Power and Community is a series of essays asking how a community comes to see itself and its own position, when both the power it faces and the power it wields work partly by shaping how it sees. The first essay proposes a theoretical model it calls eidetic, meant to account for what operates beneath any political or activist organisation, not least in how it organises itself and forms a strategy. The second essay further develops the idea of eidetic attention, meaning the capacity of a group to perceive its own situation coherently enough so as to act on it rather than be pushed by someone else’s picture of it. It tests that idea against a debate in Thucydides and the manufacture of consent before the Iraq war, then turns to living movements that aim toward this practice, leaving open, rather than settling, whether clear perception is any defence once a state or hegemon sets out to crush a community. It reworks Gramsci’s account of consent (the persuasive aspect of hegemony), through Ioan Couliano on the manipulation of the imagination and Ernesto Laclau on how collective subjects come to exist.

All In supplies the second essay both with its starting diagnosis of how movements come to evade their own original task and with the proposal (and call!) to move beyond this common occurrence, and in turn the essay argues that both require a quality of shared perception that organisational method alone cannot achieve.

Read the full essay here: https://diodotus1.substack.com/p/power-and-community-ii-the-eidetic