UNDOING POWER

This essay examines the possibility for critical scholarship to re-art iculate power so as to aid its undoing in social and, hence, dialogica l practices. It starts with an experiment in perception designed to ma ke readers aware of how language is implicated in bringing forth the r eality we see and also aware of the possibility of its re-articulation s. It presents several well known articulations of power, largely from academic writing, that depict the nature of power as the awe-invoking and omnipresent leaving nothing to be done. The essay then proposes f our defining conditions for undoable phenomena and applies them to pow er, examining the foundation of its inevitability and looking for a le ver to unhinge its constructions. And with the help of four more proce dural steps it is suggested how power may be contested, re-articulated and undone. The key to debilitating notions of power is their relianc e on physical metaphors whose entailments make an undoing inconceivabl e. This gives rise to the distinction between power and force. The und oing of power is demonstrated through three examples: simple threats, domination, and the concept of language that keeps social scientists s tuck in a debilitating way of languaging. The essay concludes with a r ecommendation for what critical theory could and should do: maintainin g the possibility of emancipatory dialogue with Others.