POWER, Theories of (HEGEmONY, POSTHEGEmONY, MICROpOWER, BIOpower) 87 Foster, Hal. Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes. London authority, will, legitimacy, subordination, and coercion. and New York: Verso, 2002. Alternately, power can be defined as “power to,” involv- Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry ing questions about facilitation, dispositional conditions into the Origins of Social Change. Oxford: Blackwell, of possibility, or capacity. In addition to this, theories of 1989. power have often defined it as the specific attribute of Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern,” New politics and focused on issues of sovereignty, govern- German Critique, 33 (1984): 5–52. ment, states, and constitution. Considered historically, Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Theory: Ideological theories of power have drifted away from the classical Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” New German liberal paradigm that gave rise to an emphasis on the Critique, 33 (1984): 53–65. state and what in many instances was a corollary defi- Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on nition of power as “power over.” Contemporary theories the Postmodern. 1983–1998. London and New York: of power can, by contrast, be seen as reformulations Verso, 1998. of theories of physical energy and, in some senses, as Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington and B. extending the sense of power as “capacity” to that of Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, “power to transform.” 1984. McLeod, Mary. “Architecture.” In Trachtenberg, Stanley Theorizing power as and beyond the (Ed.), The Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of state Contemporary Innovation in the Arts. No. 1. London, CT: Greenwood Pub Group, 1985, pp. 19–52. Steven Lukes’ Power: A Radical View was one of the Mignolo, Walter D. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: first attempts to theorize power as such, and in a way On (de)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic that it could be studied (1974). In many ways, Lukes’ Disobedience,” Postcolonial Studies, 14.3 (2011): book ushered in power as a discrete object of research; 273–283. but it also pointed to significant shifts in both the anal- Paoletti, John T. “Art.” In Trachtenberg, Stanley (Ed.), The ysis and understanding of politics. The extent to which Postmodern Moment: A Handbook of Contemporary power is the particular attribute of the state (or sover- Innovation in the Arts. London, CT: Greenwood Pub eignty, government, and so on) or politics is defined as Group, 1985, pp. 53–80. an exclusive property of the state, or whether it desig- Raulet, Gérard and Max Reinhart. “From Modernity as nates something other or more than this has been One-Way Street to Postmodernity as Dead End,” New closely associated with changing definitions of power. German Critique, 33 (1984): 155–177. There are no fixed answers to these questions, and not Rorty, Richard. “Habermas and Lyotard on Post-modernity,” simply because, as Lukes initially argued, defining what Praxis, 4.1 (1984): 32–44. power is involves engaging in politics. More so, if power Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of involves ability, it refers to something that is not always Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. exercised—as Lukes suggested in amending his theory in a subsequent edition of the book (2005)—and comes Eleni Kalantidou closer to those theories of power that understand power through the model of physical energy. Power in See also Heritage; Modernity and Modernism; this sense is not analogous with particular vectors or Postmodernism and Design; Tradition. instances of power, such as the state or sovereignty; nor is it reducible to the sense of “power over.” Theories of power can be read as a tendency to formulate a tran- shistorical or abstract question about power that is not POweR, THeORies of (HeGemOnY, specific to any given time, place, or social, political, and POstHeGemOnY, MiCROpOweR, economic arrangements, but which nevertheless has BiOpOwer) the advantage of posing questions about power without presupposing that it always assumes the same political Conventionally, theories of power have defined it in or other models. two, broadly different ways. Power can be understood In its everyday and dictionary usage, power means as “power over,” involving questions about domination, “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a THE BLOOMSbURY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DESIGN 9781472521569_txt_prf_P.indd 87 21/09/15 3:55 PM 88 POWER, Theories of (HEGEmONY, POSTHEGEmONY, MICROpOWER, BIOpower) particular way” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Yet, of power, whereas Weber’s typologies of authority and an analytical focus on power as an instance of “power legitimacy included both putatively rational and nonra- over” has been more prevalent than not in the history of tional aspects. Yet, in defining power as will, both political philosophy and science (Lukes, 1974; Clegg, reformulated the German Romanticist preoccupa- 1975). On the one hand, this may well be due to a wish tion with will as an ability to shape the future through to critically understand domination, in the sense that calculation (Weber) and/or force (Weber and Nietzsche) domination, coercion, or subjection is simply consid- (Wicks, 2011; Derman, 2012). ered to be a problem, and therefore a more pressing Alongside political philosophy and sociology, Karl concern to analyze. On the other hand, the delineation Marx’s critical readings of political economy emphasized between “power to” and “power over” corresponds power as capacity (specifically in his analysis of “labour- with classical liberalism’s definition of negative and power”), while his “political writings” on the American positive freedoms, as in, respectively, “freedom to” and Revolution, the Civil War in France, and other similar “freedom from” (Berlin, 1958). In classical liberalism, texts analyze the power of states and monarchs in the freedom has conventionally been understood in the context of class conflicts. According to Marx, “labour- negative sense, and in the form of “individual freedom power” is the “capacity for labour,” which appears from the power of the state,” where the state is, in turn, in capitalism “upon the market as a commodity.” He understood to be both a conveyance of power and the defined labor-power as “the aggregate of those mental epitome of power as such (as in the use of the phrase and physical capabilities existing in a human being, “the Great Powers” to refer to European states). which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value In the classical traditions of political philosophy, such of any description” (1990, p. 347). Unlike theories of as those of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Thomas power in classical liberalism, then, Marx considered Hobbes (1588–1679), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau power as variously dispersed across conflictual social (1712–78), power emerges with and through the rise fields and concentrated in the state, defining it in both of sovereignty or some variant of the state. Hobbes’ economic and political terms, and as a capacity that is Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and the more productive of social relationships and forms. recent writings of Antonio Gramsci (The Modern Prince) While there was much debate in the twentieth have all theorized power as an attribute and preoccu- century about the extent to which various strands of pation of the state or sovereign, and largely from the Marxism understood power as a function of, or reduc- perspective of how to attain, constitute, and maintain ible to, economic power, such debates are difficult to political rule. sustain by reference to Marx’s entire writings and are By contrast, in sociology and social theory, while instead debates around particular readings of certain power has often been similarly defined as “power texts. Foucault argued that in Marx’s Capital, “one over,” the definition was extended to imply an ability or power does not exist, but many powers.” He went on capacity situated within a relational or interactive setting to add that it is therefore not possible to “speak of that is not necessarily political or that of government. power if we wish to construct an analysis of power, According to the German sociologist Max Weber (1864– but we must speak of powers and attempt to localize 1920), power is “the probability that one actor within them in their historic and geographic specificity” (1981, a social relationship will be in a position to carry out 2012). Moreover, for Foucault, Marx, and others, his own will despite resistance” (1978, p. 53). Weber’s power is regarded as productive, and is not seen as understanding of power as an expression of will is simi- that which only, or foremost, acts to repress some- lar to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of “will to power.” thing—such as individuals—that exist outside or prior Nietzsche had reformulated Arthur Schopenhauer’s to power. argument regarding a primordial “will to live” as a “will to power,” and in so doing defined power as both anal- ogous to life—which he saw as a will to “strive to grow, Marxist theories of power and the state spread, seize”—and as having priority over life (1989, During much of the twentieth century, a range of theo- p. 259). Power, in Nietzsche’s sense, could be life-de- rists sought to construct a Marxist theory of the state nying or life-affirming, but he nevertheless understood that would understand its role and power as something it as pre- and extra-political. Nietzsche’s understand- more than an instrument of capitalist power (Gramsci, ing of power emphasized the nonrational dimensions 1967; Miliband, 1969; Poulantzas, 1973; Anderson, THE BLOOMSbURY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DESIGN 9781472521569_txt_prf_P.indd 88 21/09/15 3:55 PM POWER, Theories of (HEGEmONY, POSTHEGEmONY, MICROpOWER, BIOpower) 89 1974; Clarke, 1991; Jessop, 2007; Althusser, 2014). states rule by organizing and attaining consent, and Leaving aside the extent to which Marx did indeed where they fail to acquire consent, they resort to coer- argue that the state simply reflects economic powers cion or force (Anderson, 1976, p.