English · livello B2. Leggi il testo in inglese e allena la comprensione. Il video con audio e sottotitoli sincronizzati è in arrivo sul canale YouTube.
Power rarely announces itself. It operates through arrangements that appear natural, through silences that go unremarked, through questions that are never asked. The most effective form of power is the kind that does not need to be exercised because its subjects have internalised its norms — the kind that makes alternatives unthinkable rather than prohibited. Understanding how this works requires looking not at dramatic confrontations but at the structure of the ordinary.
The political theorist Steven Lukes proposed a three-dimensional account of power. The first dimension is observable: A getting B to do something B would not otherwise do, through overt pressure or incentive. The second dimension involves setting the agenda: determining which issues get considered and which do not. The third and most radical dimension involves shaping preferences: determining what people want, what they think is possible, what they do not think to want at all. This third dimension is the hardest to analyse precisely because it operates before the point at which choices become visible.
Language is one of the primary mechanisms of this third dimension. The vocabulary available to describe a situation shapes what features of it are perceptible. Categories that do not exist as named concepts are harder to perceive than those that have been named. Feminist scholars in the 1970s documented how the introduction of new vocabulary — sexual harassment, the double shift, glass ceiling — made visible patterns that had existed before but had been either normalised or individually absorbed rather than collectively named.
The naming of an experience does not automatically alter the power relations that produced it. But it is a necessary precondition for doing so. The group that cannot name its situation can resist it only individually and without coordination. The group that can name it has acquired a tool for collective action that is both modest and indispensable.
Thinking about power requires attending to what is not said as much as to what is — to the questions that are not asked, the experiences that are not represented, the options that are not considered. This is demanding work, because it requires looking where the absence of information is itself informative.
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