Distinguishing Power From Authority
International Society for Cultural Activity Research conference , August 6, 2021
By Dan Friedman
[+download] A few years ago I taught an online course for the East Side Institute called “What Is Power?” As is often the case with East Side classes, most of the students were social justice activists of various sorts. That is to say, their lives were deeply interwoven with the subject of power. Yet, it was immediately clear as we began our five-week online conversation that these activists were as emotionally (and cognitively) confused and conflicted about the word and the concept of power as anyone in the general population.
Mark, a social worker, social therapist and life-long progressive political activist, summed up these conflicted feelings (and concepts) directly and concisely in his first post. “I have many random thoughts on power,” he wrote. “Here are some: Fight the Power; Power to the People; Power Corrupts.”
These are common sayings that many of us grew up hearing and internalizing. While we probably accepted them all without much reflection, each gives a different meaning to power. “Fight the Power,” implies that power is something that oppresses us, holds us back, needs to be opposed, even overthrown. “Power to the People,” a nearly universal slogan of progressives around the world, implies, in contrast to the first saying, that power is a good thing, something we need to win for the people. Why then would we need or want to “Fight the Power”? “Power corrupts” is probably the most widespread and accepted of the three sayings. Yet if power corrupts, why would we want to win it for the people? Do we want to corrupt them?
Ruth, a psychiatrist based in Hamilton, Canada, the Founding Executive Director of Under the Willows, an arts-based program for children facing harsh circumstances, wrote in her first post, “I grew up in a politically active family, among family friends who were constantly engaged in passionate conversations about social and political issues.” Here she was being a bit modest, since her father was one of the founders of the New Democratic Party, the most progressive of Canada’s three major parties. “Thus, as I listened in as a child I absorbed their concerns, passion and commitment. I became aware of the many 'abuses of power' in the world, and engaged in 'power struggles' with my Mom, both of which led me to wonder about power. These early life experiences guided me into the field of work I did [psychiatry] for over 40 years. I wonder more than I know about power. While growing up, it always seemed to be a 'bad thing' yet when I first started my work as a therapist, I realized that my clients had very little 'power' and in my view, they needed more!”
Elena, a Greek drama therapist who moved into the camps of Lesbos during the influx of more than a million refugees from Syria in 2015, wrestled with the apparently contradictory aspects of power when writing to the class, “During the last few months we created a group of musicians, Syrian refugees and Greek young people, who came together to create new music that infused elements of both Greek and Arabic music. We were invited to participate in a concert outside the camp and performed in front of 1,000 people, refugees and locals. The audience went crazy. ... People were dancing, hugging, crying. What was this kind of power that was created between people? And then suddenly the organizers of the concert [an international Non-Government Organization] cut off the microphones. They said that the band was taking too much time. Power from above was dumped on us. We gave a fight and kept them on stage until they finished their last song. How about this power? How to respond to power from above with power from below?”
The discussion of these contrasting (and confusing) experiences of “power” continued until we were able to contrast it with another activity Intimately connected and yet diametrically opposed to it: authority. This contrast has been most clearly articulated in the last quarter of the twentieth century by my colleagues at the East Side Institute, Fred Newman and Lois Holzman who, in 2004, wrote, “Power (or the world “power” if you prefer), no doubt, has multiple meanings. But, as we have long argued, the socio-political sense of power is best understood in its dialectical relationship to authority. … Authority goes from the top, down. It is imposed. Most importantly, it must be known. Power comes from the bottom up. It is expressed. It is created. Obviously, in ordinary language, power and authority are often treated as synonymous. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. … the commonplace confusion of the two, power and authority, says a great deal about the authoritarian structure of our ontic, now worldwide, culture” (Newman and Holzman, 2004, p.73)
While this distinction was not new with Newman and Holzman—it has been a part of the often-contentious dialogue between Marxists and anarchists over the last 150 years—they gave voice to it in a way that could be heard by the students in my class, and, I dare say, by other contemporary non-ideologically-dependent progressives. Newman’s and Holzman’s understanding of the distinction between power and authority, as well as the ongoing dialectical connection of the two, is rooted decades of experience in organizing people to exercise power and challenge authority. The overarching authority they have been helping people challenge is the knowledge paradigm, which is embedded in all the institutional authorities—education, law, politics, economics, psychology, science, religion—of our inequitable and failing social structure.
Challenging authority, as we know, is a very difficult and often dangerous activity. Generating power from below is a creative, and inherently messy, social activity. The inability to distinguish between the two, while simultaneously navigating their dialectical unity, has proven to be the rocks upon which many a progressive movement has floundered and sunk. What has helped us avoid hitting those rocks, we believe, is our embrace and development of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, which we approach as a relational activity between people with different levels and kinds of experience, skill, knowledge and emotional development. In the process of building the ZPD together the group learns and develops and is able to exercise its power.
Before going any further I want to make clear what we mean by generating power and how we understand the ZPD.
Social and political activism can be divided into two distinct, although often complimentary, types of activities. The first, which is what most people have in mind when speaking of political activism, is that which protests against what is. It usually takes the form of demonstrations, including marches, rallies, occupations, and riots. It can take the form of strikes or boycotts. When it lasts long enough and generates enough energy it can even be expressed in elections and/or violent uprisings. Its energy is primarily destructive; its power is its ability to destabilize, even smash, the status quo.
The second kind of social and political activism, and the kind that my colleagues and I at the East Side Institute having been helping to lead for the last half century, is the building of organizations and activities from the bottom up that help those building them to meet their wants and needs and generate new wants and needs. The energy of this form of social activism is primarily creative and transformative; its power is to develop individuals, groups and communities and to engage existing social reality by deconstructing and reconstructing it, in the process, generating something qualitatively new.
These two types of political and social activism can and often do support, learn and draw energy from each other. However, the limit of protest activism, we believe, is that while it knows what it’s against, it doesn’t have the methodological tools to generate development once the “enemy” agrees to negotiate or is destroyed. The revolutions of the twentieth century, first among them the Russian Revolution which gave us Vygotsky, were made possible by massive explosions of power from the grassroots, but all too quickly solidified into rigid authority. They were focused on destroying the past, but the past can’t be destroyed, it can only be reorganized. On the other hand, the creative, transformative form of social activism constantly generates power through the activity of building grassroots organizations that engage and reorganize the dead weight (the authority) of the past. It doesn’t postpone development until after the revolution; the ongoing development it generates through the daily exercise of power is the revolution.
To understand how this is possible, we must turn to the Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky’s discovery (or observation or framing and articulation) of the Zone of Proximal Development as the means of language and social development among babies and small children has had a significant impact not only on developmental psychology, education and linguists. Building on Vygotsky, Newman’s and Holzman’s discovery (or observation or framing and articulation), has been that the zpd can and does extend way beyond early childhood. Our ha grassroot organizing showed us that adults can continue to develop across the life span if they are supported to find ways of performing “a head taller than they are.” By “development,” we don’t mean only the cognitive acquisition of knowledge, we mean also the emergence of new social skills, new emotions, an increased worldliness, and an expanding sense of what’s possible. What allows this to happen is the social relationality of constantly creating (and recreating) new zpds.
Here is how Newman and Holzman explain our understanding of the zpd:
“A zpd is, we think, simply a form of life in which people collectively and relationally create developmental learning which goes beyond what any individual in the group could learn on her or his “own.” For many contemporary orthodox Vgotsykians, what happens in the zpd is relatively traditional cognitive learning. In our opinion, this reformist point of view reduces the Vygotskian zpd to, at best, a radical technique for enhancing standardized learning. But it does not heed Vygotsky’s revolutionary demand to create a new psychology and, thereby, a new unit of study for psychology—a social unit rather than an individualized unit.” (Newman and Holzman, 1996).
The organizing of zpds, that is, the experimenting with new activities in which people collectively and relationally create their own development as a group is what creative transformational social activism does and, in so doing, it generates power. The building activity is developmental to those engaged in it. There’s something very special about belonging to a group that you are a part of creating, that didn’t exist before, that got built through you and others working and playing together. You not only have the group you’ve created, you also have new kinds of relationships with you fellow builders, relationships nurtured and supported by the very organization, the community, you’ve built. And in the process, you develop all kinds of social and leadership skills. Put another way, the building of such organizations is simultaneously a tool for generating development and power and is itself a new development and a new power force in our world.
How does this building-activity guard against its power calcifying into authority? Again, allow me to share Newman’s and Holzman’s articulation of this process. “What must we do to recreate the zpd continuously so that the environment does not insidiously interpret its activity to death (as even the best of them are prone to do)? We must perform relationally. … [in order] to sustain a developmental learning community. For it is only in performing—a human skill which for most of us is left to atrophy after early childhood—that we can be who we are and what we are not (a head taller than ourselves). Thus, the form of life in the ever-changing zpds that make up our community environment is filled with play—that is, it is performatory.” (Newman and Holzman, 1995, p.165) It’s by continuing to do what we don’t know how to do, that is, by constantly reorganizing and regenerating our zpd, that we continue to develop and generate power and guard against the authority of knowing and the hierarchy and stasis that comes with it.
I would now like to share one example of a zpd, built by adults, that sustained itself, grew and continued to develop for a decade. It was called UX, the “U” for university and the “X” for the unknown. It was a free university-like school of continuing development for people of all ages and all educational backgrounds. Its classes were offered on weekends or weekday nights, so that people who worked during the day could attend. Its student body was overwhelmingly drawn from poor working-class communities of color in the New York City. It had no grades and offered no degrees. People took courses of curiosity and for the fun of learning. Its teachers were all volunteers who taught for the joy of sharing their skills and knowledge.
The teachers ranged from academics with doctorates to people drawn from the student body. The academic teachers taught classes in everything from American history to physics. Professional artists taught dance, acting, improv, drawing, collage, playwrighting, fiction and memoir writing. Business people taught classes in resume writing, financial literacy, and how to start you own business. Nurses and doctors taught classes on diabetes management and nutrition. Fellow students taught everything from sewing, jewelry making, sign language to navigating the New York subway system. The point is, UX was a zpd full of people with very different experiences and skills supporting each other to grow and learn how to create a school that addresses their interests, wants and needs. While some of the teachers had academic backgrounds or even earned their livings at the university, none of us had ever run a school before. Like babies who can’t talk and emerge as speakers, we all started UX not knowing how to do it and emerged as grassroots educators.
UX emerged in 2010 from the All Stars Project, which for the previous three decades had concentrated on building free, after-school development programs with young people from poor communities. Repeatedly over the years, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and the older siblings of young people involved in All Stars programs would, say things like: “I don’t know what you did with my kid, but he wants to live again;” or, “I wish I had found the All Stars when I was young.” There was clearly a hunger to learn and develop in the poor communities, so we decided to see if people were willing and able to generate an activity, build an organization, create an environment, participate in a zpd, to promote that learning and development. I had been active with the All Stars for almost 30 years when we launched UX and I became, or more accurately, I played at being, its associate dean. I performed my way into the role.
The key to understanding UX as a zpd is that all of its students and teachers were volunteers. They donated their time, energy and skills to bringing the school into continuing existence and growth. Student volunteers produced the classes and the developmental outings to cultural sites around the city. They ran the tech with the teachers, input student data into the UX data base, went out on the streets and got on the phones to organize hundreds of people to attend the Opening Day event that marked the beginning of each trimester. Perhaps most vitally, UX students got on the phones and called other students to remind them of upcoming classes that they’d registered for. Five thousand students don’t just show up; they’re organized to do so by their fellow students.
When UX students talk about their experience of the school they talk about the impact of the classes, the value of being exposed to new kinds of people and cultural activities, and, most relevant to our conversation here, of the development that comes from building the school together. Here’s Bernadene Weekes, a retired office manager for a construction firm:
“First of all, it’s very educational. In one class I learned the history of New York City. In another I learned how to get my finances together. I learned about our grand jury and justice system in a class taught by two leading civil rights attorneys. I took a class in “Acting for Everyone” and another in “Public Speaking,” which is helping me in talking to people on the street when I do UX street outreach. …
“UX is also culturally developmental. We’re afforded the opportunity to attend plays at the Castillo Theatre, poetry recitals by UX students, visiting dancers from Brazil, and a lot more. … Just meeting and socializing with the wide variety of people you meet … raises the quality of my life.
“I’ve also been able to contribute my skills to the building of UX. I worked for many years as an administrative office professional and now, as a UX volunteer, I use those skills to help … produce the UX Opening Day Development Coaching Operation. This it gives me something positive to fill my days and helps me keep my skills active and sharp.” (Bernadene Weekes, remarks at the “After School City” fundraising reception, June 2, 2015)
Theresa Chaney, who spent most of her life as a hospital worker, says of herself, “Growing up on the lower east side of Manhattan was tough. The poverty, crime and lack of resources – especially in our schools - did not nurture me or support my dreams. I have had good jobs and have been able to live comfortably in my adult life but the effects of poverty are hard to break. I have always struggled to fit in and always felt rejected by society. And I had been blaming myself and beating up on myself for feeling this way. That all changed when I walked through the doors here [at UX].” Along with the classes and cultural events, she cites her work as a volunteer builder of UX as key element in her development:
“As a part of our UX phone room team, I talk with so many different members of our bigger community - from other volunteer organizers to fundraisers to youth in our programs before, after and during the organizing shifts. These conversations ‘in the cracks’ are a big part of my development. Along with my UX classes and my work as a leader organizing for UX, I have been inspired to attend Borough of Manhattan Community College, where I organized an advocacy group for senior students and am now pursuing a one-year pilot nursing program. (Theresa Chaney, remarks at the “After School City” fundraising reception, June 13, 2016)
How does the pride and camaraderie extend beyond the specifics of building UX to a more active and extensive culture of citizenship? One way is reaching out to and involving other family and community members. Mary Hall a 68-year-old grandmother from Harlem, says, “I have been able to bring what I have learned to my family. I especially love sharing this with my ten-year-old granddaughter. I bring her to a lot of the UX events. She’s exposed to live theater, taking classes, and going on field trips in New York City.” (Mary Hall, OX Opening Day remarks, October 8, 2016)
Another result of building UX for some is in developing a sense of being part of and taking responsibility for a bigger world. Janetta King, an 18-year-old high school student, put it this way, “My time here is a big deal because I live in a poor community and there’s a lot of anger and violence. It’s easy where I live to get stuck without hope. What goes on here is so different than my school and my neighborhood because at UX people care about me and my development. And I’ve had the chance to try new things. I never would have been in plays or traveled to conferences in other cities—these are things I didn’t even think about a year ago!” (Janetta King, remarks at Fulani Reception, April 11, 2014).
In addition, UX nurtured a new organization called the Committee for Independent Community Action which grew by challenging, on the streets and at community meetings, ongoing attempts by the city of New York to privatize some of the city’s publicly owned, subsidized housing for the poor. (Many UX students live in public housing.) Gwen Dow-Chance, a pre-school teacher says, “One highlight [of my UX experience] was marching in the Harlem Day Parade in the UX contingent in opposition to attempts to privatize some our public housing.” (Gwen-Dow Chance, UX Opening Day remarks, October 8, 2016), and Mary Hall adds that, “Working on gathering signatures to prevent the privatization of New York City Housing Authority housing for low-income families has increased my desire to make a change.” (Hall 2016) This is an example of the interface of protest activism and building activism and how they can interface with and support each other.
The pandemic, with its subsequent lock-down of public gatherings in New York, proved a great challenge to UX. Its in person activities have, at this point, ceased. However, in the spirit of constantly reorganizing and reperforming our zpds, what has emerged is an expanded international version of the project called Let’s Learn! It is a project of the East Side Institute and Lloyds International Honors College of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Using Zoom and What App it will launch a pilot semester this fall. The online workshops and courses of Let’s Learn! will be free and will be taught by a diverse and fluid international volunteer faculty, with students and teachers from not only the U.S. but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Denmark—and that’s just to start.
UX minimized authority and constantly encouraged the exercise of power by its students and volunteer teachers. It’s the development and power generated by ten years of UX that has allowed us to reorganize and expand its zpd. As I said at the top, the energy of this form of social activism is primarily creative and transformative; its power is in developing individuals, groups and communities to be able to engage existing social reality by deconstructing and reconstructing it. In the process, generating something qualitatively new.
Thanks to our roots in Vygotsky and his tool-and-result methodology embodied in the zpd, we have been able to generate, now in many countries and cultures, a creative and constructive power utilizing a methodology that allows it to engage and minimize authority as an integral part of its activity. The key to all this is the stretching the ZPD into an organizing activity that can continuously engage, develop and transform human beings and he world we have built and are re-building.
References
Newman, F and Holzman, L. (1996) Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life. Praeger.
Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (2004) “Power, Authority and Pointless Conversation (The Developmental Discourse of Social Therapy.” In Furthering Talk: Advances in Discursive Therapies, ed. Tom Strong and David Pare. Kluwer Academic/Plenum. 73-86.