Power Fictions Pt.4: "Power" & "Fiction"
Before we walk any deeper into this thicket together, I feel like I should more thoroughly describe, explain, define my usage of these 2 words – power and fiction. These words are central to what I’m trying to say, and I’m not quite (not at all really) using them in their normal, everyday usage.
Let’s start with Power. I think Power has to do with authority, positioning, an exertion. Power has the authority to operate from a position that enables it to exert itself upon people or the world. Power is something that is sought after and strived for. It gives a lot to those who have it, but it also requires a lot from those who seek it. It requires something different from everyone, but it is always some sort of sacrifice. And…power is always limited.
Power is limited by time. It is always temporary. There are always others striving to take it away from you. Think about the US Senate. The Power in the Senate is always shifting. One year, the Democrats are in power. The next year, it’s the Republicans. So the mission, the vision, the values, the objectives of the Senate are continually shifting. The definitions of words are changing. The people are changing, the processes are changing, the laws are changing. Think about a father. A father is in a position of power over his son. But there comes a time when that power simply disappears. All power is fleeting. No one has power forever.
Power is limited in scope. When you’re in power, you don’t have power over everyone and everything. Even if you’re President of the United States, the law restricts what you’re able to do. You can’t declare war. You can’t raise taxes. Even if you were King of the US, you wouldn’t be able to exert your will in Canada or Scotland. Even if you were King of the World, you couldn’t do anything to change the laws of physics or biology. You couldn’t control other people’s thoughts.
Power is limited by others. There are always others fighting against your power, working to subvert it, ignoring it. In this case, you would be bound to act in a certain way regarding those who rebel against you in order to maintain your power, so power is limited by circumstance. Power is also limited by place. If you’re a football coach, you are powerless on the field of play. Power is limited. The list goes on and on. Limit is one of the defining characteristics of power. So in a way, power is the thing with limits. It is unsettled. It is to be toppled. It is today with no promise of tomorrow. Power is hopeful but uncertain. It requires constant sacrifice and vigilance to attain and maintain – like the alpha male in a wolf pack has to be continuously aware of his tenuous position at the top.
Ok. So now let’s take a look at weakness and see where that takes us. Weakness has the potential to be limitless. It isn’t necessarily limited by time or scope or place. Weakness is a kind of stirring beneath the surface, a freedom, something unbounded and unleashed. Something subversive.
In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul talks about the Weakness of God. He writes, “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things – and the things that are not – to reduce to nothing the things that are.” Jesus was born during the time of the Roman Empire, but he wasn’t born an emperor. He was born in a manger. He didn’t choose centurions to be His disciples. He chose fishermen. He didn’t hang out with the ruling elite in Galilee. He hung with the tax collectors and sinners. He aligned Himself with the weak, with those who struggle and strive. He aligned Himself with the victims. At every turn, God chose/chooses what was/is weak. God displays His weakness, because power is a thing that once obtained begins to disintegrate in your fingers like sand. But weakness is limitless, everlasting. It transcends time and place. It opposes “the world,” disrupts the systems and structures of the present age, and over time, it can reduce powers of the world (as it says in 1 Corinthians 1:28) to nothing. This is maybe a little confusing, because it’s such a sideways angle for looking at these 2 words: Power and Weakness. So let’s dig a little deeper into how the word “weak” has been evolving in recent decades.
Let’s turn to science. I’m no expert on science by any means, but I’ve been reading up a little recently. In science, there are only 4 fundamental forces that operate in nature: strong, electromagnetic, gravitational, and weak. Now the weak force impacts subatomic particles and has only a microscopic range. It is weaker than all the other forces except for gravity. The three other forces hold or pull things together. The weak force is the only one working to pull things apart. The weak force can actually transform subatomic particles, which causes radioactive decay. This process is actually what causes stars to burn…and eventually, it’s also what causes them to explode. A supernova (the explosive death of a star) is one of the most catastrophic and awesome events in the universe. When a star breaks apart, star dust is projected far off into the deep reaches of space. Particles of the dead star become the building blocks of new galaxies, new planets, and new stars. Some of the atoms that make up you and me used to be part of a distant star millions of years ago and billions of miles away. And all of this transformation and renewal is triggered by a weak force working steadily, almost imperceptibly year after year after year, millennia after millennia after millennia. The weak force in physics is a kind of disordering force, much like it is in 1 Corinthians, but it is also the engine for transformation, renewal, rebirth. It allows new galaxies, new stars, new planets to form. The weak force is what will eventually cause my bones and your bones to decay into the earth, but from that destruction and chaos will come rebirth in the form of plants and trees growing up from that same earth.
Let’s look at weakness from a more philosophical approach. French philosopher, Jacques Derrida (I guess you could call him the godfather of Deconstruction, like James Brown is the godfather of Soul) also opined something that he named a “weak force.” Derrida identified the weak force as the one thing in this world that is “undeconstructible.” Ok…so a brief description of deconstruction (reaching back to my grad school days for this one). Deconstruction presupposes that powers are always breaking apart (like I had mentioned above) and that all the systems and structures and languages that we use to order our daily lives are unsettled, constantly on the verge of toppling, decaying, deconstructing. There is a weak force tearing them all apart just like there’s a weak force continuously breaking down and deconstructing the sun and the stars. And the weak force is undeconstructible. It is an invisible force that propels the deconstruction, like natural selection is the invisible force that propels evolution. The weak force of justice is constantly deconstructing the law. We are always iterating laws, revising them, striking them, creating new ones in order to achieve justice. Democracy is the weak force that is always unraveling government. The government is always shifting and changing in pursuit of democracy.
This weak force, according to American Theologian John Caputo, is always “to come.” Justice and democracy are never achieved. They are these ghosts or imprints that we are always in pursuit of. They are an unveiling. They are what unsettles and disrupts the present moment. For Deconstructors (well…at least according to Caputo’s interpretation of Derrida), the present moment is just something we are passing through on our way to the justice and democracy (you could include other examples like freedom, peace, beauty, etc) to come. We are all striving for something, some miracle, some gift, some event to come. That is the weak force at work, creating transformation in the world.
So that’s weakness. In the end, it wins out over power. The star explodes. The empire falls. But no thing in the world is ever fully powerful or fully weak. All real objects or structures or systems fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two. And they typically move along that spectrum over time.
Ok. Now let’s turn for a bit to “Fiction.” And like we did with power and weakness, let’s explore the difference between Fact and Fiction. Let’s force these two polar opposites together and see what sort of sparks fly (as John Caputo would say).
What is fact? Here’s how we’ve come to try and define it. This is from dictionary.com: “something that actually exists; reality; truth.” I personally think this is a lame definition, because it begs two immense questions: What is reality? What is truth?
I believe that you have to start by thinking of a fact as having a definite time and place. Something either observably happened within a time and place or it didn’t – that’s a fact. Facts are observable, verifiable. They are tiny ripples in the stream of time and space. By themselves, they may have little value, but they can be called upon to join together and form a data set that can be called upon to make decisions, solve problems, build arguments, or postulate and test theories. Facts gain value as they team up with similar facts and are called upon for some higher purpose.
Fiction, on the other hand, is not called upon. Fiction calls. It calls us to transform, to grow, to break down barriers, to enter into it and unravel it’s secrets and take action and give a gift of love (or perhaps hate) back into the world. Fiction calls from beyond time and space. It is unbound, untethered, unhinged. It inspires. It invites. It calls. It is not a ripple in the stream. But it can cause a ripple, a thousand ripples, a million ripples – an explosion.
So a Power Fiction is a story that calls from beyond time and space to gain authority and position in order to exert itself within time and space. It is a fiction that works to become a fact. And a Power Fiction is really a kind of juxtaposition when you think about, because you’re taking something limitless and trying to contain it within limits.
You might be saying, “Hey, Gary. It’s silly to use these terms this way. Why would you try to redefine perfectly well-defined terms in order to tell this story you’re trying to tell? It’s just semantics.” My response to you would be…whoa. Hold up now, bucco. My reasons are 3-fold. 1) Words are redefining themselves constantly. Their meaning is always unsettled, decaying, transforming. And there’s something humbling about the unknowability of words, because it points to the unknowability of the world. 2) I’m trying to build, not an argument, but a story here. These words are like the central characters. In order to establish the themes of your story, your main characters have to undergo a transformation. That's how your themes come alive. 3) This is how I know to get from who I was to who I want to become. The little spin on these words, the twists and turns, are not just semantics to me. They are signposts of discovery, streetlamps of change, markers of a life well lived.
So next let’s look at some examples of Power Fictions to get a deeper understanding of how this process works itself out in the world.
