The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics

Praise for

The Power Manual

We need to get comfortable talking about and wielding power. In this book, Cyndi Suarez does a great job of sharing theories about power — academic, literary, and spiritual. There are also several unique practical games to build people’s capacity to understand and leverage power, which I’m looking forward to trying out.

— Susan Misra, Co-Director, Management Assistance Group

Think you know all about power? Think again! Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, Suarez gives practical guidance for cultivating individual consciousness and building social power. She reminds us that the state of being of the social change agent is the most powerful force for change. We can fight for freedom, or we can enact freedom.

— Cynthia Silva Parker, Senior Associate, Interaction Institute for Social Change

Cyndi Suarez has written a book for our time. The social movements of our day have a conflicted relationship with power, endlessly deconstructing its evils while actively yearning for it. We forget that in any conflict the tendency is to become the mirror image of your opponent. There is great confusion between the struggle for power and the quest of liberation. Cyndi has written a comprehensive operations manual for living into the tension of these distinctions and quite literally enacting our way to freedom.

— Gibran Rivera, Master Facilitator

Most discussions of power explore the intellectual, political and economic dynamics that generate imbalances in our society. Perhaps that’s why power can seem so immutable: Our efforts to think or transact our way into a social reordering seem to result in little more than incremental change. In her book, The Power Manual, Cyndi Suarez brilliantly illuminates what’s missing. To exercise and understand power is an embodied, creative, spiritual and at times even playful act.

— Deborah Frieze, author, Walk Out Walk On and Founding President, Boston Impact Initiative

This book is masterful. In The Power Manual, Cyndi Suarez refuses to accept the silos by which we organize our thinking and fields of knowledge. The result is an examination of power that honors the fullness of who we are as individual human beings and as social creatures. Moving across the political, spiritual, psychological, and gender self, she helps us understand power across our lived experience. The Power Manual is the handbook every person who considers themselves working to bring about a more just and compassionate world should read and carry with them throughout their journey.

— Ceasar McDowell, Professor of the Practice of Civic Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cyndi Suarez draws insights from a diverse array of intellectual and spiritual traditions and her own experience as a social change practitioner to show that the power for social change is already within us. But we must exercise it in a way that shifts from a dominating power over to a liberating power with. The Power Manual is an accessible yet deep exploration into the complexity of power, as well as guide to group exercises for unleashing our collective power.

— Penn Loh, Senior Lecturer and Director of Community Practice, Tufts Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Practice

Copyright © 2018 by Cyndi Suarez.

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.

Illustration © iStock

Printed in Canada. First printing May 2018.

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of The Power Manual should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below. To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers

P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada

(250) 247-9737

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Suarez, Cyndi, 1971-, author

The power manual : how to master complex power dynamics / Cyndi Suarez.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-86571-881-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55092-674-3 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-77142-269-7 (EPUB)

1. Power (Social sciences). I. Title.

New Society Publishers’ mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision.

Contents

Introduction

Section One

POWER + IDENTITY | Refusing Powerless Identities

Power + Identity Intro

1 | Effective Interactions

Supremacist Power and Liberator Power

2 | Interaction Patterns

Patterns of Domination and Patterns of Resistance

3 | Transmission of Affect

Life-affirming and Life-draining Affects

4 | The Sources of Power Relations

Developmental Stages and Mind Forms

5 | Powerless and Powerful Identities

Hegemony and Supreme Power

Section Two

POWER + CHOICE | Triggering Choice

Power + Choice Intro

6 | Decision and Choice

The Efficient Unconscious and the Effort of Intention

7 | The Social Aspects of Choice

Participation in Decision Making

8 | Supreme Choice

Mastery Over Inner Experience

Section Three

POWER + THRESHOLDS | Creating the Self

Power + Thresholds Intro

9 | Rites of Passage

Self Formation in Liminal Space

10 | Theater as Interaction and Identity Creation

High Status and Low Status Characters

Section Four

POWER + GAMES | Playing with Power

Power + Games Intro

11 | The Purpose of Play

Play As Evolution

12 | The Structure of Games

Ordering Interactions

13 | The Party Game

Sign Reading

14 | The Stand, Sit, Kneel Game

Deconstruction

15 | The Tongue Twister Game

Reconstruction

16 | The Meisner Game

Reconstruction

17 | The Yes, But/Yes, And Game

Sign Reading, Deconstruction

18 | The Circle Game

Reconstruction

19 | The Lane Game

Reconstruction

20 | The Body Language Game

Sign Reading

21 | The Switching Game

Reconstruction

22 | The Status Master Game

Sign Reading, Deconstruction, Reconstruction

23 | The Scene Study Game

Deconstruction

24 | The Character Study Game

Reconstruction

References

Index

About the Author

A Note about the Publisher

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book

I’ve been wanting to write this book since I was a teenager. That’s when I started reading feminist, political, and metaphysical theory. In my life, and in my mind, I was exploring the power that structures society and that social-change agents work to shift, and the power at the root of the soul, of one’s manifestation in this life.

I grew up in Roxbury, Boston’s historic black neighborhood. As a teenager, I understood that my neighborhood was marginal in the city of Boston. I wanted to understand how this subordinate social positioning was created and maintained. In a sense, it was a contrast to my blackness-loving home. My mother immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico with me in her belly. She was raised in the Ayala Family, well-known as artists who hold up what is black and African in Puerto Rican culture. If there is one thing that characterizes the Ayalas, it’s their unmitigated love for black people. Hearing my family talk about black Puerto Rican culture, history, and music with passion and reverence made an impression on me. It was as if no one had ever informed them that black people are generally positioned as low status in many societies.

I observed interactions and devoured books. Once I discovered a great author, I read all of her or his books — Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, Foucault, Jane Roberts, Gurumayi, Muktananda, Nityananda, Abhinavagupta, to name a few. I eventually identified a core question that drove me through the next few decades: What is the relationship between the freedom of social change and the liberation of spiritual traditions?

In college I studied feminist theory and social-change organizational models. I knew I wanted to work in social change in a praxis way, working in the field and as a thinker, writer, and strategist. My approach has been to move around within the field to better understand how it functions as a system. I have worked in social service agencies, advocacy organizations, grassroots organizing networks, philanthropic foundations, a leadership and management firm, and a strategy center. I have found that social-change agents use the same power frameworks and tools that the dominant use.

Currently, my professional life is defined by writing and consulting, mostly strategy and innovation. I specialize in network approaches and elegant design. I have a particular interest in social movements, and recent work includes projects with the national leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and the national immigrant youth movement network, United We Dream.

My spiritual work has always been a part of me but finds its realization in the practice of Siddha Yoga, a spiritual path arising from the teachings of Kashmir Shaivism, considered the highest iteration of spiritual mysticism. Kashmir Shaivism affirms the supreme identity of the individual self, the intrinsic connection with the Divine. It offers a powerful model of consciousness.

Finally, this book was greatly influenced by my daughter, Saphia Suarez. She started acting at the age of four in local children’s theater programs. Over the years, I drove Saphia to and from numerous classes, rehearsals, and performances. Once, when she was a teenager and had been at it for over 10 years, I went to see a presentation from an acting workshop at Wheelock Family Theater in Boston titled Theater of the Absurd. The performance was a piece from Waiting for Godot, where the two student actors played out a seemingly banal dominant/subordinate interaction in which the subordinate had to find and utilize the moment where the dynamic could be interrupted and transformed. Excitement rose in me as I watched, instantly realizing this kind of thinking and practice as the missing piece in my book. After the performance, I ran up to the teacher and asked her about status and improvisational theater. She recommended Keith Johnstone, the leading acting teacher for this approach. This launched my personal passion for and study of acting as a liberatory practice. My daughter decided to study acting, and as the writing of this book comes to a conclusion, she begins her studies at Yale University’s drama department. As we went through the process of college application and selection last year, she told me, The way you took acting so seriously shifted the way I approached it. It used to be a passion. Now it’s my purpose. But it was she who taught me how to take acting seriously.

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The Power Manual brings these many experiences and ideas together and explores major concepts of power, with a focus on the dynamics of domination and liberation. It proposes a new theory of power based on enactment — the bringing of something to life through one’s actions. The book weaves together thinking from feminist theory, postmodern theory, sociology, psychoanalysis, neuroendocrinology, business management, developmental psychology, political theory, spiritual mysticism, economics, anthropology, and theater. It looks at key ways that power is deployed and transformed so that one may enact freedom.

Key ideas cut across the many aforementioned genres. For example, the fact that difference is a trigger for power dynamics and also a key way that one unconsciously evaluates environmental data, with a bias toward similarity; the critical role that attention plays and that it is also a resource one’s body uses sparingly; that interactions structure social systems and are also sites of resistance; the primacy of the two core emotional states of joy and anxiety; and the constant finding that power skills are learnable.

The book has 24 chapters across four sections — identity, choice, thresholds, and games. The first 12 chapters contain a story, key ideas, and frameworks. The last 12 chapters are power games. Ultimately, the role of identity in power dynamics is that of refusing powerless identities and enacting powerful identities. Choice allows one to move away from dominant power interactions, toward egalitarian interactions, but it requires attention, a limited resource. Thresholds, or points of transition, allow one to understand and master the process of power expansion and perceive the everyday points of choice. Games order and reorder interactions with others and the self, and thus are perfect vehicles for learning power relationships.

This approach shifts the focus of the actor to the self, to one’s ability to imagine, and one’s discipline of attention and effort in the pursuit of freedom. I write in a stripped down, stylized manner, focusing on the core ideas, that allows the tracking of power frameworks and practices across different genres and fields. I place citations for the key writings that influenced my work in a Notes chapter at the end, and focus on my own thinking in the body. This simplifies the chapters and clarifies my contribution to the ideas I weave together. While the subject of power is a complicated one, my aim is to create a book that is sophisticated in its thinking and accessible.

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Why do power relations matter in social change, or for any of us who care about living the best life we can live? Because we have to be clear about the type of power we seek. We need power to move through the world and construct a meaningful life, but we must ensure that it is liberatory — allowing us to thrive and create the beauty that can come only from who one is now as this