Chains of Power and Their Representation

Power is the ability to send and bind someone else to act on one’s behalf, a relation that depends upon habits of interpretation. For persons attempting to complete projects, power involves communicating with, recruiting, and controlling subordinates and confronting those who are not in such a relationship of recruitment. This leads to a basic theoretical vocabulary about power players and their projects—a model of rector, actor, and other. As multiple relations of sending and binding become mutually implicated, chains of power—understood as simultaneously social and symbolic—emerge. The vocabulary presented for analyzing power is developed with reference to a series of instances, including the exploitation of labor and police violence. Finally, the paper analyzes a case study of an imperial encounter on the American frontier and examines therein a shift in how political power was represented, with implications for the sociology of transitions to modernity.