We might even go so far as to say that "power" has different forms -- distributive power, identity power, decision-making power, bodily power. . .

And then one thing I'd like to posit is there is a difference between coercive power, and power tout court -- power is not a dirty word, because there are more forms of power than hierarchical and violent flows or foundations. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, said a man wise in the ways of doing politics, but not all power does -- hence why things like petitions, demands, marches, and strikes can work to effect change. — Moliere

I totally agree with the above. The irony of those 'realists' who like to say that power flows from the barrel of a gun (tout court) is the total impotency of that idea when it comes to accounting for most of anything that has happened on the planet, ever. They are not worth taking seriously. And as anyone who has even a minimal acquaintance with humans knows, expressions of violence are more often than not expressions of a lack of power, or at least a deep fragility in what power there is. There are few bigger fantasists of reality than 'realists' about power.

And you're right too that power is not a dirty word: power simply 'is': that we live in a world with others at all implicates us into relations of power, and the point is to cultivate healthy relationships of power, rather than diseased ones. Those who think we can do without power effectively want a community of dead bodies.

The one thing I'd add to your list is constitutive power: power not merely to coerce or manipulate but actively create and bring into being. As Foucault showed a long time ago, this is perhaps one of the most dominant forms of power operative today. Power is multi-pronged and multivalent, and any understanding of the world needs to match that richness.

But of course we can't really do that on here, so what is this? — csalisbury

A relay. A differential gear. A catalytic molecule. Plug it in, see what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe something, somewhere. The rest is blackmail.

You might like the Tao Te Ching better. Or the traditional split: Daoism in the sheets, Confucianism in the streets.

I was under the impression that the “identity” in “identity politics” pertained to people who shared a common, mostly biological characteristic such as skin-color, gender, orientation etc. — NOS4A2

Alot of people are under that impression. But the logic is exactly the same, and it's simply arbitrary to think identity stops at biology.

This is one of the reasons I explicitly tried to outline some other models of politics in the OP. People simply don't really have a very good grasp of what politics can involve other than claims underwritten by identity, and even those who say things like 'avoid identity politics at all costs' list nothing but identity politics as an alternative!

the land, proximity and common enterprise — NOS4A2

What are these if not markers of identity?

rather than membership in a community — NOS4A2

The community is just another identity.

As to identity, identity is about “who am I”. Some will look to their skin color and proclaim to have discovered who they are. Some will more readily associate who they are to tendencies of intention and the personas that follow suit. Both of these, however, will constitute identity affiliations. — javra

But all this is very limited, no? An expansive politics can well include questions like: "who could I be?". The whole question of what you call 'association' is 'backward' looking, at it were. Its anchor is in the past. I 'am' this history or body that has made me (past tense), who I am; and given this, how do I proceed? That's how I understand identity politics in the most broad sense. But politics doesn't have to be about 'association'; that a community wants better roads, or better school curriculums, is largely not a matter of 'associating' oneself with anything at all. A democratic politics might expand the question further: "who could we be?". What kind of possibilities can be made available for us, in ways that will change who 'we are', and how should we cultivate them?

One of the reasons I listed what I called distributive and participatory modes of politics as alternatives to identity politics - apart from them being quite basic aspects of politics - is that they can be articulated in the future tense in a far better way than identity politics can. Generally, societal goods are not simply goods for their own sake, but for what they enable one to do. Build that business, write that novel, till that farm, without worrying too much about 'who you are'. Similarly with participatory politics. It's one centred on 'action', and not 'identity' and 'association'. Again, this is not to 'badmouth' either, but just to indicate how much richer politics can be (and in fact is).

Yeah. Democracy does not do well in conditions of adversity or emergency. It functions best in stable regimes, where the sense of urgency does not override - as with war - a rich articulation of policy. Rousseau, the Frenchman, understood this quite well.

I hope so.

Americans'll live. Probably at the expense of everyone else, but they'll live (unless of course you're a bit off-white, in which case you might be shot by a cop instead).

Of course the things I've listed is contingent on my view of the world and how it works, but I find it hard to imagine that someone engaged with politics to some depth but with a different world view wouldn't also list a similar myriad of things. — Saphsin

Yeah. It's one of the reasons I listed - without citing - Raymond Geuss's view of it: politics as a question of who does what to whom for whose benefit. It's worth quoting him properly:

"To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these. Who—which individuals or the bearers of which offices, positions, or roles—has control of employment
in the society, and who have lost their jobs? Will those who have lost their jobs have access to alternative modes of subsistence or not? Who will provide those alternatives, and what exactly will they be (provision of cash payments, vouchers, or jobs in the public sector by the government, or of shelter and food by charities)? Are the unemployed organised, and capable of collective action, or are they disorganised and inert, and if they are organised, what form does this organisation take? What concretely has one party done to the other: How exactly will the policeman punish me? Will he give me a warning, impose a fine, hit me with his truncheon, or take me to jail? Will he also expect a bribe? Finally, who benefits and who does not from the transaction in question? Who derives distinct positive benefits from any individual action or type of action in a given society will often be an extremely complex question." (Philosophy and Real Politics)

One of the reasons I like it too is because politics here is a 'question' and not so much an 'answer'. Geuss' answer to 'what is politics' is something like: 'take a look and see'. It's a nice, Wittgenstein inspired position.

But it seems like there's a double humiliation involved in taking this line – to shill for democracy is not only to shill for the powers (probably against your own interests), but to do so based on a vision of that state taught to you by a foreign power's (America's) propaganda. — Snakes Alive

I've studied democracy most of my adult life. Political philosophy was my way into philosophy. The notion of it is far richer than what Americans think. If anything, Americans are pretty awful at the whole thing. Europeans are somewhat better, but even then...

Also, a casual acquaintance with anywhere that isn't a democracy helps one realize quite quickly the value of even a very shitty one. It's something of a privilege not to be 'able to live' with what you speak of.

Cool beans.

That's... my point.

You're free to believe that, but belief in the power of a political ideology in spite of all evidence to the contrary strikes me as deluded fanaticism. — Snakes Alive

This is fair. I mean, I like to think that I believe in a roughly understood set of societal and institutional arrangements, held together by a certain ethos, mutually perpetuated, but I suppose that's what a fanatic would say. I'm OK with that. As someone somewhere said, if you're not a radical, you're not paying attention.

And that wasn't the idea. If our answer to "who" etc. is "everyone ," then how would it amount to identity politics? — Terrapin Station

:chin: I didn't say it would 'amount to identity politics'.

We all know what it means — Saphsin

I'm not convinced. It's increasingly clear that politics is often thought of in institutional terms. And from the responses here - 'corruption, force to kill' - its understood very badly indeed.

If the answer to that is "everyone," I don't get how it would be identity politics. — Terrapin Station

Huh? I didn't cite the passage (of mine) you quoted as a question of identity politics.

Ah, but real democracy has never been tried... — Snakes Alive

I like to think of democracy as qualitative. Most of them, where they exist, are in poor health, getting worse. Some exhibit signs of pathology. What's not been tried are efforts at healthy ones.

But why are you shilling for our ideology online, then? — Snakes Alive

It's not yours! Jeez. Americans.

I'm not sure any one quality uniting the ones willing to do the worst, except maybe that they could. — Snakes Alive

No, but a distaste for politics has always been a bad sign of things to come.

I'm not American, thankfully.

As for politics as predicament - that's another interesting one. A problem to be solved, rather than a field of life to be negotiated. Of course those who want to 'solve' politics have always been the willing to do the worst.

in the end, it's still about who gets to kill who (or some proxy for it, like imprisonment). — Snakes Alive

A shallow but increasingly common view of politics I suppose. How depressing.

Some interesting reactions here. 'Politics is about force to kill'; 'politics is corruption'. People wanting to place themselves at a distance from politics, like they are innocent observers from afar. Perhaps this is why democracy is unsustainable today. No one is able to see themselves as a political actor.

Politics is about force — Snakes Alive

Sometimes. Even often.

I suspect what people mean by identity politics when they rail against it is that the groups along which people identify are things like race, gender, etc., rather than class (as leftists would like), nationality (as nationalists would like), religion (as the religious would like), etc. — Snakes Alive

Sometimes this too. But there are plenty of other ways in the politics plays out, as I tried to relate.

How lucky you are to be a position to do that. Imagine if power relations were different...

Tell me where I was wrong. There's nothing neutral about co-operation. Co-operation requires conditions which enable and sustain it. And those conditions are always power-saturated. This isn't anything special to co-operation. Even violence has it's conditions of power. Nothing is neutral. Or, if anything is neutral, there are conditions of power which sustain that neutrality too.

I wonder if saying that all politics is identity politics is a way of denying fluidity in favor of static identities. — frank

To some degree. Established identity can be a bulwark against harm or unwanted change. To call upon identity is to potentially call upon a very rich texture of histories and culture to shore up a political claim. But that's the danger in it too: it has the effect of binding one to it ever more closely. It's reactive and comes from a position of weakness. This is not a fault, necessarily. The hurt are always in a position of weakness.

Views like that end up naturalizing existing power-relations under the guise of being 'power-free'. Every time that happens it ends in tragedy. It's the favourite ruse of every Stalin that's ever been: "oh this isn't power, this is The Cooperative and Mutual Understanding Way".

Power is the fundamental unit of identity. — unenlightened

Perhaps, but the converse does not hold.

Politics therefore is a corruption of 'societal action', which without coercive power would be inescapably cooperative. — unenlightened

But this is naive. All societal action is power bound, and the attempt to say it isn't is just unreflective and unacknowledged wielding of power. Perhaps the most dangerous use of it of all. It's only cults and religions which believe in the unfallen Eden of power-free relations.

Yeah, I don't mean institutional politics, or at least, I don't mean it exclusively. Loosely: any societal action (which might include setting up institutions!) made to maintain or effect a change in the distribution and effects of power in society. Anything that involves the question(s) of Who(?) does What(?) to Whom(?) for Whose benefit(?) at the social level.

Somebody here on the forum recommended it. Was it you StreetlightX? Maybe it was @apokrisis. — T Clark

'Tis a fantastic book, but yeah, it was Apo. The best current book for the lay reader is Nick Lane's The Vital Question. Super in depth look at cutting edge research into how life might have come about. A bit more technical than some other pop-science books, but its emphasis on energy constraints and the role it plays in the development of life - something alot of people don't think about - is super eye opening and worth the trudge.

Or am I misreading the parethetical? — Coben

I meant that you should save yourself from the torpor is all! It was a dig at forums, on which I waste plenty of my time too - not you. Apologies it it came off otherwise.

Just a feeling I have — TheMadFool

I don't doubt it.

I guess I see not reason to assume, when writing generally to people in a philosophy forum, that one should assume they are in a torpor. — Coben

Oh you need to spend more time on a philosophy forum (although on second thought...).

Anyway, it just strikes me that alot of the the circle-jerk of mutual-agreement going on in this thread is a apology for condescension. It reeks of a lack of respect for the intelligence of the other, or else just intelligence in general. Not even children ought to be spoken to like children, who generally deserve much better than we give them. The OP's linked essay has a very nice point about how, when writing about tough topics, one ought to be 'dual-lingual': able to flit easily between specialist and lay writing. This I quite like.

Politicians universally speak like fucking morons, as though to an audience of equally moronic dolts. It's insufferable.

What a cutie.

I'm not a pessimist! I believe very much in what Agamben once called the courage of hopelessness. It's those who think things are peachy that you have to worry about. There's no one more pessimistic - and dangerous - than a disappointed optimist. Foucault put it best: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. "

God hasn't added to the misery of the universe though, as it seems the theists are preaching a more joyful existence than their opposites, certainly in this thread at least. — Hanover

There's nothing inherently good about joy. It can be abused - and can be made abusive - like most anything else. Joy even accents evil; maybe the only thing worse than acts of evil are acts of evil with a pleasant, happy smile.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not passing value judgements here. Mao's quip is applicable as ever: “There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

People are too easily impressed. Then they get ideas. Like God. Which only adds to the misery of the universe. It's awful.

You.

Nothing's 'difficult to understand'. You're simply absuing words is all.