Power: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences

By Olivier Dupont

A polymorphous concept, power has imposed itself since ancient times. Whether it characterizes the phenomena of domination, exclusion or voluntary submission, it illuminates social relations and, since the 20th Century, interpersonal relations.

This book offers, first of all, a daring panorama through its intertwining of different theoretical propositions relating to power, across time and across disciplines. It then presents the work of researchers in information and communication sciences who draw from these proposals the materials allowing them to develop their own analyses.

These analyses revisit discursive power with respect to contemporary formations of communication and information. They investigate digital technologies by problematizing the phenomena of influence, control and access to knowledge. Finally, they reflect on the media in the light of inherent powers of social mediation, advertising and journalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Apr 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781119610403

Book preview

Preface

This book is part of the set: Concepts to Conceive 21st Century Society. This set is a state of the art collection of the latest theoretical developments started by researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) embracing their discipline. The authors of the set have put forward an interplay of concepts employed in the ICS community. These concepts are also used in other disciplines related to the humanities and social sciences (history, sociology, economics, linguistics, psychology, etc.) besides often fitting in line with the concerns of science and technology researchers (ergonomics, artificial intelligence, data analysis, etc.).

In this set, we aim to highlight the theoretical approaches used in ICS, which is often regarded as a cross-disciplinary field, from a deliberately conceptual point of view. We thought that this was the right choice to supplement the different epistemological works that have already been carried out in the field.

To describe in further detail the perspective adopted in each of these works, we should point out that it represents the point of view of researchers in ICS with a didactic aim and an epistemological focus. We will start by considering ICS as an academic discipline that contributes to the creation and dissemination of knowledge related to information and communication.

Thus, our theoretical reflection will be based on the analysis of a series of concepts widely used by the ICS community, and we will aim to make it accessible to humanities and social sciences students as well as useful for teachers and researchers in several fields and for professionals who wish to consider their practices. This interplay of concepts allows us to conceive 21st Century society in its social and technological aspects. It also helps shed light on human and technological relations and interactions.

So far, this series is expected to include a dozen works, each of which presents one of the following concepts, which are widely used in ICS: power, discourse, mediation, the dispositif, memory and transmission, belief, knowledge, exchange, public/private, representation, writing, and aesthetics.

Each book in this set shares the same structure. A first part, called Epistemological foundations, summarizes and allows us to compare the theories which over time have developed and then re-examined the concept in question. A second part presents recent problematics in ICS which involve the concept with the aim of establishing or analyzing the topic researched. This organization of the content can get rid of the restrictive meanings that concepts may take on in the public or professional sphere, or even in various disciplines.

The first four books examine in turn the concepts of power, discourse, mediation and dispositive (dispositif). In these first texts we come across two concepts with a strong historical background: power and discourse; and the two others have emerged instead in the contemporary period: mediation and the dispositif.

These books are the fruit of collective reflection. Regular meetings among the different authors have made collaborative development of these four texts possible. The content of these works and of the preparatory work on the other concepts also forms the basis of a course in ICS epistemology that has been offered in several types of education for the past ten years or so. Thus, it has been tested before an audience of students at different levels.

Some authors have already been asked to write about the other concepts. The series coordinators will see to it that these authors follow the logic of the set and the structure of the first books.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jacqueline Deschamps, Valérie Larroche and Jean-Paul Metzger, the three other teacher-researchers involved from the beginning in this series Concepts to Conceive 21st Century Society for their engagement and the richness of the thoughts they shared, which strongly enhanced the publication of this work.

Thanks as well to Jocelyne, Julien and Aline for their careful reading and their pertinent comments.

Very special thanks to Mary Carley whose help has been precious for the English translation.

Introduction

To respect the logic of the series Concepts to Conceive 21st Century Society, this book is divided into two separate parts. The first is dedicated to the epistemological foundations of power. It clarifies the concept independently of the disciplines in which it is used by confronting theories that, over time, have made it possible to establish and then reassess it. The second part is based on the contemporary issues in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) that involve the concept of power, with the aim of establishing the topics to be researched and analyzing them.

The concept of power took root among the classical philosophers who united two significant questions: a political question, through which they examined tyranny and democracy as they wondered how a people or a group should or could be governed, and a rhetorical question, through which they wondered how this power was wielded in speech. Beyond the diversity of the theories we will encounter in this work, these questions continue to leave their mark on a large number of research topics, regardless of the time period, in the disciplines and theoretical frameworks that address the concept.

In the first part, which addresses the epistemological foundations, a historical continuum could have been adopted to present different uses of the concept of power in the humanities and social sciences. This is what the philosopher Jacqueline Russ (1994) did, beginning in antiquity, from the time of the first analyses of political power, to the contemporary period, during which the interactionist approach to power relations has considerably enriched the notion and the theory of power (Russ, 1994, p. 55). We have instead chosen a slightly different path, which nevertheless distinguishes a political, institutional and organizational power from a subjective and intersubjective power in which relations are dominant. In effect, these two conceptualizations do not correspond in this study to two periods that are as clearly distinct and successive as in Russ. Political, institutional power still deserves to be explored and explained in the current period. The concept of intersubjective power can be traced to roots that significantly pre-date the analyses conducted by Michel Foucault and Michel Crozier¹. Furthermore, a third category of conceptual use should be taken into consideration, taking into account our experience as a researcher in Information and Communication Sciences. It is a question of discursive or linguistic power that, for its part, has been understood in very diverse periods and theoretical or disciplinary frameworks.

Once the epistemological foundations have been explored, the second part of the book presents work in information and communication sciences that uses the concept of power. It is centered around three major research questions, the first of which somewhat extends the chapter about discursive power in Part 1 (Chapter 3).

In effect, since the earliest days of ICS, the exercise of power through language has called out to researchers building the disciplinary field. The first among them, Roland Barthes (1978, p. 12), explained that this object in which power is inscribed for all of human eternity is: language – or, more precisely, its necessary expression in speech. He saw in this a fascist essence, because as soon as it is proclaimed, it goes to work for a power that manifests through the authority of the assertion and the gregariousness of the repetition² Roland Barthes (1978, p. 14). This language, which, in Barthes’ eyes, is more effective for subjugating than for communicating, has thereafter continued to be studied in the context of power within ICS by exploring different research questions. These will therefore be the subject of the first question in this second part, entitled: Linguistic power in ICS (Chapter 4).

Beyond work concerning linguistic and discursive exchanges, another research axis in which the concept of power is frequently used in ICS concerns informational reconfiguration and, consequently, communicational reconfiguration of our societies. This manifests particularly through diverse studies concerning, on one hand, the existence of an information society, and on the other hand, the developments of information and communication technologies (ICT) that reinforce control and the relocalization of powers. If some characteristics point in the direction of a reinforcement of counter-powers – a fear, which ICS aims to analyze, spreads: is ICT generating an accumulated visibility, a surveillance that can be assimilated into a new panopticon or a society of control whose signs were described in a visionary way by Gilles Deleuze (1990)? These different studies will be featured in the second question we explore, entitled: Power, society, and developments in ICT (Chapter 5).

Finally, a third axis of studies that use the concept of power seems to us to emerge within the discipline and from its dialogs with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: this is a question of the examination of everything that can be called media in the broadest sense of the term. In addition to the development of new arguments in the ICS community that build on the work of media sociologists, political scientists and others on the nature of the power exercised by the media in general, some work has been dedicated to the study of a specific media or media organization, and others, undoubtedly more numerous, to the power of journalists as a social group caught up in a power relationship with other social groups. These latter works align with the broadest question concerning mediators and the power they possess. Finally, closely connected to the media, but also to non-verbal communication, it is the power of the image that is examined by researchers in ICS, both in the specific field of advertising and in the wider field of all audiovisual or multichannel communication. All of these works will be presented in a third question entitled simply Media power (Chapter 6).

1 For Jacqueline Russ (1994, p. 55), the analysis of power as a relation dates to the 1960s and the work of Michel Foucault and Michel Crozier in France and Robert Dahl in the United States. This is explained by saying that our contemporary civilization manifests a network of connections and interconnections and that information and communication today are in charge of thought. Power therefore becomes a mode of being inherent in social relationships.

2 Signs only exist when they are acknowledged and repeated; they are therefore conformist and gregarious by nature.

PART 1

Epistemological Foundations

Introduction to Part 1

As we have previously stated, power is an ancient concept that draws its origins from observation of the political organization of the city-state and human communities. The distribution of tasks and their hierarchizations, the consequences of inequalities in physical strengths and linguistic competencies, the dialectic between experienced feelings and the relationships that result from them are objects of reflection that have inspired theoreticians for 25 centuries. They have sought to understand the social world that surrounds them and the different positions of the individuals that constitute it. In this context, political organization, intersubjective relationships and the implementation of language are the three conditions that have been selected for exploring the epistemological foundations of power in this section.

1

Political Power, Institutions and Socio-economic Organizations

1.1. Explanations of the emergence of political power

By focusing on the emergence of political power, philosophy seems to have historically privileged psychological explanations with regard to the social circumstances linked to the constraints of adapting to the environment. There is something reassuring in the fact of dismissing physical or genetic determinisms that seem to program the behaviors of other living species and to attribute the capacity for choice to human beings.

As is the case for Hobbes¹ (2016) and Machiavelli² (2003), philosophers in the modern period³, relationships between individuals are characterized by egoistic tendencies and hostility. Political power therefore originates in the fundamentally egoistic nature of the person engaged in a merciless battle for survival. It allows human beings to cohabitate without violence or, at least, to claim a monopoly over that violence.

Going beyond this paradigm of the egoism/altruism binary, Hegel⁴ (1991), at the beginning of the 19th Century, analyzed the interpersonal conflicts in the context of a moral reason, the quest for recognition. He therefore tended to see in the State the outcome of this quest, which he called fulfilled reason. It is a universal juridical form, regardless of the historical paths that have led to it, a form that is the outcome of a battle for recognition that guarantees to all a recognition that is both juridical and social⁵.

A century later, Max Weber⁶ (2013) discarded the basis of the psychosocial and relational approach by explaining that, regardless of a society’s social form, it always ends up with a power of the best that rests on a variety of legitimacies: traditional, charismatic or rational. However, during this same time, sociological thought concerning the legitimacy of the exercise of power by the best led authors including Pareto⁷ (1968) to associate the proper functioning of society with the circulation and renewal of the elites. All of the contemporaneous analyses of meritocracy and the equality of opportunity, as ontological principles of democratic States, are based on this premise, first introduced 2,400 years ago by Plato⁸ (1997), who explained that the best or the most competent, namely the philosophers, should be the ones to exercise power.

Finally, we cannot overlook the original point of view of Étienne de la Boétie⁹ (2015) who as early as the 16th Century described a dialectic of power relationships that was far from unequivocal. As reported by Daniel Bougnoux (1993, p. 37), it is the ambition of voluntarily enslaved subjects to recognize themselves in a great, glorious hero who provides a basis for the power relationship. It is not the master who makes the slave but the slave who engenders the master; power therefore does not descend, but ascends.

1.2. The State, the achieved form of political power

If the philosophical foundations of the analyses of the emergence of political power that we have just discussed rely on the human psyche, those that examine the modern State as a social phenomenon clearly adopt the point of view of the social sciences such as sociology, history or economics.

The State is the dominant and undoubtedly convergent form of the exercise of power while human collectives are developing, whereas the tribal form corresponds to natural societies whose population density is limited. To illustrate this convergence, we only need to consider the understanding of the generalization of this social form that appears as much in the Hegelian perspective of fulfilled reason as in the Marxist perspective of the emergence of capitalism and the dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. At a previous stage such as during feudal society, political power was expressed through the fief, which ensured the local protection of men and goods.

It was Ernest Gellner¹⁰ (1995, pp. 160–70) who seems to us to have best explained how the historical context of socio-economic development was able to determine the forms taken by political power. Subscribing to the egotistical paradigm of human nature, he distinguished three periods of human violence. In the simplest societies, there is no production and what one acquires is quantitatively of little importance and perishable. Nomadism, gathering, hunting and protection from predators are the most widespread social practices of groups encountering each other in vast spaces. There was no need to defend a surplus. Violence isn’t a principle of societal organization, and it is even less so when the number of individuals available for engaging in it is low.

The situation changed with agrarian societies, which produced food and goods that it partially stored. However, these societies still did not experience growth linked to technology. Some years were better than others. Such conditions led to the omnipresence of violence and coercion because there was no indisputable principle concerning the distribution of goods, and because riches were easier to acquire through predation than production. War is superior to commerce, and agrarian societies were all dominated by kings, lords and warriors. Conquests made it possible to appropriate riches, land and labor.

This system began to evolve and to weaken when output began to increase regularly. The richest States were those who stimulated the most growth. It therefore became more honorable to be a merchant or a producer than a warrior. As for military means, they became so powerful and destructive (atomic bomb) that they had to be used with restraint, or even to be banned.

Marxist thinkers do not contradict this historical thread associating the implementation of modern States with an accumulation of capital leading to the development of commercial and then industrial capitalism. These forms of economic development seem to require the support of a powerful and expansionist State that exercises a monopoly over violence.

Capitalism consequently relied on a powerful State whether it called itself liberal or defined itself as socialist or even communist. This was in any case what Paul Boccara (1974) explained as early as the 1970s when he spoke about monopolistic State capitalism with regard to the Soviet Union: this is also the observation we can make when considering the current development of China.

Among contemporary thinkers, Martin Carnoy (1984) is the one who seems to us to have best cataloged the different theories of the State and the modes of the exercise of power that characterize them. He highlights the debate between three theoretical frameworks: institutionalism, pluralism and instrumentalization.

In the wake of Weber, institutionalists insist on the autonomy of public institutions: once the winds of history have sown the seeds of a historical State in a territory that becomes its national foundation, the former will follow its internal logic.

Pluralists see in the structure and the development of the State the result of a series of diverse influences that constantly reconfigures it based on the dynamics of a pluralistic civil society and through the constant application of a constitutional process. France constitutes a typical case with its numerous constitutional reforms and changes of republics (Third, Fourth, Fifth).

Instrumentalists, often Marxists, consider the State as the expression of social actors who pursue their interests and impose their dominance, whether that happens without opposition within the State (the executive committee of the bourgeoisie) or as the provisional result of struggles and alliances.

In order to explain the view concerning the exercise of power contained within each of these analytical frameworks, we will confine ourselves here to citing a few authors.

The State, as an autonomous institution, plays the role of an intermediary, which manifests the powers of arbitrage and mediation. Jacqueline Russ (1994, p. 68) insists on this role of arbiter, which exercises an institutionalized, juridical power, through the mediation of its mechanisms, a strategy of social cohesion, and a capacity for regulation and arbitrage. The beginnings of this institutionalist vision of an arbiter State can be found in the analysis of democracy described by Tocqueville¹¹ (1990). For the first time during the American Revolution, the State gained its independence with regard to social groups exercising power on the basis of hereditary status (as illustrated by the apocryphal phrase attributed to Louis XIV, "l’État, c’est moi) or the hereditary responsibilities of the aristocracy. Once the democratic State took hold and was no longer considered as an instrument in service to a class, discussion often focuses on its arbitrage mission. Tocqueville was one of the first to have undertaken such a discussion. First of all, he warned against the potential slide for democracy itself that could be engendered by an overly strong demand for equality addressed to the State. There was therefore a risk of degeneration into tyranny: if the State intervened too much, even with the sole objective of achieving equality between its citizens, it could progressively inhibit vital forces, increase individualism, and even revert to a new despotism. Nevertheless, the analysis produced by Tocqueville was more sophisticated than the way in which some¹² caricatured it later by only retaining the proposition where he speaks about a State that is vast and protective (Benoît and Keslassy, 2005, p. 24). In fact, if on one hand he was opposed to the administrative implementation of permanent legal charity and rejected the constitutional provision of a right to work, on the other hand he encouraged public intervention in times of crisis, surveillance and industrial regulation as well as in the fight against poverty¹³. In short, the apparent complexity of Tocqueville’s thought must be placed into the context of a double conviction: his engagement as a liberal republican who saw in the rise of public opinion thanks to the press the first effective power of democratic regimes"; and his distrust of economic liberalism whose assumption of the exclusive efficacy of the market led to the rejection of the State.

Pluralism