common-sense
(ordinary language) use of the term.
The classic political economy approach (power as a scarce resource)
was the mental map inherited by Marxism, which shifted the focus
from ethno-territorial sovereignty to the social landscape of
industrialisation. The Marxists sawpower as emanating from
productive forces, i.e. capital and labour. They understood that,
compared to previous epochs (feudalism, slavery), capitalism was a
progressive force in society, and also that without capital there would
be no working or ‘productive’ class. But despite this Marxism persisted
in thinking about the relations between these two forces as a zero-sum
game whereby one side had power and the other side lacked it. So for
Marxism class antagonism took the form of one class dominating and
repressing another, using the ultimate fear of death (coercion) as well as
intermediate strategies of sovereignty, such as the law, divide and rule,
patronage, hegemony, etc. The point was that power was still
something to be taken from someone else, and exercised over them. In
contemporary cultural theory, the model persists, but the place of
‘class’ in ‘class struggle’ has been taken over by any of a number of soi
disant oppressed or repressed groups, from women and ethnic
populations to people identified by their sexual preference, age or
identity.
Foucault broke with this scenario in order to take seriously the
effects of modernisation, and the changes brought about by the
productive force of both capital and labour, acting on both the natural
and the social world, in an expansive cycle of growth. His own work
focused on studies of madness, incarceration and sexuality. From these he
formulated theories of truth (knowledge), power (how‘we constitute
ourselves as subjects acting on others’) and the self (ethics) (see
Foucault, 1984: 351–352).

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