Action in Society: Refl exively Conceptualizing Activities
4.5 Conclusion
targeted institution through their actions, the elicitation of support from others is the central axis around which politics revolves. And that axis has two poles. The fi rst is rhetoric that is the style and content of addressing others in speech and other kinds of performances to join in the politi- cal project. Apart from naked coercion there is no politics, big and small, without rhetoric (Burke 1950 ). 38 The second pole of the political axis is organization. It comes into play simply because the elicitation of participation in the constitution of institutions on a larger scale requires many helping hands making use of techniques of pro- jective articulation which need to be coordinated and focused to yield the desired institution form- ing effect. The hitch is, that organizations them- selves are institutions, and a very particular kind at that. What distinguishes them from other insti- tutions is that they have become self-conscious through a dedicated staff of people maintaining and or directing them. 39
Power is the ability to succeed in politics. That is to say power is potentiated agency; beyond the ability to act it includes the ability to deliver on intentions. This can happen by a whole spectrum of different ways structured by the degree to which the involvement of others proceeds dia- logically such that they become in fact fully equal co-politicians, or monologically by subjecting others to some form of control (Glaeser 2013). 40 Power is constituted in different ways in different
38 It is no accident, therefore, that the art of rhetoric as a self-conscious practice bloomed fi rst in participatory poli- tics of the ancient Greek poleis and in Republican Rome.
Accordingly within the Europeanoid tradition Aristotle’s On Rheotoric and Cicero’s Orator have become the defi n- ing texts.
39 This has very interesting consequences. As institutions organizations require a self-politics to maintain them for the purposes of engaging in target politics. That creates all sorts of interesting problems concerning the relationship between both kinds of politics. Many of the problems and frustrations commonly seen in politics are closely related to confl icts between target politics and self politics.
Pioneers in the fi eld of political organization had to wait for mass-modernity to appear. The most important fi rst generation encompasses Lenin ( 1902 ), Michels ( 1911 ).
and Weber ( 1922 ).
40 Control efforts can have rather interesting ironic effect in that they produce the illusion of power while actually undermining it.
situations. Indeed, different kinds of institution- forming projects require different capabilities and forms of control. 41 Money is power only if money can buy the kinds of actions required for the institutionalizing project under consideration.
Neither is knowledge per se power. Indeed it is important to note, that under certain circum- stances knowledge may even be detrimental to the exercise of power, for example if it raises doubts thus undermining the trust in understand- ings that enable acting (Glaeser 2011 ). However, situationally specifi c knowledge can become political knowledge, where it enables an imagi- nation of alternative states, provides understand- ings concerning the action-reaction effect chains central to the particular institution politically tar- geted, and where it involves knowledge about how to mobilize the people that need to partici- pate in carrying that institution. Knowledge satis- fying all three of these requirements is indeed a constitutive aspect of power.
against other more or less explicit action logics that is against a plurality of understandings in play within a local context.
If the search for a substantively rich, unitary and monothetic activity concept valid for human beings in all historically extant social confi gura- tions is misguided at least for those purposes tra- ditionally avowed in the social sciences, we should instead look for a metatheoretical activity concept which is confi gurable in many different ways, and that can work as a formidable search tool to develop culturally and historically sensi- tive notions of action for specifi c domains of social life while satisfying the four criteria of appropriateness which I have discussed begun this chapter. With the consequently processualist notion of multiply intersecting action-reaction effect chains I have provided such a metatheoreti- cal concept. By comparison with other notions it is low in metaphysical commitments beyond arguing that social world, including institutions, that is the more stable parts, crucially exists in the actions of people; that people act mostly in response to the actions of others and in doing so confi gure and reconfi gure their multi-modal understandings that mediate their relationship with the world by simultaneously integrating and differentiating it from their particular vantage point. There is no commitment in this model to a particular kind of discursivity (and hence ratio- nality), no need to posit emotionality as enact- ment of universal basic emotions, and no urge to limit sensing to universal schemes. Instead the model asks researchers to tease out the relevant features of the social world by using the model as a guide to ask questions about it. Thus, social thought and empirical research about social life can once more open themselves to the full plas- ticity of human beings which might have empow- ering consequences for the political imagination.
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