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Chains of Power and Their Representation STXXXX10.1177/0735275117709296Sociological TheoryReed 709296research-article2017 Lewis A. Coser Memorial Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting 2015 Sociological Theory 2017, Vol. 35(2) 87 –117 Chains of Power and Their © American Sociological Association 2017 https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275117709296DOI: 10.1177/0735275117709296 Representation st.sagepub.com Isaac Ariail Reed1 Abstract Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity. Keywords power, authority, agency, culture, empire Power is useful, because it allows those who access it to move and shake the world such that they are more likely to achieve their projects, to bring about a future that in some sense suits them, or at least that they imagine they want. Yet when a person (or group) accesses power, she calls into action not only herself but others and thus raises the question of the authoriza- tion of action. Which actions are understood by which people as authorized? Whose actions are understood as always already authorized, no matter what they do? And how does the interpretation of action as authorized, not authorized, or ambiguously authorized participate in making an action effective? These are the questions of power made legitimate, the ques- tions of politics broadly understood. However, sociological discussions of the legitimation of various entities (e.g., the state, organizations, leaders) can obscure from view the mundane problems of interactor communi- cation and interpretation that attend all actions, by drawing focus to the degree of legitimacy attached to social objects presumed to be fully solid, even behemoth-like. As a result, socio- logical research has not always been able to explore the relationship between the pragmatics 1Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA Corresponding Author: Isaac Ariail Reed, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville, VA 22904. Email: [email protected] 88 Sociological Theory 35(2) of action—the basic ability of humans with projects-in-mind to pursue ends-in-view via an interpretation of the world around them—and fundamental questions about (1) hierarchy, domination, and physical or symbolic violence and (2) the classic sociological locations of power, that is, the state, the firm, and the Church. Yet the pragmatics of action and the struc- tures of power in society are clearly related. This article—which is really more of a research proposal, attached to a case study and the elaboration of a conceptual vocabulary—explores the relationship between action, interpre- tation, and power. It reformulates the concept of power through a consideration of the prob- lems that confront persons when they attempt to recruit allies or are themselves recruited. Such relationships of recruitment are often hierarchical, and in so far as they are, I will argue, they embody power in the double sense of capacity and control. Properly recruited and maintained allies can be sent far afield in time and space to pursue a project, and thus power is the ability to send and bind someone to act on one’s behalf. As actors are linked together in relations of sending-and-binding, chains of power emerge. It is these chains that are the basis of both agency and domination in society. As social ties, chains of power are constructed, in part, out of signs that construe and com- prehend those ties; they are simultaneously social and symbolic. In particular, when one person or group sends and binds another person or group to pursue a project, the first embeds this sending-and-binding in a picture of the world that contains an idea of who is acting for whom, and under what authorization. The representation of in whose name action is authorized thus becomes important for the communication, coordination, and justification of action. In what follows, I will develop the term rector1 to refer to this key aspect of power relations, wherein a concrete person or group who does the sending is also represented as part of a schema of autho- rization. Persons, engaged with each other, consistently name rectors as the sources of projects, the justifications for violence, and the ultimately responsible entities for what they are doing. When they do this, they make themselves actors who act, specifically, on behalf of rectors. The relationship between the representation and multiple interpretation of rectorship, on one hand, and the actual ability of those installed at the top of hierarchies to pursue their own projects, on the other hand, is, I propose, a key site of empirical variation for sociological study. Finally, into the social-and-symbolic world of rectors and actors there emerges a third category, both of the world and repeatedly and variously symbolized—others. How persons are brought to imagine some other persons as fundamentally alien to their own projects of action—as outside a given chain of power and its representation—and thus as disruptive for ongoing projects and functioning hierarchies is also not straightforward. Indeed, there are odd ways in which others can become essential to precisely those relations of power from which they are excluded. How should one examine the world of power and action, tied together by this basic human process of recruiting, sending, and binding allies? The problem is that most legitimated power structures are so well reified by vicious social action and smooth habits of interpreta- tion that it can be hard to pierce the skin of the leviathan to see how things work underneath. I pursue a strategy that I have found useful for the second project that animates this research proposal—the attempt to offer an account of transitions to modernity. To understand power, and to construct a sociology of modernity, the precarious and violent world of frontier poli- tics—at temporal and spatial remove from the centers of power—is a particularly evocative setting. I start the study of power, in other words, at the edge of empire. LITTLE TURTLE AND ANTHONY WAYNE In 1795, Mihšihkinaahkwa (to whom I will hereafter refer by the English translation of his name, Little Turtle), the military leader of the Miami tribe, encountered Anthony Reed 89 Wayne, head of the U.S. Army in the Northwest Territory, at Fort Greenville. The two leaders met along with other generals to negotiate a treaty between the U.S. Government and an alliance of Native American tribes who lived in the Ohio Valley. This treaty constituted the culmination of a years-long struggle over the Northwest Territory between the British, the United States, and what historians have come to call the Ohio Indians.2 In the aftermath of the revolutionary war, the U.S. government had tried, first, to negoti- ate with the Iroquois, former political patrons of many of the tribes that lived in the Ohio Valley, and thus to arrange for the Iroquois to convince or force the violently resistant Ohio Indian alliance to the negotiating table. When this attempt at indirect compulsion failed, the United States went to war. The Ohio Indians achieved decisive victories against U.S. forces in 1790 and 1791, causing a crisis for the Washington administration’s Indian policy and undermining belief in the strength of the federal government among the U.S. electorate (Calloway 2014:23–24, 133–39). This military ascendance of the Ohio Indians was subject to massive reversal in 1794, however, as “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s American legions defeated the Ohio Indians at the battle of Fallen Timbers. Wayne’s army then razed villages and burned cornfields. In the midst of the battle, the British unambiguously abandoned their Indian allies, locking them out of Fort Miami and subjecting them to slaughter. Thus in 1795, when it came time to negotiate a treaty over land ownership, use, and trading rights in the Ohio Valley, the gener- als of the allied tribes negotiated from a position of weakness, while Wayne and his generals did their best to play magnanimous and intimidating hosts. In the negotiations, Wayne would press for total and exclusive rights to a vast swath of territory, including land that is now Chicago and Detroit.3 Negotiations began with a ritualized exchange of gifts, and this signaled a certain normal- ity, for there was a long precedent for such encounters. The struggle over the Great Lakes region was much older than the new United States, and the seasoned military leaders of the allied tribes of Ohio had negotiated myriad treaties with the British, French, and Iroquois. The Indian generals thus used the language of familial relations to discuss relations with the United States, in this case substituting the will of George Washington as the “great father” in Philadelphia for what previously had been kings or chiefs on the continent or on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. These generals also referred to General Anthony Wayne as “father.” This was all a normal way to proceed. But something was amiss.
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