Math Forum / Mathematics / Mathematical Logic / February 2010

On Power [originally posted to 'alt.sociology']

A comment on the nature of political power: in the main, all
discussion of the topic seems somehow ludicrous, but perhaps there is
a guiding thread in all such commentary as is offered outside the fold
of party politics.  Perhaps the defining characteristic of political
power is its having to do with nonpolitical energies *already spent*,
cultural-practical forces outside the material shaping of class and
country — which are no longer, but exert a controlling influence on
those considerations which can comfortably be hived off as
”technical”, the issues upon which political personages meet in
conflict.  That is to say, the in-existence of the wellsprings of
political power is well-nigh literal and cause for consideration of
what is at stake in political conflict: perhaps it is nothing less
than the decision to be quits with an issue as contemporary, or to
allow a complex of pragmata and its ordering to continue to exert a
constitutive effect upon the space of our life.

What does such a sign and its symptomatology suggest for the role of
political power in society?  That it itself is far from constitutive,
so far as to suggest that careful attention to all the disjecta membra
of everyday life is a prerequisite for an informed perspective on
politics.  In other words, the “objective” analysis of politics
suggests that a concern with “social facts” is far from lazy – rather,
such *realités* are the coin of rational political discussion insofar
as it permits of constructive resolution between adversaries. Only
concrete examination of the situation facing us in society today can
avoid the dangers of extremist political or anti-political movements,
such as perennially threaten to capture “the spirit of the age” among
the disenfranchised; and the undesirability of such, the eclipse of
progress in the name of a extra-political order attended to by the
same hands, is certainly no issue.

Rubard Oct 6 2004