Power works best when power is rarely actually needed

Evidence

The analyses which follow are meant as a contribution, using the example of power, to clarifying both the relationship between the life-world and technique and the conditions under which that relationship develops. The general theory of communication media helps transfer a theme more commonly examined with reference to science to the practical arenas of power/law/politics. The capacity for increase of the power-code, its effects in abstracting, idealizing and schematizing, its reductions and short cuts to orientation are here paralleled by other types of technicalization – for instance in the realms of logic or finance. At one and the same time they are conceived of as ‘deviations’ from the basic phenomena of social life, as ‘normalized improbabilities’, and as structures which always assume that influence normally does not have to be based implicitly or explicitly on power, but can be exercised with ease and practised as determined by the situation, without making it essential and without having much depend on it. Power presupposes that not too many problems which can be solved only by power will arise; in the same way that, within communication regulated by power, it must be assumed that not too many communication problems will turn into code problems. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 728

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: True pacification requires reducing power, not accumulating it — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 824; Power grows stronger the less visible it is — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 42; The most effective power operates invisibly, without coercion or open resistance. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 42