LANGUAGE IN INDIA

POWER 7
POWER TO ACT CIVILIZED
Ranjit Singh Rangila

TOWARDS A THEORY OF POWER

This writing is a step towards formulating a theory of power play that takes place and gets negotiated among people in their life making routines. In more specific terms the writing is developed to surfacing of power play in the lives of people.

As such these issues are not direct concerns of any known discipline. To me they form the core of my theory of C-semiology. The theory of power play is conceptualized within the vision of this theory. In that sense this writing also develops C-semiology further. This writing takes a position on power on two different levels of observation.

The first, among those theories of human action that believe that all that is articulated in life praxis has just mater of fact and declarative statements, this writing takes a position that the so called mater of fact and declarative statements not only carry power (see Rangila 1988) expressed in them, but they are purposefully invested with power (see Rangila 2001a).

The second, among those theories of power that just assume that power is expressed in all that ever happens in the lives of people, but do not give any place to the observation of actual power play, this writing attempts to theorise power play as lived experience of individuals as they make their lives in societies world over.

The writing, in this sense, does not leave power as a mere existential. Power is also conceptualized as an actential reality.

POWER – THE CONCEPTUAL ENTITY

Viewed in the vision of C-semiology power is a conceptual entity. Like any other fact, concept, percept, act, text, statement, or creation in general power too has its multidimensional identity. It has a potential and broad array of dimensions in which two of its dimensions may serve as the two ends, and the others as the inside constituents of its dimensional identity. The identity array has an architecture.

It is known to human societies that power surfaces in the daily lives of people. In other words, people of the known societies experience power play taking place in anything that they do, or say. Power in this sense is a part of experiential reality of people among the known societies.

For power to be a conceptual entity is to be a part of experiential reality of people.

TWO ENDS - THE TYPES

Among many of the possible dimensions of power, two are of immediate concern to the present writing, because they seem to form the two ends of its array. The first may be called power as a tool of political might.

This is a very obvious end of power theory and is by far the most bothered about in the academic on all the sides of intellectual glob (see Chenoy 2004 for a good debate on the alternatives within this end of notion of power).

Whether it is the indomitable Kautilya in the east, or the prolific Plato, this end of power has benefited from the intellectual depth of every known mind. The most recent and that too very pointed example of this dimension of power play could be the statement “ladies and gentlemen, we have got him”.

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RANJIT SINGH RANGILA

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