Politics

Politics is always ultimately a question of who is allowed to speak to and as power, and who is excluded. Which singular voice or idea, which propositions are allowed to drown out the others, why, and from whom? We can see this in a lecture hall as easily as a federal election, at a concert or in a board meeting. Most of the actually existing rules of power are unwritten, codes of behavior, style and speech that are known implicitly or explicitly by insiders but are unknown to outsiders. Who can speak and how much will their opinion matter, how direct will be its influence on power, these are the core questions of politics. The political process is always analytic in a sense, it always cuts into a population. People are included and excluded to define a hierarchy of legitimate participation. Are you a citizen? Are you an immigrant? Are you rich? Are you an educated professional? Are you white, black, Latino, Asian? What music do you listen to? What language and idiom do you speak? The navigation of power is conditioned by a host of these questions. And the most important question of all, how close is your proposition to the major existing configurations of power? How are your acts and words aligned in regards to the acts and words of the already powerful, be they institutions or individuals?

We cannot hope for a world in which this subterranean calculus is absent. It "Power" is simply the ability to form semi-coherent organizations and events that sustain themselves and/or increase over time. Last night I went to a wonderful show at Enchanted Forest, known to many Austinites for their performances that mix the aesthetics of raves and jam band shows with more ambitious performance art. I had a great time, even though they had problems with the sound system. During one of these problems, someone whipped out a set of bongos and started playing, trying to get a drum circle going. The MC vied with him a bit, and it was entertaining. Eventually the MC drowned him out be blasting a hip-hop song. I'm using this as an example of power dynamics because it's fairly innocent. The drummer tried to participate in the event directly, through starting a drum circle. Functionally, this was an attempt to share int he power of this particular event, to bring the audience into the show. The MC put a stop to it, albeit humorously. He was able to because he had an instrument of power unavailable to the drummer- a set of giant speakers. There was a momentary contest of power within the event, and the MC won through superior technology.

Now, frankly, as an audience member, if the whole event had been derailed into a drum circle, I would have been pissed. I wanted to see skilled performers, not be in a drum circle. So I'm glad the MC won. My point is simply that power is exercised all the time, in every event, every organization, any cluster of people.

The point of political thought though should be to bring these power mechanisms to light as they happen, to point out the process of exclusion and inclusion that is occurring, to evaluate them. This is the constructive element of political thought, to question whether or not the particular processes of inclusion and exclusion are appropriate, "fair," etc. For a political movement, there must be some sort of focus, some sort of tendency to promote, but we should be aware that this process is occurring. We can then always be mindful of the possibility of doing otherwise, of modifying our politics, or of adapting them to the times without losing the core of values we want to promote. So we must note and critique inclusions and exclusions. We must evaluate this process as it occurs. And we must always be able to focus our attention beyond the particular political arrangement of the moment and towards the actual values that are guiding us.