The Power Issue

ΦM A G A Z I N E THE POWER ISSUE v o l .13

MAGAZINE Φ

THE POWER ISSUE VOLUME 13

Power is central to our understanding of the world. We've seen what too much power can do: hierarchies have been the source of conflict since we can remember. Yet, we stand firmly, and perhaps naively, in the belief that power can be used as a source for good: we love underdogs, rags to riches stories, and Davids defeating Goliaths. Most deeply, power itches at our hopes that we can gain a greater understanding over ourselves and truly be the authors of our lives, not just ghost writers. Speaking of ghostly-writers, Plato once said that "the measure of a man is what he does with power". For this issue, we think it's more about what we've been able to create with it that really counts. We hope you enjoy. CHIARA ZUCCHELLI EDITOR IN CHIEF The Power Issue | Φ 2

The front and back covers for this issue were created by Charlie Wardle. For enquiries, and more of her work see @wardle_charlie on Instagram. Take Back The Knife by Viola Ugolini 5 Debt by Moe Szyslak, art by Charlie Wardle 7 These Hands by Frank Hernández 10 Samizdat: The Power of Quiet Hate by Lara Mae Simpson 11 Don't Worry, I Only Eat Stupid by Amber Platel 12 14 Submission by Xenia Knoesel, with art by Renée Bertini 17 The Lamb by Leah Wu, art by Francesco Feltri 19 Power/Control as a Final Value by Yury Tikhonravov 21 What's the Emergency? by George Davey, art by Wayan Chan 22 Art by Francesco Feltri 24 Humanise the Machine by Michael Cannon 26 This Burnt Palette by Georgia Gibson 31 Smile by Jo Warren 32 Malcolm, Lord and Saviour by Ishita Uppadhayay, art by Charlie Wardle 50 54 My Frustrations with the 'Power Dynamics' Discourse by Annamaria Robles Fumarola 44 Art by Cveta Gotovats 47 The Power of Protest Songs by Joseph Brammer 48 The Foxes by Sarah Nazir 40 At Your Door by Stefanos Carras 56 A Clockwork Utopia by Alex Alcock Do You Know How to Find the Aorta of the Heart? by Sophie Howe, art by Wayan Chan 62 An American Cloud by Kaj O'Connell Managing Director by Kesara Ariyapongpairoj 43 Pain and Fear by David Alvarez Costas 34 Extinction by Stephanie Ritzema 63 Stand Firm by RUNA (aka Rute Norte) 4 Is Ignorance is Bliss? by Barbara Listek 36 Art by Robert Innes 60 66 Art by Charlie Wardle 3 CONTENTS

The Power Issue | Φ 4 STAND FIRM by RUNA (aka Rute Norte)

5 this knife has no polish you say, one hand around the handle, one hand under the blade. I’m sorry I say, I’m sorry. am I sorry for not handing you the power to easily slice the fruit? for making it harder? you open it and it seeps sour honey. I wasn’t even sure which you i was talking to, a real person or a dream déjà vu – surely a man though. now I remember, and yes, you are my new favourite butcher for I gave you the knife but not the wounding power now I am the lemon swaying, sunny side up waiting – aching – for you to operate: a sterilised needle, a slippery surface. but how gladly I misjudge comfort and hand spin it into intimacy when the phantom buzz of the bee in my pocket stings more than your skilful silence when trust is the key to a million broken locks you don’t even care to open let me take back the knife, then. it’s not too late I’m not too o p e n Take back the Knife by Viola Ugolini

The Power Issue | Φ 6 ART by Charlie Wardle

7 DEBT by Moe Szyslak I was barely conscious, woken up. My brain still foggy from the lucid dream I’d been having and all I could think about was the checks and balances of the “system” that led to this unplanned morning, the uncaring enforcers of bureaucracy, with their intense soul drained eyes and the creation of statehood that stemmed all the way back to ancient China. Or was it Egypt? It was the second time I had questioned the freedom of my country at this doorstep, both times involving the Runnymede council, the birthplace of the Magna Carta. On this occasion it was the fact I hadn’t paid my council tax. Why did I bother getting out of bed? Usually, I would've just gone back to sleep, but today I felt the need to be productive, to take on the responsibility of the day, although that “responsibility” was only signing a package for my housemate, who was away, . Perhaps the neighbour needed some milk, not that I had any. I try to buy myself some time, to worm my way out of paying £600 while wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. I play dumb, or at least play dumber as I continue to wake up. I heard that the British police have the right to search your house, even if they don’t have a warrant, at least those body(?) Yanks have rights, I think to myself. And due to this, they usually try to worm their way or find a bullshit reason to enter. I can’t let them in, I stand against the barbarian hoard. I am getting distracted again, not really listening to the legal data given to me by this lanky, greasy ponytail wearing up jumped thug, a camera upon his chest capturing my very unattractive totality, almost naked. I am the one being watched by the all-seeing eye of the state, the panopticon of modernity, I am probably being secretly fed to a black box, a supercomputer in the Arizona Desert - not that I’m special, we’re all being watched. I look down at his feet, one shoe is polished, the other dull. This is the kind of idiosyncrasy that humanises him to me, I look into his eyes again and ask with empathy: “You have dead eyes, do you like your job?” He snickers with a malevolent smile. He must have thought I was being smart, perhaps I was. Seeing that I didn’t want to pay and was wasting time he gets on his phone and calls his “colleague”. In the imagery of my mind I joke to myself, if this was a movie the colleague would be black, it’s always a skinny white guy and big black guy used as the enforcers of criminal organisations, scenes from Pulp fiction and Breaking Bad flash in my brain and just after I fault myself for being so culturally basic to think of two examples from pieces media that I consider to be overrated, a big black guy walks up to my door. Am I a racist for thinking that? Or did my thoughts become reality? God my head was pounding, was I drinking last night? I was starting to get cold; I was basically wearing nothing on this February morning, the self-hate already taking over, and now white guilt, I am I loosing this psychological war, this power play. I need my phone to call up my housemate, the one whose name was on the form, yet it was my council tax that wasn’t paid, being the only non-student member of this forsaken living arrangement. After being told that if I don’t pay today, they can return to do a search of the premises, scope it out, check for valuables and start seizing them; the speakers, drum kit, tv and guitars could fetch a good price and that’s only in the living room. The only problem is I’m skint,so must transfer money from my savings, this will require me to get the laptop inside, with the threat of seizure and the fact I was getting really fucking cold I reluctantly let the pair in.

The Power Issue | Φ 8 The living room probably smells like death to them — God I’ve become a feral rodent of a man, accustomed to living in squalor. The entire room has this oppressing energy, the bins overflowed marking the floor and walls around it with a dark hinge, splatters of filth. The sink full of crockery and a rotting fatty grey-like matter. Bottles of beer and overfilled ash trays fill the kitchen counter that I sat by. So I call Liam, a good hearted fellow, the least mad of the current occupants of this failed state of affairs which I call home. He sounds tired, I probably woke him up. Seeing that I have lost, the two ease off, the tension dissipates and only the depressive vibe of the room remains. I call my friend, explain and hand over my phone, log into my bank and send the money over. £665.99 I must pay, and a shiver runs down my spine. Was it the sheer amount, or the fact it was only 1 penny off £666.00? One singular decimal off the mark of the beast, was I being cosmically toyed with? I ask myself. I slot my card into the machine, punch in my pin and pay. I look up and again, Ponytail is smiling but this time it’s different, he’s pleased with himself, he likes this job, he clearly gets off on the power of collecting debts, often from those at the bottom runs of society. I shake his hand, the only thing I managed to do with any sort of power or agency and escort the two out, I breath in the cold foggy air and sigh, this is my fucking life. I walk back into the kitchen, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially exhausted, I say “Let’s try and make something of today”, then I pass out on the sofa — uncomfortable due to the dirty leather, that would stick to my sweaty skin — thinking I’ll wake up after a short nap. As I start drifting off into unconscious, the divine dance of duality commences; colourful geometric pattens of light pirouette around the darkness of my fractured mind. People, entities, gods and demons come to me, but I’m not afraid, at least for the moment. The chattering of millions of minds, the collective unconscious. Most people would be surprised, or perhaps consider themselves to have gone mad! having this level of psychosis; where the wall of mind and matter may not be completely evaporated but is translucent or aethereal. It’s almost heavenly or hellish depending on my emotional state. Either way, Iit’s a regular occurrence, and perhaps in some ways always has been. But because of the myriad of legal and illegal pharmacological and recreational substances floating around in my system, the long periods of internal and external transcendental meditation, the deep late night intoxicated group conversations of Jungian psychology, metaphysical theory, and mythical archetypes, and depths of the chaotic, and violent and sexual interpersonal relationships that surrounded this house and my life like a vortex - ALL this increased it prevalence, its duration and my understanding of IT. I’ve spent hours in these trance states of halfconscious and deeper truths but more likely just illusions but this time it was different, it was as if I was feeling every living and dead thing in the house; the bacteria and ‘sprits’ of myself, my housemates, the collected mould, dirt and filth, the spiders, the moths, the vestiges of the previous occupants of the house. 3 Englehurst was a sort of “commune” during the pandemic. I had crashed few nights on this very sofa before I had taken it as my house, the realisation of the amount of dead skin cells, blood, shit, and sexual fluids made my skin grow ever itchier, I felt the collective structures of life; the mental, physical, organic and material that bind us all together. The very gravity of the knowledge I was experiencing but not fully understanding flowed over my head like a wave over a rocky beach and as it peaked, I fell into the abyss of full unconscious: “sleep”. ϕ

9 ART by Charlie Wardle

The Power Issue | Φ 10 [ I learnt to read “success” as “exploitation.” Power is the big bad word whose backlit shadow I cower from. I know he’s/it’s not looking for me like I’m looking for him/it, but when we touch he’s/it’s fire and I/we melt. ] Mountain fog clears. I’m covered in soot. Ploughed, cultivated, reared by your ugly head. Your hands, wrapped in white leather, took My heart and my land as lambs for your bed. Mam dipped me in the river by a man’s foot. Holy features, burnt in soil for cherished bread. Metal soothsayers churn the words wiser ones put. You fear all that is natural. You render your fears in red. Patriarchy provides the lines. I’m a good girl when I colour inside Be palatable. original. genre clips my wings. Maybe this tune can start, when a skinny man sings? I mourn sheets and ink; your blue glare sucks an eyelid’s tide. My art is rhythm and strokes and lines. through them I thought I was wise. I’m so sorry my love; empowerment is the puppet master in disguise. by Georgia Gibson This Burnt Palette

11 SMILE by Jo Warren

The Power Issue | Φ 12 Do you know what a samizdat is? I didn’t realise I was about to have the strangest interaction of my life. I was sitting alone at a poetry event, flicking through the journal’s new issue during the interval of readings. Curved lamps glowed bright orange; clinking glasses, the steady thumping of vinyl beats, and the chatter of creatives surrounded me. A woman waded towards me through the crowd. I sat up and I noticed she was holding something— several small paper parcels, crudely stapled together. She took a seat next to me and greeted me—I asked her name but didn’t catch it. She asked me if I write poetry and, slightly taken aback, I replied yes, I suppose, sometimes. Trying to establish common ground, she asked me what sort of poetry I like. She furrowed her brows at the unfamiliar names I mentioned. I don’t really like…modern poetry, she said, which I thought was interesting, considering where we were. She won me back when she said she liked Sappho. Of course there were other lesbians at this poetry event. The woman rustled the bundle of paper parcels in her hand, then leaned closer. Do you know what a samizdat is?—I asked her to repeat over the noise. Finally, I understood, but I didn’t know the meaning. She told me it’s a Russian term for poetry written in times of censorship. When this happened almost a year ago, I thought she might be referring to the war in Ukraine that had recently broken out. I believed that this woman must have been trying to create solidarity during difficult times by sharing art intimately. She said she had six samizdats and she was going to give me one—I gratefully accepted. I noticed they had some sort of writing printed onto them, but in the dim light I couldn’t make it out. It didn’t matter—she urged me to open it when you get home. I assumed this meant, let’s not draw attention away from tonight’s event, and it would be troublesome to open a parcel containing little paper cut-outs, let alone with the sharp, wonky staples that she warned me about. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t waited. I wish I at least caught her name. She left and I enjoyed the rest of the evening, the samizdat sitting snug in my tote bag. I left the venue feeling effervescent as I often do after such events, but, this time, I had something to look forward to when I got back. I walked fast across Waterloo Bridge, propelled by the wind whipping up my anticipation, my numb fingers texting friends about what had happened. It was only in the harsh glare of my student room that I could see the faint, grey words printed on the parcel. My breath hitched. How did I not spot this at the event? I didn’t even think to look closely until I had obeyed her instructions to wait—until I was alone. It quickly became apparent why she stressed I couldn’t pry open the staples amongst a crowd. The samizdat was full of disgusting transphobic material. Splayed across my desk were several little paper cut-outs of nonsense rhymes. Some were about genitalia, or paedophilia; some included defaced The Power of Quiet Hate by Lara Mae Simpson CW: Transphobia

13 posters of trans events, people’s faces scribbled onto, or applauding of J. K. Rowling. I went to scrub my hands clean, as if I could wash off the sickness. I threw them out of my sight. I alerted the literary journal’s team and somehow it got worse. They told me that the same person had been handing out the samizdats at another literary event. Because they knew what she was doing now, they were able to report her to the event organisers. When she refused to leave, they called the police. I don’t know what happened after that, but they said they hoped she'd been deterred. What I do know is that some cruel individual decided to spread their hate not just on social media but through an elaborate—albeit shoddy— underground method. She wasn’t bold enough to proclaim her bigotry in public, but she invaded what I assumed to be a queer safe space and planted poisonous seeds in the hands of multiple people. People—I reflect in horror—that she thought might support her. That would go home, open the parcel, and agree with her repulsive, closed-minded views. I fear that she singled me out because she saw me as a potential fellow TERF. Or maybe she didn’t care who she picked—it was likely that most people at a poetry event would repel such discrimination, and that’s the shock reaction she wanted. If that’s the case, I can’t think of any reason why she shared her revolting ‘poems’ in such a clandestine way other than to be sinister. What if a trans person opened that samizdat? How devastating, how violating would that be? I was incredulous that this person had been circulating samizdats at several London poetry evenings, but within the bigger picture, it’s hardly surprising. Transphobia is rising exponentially in this country, with no sign of stopping. Almost a year after I was handed the samizdat, Brianna Ghey was murdered. The spread of hatred, in every form, has tangible effects. It is killing people. It sickens me that this woman believed her transphobia was a samizdat. That ‘feminists’ like her are convinced their bigotry is being censored by the state, and/or by people trying to liberate a marginalised group from oppression in every facet of society. The samizdat aims to escape a threat of violence for expressing views. But as Lola Olufemi states in Feminism, Interrupted, If a feminist world is one without violence, establishing a hostile relationship between trans and cis women only serves as a distraction from identifying the root causes of the machinery of social organisation that put our lives at risk. Who wins in this scenario? How is violence eradicated? Whose lives are at stake while we separate ‘real’ women from ‘fake’ ones? (p. 63) Do ‘real’ women wrap up their transphobia in a paper parcel to give out at protected queer spaces because they’re too afraid to speak out in public, unshielded by a phone screen? Is this going to advance ‘real’ feminism? I keep thinking about sacrifices—about how in None of the Above, Travis Alabanza amended an article attacking them called ‘Children sacrificed to appease trans lobby’ to, ‘All of us sacrificed to appease the gender binary’ (p. 181). ‘Feminists’ like the one I encountered sacrifice so much of their life to upholding gender norms that they are reduced to cruelty and contemptible methods. If they are not ‘debating’ in the media the existence of people simply trying to live, they are infiltrating private spaces with hate that is quiet, hate that creeps up on us. It is this hatred that causes disproportionate suicide rates amongst trans youth, that bubbles beneath the surface until those young people are killed. At Brianna Ghey’s vigil outside the Department of Education, someone at the back of the crowd shouted Say her name three times. The thousands of people gathered joined in the mournful chant. But when the voice cried She was only sixteen, silence followed. The words echoed into the night. Sometimes, violence is so heavy we cannot speak. I didn’t speak against the unknown woman’s secret spread of hatred—I didn’t know what she was doing; I wish I did. I wish I could have shouted at her and ripped up her parcels to tiny shreds. The hatred corrupting our government, our schools, and our media seems to slip through our hands like this—it gets passed around like samizdats, and then suddenly, it’s deafening. But to see so many people at the vigil come together to scream No justice, no peace, I remembered how powerful we can be. We cannot be censored, and we’re not hiding. We can be loudly defiant in the face of hatred, no matter how quiet it may be. ϕ

The Power Issue | Φ 14 Power/control appears in various lists of final values from ancient times to the present. People live for power and die for it. However, this final value generates a number of paradoxes, not only theoretical but also practical. Control can be understood as the ability to manipulate circumstances according to one's intentions, or in simpler terms, the ability to do whatever one wants. This concept appears in various philosophical texts under different names, such as "control over one's environment" in Nussbaum's list, "political freedoms" mentioned by Van Camp, and "freedom" as discussed by Rokeach, Frankena, Kagan, and Gert. Another synonym for control is power, which is sometimes referred to as "achievement" in the Englishlanguage literature, as used by Chappell, Hurka, Fletcher, and Rice. Control is often seen as the key to realizing other values. If one has enough power to do whatever they want, they can achieve any value from the list of final values. Some philosophers, such as Rokeach, Griffin, Kagan, Ferkany, LewinsohnZamir, Lauinger, Nagel, Hooker, and Dos Santos, argue that only accomplishments, triumphs, or meaningful achievements deserve to be considered final values, while others like Scanlon view control itself as the final value. In some philosophical traditions, such as the Purushartha list, this final value is called "artha," which generally means profit, wealth, and career. Wealth is often considered a means of control, as suggested by Aristotle, the Book of Documents, Huan Tan, and Maqasid, although it is not always sufficient or necessary for achieving control, as exemplified by Gert's identification of wealth with freedom. One's own abilities, strengths, and skills can also serve as means of control, as mentioned by Arneson, Parfit, and Murphy. The association between control and wealth often leads to the label "materialists" for those who prioritize control as the supreme value. This label refers to an existential strategy rather than a metaphysical stance, although there can be a connection between the two. A materialistic worldview arises when one's final value is the freedom to control circumstances. The materialistic world is divided into a controlling subject and controllable objects, with the controlling subject often facing paradoxes and philosophical difficulties. One challenge for the materialist is that the controlling subject is also an object of control. In pursuing control over circumstances, the subject must also master and conquer themselves. This raises questions about the source of desires and intentions, and whether it is possible to truly control oneself while constantly satisfying desires. Some philosophers, such as Oderberg and Andrew Moore, argue that control may not be worthy of inclusion in the list of final values, as it can be considered an instrumental value or a secondorder value. This is also true for other final values, such as pleasure and knowledge. It is worth noting that internal contradictions can be found in any final value, which might be seen as an inherent property of such values. ϕ Power/Control as a final value by Yury Tikhonravov

15 THE CORRESPONDENCE OF POWER TO THE FINAL VALUE PROPERTIES: For the sake of power, people live. For the sake of power, people die. [Existentiality] Power can only be fully realized in omnipotence. [Transcendability] Power has no limit and never gets boring. [Inexhaustibility] Exercising power is the moment you want to freeze. [Eternability] Nothing can replace power. [Irreducibility] Power can be an end in itself and be pursued for its own sake. [Intrinsicness] Power can be the measure of everything. [Normativity] You can’t confuse intoxication of power with anything. [Experiential specificity] The impossibility of control is unbearable. [Necessity] You can take power by your own efforts. [Teleologicality] Power is valuable under all circumstances and in all possible worlds. [Analyticity] Everyone needs control. [Universalism] The consistent pursuit of control reveals a world in which everything resists your will, but can be subjugated. [Metaphysical autonomy] Anything can be presented as a force. [Ontologicality] Life as a struggle for power is taught by Materialism (as a way of life). [Cultural-historical significance] POWER/CONTROL General definition: ability to manage circumstances in strict accordance with a plan or a desire. Semantic field: benefit, utility, wealth, strength, liberty, domination, achievement, accomplishment, attainment. The opposite: helplessness. Extremes: absolute power—slavery. In psychology: a sense of control. In Indian culture: artha (means of life, अर्थ). In Chinese culture: fu (wealth, 富), gui (official career, 貴), li (benefit, 利). In worldview-history: Materialism (as a way of life).

The Power Issue | Φ 16 ART by Renée Bertini

17 I sink on my knees before you I do not want to stand on my feet On my knees I think around you Submit all things tall. 'I like being told what to do you do not see the pleasure of obeying' We are too free, all of us, it leaves free will as a shadow when no force yearns to bind it. I sink on my knees And you are just as strong as I but creeping weaker You keep the burden of not knowing where your power ends You have not surrendered it yet I, once this is finished, spring like the wings of white doves through your window. I, once we are finished, will hold the power of breaking my own will. Submission by Xenia Knoesel

The Power Issue | The Body Issue | Φ Φ 18

19 Who lifted gloss from the asphalt’s ledge Who sang jokes to the crowd of teeth grinders Who hunted dogs in the bedroom mirrors And sparkled on Uvalde’s radio An American Cloud by Kaj O'Connell PHOTOGRAPHY by Kaj O'Connell

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ART by Francesco Feltri They talk - they talk a lot About the lamb - the lamb That cannot talk, cannot utter What it yearns to, They fear - they fear what is Hidden behind - behind the mask Of neither evil nor good, maybe Both being too potent, Too powerful, the dichotomy Rages beneath the calm undertone - The passion - passion yearning To love and to destroy, Maybe evil and good are alike - Maybe power is not to create nor destroy But to harness both The Lamb by Leah Wu 21

The Power Issue | Φ 22 What’s the emergency? by George Davey IT'S NOT UNCOMMON The soft voice of Tom Petty’s ‘Angel Dream’ raised me from the slumbers of sleep. One of my greatest decisions was scrapping traditional alarms in favour of music. Nothing like the rhythmic strums of Petty’s guitar to ensure a peaceful start to the day. After writing down the night’s adventures in my dream journal, I ran through a five-minute yoga sequence before hopping in the shower. Two minutes under the rush of Hampstead’s chalky water. Bliss. I’ve discovered that cold morning showers are the key to a successful day in the office. I dripped dry while brushing both my teeth and tongue and flossing my mouth of overnight residue. I sat on the corner of my bed and treated my hair to the luxury of Dyson Airwrap. I pulled on a fresh pair of cotton socks and changed into Stradivarius’s matching underwear bra set. Stepping into a long grey skirt, I drew it to my waist, sealing it with a black leather belt. The world’s finest. It was embroidered with my name, after all, Lucy Ashton. A 30th birthday present from my dear mother, the kindest soul. Thankfully there was time to eat my overnight oats and sip a morning glass of almond milk. When my watch flashed 7:15, I headed to work. The Canadian dollar wasn’t going to sell itself. One five-hour conference later, I emerged from the boardroom and drove to Chutney Mary’s for late lunch. Originally, I only planned to drive to Mayfair for a quick bite, their lamb biryani being the tenderest in the city. However, a new watchmaker had opened down king’s street. I couldn’t ignore the place; I needed a watch to suit my afternoon attire. So, I strode in and asked for their collection of Patek Filipe. I was greeted with wary eyes and cold stares. ‘Sorry Ma’am. We only sell watches for the male wrist. Perhaps you could look in the jewellers down the road.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘We sell watches for people with big wrists, men’s watches. There’s a woman’s jeweller down the street.’ ‘What’s the issue with a little browsing?’ ‘You need to be a member of the MMWS to shop here. I’ll have to call security if you don’t leave the store.’ I stood my ground; I wouldn’t be pushed around by an overweight man in a suit two sizes too small. ‘Excuse me?’ ‘The MMWS, the Mayfair Men’s Watch Society. We only sell watches for...stronger people.’ I shook my head in disbelief but didn’t give up my ground. Four security guards emerged from the back, like cows to grain; they swarmed me, ushering me from the sterile building. One of them kneaded my left breast. I hit him. After being thrown out, I headed straight for the comfort of my Aston. I dabbed my face and called the police.

23 THE ONE PERCENT Water danced, soap foamed and steam rolled across his skin. Not forgetting to scrub beneath the muffin top, Lucas cleaned all 117kg of his hairy body. With delicacy, he peeled back his foreskin and washed away the coagulated smegma, before moving the stream of water to an even dirtier area. His toes. He dried himself with a white towel and squeezed a nodule of green toothpaste onto the head of his electric toothbrush. Two minutes later he pulled on a set of white socks, white briefs and changed into his only clean suit. If his mum quit slacking then perhaps he’d have more choice. But no, she clearly had other priorities, clearly didn’t respect him enough, clearly didn’t recognise his breadwinner status. So, unfortunately for Lucas, he was stuck wearing a suit he’d definitely grown out of. Lucas wolfed down a bacon sarnie and guzzled a glass of orange juice. He left the flat and caught a southbound train to Bond Street. The train was packed to the brim with immigrants, construction workers, and businesswomen. You aren’t stealing my job. He grinned at the ugly faces. He walked the ten minutes to Larmenswatches in only seven. He’d mastered the art of busy walking, walking while talking, corporate man walking, don’t get in my way walking. A girl bumped into him. ‘Sorry’ she mumbled. Lucas ignored her. It wouldn’t be long until gentrification cleared everyone but the one percent. Everyone but wealthy men. The way it should be. He crossed the road without looking, traffic would wait. He was a white man in a black suit. A pillar of society. His taxes paid for the buses, they knew their place. Two hours into his shift a woman walked into the store. She must be lost. ‘Sorry Ma’am. We only sell watches for the male wrist. Perhaps you could look in the jewellers down the road.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘We sell watches for people with big wrists, men’s watches. There’s a woman’s jeweller down the street.’ ‘What’s the issue with a little browsing?’ ‘You need to be a member of the MMWS to shop here. I’ll have to call security if you don’t leave the store.’ ‘Excuse me?’ Who was she to question his decision-making? ‘The MMWS, the Mayfair Men’s Watch Society. We only sell watches for...stronger people.’ She didn’t budge, so he pulled a red lever under the counter. From the security room emerged Ricky, Ryan, Bruce, and Mark. They showed her to the exit and pushed her into the morning cold. Not before she slapped Ryan and dashed away, probably to gather her lady friends. He couldn’t deal with any more hassle today, so he called the police. ϕ 23 ART by Wayan Chan

The Power Issue | Φ 24

25 ART by Francesco Feltri

The Power Issue | Φ 26 Humanise the Machine by Michael Cannon Stories have power. We know this. But they give power too. Articulating lines of place and plot, character and cosmos, flesh and fortune, the lines of a story speak a world into existence. “Worlding”: from nothing to something, a world breathed along vocal chords, resonates into being. With each stroke of the pen, a particular balance of order emerges, one of individuated objects and subjects and relations, and an implicate order of sense in which these creations may be co-ordinated and held together. In this ordering is a way of making sense of reality. In their simpler forms, these things are well known and the power of story is familiar, if a little enigmatic. Magic, myth, religion, legend, science, reason, capitalism, nihilism. Each offers, one way or another, at least two things: a sense of ‘what is’, and ‘what matters’. Crucially, it doesn’t matter whether a story is true, and it doesn’t even seem to matter whether we believe it. Santa Claus is a story that, whatever it roots in truth, effects the lives of a good chunk of the human population, directing timely economic flows of goods, services, people, and funds, not to mention the worldly enchantment it affords for believers. The truth is, a story’s power is not a question of truth. We know this. For all its beauty, Truth is an uninspired author, Stranger than Fiction. Fiction, who would seem to know us better, Meets us halfway, Knowing something Truth cannot accommodate. The legitimacy of a story and its world is then a challenging matter, all the more so when there is more than one story about “the world”. In a world of many stories, a simple conception of truth is a poor guide for navigating and arbitrating which stories to hear and heed, but, for better and worse, it is also unneeded - the effects of some stories speak for themselves. A tired but enduring slogan in science has it that “all models are false, but some are useful.” The models are stories of their own, drawings of lines that mark what is included and what is excluded. However, as Abeba Birhane puts it, whilst “all models are false, some are dangerous.” “Worlding’s” place as a term in postcolonial theory is an important reminder of the dangers and responsibilities of our world-making stories. It remembers that Worlding can be violent. It remembers that cartographic colonisations of the unknown effect an imposition of lines that are seldom welcome, and seldom fit, severing and incarcerating landscapes, languages, bodies, and cultures according to the sense of an imperially mandated story. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that whilst some characters are better off than others in these stories, the real power is with the author. Who is drawing the lines? OUR STORIES ABOUT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ARE STORIES ABOUT HUMANS The point about the power of story is something generally recognised, but in the context of artificial intelligence, it remains to be properly appreciated. There is important exception that proves the rule in the work of authors like Timnit Gebru and Abeba Birhane who are bringing an overdue postcolonial awareness to AI research – Gebru, for example, cofounded ‘Black in AI’, "His description was as cold and as sterile as the cosmology that enabled his supremacy." Bayo Akomolafe "In other words, tell me how the universe came about, and I will tell you who you are." Heinz von Foerster

27 a movement now with thousands of members dedicated to addressing the diversity crisis in AI. The members create spaces and opportunities for sharing ideas, collaboration, and inspiration, “to increase the presence of Black people in the field of Artificial Intelligence.” The kind of stories to which this work brings our attention concern the operation of contemporary machine learning AI systems and how they lead to outcomes that are systematically harmful for minorities. This is vital work, a story that needs to be told and heard. Standing with this story, the story I want to bring to attention here concerns not the technology of artificial intelligence, but the models of mind and cognition connected with these systems because the million-dollar-question is whether AI and machines are legitimate models of human minds. Currently there are at least two kinds of stories about what minds and cognition are. Each can be thought of a philosophical paradigm in AI research. These stories have power because our models of mind and cognition are nothing less than a story about who and what we are. Moreover, just like other stories, truth does not entirely settle the matter - both paradigms are supported by many decades of science. As stories about who and what we are, each paradigm has uncharted power for defining our sense of ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’. The mainstream story that currently dominates is that our minds are a particular kind of machine, a computer – call the story Cognitivism. That “the mind is a computer” is a simplification, and most researchers will want more nuance. It is however a useful model and intuitive anchor for how the Cognitivist story conceives of minds. In this story, cognition – what a mind does – is, appropriately, “computation”. Computation is also easy to oversimplify, but it’s easy to overcomplicate too. The term has a rich history in the canon of modern European thought, involving such names as Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Formal definitions of computation have been around since at least Alan Turing’s famous 1937 paper on Computable Numbers, the paper from which we have the notion of a Turing machine. There have been important developments since, but the key is, where most stories are stories about both ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’, computation is a story that decouples ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’, just like “Hume’s Guillotine”. In this regard, computation is a form of rule-defined calculation, and just like a calculator that processes information according to certain rules, there is a processing of ‘what is’ with no care for ‘what matters’. Blind labour. It is “just following orders”. To remember the danger of such banality, call it “Arendtian Computation”. In supposing that the mind is a computer, we tell the story that our mind is a machine, that we are a machine, no different functionally speaking from the machines we build. This functionalism is important. It becomes the measuring stick according to which we compare ourselves to AI and, then, the terms by which we evaluate our worth as humans. It is a sort of collective epistemic injustice. A feature of functionalism is that functions can be “substrate independent” – software that can be run on hardware, whether synthetic or biological, silicon-based or carbon-based. The upshot is that machines can “realise” the same cognitive functions as humans, legitimising the idea that there is no significant difference. We are now seeing the reality of this with machines that can learn images, languages, and now even are generative. Most recently are OpenAI’s “DALL·E 2” and, at time of writing, four iterations of “GPT”. DALL·E 2 generates images from text prompts. It is not open to the public, but smaller versions of the program are. Below is an image generated by what was formerly “DALL·E mini” with the text prompt “a dog on a mobius strip in the style of Escher”.

The Power Issue | Φ 28 The third iteration of GPT, ChatGPT, generates text from text prompts and is even capable of dialogue. Here is the output of ChatGPT to the text prompt, “write me a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare about the power of stories”: When words doth flow and tales doth weave their spell, The power of stories doth enchant us all. From ancient myths to modern fables well, They move us deeply, making our hearts enthral. A story can inspire and ignite, A passion in our souls we did not know. It can evoke emotions with its might, And make our tears of joy or sorrow flow. In books and plays, we find a world so vast, A place where we can dream and feel alive. A story’s grip on us is known to last, And in our hearts and minds, It does survive. So let us cherish stories old and anew, For in their power, our spirits are renewed. The most recent edition, GPT4, is set to be able to integrate the capacities of all its previous iterations, including into one system text, audio, and video. Whilst it may not be Shakespeare, on the basis of much less we have begun to ask questions like “can AI produce art”, “can it write poetry”, “can it do my job”, “can it realise my function?” That is the power of functionalism. It is common denominator between humans and machines that is becoming the means by which we also understand ourselves as humans. In an extraordinary book, On the Origins of Cognitive Science, Jean-Pierre Dupuy points out that Cybernetics, the progenitor of contemporary cognitive sciences and AI research, constituted not the humanisation of the machine, but the mechanisation of the [human] mind. We contort ourselves to fit the model of the machines we build, rather than find a model that actually fits. In our concern that machines might be able to do anything we can, we reveal how little we think of ourselves, how much we have forgotten of our depth. “I’m just a fleshy machine.” “All models are false, but some are dangerous.” This story of Cognitivism, with Arendtian computation and functionalism, is overpowering us. Where once we were telling the story, the story is now telling us – telling us who and what we are. And we appear to be allowing it to. Recommender algorithms on Netflix and Amazon function better if we are more predictable, so the choices we are offered – “people who bought this item also bought…” – steer us toward more statistically average consumption patterns. Put differently, such autonomous systems change our preferences to fit theirs, and we pay a subscription fee for the pleasure. Who is really drawing the lines? On the margins of this cognitivist paradigm and story, another quietly draws breath. In this story, the story of a mind is the story of living organism, a self-organising, “autopoietic”, “sympoietic”, biological and ecological system. Where the bar begins is a matter of some debate, but the models include a range of organisms from microbiology to macrofauna. The story tells us that mind is charaterised by “4E’s”: a mind is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. In this story, cognition is “sensemaking”, an integrated making-sense of ‘what is' and ‘what matters’. Call this story “post-cognitivism”. In our time of biospheric uncertainty, there is an untapped power in this story to understand ourselves in a way that puts our feet back in the soil. Each of the 4E’s speaks to the degrees of freedom of our agency as living systems – having a body is not just a matter of hardware, a body locates us in physical space and defines particular degrees of freedom of choice, action, and agency. Meanwhile, being embedded reminds us that we live in both natural, digital, and mimetic worlds, each with their own selection pressures shaping the choice and necessity we encounter. Being extended means, on the one hand, that the boundaries of my body are not always the boundaries of my agency because cars, pencils, a backpack, the internet, and – à propos – stories, and all other technologies, enable me to reach things that I cannot with just my body. But it also means that I am changing the very environment to which I am adapting. For those who have them, heated, insulated homes and resource-rich supermarket shelves of food are technologically generated environments, and obviously do not afford the same selection pressures as the wilderness to which our ancestors were once adapted. The depth of our extendedness shows in the extent to which we are increasingly adapted

29 to urban environments of our own creation, and not natural environments, of nature’s creation. Finally, the enactive character of the mind means that this embedded, extended body is a living, breathing, complex system, maintaining a thermodynamically precarious metabolic exchange with the world, and that this is all precarity, one day, will end. More specifically, it means that ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’ are one because we make sense of the world in a way that keeps us alive. Living systems necessarily care about ‘what matters’. This story then is a story about how living systems live and stay alive. That is the power of this story. HUMANISE THE MACHINE A machine story and a living-system story. Both supported by science. And yet, it is the machine story that dominates and the livingsystem story that quietly takes what place is left on the margins. The machine story is the story that tells us we are no different to machines, that exorcises “what matters”, valuing blind labour and Arendtian computation. It is the story that produces technologies built on chains of production we know are destroying ecosystems by the mining of rare earth metals, supporting child and slave labour in those mines, creating geopolitical and developmental tensions among nations that depend on international supply chains, and that’s just the hardware. We know the software is terrible for our mental health, we know that it shortens our attention span by chronically hyperstimulating our nervous systems, that it polarises our beliefs by both exposing us to the most extreme of the ”other side” and feeding us information that confirms our existing beliefs, and that it is cultivating generations of children whose nervous systems are adapted to on-demand hyperstimulation of “infinite scroll” social media. Why do we allow ourselves to believe models of such systems could be legitimate models of what we are? Stories have power, but they also take power. The power we give them. Why do we give this story the power of our belief when we can see its effects? What does it give us? AI is not only disrupting the stories we tell about ourselves, but, as we contort ourselves to fit a functionalist measuring stick, AI is quietly changing the stories we even think to tell. This is very real collective epistemic injustice, and almost self-imposed. We seem to be diminishing ourselves to make sense of AI on its terms, fitting into the space that it allows us, rather than the other way around. We permit ourselves only so much value as the story decrees, with the authority of scientific truth and objectivity. We tell the story, but we are not its authors, we are its subjects. The risk is that we forget what we are, and turn into the machines we’re building, slaves to ends not our own, in blind, Arendtian labour, no longer caring about ‘what matters’, but calculating ‘what is’ in a world run by algorithms we’ve long forgotten why we wrote. How long before we forget? We can choose to make a choice about the story we want to tell, or we abdicate the choice, and the choice will be made for us. This is not a call to elevate the human and risk repeating centuries of human exceptionalism. It is a call to remember our humanity so that we may step into our emerging planetary technoculture with our feet still in the ground. It is a call to humanise the machine we are in risk of becoming. The choice is lived out, one way or another. ϕ

The Power Issue | The Power Issue | Φ Φ 30 THE CATHEDRAL by Rodin (1908)

31 These hands of sand go to rack and ruin with the time it takes for them to stick together, stable on a pavement that ends where the boundary where the spreading of salty water waves begins. I imagine myself on a beach where the poet once lost his clock with which he counted all past ages, where the dreams of a brown haired girl were buried, with her sunken head, and a baggy shirt, where the seagulls fly and rest, as the human race drops in tears of disappointment at the contemptuous thought reflecting such unbearable impulse to improve itself and the natural world, to understand itself, and whatever lies beyond her eyes and steps. What to do with these hands if I can't think through them? They have called me special because I express in verse what a bird with his flight naturally conveys, what a tree with its leaves green, red and gold is able to transcend, what a wolf with his howl can kiss. The illusion that my thought is worth any more than the slow march of a caterpillar, lies long subdued, I only wonder: ‘What use are my hands, if with them I create and destroy, without any distinction between right and left?’ Why do i want hands whole with opposite thumbs, if a single finger is enough for me to diffuse my reflection in the water? What use are my hands, if when I lay them on the sand, listening to a snail, sliding by my side, and sighing nervously, a singular thought sits in my mind: 'Why hast thou forsaken me?' These hands by Frank Hernández 31

The Power Issue | Φ 32 Pain and Fear by David Alvarez Costas Sorrow is the birth of ambition and ambition, the name of hunger when it craves power. Greed its thirst. You are powerful - says humanity in its tantrum against determinism. But what is it to have power? Is it to be enabled? Then "can" would be the verb in which power is conjugated. To be able to choose one's destiny, as well as to never arrive, to live forever in the horizon of possibility of Dasein; a being-in-the-world that never renounces the myriad of open doors closed by every choice taken and is thus forced to live in a comatose state. This is why Dormael's Mr Nobody was truly nobody. Because the lightness of his being was absolute, in not choosing he did not commit to any possibility, that is, in wanting to preserve his power he did not exercise it at all. He who seeks power for its own sake often has to cede the actuality of power to preserve its potentiality. Isn’t it ironic? Like the sailor who never puts his boat afloat and rejoices in its spotlessness, the power-seeker maintains his freedom untouched, pure, and, that is to say, nonexistent. Meanwhile, he expands it beyond the frontiers of alien freedoms that he also suspends for his own sake. Moreover, if knowledge is power, then the Orwellian observation about the worker as trapped in a routine that makes thought impossible is more than the revocation of power, it is the parasitisation of others' freedom, our freedom to choose what we will, because power is an open possibility unified into a being’s right to merge various open doors into one. That is what is stolen from the power seeker, namely, the actualization of possibility. He who attempts to accumulate more power than that which is contained within the limits of his being is condemned to wander through a desert of open doors without ever crossing any frame. Thus, the power seeker, or more accurately, the power slave, is he who betrays the structures of coexistence to favour those of domination. What for? For a divine desire. I say divine because God is the manifestation of the horizon of possibility that drives civilization towards domination, as well as the device that justifies it. Power was always supposed to be a means to an end, but it has become an end in itself. And misguided civilizations have sought it for centuries with the sole goal of waving it like a burning white flag. In this striving one does not give up freedom. Instead, one allows it to vanish like tears in the rain, and like tears in the rain, its banality slips out of the heavy eyes of consequences that never were foreseen. The power slave chooses Kundera’s unbearable lightness and, just like the characters of his book, ignores that there never was a dichotomy between freedom and commitment. We were never free. But the power slave is even less free in his will to nothing. For this reason, when I say that Power is the striving for possibility and the absence of choice, what I mean is that the powerful lacks being. We only know the puppets in this representation of power struggle, they can be identified by their titles of public servants (presidents/ ministers etc.). Only losers in this transference of mastership, an ode to a false diluted ideal of Godlike freedom. They ignore something crucial; kings, pawns, knights, and every other piece on the board, all ignore that power does not reside in people but in their world-views, and often even in acting with the intention to demolish this narrative of chains that cancels freedom, power seekers forgot or simply embraced the narratives that favoured their greed. What they ignore is that freedom is not possessed but actualized, and, for this reason, leaders are such powerless creatures. That is why they walk on the red carpet of pain and fear, as mere slaves in golden dresses, like self-centred spectres, ghosts of mere flesh, disoriented shadows in the cave of existence. And it is this shadow of a human that our kings and queens, presidents, gurus and CEOs have always

33 been since they ascended to their thrones, because it is a requisite to sell oneself before acquiring the power to traffic with others. The coin of this exchange is pain and fear. Remember, remember how already in the Assyrian empire the tyrant that ruled would almost kill with lashes the leaders of any province that rebelled against him. I say ‘almost’ because the goal was not death, but pain and fear, and it was achieved by spreading honey and milk over the wounds of the whipped and leaving them tightened down in a swamp so that insects would eat the rebel alive, sometimes for up to seventeen days before they fell unconscious. Pain and fear, those are the foundations of our civilization. However, in spite of Machiavelli, pain and fear have never been enough, and the people of Assyrian empire overthrew the tyrant and burnt the capital down to its foundations. It must be clear by now that violence is the seed that germinates when power is treated as an end in itself, and this power play puts life in check in the name of yet another false god. Despite their glass palaces, the elites want redemption. After all, they just wanted to live a life that was more their own than life itself. We are no better, just less or more depending on the perspective. But life is commitment, and commitment manifests in a unique possibility for being. The choice is inevitable: escaping towards power is yet another of its shapes, one that makes the most coward of slaves come to light. Idols are crowned, and the conformist sheep emit their baaing under the influence of that normalizing power that Foucault despised. It is hard to escape these muddy tides that threaten to carry us into the septic tanks of perdition. However, looking into the distant mirror of this labyrinth of chances, the burning white flag collides with its own echo, and the echo is an old forgotten song, the song of the guillotine whistling its cry against the walls of this world. Can you hear its chant? Feed me with your kings and queens and I shall spit their bloody crowns into the ground. ϕ

The Power Issue | Φ 34 Don’t worry, I only eat stupid by Amber Platel Eventually, I crashed. The atmosphere was breathable; which was good, considering that the body of my craft had displayed little durability as it popped open in the middle. It was like watching a child extend the arms of a pair of sunglasses a little too far, the hinges snapping as the ship came into contact with the rough landscape. I had been strapped in and the thick material saved me initially. I would have felt more grateful, however, if I had not been suspended upside down, three and a half metres from the roof of the shuttle. My body was tense, my eyes squeezed shut, braced and ready for the impact. The craft was a wreck of twisted metal. The windows cracked and the upholstery torn, exposing the mouldy foam of the furniture through the ruined synthetic whites. Nothing seemed worth salvaging as I made my way out through the fractured remains of my sort-of home. Despite the lack of gravity, I had little choice but to trust that breathing the air unassisted would not kill me. I ventured away from my crash site, the landscape was rocky and dusted. Everything was grey and chalky as though it had been sprinkled with ash; my boots left weighted footprints behind me, proving that an atmosphere of some kind must have been present. It was warm and dry and unending. The horizon seemed thousands of miles away, and the barren grey desert was featureless. From all directions there was little except for me, my craft and a scattering of boulders. And of course, a massive hole covered with tarp and ash. A hole that I had managed to fall into. I screamed a bit, I will admit. Out of frustration, I even kicked the chalky ground and threw my body against the cavernous walls in an attempt to scale the huge pit. After an hour I was defeated. After 4 hours I was hungry. After 7 hours I was freezing, and it was dark. After 9 I realised that there were no goddamn moons on this goddamn lonely planet. After 11 hours, they appeared. They looked to be tall and gnarled like a thin and knobbly tree. They were as grey as the planet they inhabited, with equally barren expressions and rocky bulbous skin, thick as a toads. They stood there for a few minutes, silently, seemingly studying me. I called out, ‘Hello?’ but they simply kept staring. ‘Can you pass me a rope, or, uh, maybe a ladder please?’ They stared for another minute or two, before turning to each other and screaming. Or at least, it sounded like they were screaming. And they started jumping, bodies vibrating against bodies like atoms being heated. Arms went flying upwards, 6 per body. It felt like they were rejoicing. Maybe they thought I was some sort of saviour; some Messiah or saintly resurrection? ‘I come in peace?’ I offered. I tried out a few more cliches, even holding out a Vulcan salute before noticing that they definitely did not have enough individual fingers per hand to reply with the same and quickly revoked the gesture. The vibrating scream continued, and I realised that they most likely created and covered the hole, and that this was probably a trap of some kind. They kept screaming. I started pleading. The crowd separated, and one stepped forward. * I am willing to admit that the creature in the hole looks delicious. Its fleshy meat sack seems to hide a plethora of juicy, functional organs. The layers of fat could be a perfect source of fuel to heat our homes and the skin can be used to make coverings, or maybe as decoration. The little bones and teeth would be perfect, strung up and draped across our limbs. ‘Speak.’ I order. My crowd has been chanting, explaining the rules to our The Power Issue | Φ 34

35 visitor. The fleshy thing opens its mouth and bleats the same sound of indifference. ‘Please, let me out of here. I will do anything you want. Just get me out.’ Not once does it change its tone. It sounds bored; uninterested in our presence. I look around at my neighbours, ‘Does anyone understand?’ We raise our arms in a united agreement that nobody among us had. The collective riles up – the prospect of a fresh meal is exciting. The chanting of the rules starts again. It makes another noise. ‘Just tell me what you want. How can I get out of here?’ The group responds to the beings’ bleats through more ritual jumping. There is no intonation in its voice, but it begins to pace the floor. It throws its arms up as if excited, though its face reads no joy. It has begun launching itself at the walls of our trap. ‘I believe that the visitor is aware that it is trapped.’ I explain to my group. They groan. The creature in the hole falls suddenly back off of the wall. Its eyes wide as if consuming us. Its brows raise, and its mouth gapes open. ‘Does that mean we can’t eat it?’ one of them asks. ‘Of course not,’ I answer. ‘Being aware of its situation doesn’t mean anything.’ I direct my attention back to the creature and address it. ‘Show me that you understand me.’ ‘Please, don’t hurt me. I will do anything, I swear. Just don’t hurt me.’ One of the group suggests that the creature spoke as a response to me and so must have understood that it was being addressed. Someone else argues that this is arbitrary, that a creature making a noise whilst being addressed is merely conditioning, not a sign of intelligence. Communication is the only way to truly know that something is intelligent. ‘In fact,’ I point out to the group, ‘conditioning doesn’t even indicate sentience, if you really think about it. Just because a creature is aware that doing a dance will get it a meal, doesn’t really mean it knows why it is getting a meal, or who is supplying the meal; or why they even need to eat in the first place. It has just been programmed that way. Maybe we should try one last time with the fleshy thing in the hole.’ We address it one final time. I try to explain that if it could just reply in an intelligent, understandable way, we will be morally obliged to let it go free, unscathed. I know it won't make a difference, but some of the more sensitive among us prefer a lack of sentience, as well as intelligence in their meals. The being is squawking and pacing and attacking the wall. Yes, it appears to be irate and heated and anxious; but overriding all else, it just seems dull. ‘Get me out of here, you ugly, grey piece of shit! Are you dumb? You are honestly some of the stupidest fucks I’ve ever come across in the whole of the galaxy!’ I take the stunner out of my robe, aim it at the pale skin that lay between the creatures’ eyes and release the trigger. It begins jolting, its body going into spasm as the energy burns through its nerve endings. This is, of course, the most ethical way to dispose of unintelligent life. ϕ 35

The Power Issue | Φ 36 by Barbara Listek

37 I n recent times, the growing disregard for the expertise of scientists and academics has become increasingly clear. The rise of anti-intellectualism in public discourse has put experts in the crosshairs, particularly on issues like climate change, pandemics or vaccination. This phenomenon is characterised by the rejection of knowledge and expertise in favour of opinions and beliefs. Particularly, when those opinions align with one's own political or ideological leanings. With the democratisation of information through social media and the internet, many are turning to easily accessible sources online rather than traditional forms of acquiring knowledge. However, this accessibility comes at a cost, as the lack of tools to filter out fake news and pseudo-science leads to a proliferation of fringe movements and conspiracy theories, such as the infamous Q-Anon or the New World Order. By examining the phenomenon of anti-intellectualism in its various forms through the lens of power and knowledge, I will look at its implications for existing power imbalances, systemic inequalities and disempowerment of women. The rejection of knowledge can manifest in different ways. One of them is a number of young people, particularly on social media, who, despite having access to education, decide not to pursue it. Instead, they often turn to sources such as self-help and personal development literature, which have hugely grown in popularity in recent years, particularly amongst younger generations. A reason for that can be growing anxieties about the world and the current state of society, but also the glorification of digital success and online careers, which often align with the self-improvement narrative. At the same time, with the internet and social media putting additional pressure on the pursuit of greater financial freedom or wealth, intellectual pursuits, particularly in the realm of arts and humanities, are often ridiculed and dismissed as being irrelevant or frivolous because they do not immediately contribute to these aims. This shift can be attributed in part to the devaluation of college degrees, which is not only evident amongst the general population but in the eyes of employers. In many workplaces, a college degree is no longer a requirement and can be substituted with suitable courses or self-acquired professional skills. While this trend can be understood as a natural consequence of the increasingly profit-driven nature of capitalist society, it raises important questions: Is education still socially valuable? Or is being knowledgable “out,” and is ignorance bliss? Anti-intellectualism may arise from a perception that the educated elite holds a monopoly on political discourse and higher education while disregarding the concerns of the public. Anti-intellectuals thus assume the role of champions of the common people - the populists against political and academic elitism. Another reason, as pinpointed by Zygmunt Bauman, who wrote about this phenomenon at the beginning of the century, attributes anti-intellectualism to the rapidly changing and uncertain society we live in, where individuals are less likely to trust experts and institutions. Political polarisation eroded trust in authorities and institutions. Additionally, economic challenges such as the rising cost of education and widening income inequality can also foster resentment. As argued by Bauman in Liquid Modernity, the educational system, which once served as a pathway to social mobility, is now unable to fulfil that function. As a consequence of that, the authority of education and the intellectual elite is increasingly undermined and questioned. The ascent of anti-intellectualism also signals a transformation in the dynamics of power. Throughout history, education has served as a privilege exclusively granted to the elites, a tool employed to validate particular groups and preserve the established order. How, then, despite the widening access to it, can we explain its devaluation? The rejection of critical thinking and expertise in favour of populist rhetoric and alternative facts can be seen as a means of asserting power and control over societal narratives. As such, it is crucial that we examine how anti-intellectualism is used as a tool of oppression and work to resist it. As access to education becomes increasingly inclusive, those who have traditionally held dominance in these spheres begin to reject it leading to the growth of anti37

The Power Issue | Φ 38 intellectualism. This phenomenon of "male flight" is a prime example of this, with men abandoning activities, industries, and products that become associated with women and femininity. This can be seen in fields such as nursing and teaching, which were once male-dominated but have since become saturated with women. As women fight to gain representation in traditionally male-dominated disciplines, men tend to flee these areas, leading to a societal push to devalue their worth. This can be observed in the form of decreased wages in these fields, as seen in a study by The American Journal of Ophthalmology, which found that when women in large numbers became designers, wages fell 21 percentage points and when they became biologists, wages fell 18 percentage points. This phenomenon can also be observed in the world of academia. As more women enter and excel there, we can see a growing societal push to devalue the worth of these disciplines and reject intellectualism as a whole. A shift in attitude is not only reflected in decreased wages for women in these fields but also in a growing mistrust and disdain for intellectual pursuits. It is a subtle yet powerful tool used to maintain the status quo, where the traditional holders of power and knowledge are challenged by the rising voices of the marginalised. The question arises, does the increasing accessibility of education threaten those who traditionally were able to enjoy it without competition? As more and more marginalised groups gain access to knowledge, there is a growing pushback from those who feel their dominant position is being challenged. This can manifest in the form of anti-intellectualism, as those who now feel under a threat seek to devalue the worth of education and knowledge to maintain their own power and privilege. Furthermore, there is a growing concern that if experts are no longer primarily white men, their opinions and conclusions are not being given the same weight and credibility as they once were. This is particularly true for women and ethnic and racial minorities who, while increasingly present and successful in both humanities and STEM fields, still face significant barriers and discrimination in their pursuit of knowledge and expertise. The rise of anti-intellectualism can be seen as a tool used to maintain power dynamics in society and to silence marginalised voices. The rejection of knowledge has also found new expressions on the Internet. Many young women have taken up the mantle of 'bimboism' or 'bimbocore', in an attempt to reclaim the term ‘bimbo’ from being associated with a beautiful yet shallow person. Referencing iconic figures such as Elle Woods and Dolly Parton, bimbocore offers a biting commentary on the misrepresentation of feminine and alluring women as ditzy and unintelligent. Bimbocore, which embraces hyper-femininity and reclaims the stereotype of the 'dumb blonde,' represents a rejection of elitist and misogynist views of intelligence that have long been used to exclude women from positions of power and influence. For many who identify as bimbos, choosing to present as less intelligent than they truly are is a strategic choice. After all, they are all too familiar with being underestimated and overlooked in the intellectual sphere and may use this perception to their advantage. But beyond that, their anti-intellectualism can be seen as a protest against the rigours of hustle culture and the elitism of capitalist society. To reject the pressure to constantly compete and instead embrace a 'soft life' focused on selfcare and pleasure is, in many ways, an act of defiance. In this context, bimbocore can be seen as a form of resistance, an assertion of autonomy and a reclaiming of power. But is it truly? Yet, there is an undercurrent of deeper concern beneath the surface of this trend. Under the videos of self-proclaimed bimbos, one can even find hashtags like ‘lobotomy chic,’ described as the exploration of femininity through nihilism. The violent practice of 38

39 lobotomy, a brain damage practice used in the early days of psychiatric treatment in the mid-twentieth century, primarily performed on women diagnosed with 'female hysteria,' served as a tool to induce passivity, submission, and compliance. In this way, it has become emblematic of the violence inflicted on women, who were tied to household duties and barred from pursuing intellectual pursuits. Although most of these videos contain a significant degree of irony and dark humour, they highlight a concerning trend of reinforcing traditional gender roles and departure from intellectual curiosity and critical thinking. Bimbocore, thus, runs the risk of making it more challenging for women to be taken seriously, particularly in spaces dominated by men or those with traditional views on gender roles. By celebrating a particular form of femininity that is hypersexualised and performative, it may further entrench the idea that a woman's worth is tied to her appearance and sexuality, perpetuating the marginalisation and erasure of women who do not fit into this narrow mould. These concerns echo Betty Friedan's critique of societal pressure on women to prioritise domesticity and family life over personal fulfilment and intellectual pursuits in her landmark book "The Feminine Mystique." "The history of woman is the history of the continued and universal denunciation of her mind," wrote Friedan. Therefore, as we celebrate the reclamation of "bimbo" as a feminist and anti-capitalist identity, we must also remain vigilant of how oppressive power structures can take root in cultural trends. Rejecting intellectualism might seem like a way to stick it to the system and assert some control over our own narratives. But let's not forget that those in power benefit from our disengagement and lack of critical thinking. We also risk entrenching existing power imbalances, further marginalising minorities, and silencing diverse voices. So maybe it is time to rethink our relationship with power and knowledge. To make education more accessible for everyone, and encourage a diversity of perspectives in academia. We don't have to all fit into the same narrow definition of success. Instead, let's embrace curiosity, questioning, and open-mindedness as the keys to a more just and equitable society. ϕ 39

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The Power Issue | Φ 42 PHOTOGRAPHY by Kesara Ariyapongpairoj

43 Managing Director by Kesara Ariyapongpairoj The Managing Director always comes home late. Work came first, your wife could wait, you kept her waiting for a million nights. The plates of food she made waited, too, in the dark, growing cold as you were out there making gold, hard at work, hard with drinks, with faceless Women Now and then you embraced me with those hard-working hands. You ruled with care, you never threaten, apart from once you left me beaten and branded from the chosen weapon – a hanger, broken. Your big Bag hangs over us. Its shadow blinds my mother, pacifies her wrath, numbs her anger. It binds me to eternal gratitude, a debt I can never pay back. It is proof of your competency, what you still lack, and a bargaining chip for a family still intact. Even now we sit in separate rooms and dine together, silent, on Sunday noon.

The Power Issue | Φ 44 Women decided that because they didn’t believe in patriarchy anymore, it had disappeared. Images of flings, hookups, casual sex, dates, relationships starting, relationships ending, no commitments, and so much fun. I, too, held these scenes in my mind, as an early teenager, as a promise of a future surely ensured to me. I knew I needed to give it some time but, surely, it would come. Images have that effect. As John Berger said, they speak of the future, but never of the present, which, for me, consisted of a suburban family lifestyle with enough religiosity to fuel my self-doubt. Fast-forward a few years and widespread accounts of sexual abuse explode on social media. It is not all fun and games – something, which women already knew, and I, now, later, in my adolescence, had begun to intuit. In the aftermath, it has been said that as a society we have been welcoming a sexual revolution, inaugurated by the notion of consent. This new paradigm assumes that everyone is free to make sexual choices, which are clear and transparent to oneself and should be respectfully communicated to the other. You probably don’t need me to say that many times a woman’s ‘yes’ may not correspond to her own wishes. A woman may be saying ‘yes’ out of coercion, fear of what saying ‘no’ might imply, and confusion over her own sexual role, which, many times, is a result of the shame, guilt, or contradictory cultural signifiers imposed on her sexuality. After all, there are many rules on what kind of women, women should be, and what kind of sex, women should want. None of which are very clear. Patriarchy disfigures the equal, abstract binary of the answering ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ The risk of saying no, especially high for trans and black women, undermines the freedom and equality that the notion of consent assumes to exist between the two agents. For such a reason, it has been criticised by many feminists for its liberal and capitalist underpinnings; for the presumption of equality that is, actually, non-existent. I, mostly, agree. The critique, however, can be allconsuming. It is not just consent as a framework, but the entire possibility of wanted sex, that becomes impossible to realise under patriarchy. As Andrea Dworkin famously said, “all heterosexual sex is rape.” Though contemporary feminists may have retreated from Dworkin’s radical pronouncement, there is a sense in which, in the wake of MeToo, there has been a renewed focus on the relationship between sexual agency and power, with the view that these two conflict and exist at odds with one another. The main idea is that unequal power differentials – gender, race, class, age, status, profession – obscure, if not deny, the possibility for the expression of a truly free, sexual subjectivity. This argument is particularly made about heterosexuality, which is what I will mainly confront, though I believe my analysis is not limited to it. In what I will call the ‘power dynamics’ discourse, it is encouraged that women divest themselves from such unequal relationships. They should desire, instead, people cleared of that power. Men, however, according to this idea, should actively become aware of their position and disavow themselves from the power vested in their masculinity. Both these options presume a sort of individuality in conceptualising power, as if our investment in it was something we could either reject or embrace. But what is particularly excruciating is the impossible demand it makes (on women! again!) that we find spaces free of power that might compromise us. It demands a pledge, that we align our desire with our politics. As if who we desire was a choice we could meditatively take. There is a historical lineage to this. Second-wave feminism’s slogan ‘the personal is political’ undertook to reveal the oppression found in the most intimate of places: the family, the home, and the bedroom. The battle for liberal political representation seemed to be over. Politics was now everywhere, with the most political being that which had been deemed natural and ahistorical. The prevailing notion of woman’s natural duties and tendencies had whitewashed the relations of force, the presence of unwaged labour, and the compulsory status of heterosexuality that had dictated women’s existence, all to the benefit of capitalism and patriarchy. The urgency for feminists was to show its artificial status, and therefore both claim women from the chokehold of history and enable them to reimagine their lives and possibilities. My Frustrations with the “Power Dynamics” discourse by Annamaria Robles Fumarola CW: Sexual violence & abuse

45 It was to realise, as Andrea Long Chu notes, that patriarchy not just lived in our political and economic institutions, but in the deepest corners of our psychology, feeding our desires and ambitions. The implication, then, was that “feminist revolution could be achieved by combing constantly through the fibrils of one’s consciousness for every last trace of male supremacy – a kind of political nitpicking, as it were.” Lesbian separatism was an attempt at such a project. Their belief was that desiring men sexually and romantically – with the frustrations it might imply – while trying to abolish male domination, was a political incompatibility, a contradiction that slowed the feminist movement. So by actively choosing to disassociate from men, they could cultivate and build an autonomous political identity and community, undisturbed by the barriers of male power. This attempt at purity, powerful and forceful as it was, had an alienating effect on many black feminists, for whom alliance with black men was necessary for their fight against racism. It becomes clear that power crosses our world, multifariously – and, perhaps, frustratingly – in ways that many times escape simple categorization. Making a political practice out of purifying one’s thoughts has two-fold implications. On one hand, there is a satisfaction that comes with attaining political consciousnesses, as well as a hope and wonder that ignites in the knowledge that things could be different. On the other, lies the danger of moralism towards those who engage, and like to engage, in so-considered ideological practices and fantasies, whether that be, porn, kinks, BDSM, or the desire to be with someone more powerful. (And there is a notable history of feminists accusing such women of blocking the path towards liberation). According to this discourse, we should tell our female friends, when they desire someone more powerful – be it their boss, an older man or a musician on stage – the ‘hard truth.’ It often seems to us that we should help them unfold their veils of false consciousness and let them see their situation for what it really is: a manipulation and abuse of power. If not, we must advise men to refrain from ever engaging in situations of such inequality. Even if the woman in question seems desirous, one should be wary, because, ultimately, she might be under the blinding spells of idealisation. All this is a familiar narrative, one, which, ultimately, distrusts and patronizes women’s sexual autonomy and is unable to conceive the possibility of their pleasure and desire. I understand the hermeneutical impulse. I have told friends phrases along those lines when I believed they deserved better. As female friends, however, we must be cautious in believing that our distanced clarity grants us the authority of a truth-teller. We must also be careful to not indulge and gain pleasure in this act, either. As Simone Weil said, forcing someone to read themselves as we read them can be a form of slavery. It can be extremely frustrating when a friend’s attempt at care comes through as a profound misunderstanding of the depth of our feelings. The feelings, which we are then left to sloppily defend. Of course, on the other hand, as the receivers of advice, it can be enlightening to hear a friend put words to feelings long dismissed. Especially when it leads us to realise that an uncomfortable certain sexual interaction was actually violent or coerced or disrespectful. But to assume that abuse is the unassailable standard through which we should measure all sexual encounters laden with power is to dismiss the possibilities for women’s sexual autonomy. I, again, do not want to seem that I am combing over the realities and violence of patriarchy. With all that in mind, we should be ready to think of the possibility that women engage, interact and negotiate with power. They might want to undermine it, or simply follow it; embolden themselves through it, or lose their selves in its presence; it might be surprisingly comforting or arousingly, the opposite. We should not be expected to know and be clear on this matter, either, to have to rationalise it as if it was defective. As Maggie Nelson explains, in On Freedom, if we want to shift towards being potent, active, and non-reactionary subjects, we must reconceptualise power, and think of ways one might experiment with it, in its many forms and facets. There can be a wide variety of experiences and wishes that occur in relation to power. Desire exposes our vulnerability as rational, self-possessing subjects. It is a reminder of a will that awakens when imagining and touching the other. We should be wary of discourses that make victimhood the prime condition through which women can claim political subjectivity. It is easy, when primarily framing the experience of womanhood in the language of trauma and harm, to lose track of the hope at the core of the feminist project, and become sceptical of any expressions of pleasure. Discourses of this type tend to achieve the opposite of what they set out to. In King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes explains how rape culture uses the notion of the victim to police women. It puts the image of the traumatized-for-life, asexual, joyless, bedridden victim up to women’s faces as a double threat. As if to say that, if you become a victim, your life will forever be pleasureless; to the rest, assume that these

The Power Issue | Φ 46 are the risks of going out and enjoying yourself, or living any kind of life that is not pure drudgery. So feminist discourses that remind and repeat time and time again, how battered, defenceless, and defeated women are in society, run the risk of repeating this same uncompromising opposition between a life of pleasure and joy, and one of victimhood and abuse. Being a victim becomes an ahistorical, ethical and political identity. This rhetoric is not purely theoretical: I am reminded of, when, after an upsurge in spiking incidents, feminist collectives encouraged other women to ‘strike’ against London nightclubs, to punish and demand change. As we compromise women’s pleasure, again, we implicitly expect that women stay at home until the revolution comes. We could potentially submit to doom and defeat, and leave our bodies to a lethargic sadness, relieved only by the knowledge of the power oppressing us. Option A: horny and sexless but, at least, we’re self-aware! Or perhaps, the image of our total subjugation, instead of producing a despairing conformism, could be used as a tool to build a political project that envisions feminist liberation. As if representing ourselves as slaves, it would make it easier for us to achieve its opposite: total freedom. So, option B: the chains will be unleashed. But, as much as I am committed to the idea that our society could be radically different, and freer, such a vision needs tools, energy, and imagination, which can only be grounded in the present. Our notions of freedom rely on the present, as freedom does not live at a far distance in a far, limitless future, unless, what we’re wishing for, of course, is a redemptive heaven. If we would like to free female sexuality from shame and silence, we must then truly give in to our desire, even when self-destructive or politically dubious. To do this is to realize the truth and weight of women’s sexual agency, in all its complexity. I can still remember the excitement and relief the moment I first read the work of Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, and Chris Kraus, among others, who were confessing, in an act of deliverance or submission, their raptures for men with little merit. And I, meanwhile, felt like I had finally been let into a lost and hushed world of feeling–of pain and pleasure, of obsession and invention. Committing to this honesty, brings us closer to Audre Lorde’s notion of ‘the erotic,’ understood “as a measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” working from within and against the demands of a rationalist and individualist, capitalist reality. When the desire is understood in its ambiguity, in its piercing vulnerability, we may begin to hear the pulsating sounds of a yearning. ϕ

47 ART by Cveta Gotovats

The Power Issue | The Power Issue | Φ Φ 48