This sets out my political attitude to power and the basic concepts I build on.

My attitude to power

Us progressive-lefty type people often have a very negative view of power. We're surrounded by negative stories about power and by negative examples of power being used.

Lots of us are involved in activism that revolves around challenging power and powerful people; progressive journalism is all about "speaking truth to power" - a sense of opposition to the powerful, bringing powerful entities to account in the face of their resistance.

And it's definitely true that in our violent Western culture power is very widely abused - indeed, the widespread abuse of power is what makes it violent.

As a result of all this it's easy to slip in to thinking that power is bad in itself.

But power is neither good nor bad. The definition I use of power is it's simply the capacity to make a difference. Us dreamers, change-makers, activists and progressives obviously want to make a difference - a difference that is important to us. Not only that, we who live in marginalised social spaces with marginalised identities and marginalised characteristics are chronically short on power. By definition, those at the margins have less social power - it's how we get to be marginalised.

So we need to get hold of all the power we can. Whatever small bits of power each of us has access to, our community needs it all - we need every single drop.

But here's the challenge: we've been socialised into an incredibly negative and dysfunctional relationship with power, including our own powers. Our culture just does not have good templates for how to use power well. Two patterns of using power predominate, overlapping largely with binary gender norms: either using our own powers to meet our needs at the expense of others around us, or using our powers to meet others' needs at our own expense.

Obviously neither pattern is satisfactory. We need to all collectively learn how to use power well, how to bring our powers really effectively and make our powers really available - so that we can make the differences that are important to us.

What's a good use of power?

I've said there's 2 predominating templates for using our powers: one benefits ourselves at others' expense; the other benefits others at our own expense. In the first the benefits flow inwards to self; in the second the benefits flow outwards.

What if we could just bring those two into balance with each other? What if we could bring parity to the flow of power?

What if when I use my power I benefit no less than and no more than those around me?

This is my goal with power - I call it the parity principle in using power.

When we do manage to exercise a power in parity like that it becomes a superpower: we can continue endlessly to exercise it cos it is a capacity we have that needs exercise, and those around us continuously benefit from it and so they support us to keep exercising it.

How can we tell we're in parity?

Exercising power is an embodied practice - it's something we do even if all we're doing is speaking. There's a couple of simple embodied indicators of how we're going with our powers in any situation:

If we're tending towards the benefiting-ourselves-more-than-others end of spectrum then the people around us need to protect themselves from our power, so we might notice that people draw away from us, set limits on interacting or don't stay connected.

If we're tending towards benefiting others more than ourselves then we'll notice that it's very tiring, and over time we'll get quite depleted and eventually get to burnout.

There's all sorts of qualifiers to these two raw indicators: in specific situations using our power in an imbalanced way can be both appropriate and necessary. But in terms of my political project I set out above, of us collectively learning to bring our powers to our communities, we can use these two indicators to help us look at the power flows in an ongoing situation or over a period of time.

Every person has many powers

If power is the capacity to make a difference, it becomes apparent that each of us has a vast range of powers, ranging from the very basic that we compress the ground we stand on and change the air when we breathe, right through to very specific intellectual, emotional and physical strengths which we might have spent decades honing.

Some of our powers are socially constructed privileges, like being white, being male, being wealthy, educated, handsome/beautiful, and so on.

Other powers are very "soft" ones: having minimal attachment trauma from childhood, having a very supportive circle of friends, having done lots of therapy, being emotionally expressive.

Other powers are highly contingent: they only come forward in specific situations while in others they're a deficit. e.g. being autistic, highly sensitive, left-handed, a super-recogniser and so on.

We don't usually think of power as being so multi-faceted, nor of ourselves as being powerful in multiple ways. This is part of the collective cultural view of power: the only powers that are important are the huge heroic-pompous powers which have dramatic impacts.

Gradients between two people

At the micro level, in ordinary human interacting, a great deal of power is constantly being used but we tend not to notice it until it has an uncomfortable impact.

When both people in the interaction are very similar - from the same cultural background, same age, gender, interests, and so on - then the presence of power may not be noticed. The two people might just get on with pursuing their interests together. It might feel like fun, or pleasure, or ease.

But if there is a significant difference between the two people, say one is quite tall and the other quite short, then depending on the situation one or other will have more power than the other. For example say they're on a bus together. The short one can sit on any of the bus seats - they can choose anywhere. The tall one might only fit in some seats at the front - they have far less choice.

There's a difference in power. Between the two people there is a power gradient: one person has more power than the other.

Now follow them as they get off the bus and go to a bar for a drink. Getting the drinks is a nightmare for the short one while the tall one gets noticed by the bar staff readily.

Again there's a power gradient. But in this situation the gradient has reversed - it's the opposite of what it was on the bus. As the interaction unfolds the relative advantages of each person can change - as we saw, even to the extent of reversing entirely.

Power landscape

In this example we're looking at only one characteristic between two people. But as I note above, any two people have multiple powers. And the differences between the powers of the two people form gradients. We can imagine these multiple gradients as like the slope-y bits in a landscape, like each power gradient we name is a short line across some hilly country on a topographic map. When we collate all the lines together we start to get a more three-dimensional sense of the way power sits between the two people. We get a sense of the power landscape.

So when two people come together there is always a power landscape between them, made up of the ways in which their powers intersect. When two people are very very similar the power landscape can be quite flat. The more differences there are the richer and more complex the power landscape becomes. And, as we have seen, that landscape is very context-dependent: as we move through events and situations the relational power landscapes we are in can change, even quite dramatically.

One last element in the power landscape is that we can have a situation where one difference can result in two powers that oppose each other. A good example is age. Say one person is a generation younger than the other. The younger person may have much greater physical endurance and force while the older person can draw on much greater emotional resilience and stability.

Neither gradient cancels out the other, or subsumes the other. Both gradients are completely real, and exist alongside each other. And each one can come to the fore in social action at any moment. Occasionally both gradients may be present at once, for example in a conflict or a masterly piece of co-operation.

Discourses as social power

All this is about power that is local to two people. But there's a much larger level of power which is critical to human life: the collective and social level of power i.e. what we can do when multiple powers come together.

One the most extraordinary things about humans is our capacity for language. It enables us to create and enter into a whole non-physical realm of meaning. The significance of meaning for power is that when we share meaning among us we can coordinate our actions to a really intricate level and across a really vast number of people. This coordination enables us to combine the powers of a group of people, and then, at a further level, combine the powers of the current group with the powers of people past which have become sedimented into knowledge and and technologies expressed in infrastructure, machines and tools and the techniques we've developed for using them.

So as a language-using social animal we're able to coordinate the simple powers and capacities of the bodies of millions of people past and present with this sedimented knowledge and tech to create incredibly powerful social systems. Our shared language is crucial for keeping us well oriented to those systems. For example, when we come across a road or a house we know what these are and we know what to do: we take actions which are appropriate to the system in which that road and that house have emerged. These objects "road" and "house" are highly culturally specific: what people from one culture call "road" or "house" may appear as something entirely different to people from another culture.

There's many ways to analyse our social systems. The lens through which I look at the power of a social system is the concept of "discourse". I use the word rather similar to Michel Foucault's use of it to describe a social process. The discourse I talk about is a social system comprising some objects, some people, their actions, and a set of meanings which enable the people to coordinate their actions with the objects such as to produce a socially meaningful outcome.

You can see from my definition there that a discourse is a lot about power: a bunch of resources, coordinated action, and outcomes. Indeed another appropriate term might be a power system.

Possibly the core of a discourse is the meaning level. A discourse always revolves around a nodal point: a statement or belief which defines the discourse and is almost like an entry/exit point for the discourse.

To take a pertinent example, we'll look at the discourse of binary gender. The nodal point of the discourse could be the statement "there are only two genders". From that statement an entire world of different positions devolve. At one extreme people can fully agree with it, and live their entire lives happily within the discourse. At another extreme people can disagree with the nodal statement but nevertheless be subject to its power, since the statement links in with a huge network of social power or other discourses. People who reject the nodal statement are at the margins of that discourse.

The different locations within a discourse and their related quantities of power I call subject positions, and within each discourse there is a terrain of subject positions ranging from centralised i.e. maximally benefiting from the discourse, through many intermediate positions to marginalised and even further e.g. ostracised/condemned.

The subject position a person is in arises from their relationship with the nodal point i.e. the core statement. To be centralised by a discourse one "takes on" the statement, or "takes it up" - subscribes to it almost as a truism, and all one's actions are continuously consonant with the statement. If a person starts to question the nodal statement then their relationship with the entire discourse shifts, and also their access to the social power generated by the discourse and made available to the people within it starts to be reduced.

People who are marginalised by the "only two genders" discourse are subject to it and as a result often draw on other closely related discourses within which they can live and relate happily. An example of such a discourse derives from the statement "binary gender is a socially specific construct". Within that discourse once again there's a full range of subject positions from centralised to marginalised, and trans people of all sorts are centralised in this discourse.

The two example discourses here, the "only two genders" discourse and the "gender is a social construct" discourse, are related in that they both draw on a shared set of meanings around gender, even though in a sense each discourse rejects and contradicts the other. Around every discourse there's an entire ecosystem of related discourses which help the discourse to make sense and give it coherence in social life. We are, after all, at a fundamental level talking about the issue of shared meaning - and every meaning exists in a rich terrain of nearby meanings against which it can be defined.

Alongside this intertwining of discourses which brings coherence to them there is also a power landscape between discourses, in a similar way there is always a power landscape between two people. Different discourses have different quanta of power - in our example above the "binary gender" discourse has enormous social power because it dovetails with and makes sense of a vast range of other discourses, for instance in language, in law, in architecture, in literature, in fashion, art and so on. The "social construct" discourse in contrast has far more tentative traction on social power. Hence there's a very steep power gradient between the two discourses.

Nevertheless at the small local scale that power gradient can get reversed: a sole cis person in a room full of nonbinary people can definitely feel marginalised. Or cis allies attending a Trans Pride march can feel uncertain, anxious, fraudulent, and so on precisely because their life is largely within the binary gender discourse but for the moment they're in a situation where the "social construct" discourse is foregrounded.

Frame Disputes

The final piece I want to bring about discourses relates to my final observation above in the section on power between two people, i.e. that in any relational situation there can be two power gradients present which slope in the opposite direction. The same is true at the social level with discourses.

Lets stick with the example of the cis allies at Trans Pride. The march goes through the centre of town, blocking off streets, disrupting traffic and generally being a spectacle. Now lets imagine a group of spectators start heckling the marchers. Some marchers respond in kind, the situation escalates and suddenly there's a shouting match right there between a trans marcher and a (presumably cis) onlooker. We can imagine the dialogue - it's been rehearsed many many times. The marcher claims the right to occupy the streets and take up space. The onlooker claims the marcher is not a legitimate person and doesn't have to right to take up space.

Through the power studies lens we could say the marcher is drawing on the discourse of transness, with its claim to inherent legitimacy of transness and the political story of the long history of trans denial, oppression, murder and marginalisation. The onlooker is drawing on the discourse of binary gender, with its claim to be natural and unavoidable which supports the onlooker's revulsion and rage at having their discourse momentarily rendered impotent.

Each person can use their favoured discourse to render the other incoherent, to cast the other right to the margin of their favoured discourse and even beyond. And so each person manouevres for position in the conflict, knowing that if they can get their discourse to prevail they will win the argument.

This is a situation I call a frame dispute. Each person is attempting to get the interaction framed in their preferred terms, deploying their own discourse to guide and support their own actions and to position the other as marginalised in some way.

We can see from this dispute situation how a discourse arranges the power landscape and gives those who are centralised by the discourse access to the powers which are contained within it, while reducing the powers available to the people who are marginalised by it. Depending on which discourse is engaged by the participants, the power landscape can change dramatically. This is what motivates the dispute.

From here is a short step to my overall definition of human-level power or power in social life: power is our basic morphological capacities combined with the discourses we can access which centralise us.

Side by side

As well as discourses existing in their ecosystems and juxtaposing each other, it's also possible for two discourses with opposite effects to sit alongside each other. This can lead to quite complex power dynamics. The example I developed in my PhD explains a power dynamic often present in relationships between cis men and cis women. Classical feminist power analysis convincingly points out the thoroughly sedimented power gradient between men and women in the major social institutions, and how this power gradient can get reinforced by violence at the interpersonal level. Alongside this discourse, which we might call "men are powerful and legitimate", is another and related discourse, something like "women are relational and sexual".

The relationship between the two discourses is complex. At the wider public-social level the "women are relational-sexual" serves to marginalise women's legitimacy as public social actors. But something quite different can happen at the interpersonal level. At this more local level, where skills at public life are not so relevant and relationality is of crucial moment, the power gradient between the two discourses can quickly reverse. Women's legitimacy as relational enablers and arbiters can get centralised and men become marginalised.

In this situation the "men are powerful-legitimate" discourse clearly has not dissolved. Rather it has just been backgrounded. But side by side with that discourse is the "women are relational-sexual" discourse, which exactly reverses the power gradient. Thus the power between the two people in such a relationship can swing back and forth as each discourse is foregrounded as the interaction unfolds.

Many cishet couples become entirely comfortable with the two discourses and develop familiar patterns enabling them to smoothly move back and forwards across them. In effect they work together to harness the powers from each discourse for the good of their relationship.

Equally, this side-by-side positioning of opposite power gradients can be a source of ongoing conflict in relationships. There's many ways such conflicts can run. For instance, when one discourse is foregrounded, one or both people may remain aware of the other discourse "hovering in the wings," almost waiting to pounce, i.e. that the currently-marginalised person can easily call that other discourse forward and "turn the tables". This is a rather febrile atmosphere, and can easily happen in any situation where different discourses give exactly opposite powers to the participants.

Can we map power?

It's very tempting to consider how we might map these landscapes and terrains I proffer here. It's exciting to consider that an issue as slippery and as significant as power could be concretely mapped, pinned down in fixed and stable notation so that everyone can see what's going on. When we make power visible in this way it potentially changes our relationship with it, in the same way that having a physical map of the physical landscape gives us so much.

I have not yet found a way to map these power terrains, but something might emerge. One of the difficulties is that the power landscape is both incredibly complex and incredibly fluid. It definitely is possible to draw pictures of specific bits of the landscape - say, what unfolds in an interpersonal situation or our Pride march altercation. It's also possible to map, at least partially, those parts of the landscape which are relatively stable and durable, for example the multiple vectors of marginalisation described by intersectional activists, the relatively sedimented powers of institutions, or an individual's overall flow around the use of their powers.

But even so, alongside these are many smaller-scale discourses which can have incredibly significant local effects, such as the strength and quality of a person's support network, or the overall state of a person's nervous system. And also there is constant innovation in society around linking existing discourses together in new ways, for example new discourses of empowerment in the face of systemic marginalisation.

Final words

In terms of studying power, and especially in relation to my political project of us learning to bring our powers well, I find it is incredibly helpful to just name the various powers and power gradients present in a situation even if it's hard to map them in any stable way. Naming them draws beneficial attention to them: it shows that it's ok to talk about the gradients present, and it also allows participants a "gap" between themselves and the power flows rather than simply being subsumed in them or subject to them.

This "gap" is sufficient to open up the possibility that things might be done differently. Many power gradients are structural in nature i.e. privileges or capacities that we can't renegotiate or remove. But perhaps the person topping a gradient might be able to observe more how that power is shaping this specific situation, and the person bottoming might be able to give more precise feedback, and so on.

Our powers, at core, are simply our capacities to make a difference. They enable us to do things, shape things, bring about change, create stuff. The issue is not whether power is good or bad but rather what do we do with the powers we have. And most importantly, power is relational: it's our capacity to shape the world we are in. Relationally, then, the question around power is who is benefiting? Is it me, is it you, or is it all of us?