How Power Shapes Writing [Part 1]

Productive Power, Culture, and the Subject

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

— Bertolt Brecht (translated excerpt)

From Power to Culture: The Making of the Subject

When power comes to mind, most of us still imagine the idea of repression. We picture a government forbidding certain ideas from circulating, or a boss demanding compliance against our will. These are recognizable forms of power because they announce themselves openly; they draw clear lines between domination and resistance. We know where power sits, and we know what it looks like.

The more pervasive form of power today, however, rarely appears in that way.

Power works best when it disappears into everyday life. When it no longer looks like power at all.

Power that relies on continuous force carries inherent limits: it reveals that the order is unstable, consumes energy and resources through ongoing correction, and, by making domination visible, invites resistance in return.

Productive power, on the other hand, shapes the conditions within which thought takes form well before anyone notices those conditions exist.

As Bertolt Brecht suggested, our defect is that we can think, and so power’s strength lies not in fighting thought but in guiding it without appearing to do so.

Think of it in terms of subtle orientations — ways of moving through the social world that feel natural rather than imposed. You are given a series of identities to choose from, together with a set of invisible instructions about how to move up and down within hierarchies, where certain actions are rewarded as good taste while others are labeled naïve or unserious.

Eventually, those orientations become internalized. The guidance fades from view, leaving only the feeling that some paths make more sense than others.

Once that happens, subjects begin to regulate themselves while believing they are simply exercising choice. They come to see themselves as measurable objects — comparing output, tracking progress, wondering whether they are keeping pace with standards that seem obvious but were never consciously chosen. The “good student,” the “productive worker,” the “patriotic citizen” are more than social roles; they are forms through which power transforms expectations into personal aspiration.

Truth itself begins to feel less like a direct relationship to reality and more like a relationship to legitimacy. Actions that do not fit established grids risk being dismissed because they fail to be recognizable.

Careers, credibility, and access depend on remaining inside a certain frame, and so thought adjusts itself preemptively: the pause before asking a question, the sentence rewritten to sound more reasonable, the instinct to soften an idea before it risks sounding out of place.

Power no longer needs to apply pressure in such circumstances. You don’t have to be silenced once you have already learned what to think — and how to think it.

As a writer, I’m constantly reminded of this dynamic. Platforms do not dictate what we say; they shape what becomes visible. What is visible teaches you to anticipate what lands and what circulates. Gradually, the act of writing begins to orient itself toward the logic of metrics, turning writing into a game of performance. The reward is that your writing is treated as serious. You earn a place within a recognizable hierarchy that can only be maintained if you stay consistent.

And this adjustment is not unique to writing.

It repeats itself across almost every domain of social life: the employee who learns which ideas move a meeting forward and which close doors; the church member who senses which themes feel safe to discuss and which remain unspoken; the artist who gravitates toward styles more likely to spread; the scientist who follows questions that seem worth pursuing while leaving others unexplored.

When enough people learn to anticipate the same rewards, their individual adaptations begin to converge. What starts as personal strategy becomes shared expectation. Over time, these patterns harden into cultural standards: ways of speaking, writing, and interpreting that feel natural precisely because everyone is already orienting toward them.

Listen closely and you can hear some of these standards echoed in ordinary language:

Time is money. If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way. Success leaves clues. Attention is the new currency. Everything happens for a reason. Numbers don’t lie. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.

These phrases feel familiar, almost obvious — part of the shared language through which we make sense of effort, success, fate, and value. They keep us moving, but within a space already mapped out, where the stories we repeat teach us where to go without ever naming the boundaries.

Sometimes productive power even disguises itself as openness. A Super Bowl halftime show may feel transgressive. A formerly marginal voice earning recognition; a cultural moment that seems to signal some shift. Yet when an idea becomes aestheticized and widely applauded without demanding any structural change, power is merely legitimizing what it can control. The appearance of inclusion turns into one of the most efficient ways of stabilizing the existing order.

It feels as if the best ideas are simply rising on their own. What we lose sight of is how those ideas travel — and how that movement is shaped long before we notice it.

This is where media, fiction, and propaganda do their work.

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