Intentionality, “society”, and the technique of the word

AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original

Rarely, almost imperceptibly, a person sometimes ceases to experience the world merely as a given and begins to experience it as a question: what is natural, and what has been arranged so that it can no longer be distinguished from the natural and is experienced not merely as natural, but as necessary.

When this question arises, it reveals that the “necessary” is not always a property of things, but often the result of an earlier act that remained unseen. Before the manipulation of meanings, there is something more fundamental: a direction of the will. An intentionality, if the word fits here, that is not yet rhetoric and not yet an institution; it is the elementary move to make the other person predictable, available, measurable, and therefore manageable. Power does not begin with the word “power”. It begins where the other person’s freedom ceases to be tolerated as an indeterminate possibility and is turned into order. This decision may be clothed in a thousand pretexts — security, progress, unity, prosperity, salvation — but the pattern remains: the few determining the form of life of the many.

What is historically paradoxical is not that there are strong and weak people; differences in strength also exist in nature. The human paradox is that the powerful are not satisfied with strength. They want something higher: they want legitimacy. They want imposition to appear not as imposition, but as “the way things are”. This is where the technique of discourse is born. Violence requires presence. Legitimation allows absence. Once people are persuaded, the one imposing power can be absent and yet remain in force.

For this legitimation to work, its object must first be created. And here enters the word you identified: “society”. “Society” is not a natural being like a mountain or the sea. It is a name that makes the multitude appear to be a single thing. In reality, the multitude consists of countless lives, countless stories, countless objections. Yet the word “society” compresses them into one image: a body. And as soon as a body appears, something else can appear too: the “interests of the body”, the “health of the body”, the “danger to the body”. So treatment can appear. So a manager can appear. So someone “entitled” to speak on behalf of the body can appear.

Thus manipulation does not begin with a lie. It begins with compression. With replacing multiplicity with a name that carries authority. Power does not initially need to tell you something untrue. It needs to give you a way of thinking that makes the outcome inevitable. To make you see the multitude as “society”, discipline as “order”, objection as “threat”, disobedience as “violation”, fear as “realism”. Then, once these are established, the rest of the machinery works almost by itself.

This is the point where words acquire an authoritarian character: not because they are harsh, but because they appear neutral. The most powerful imposition is the one that looks not like a command but like a description. “Society needs…”, “reality demands…”, “the law stipulates…”, “it is natural…”, “what is normal is…”. All these phrases conceal the same move: they remove responsibility from the person imposing something and transfer it to an abstract entity — society, reality, nature, normality. This is how power disguises itself: it does not command, “I want”. It declares, “This is how it is”.

Why did the few historically come to dominate the many? There is no single cause. There is a combination of converging tendencies. First, the need for coordination: as people grow in number, life requires organisation, and organisation produces roles. Then, accumulation: whoever controls resources controls time, and whoever controls time gains an advantage over the needs of others. Next, the psychological pleasure of security and superiority: domination offers a sense of immortality within time, as though you could stabilise the world so that it would no longer threaten you. And finally, technique: once it is discovered that you can govern not only with weapons but with definitions, imposition becomes subtler, more lasting, “civilised”. Power matures when it understands that the best obedience is not imposed, but arises within the subject as reason.

This is what is outrageous: power is not content to restrict you. It wants to shape you so that the restriction seems reasonable to you. It wants to train you to utter, of your own accord, the words that bind you. To identify with the “we” it fashioned in order to govern you, to fear the “deviation” it named in order to bring you back into line, to accept the “reality” it constructed in order to close off your horizon.

And yet the crack exists: the moment when you see that “society” is a name, that the “normal” is a measure, that the “natural” is a transfer of authority, that “must” is a technique for turning choice into necessity. At that point you are not tearing down the world; you are tearing down the disguise. And stripping away the disguise is perhaps the first real act of freedom within a world that presupposed you without asking you.