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Dance A Theory of Power It is easy to mistake what’s on the surface for what is really going on beneath. It is easy to think that what can be touched exhausts all that is real. Weapons, money, and position provide those who possess them with a clear advantage in what most people conceive as power; getting others to do what they otherwise would not do. The mere possession of those things doesn’t explain, however, why that advantage exists. Similarly , it doesn’t explain why having those things does not prevent the loss of power. It can’t explain why it is that babies and others, like Puerto Ricans , usually considered weak in society are sometimes able to get their way, to get power, despite possessing few of those things. The dance model can explain the origins and loss of power because it calls attention to agents and social relations rather than things. It gives importance to the role of the agent, both individual and social, in the constitution of society. More specifically, the dance model focuses on the social interests, passions, and habits that set people in motion, usually towards and with each other, and that form the foundation for the exchanges that take place between people while in motion. It is economic, political, and social interests, thus, that send people in motion into each other’s arms, that keep them going as social relations, and that often bring those partnerships to an end. Power rises and falls with social interests and the movements they inspire . Power, for that reason, is more than things. Money, weapons, and position deliver power only to the extent that others desire money, fear getting hurt, and respect authorities. Power, in that sense, gets going and is kept going because some possess values and others have interests and passions. Agents with values meet or are simply born together with agents with interests. Agents with needs, wants, or desires respond to and can be influenced by agents with the values they seek. Power is generated in this basic two-way interaction involving agents and interests. Power is generated and is lost in repeated interactions like 1 14 this and in more complex ones involving many other agents. It is, as a result , something fluid, variable, and dialectical. Agents make the rules that inform such interactions, usually not consciously, not directly, and not in their own time. Agents are usually happy to know those rules, accept their constraints, and perpetuate them. These rules make things happen, make life happen. Agents sometimes attempt to resist the rules but can’t find enough others to join them in casting them aside or bending them their way, and thus resign themselves and continue to perform them (Irvine 2006, 221). In most cases, social agents simply act and carry forward the rules that guide their actions. Power is created and lost in processes that look, thus, a lot like dance. There are alternative and good ways of depicting and explaining power. The dance model is better than the models based on chess, game theory, or the simple possession of things. It is better because power, like dance, is variable, interactive, and social. Power is not a solid, an eternal status, or an independent force. Dance also better represents the way that people provoke power while in pursuit of something. Admittedly, people also play games like chess for many reasons. Chess is also interactive. Chess is not, however, a good model for power. While people enter chess games for lots of reasons, playing chess requires that each side use logic and reason, and playing it is basically a limited two-party exchange.1 Chess can’t be played by drunk, dreamy, distracted, or irrational people . Dance can. Also unlike chess, people dance in search of freedom, escape, security, happiness, self-expression, and much more. They also dance, of course, in search of power. More importantly, dancing can result from and invoke any number of human senses—from reason to habit to hedonistic pleasure. Whatever agents’ motivations or states, it is their interests that launch them into an engagement with other agents and that offer the possibility of greater or lesser power. As we often discover, “desires bubble up from deep within us” (Irvine 2006, 218). The theoretical lineage of this dance model can be found in the social power theory of the 1960s (Emerson 1993; French and Raven 1959), Marxism, social network analysis, Bourdieu, and the postmodern...

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