Power in the Passive Voice

A number of random topics that had been swirling through my mind lately--the economic recession, Foucault, how power works, and good writing--came together when I read a post by Barbara Ehrenriech at the TPM Cafe blog. Ehrenreich is a writer made famous by her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In this recent post on the recession, she wrote:

We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about “the economy” and “the recession” we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.

This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with “the economy,” we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand.

Suddenly a couple of things clicked for me. I've been taking a class called "Culture, Power, Identities" in which we've been discussing how to define power and how it works. One author we read--and who I've read in almost every graduate seminar I have ever taken--is the late French theorist Michel Foucault. One of the many irritating things about Foucault, for me, is that he defines power in the passive voice. Power is imposed upon people, is embedded in society; people are constantly being surveyed and defined. But where, as another theorist has put it, is the doer behind the deed? For Foucault, "power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted 'above' society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of."

This is the sort of power relation Ehrenreich is talking about when she describes how we talk about being in a recession or the economy being bad. There is no doer behind the deed. But what Ehrenreich gets--and maybe Foucault didn't--was that there are people to blame. Particular people and corporations do have power over our aspects of our lives.

Just one example: Gas prices didn't just happen to explode to over $3/gallon because of lurking forces; the oil companies decide what to charge to maximize their profit. With millions of Americans having trouble affording gas and other commodities which cost more because of the high price of gas, Exxon's CEO roped in a $21.7 million dollar pay package this year and the company's profits hit record levels.

We try not to write in the passive voice because we need our readers to know who the actors are. We should do the same when we think about the country's economic problems. We may not be able to "radically efface" those in power, but hopefully we can at least bring them down to size.