Lecture Overhead Transparencies  on `What is Power?'

How is power exercised?

Identify some examples

Personal experience

Novels

Other sources

Are there different forms or dimensions of power?

Power as a contested concept

Role of values – power/knowledge relations

Power and freedom

Power as positive as well as negative

Identity

Social position

Attachment

Insecurity

Passive, aggressive (self-defeating)

Inequality

Resources – material and symbolic

Bacon – Black community leader

Fiske – young journalist

McCoy – rich bond salesman, suspected hit and run driver

Lamb – young hit and run victim, law-abiding and well educated

Auburn – felon alleged to have accompanied Lamb

‘This is nothing but the Establishment looking after its own,’ said Reverend Bacon. He was leaning back in his chair at his desk and talking into the telephone, but his tones were official. For he was talking to the press. ‘This is the Power Structure manufacturing and disseminating its lies with the willing connivance of its lackeys in the media, and its lies are transparent'.

Edward Fiske III, although a young man, recognized the rhetoric of the Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reverend Bacon stared at the mouthpiece of the telephone with a look of righteous anger. Fiske slumped down a little farther in his chair. His eyes jumped from Reverend Bacon’s face to the swamp-yellow sycamores in the yard beyond the window and then back to Reverend Bacon and then back to the sycamores. He didn’t know whether eye contact with the man was wise at this point or not, even though the thing that had provoked the anger had nothing to do with Fiske’s visit.

`Bacon was furious over the piece in this morning’s Daily News suggesting that Sherman McCoy might have been escaping from a robbery attempt when his car hit Henry Lamb. The Daily News intimated that Lamb’s accomplice was a convicted felon named Roland Auburn and that the district attorney’s entire case against Sherman McCoy was based on a story concocted by this individual, who was now seeking a plea bargain in a drug case.’

‘You doubt that they stoop so low?’ Reverend Bacon declaimed into the mouthpiece. ‘You doubt they can be vile? Now you see them stoop so low, they try to smear young Henry Lamb. Now you see them vilify the victim, who lies mortally wounded and cannot speak for himself. For them to say that Henry Lamb is a robber — that’s the criminal act…see… That’s the criminal act. But that is the twisted mind of the Power Structure, that is the underlying racist mentality.

Since Henry Lamb is a young black male, they think they can brand him as a criminal . . . see . . They think they can smear him in that way. But they are wrong. Henry Lamb’s life refutes their lies. Henry Lamb is everything the Power Structure tells the young black male he is supposed to be, but when the need of one a their own demand it. . . see.., one a their own.. . then they think nothing of turning around and trying to destroy the good name of this young man…

What?... Say, "Who are they?"... You think Sherman McCoy stands alone? You think he is by himself? He is one a the most powerful men at Pierce & Pierce, and Pierce & Pierce is one a the most powerful forces in Wall Street. I know Pierce & Pierce . . . see . . . I know what they can do. You heard a capitalists. You heard a plutocrats. You take a look at Sherman McCoy and you’re looking at a capitalist, you’re looking at a plutocrat.’

A relation in which the actions of some people have an effect on the actions of others

Power is exercised in the (re)construction of social reality – it is pervasive; positive as well as negative

Autonomy/Sovereignty – do we accept/naturalise the ascription of autonomy to human beings OR do we understand this ascription to be constructed through a particular (historical/cultural) grid of intelligibility?

Lecture Overhead Transparencies on Inequality

What forms do inequalities take?

consider the novels – class, gender, ethnicity,age

Why are inequalities significant?
consider issues of identity and insecurity

Why are there inequalities?
consider (construction of) natural and social differences

How are inequalities reproduced?

consider the workplace

Differential access to valued material and symbolic ‘goods’

Land, capital

Expertise, knowledge, qualifications `cultural capital’

Importance of language and social construction of `need’, etc.

Social divisions

Capitalism

Patriarchy

Colonialism

Ageism

Legitimation of divisions

`natural’/`universal’

utilitarian/ rational-economic

meritocratic