Differentiating reflexivty

Seeing through power

Very few might doubt qualities of certain objects sitting right in front of them. These are real to them. No fantasy. However, names of quotidian objects carry their respective histories. Names are very efficient in making us understand reality. Many actions and processes can be implied. Rich vocabularies facilitate communications in significant ways.

There is, however, always hindsight of those strengths. That many meanings are entailed in a name increases ambiguity as to how people may read these implicit meanings. Ambiguities of any kind require us to become sensible to power relations. As we know, reality we are living through appears to be getting less and less diverse. Ambiguities are settled, rather than resolved, through the effects of power.

Power is actually circulating, rather than unilaterally being exerted from the dominant parties to the dominated. How could you think the boundaries between the powerful and the powerless be drawn? Power had better be understood to be exercised in a reflexive manner. Even the dominated should be managing to cope with power relations by identifying their strengths and weaknesses. No one is a mere passive dupe who only involuntarily responds to stimuli conveyed from environments.

While recently objections and resistance to standardization have become evident, such antagonistic approaches seem less successful insofar as they follow the same methods for domination. What is urgently needed is to understand how power is operating to organize society in particular ways and to appreciate the power that are exercised by a majority of people, rather than the relatively small groups of powerful people.

As were stated in Introduction and the last post, ambiguities in definitions of identities, values and meanings cannot be eliminated with even rigorous scientific methods. We ought to learn how to become as frank as possible about the power that we each exercise in making decisions between sameness and uniqueness of identities. Even after determining, the dual meanings remain. Thus, we should encourage, rather than admonish, as frank responses as possible. Only continual successions between presenting and interpreting one another’s assumptions about those dual meanings can democratize processes of social constitution. To do so, we take seriously limitations imposed upon us by nature. Talk is not as cheap as we assume.