Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic

George Kokkinidis,Marco Checchi

doi:10.1177/1350508420973304

George Kokkinidis, Marco Checchi

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420973304

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Journal: Organization	Publication Date: Jan 7, 2021
Citations: 3	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: De Montfort University, University of Leicester

Abstract

This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad’s intra-active agential ontology and Foucault’s microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power.

Highlights

Imagine entering a clinic and finding no doctor: would that still be a clinic? Imagine being ill but once you enter the clinic, you are not a patient
The traditional clinic can be defined as an apparatus where power is performed through a series of stable boundaries: intra-active entanglements that decree divisions, exclusions and set practices
Each boundary performatively constitutes a power relation: every time passive patients submit their bodies to the expertise of the doctor; medical power is affirmed and the boundary is reinforced

Summary

Introduction

Imagine entering a clinic and finding no doctor: would that still be a clinic? Imagine being ill but once you enter the clinic, you are not a patient. While the traditional clinic expresses the institutional integrations of sedimented power relations, KIA is the revolutionary codification of dispersed and otherwise isolated points of resistance: against austerity, against the state, against medical profession, against the passivity of patients, against the boundaries that isolate the disease from the body and the individual from the community.

Results

Conclusion