A Reflection on the Power of Words and Narratives
Aydin Areta

Never imagine that what you think and express, and the sharing of your personal awareness with others, is futile. If the world of words and narratives had no value, despotic governments throughout history would not have devoted all their instruments of repression to such an endless effort to dominate the world of narratives and words.

The long list of methods such powers use to control the world of words and narratives speaks for itself:
- monopolistic control of the media;
- use of every instrument of propaganda in the media and public space;
- an endless appetite to control educational content at every age;
- the absolute domination of censorship over the space of thought and books;
- restriction of social networks that can become platforms for exchanging thoughts and ideas within society;
- social exclusion and imprisonment of every artist, journalist and thinker who offers society a thought, narrative or art different from the official narrative.

All these methods, which openly seek to restrict the “world of words”, express a truth that has always stood before us: controlling the world of words and narratives is the most important and fundamental strategy of systems of repression, and precisely for this reason our resistance must begin here as well.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher associated with theories of power, is presented here as arguing that the world of words and narratives is not merely one of the “instruments of power”, but the most important source of power, one that systems of power must capture if their command over other instruments of control and repression is to become possible.

Yet “power” in Foucault’s thought is never simply concentrated. Power is everywhere and rises from everywhere: from an image, a poem, a narrative, a text—and from every thought you express as art, poetry or writing. Power is present in your personal narrative and your story, whose force you can set in motion through society.

Foucault also tells us, as the argument is presented here, that words and narratives shape our understanding of the world and its “regimes of truth”. Once these regimes of truth become institutionalised within our “everyday beliefs”, both our actions and our inaction come under the influence of power.

Power is everywhere, but it is not permanent. Every system of power requires continual renewal in order to sustain its social life. The obsessive persistence of systems of power in controlling words and narratives is rooted in their deep fear that this power may fail to renew itself. The history of systems of power shows that the hard power of a despotic system cannot prevent that system from being expelled from the shared narrative of individuals who, by choosing a “narrative of resistance”, create new sources of power within their society.

According to the Foucaultian reading presented here, contrary to what many of us imagine, the work of systems of power is not simply “hard control and repression”. Their work is “production”: producing narratives, producing words, producing ideology, producing the boundaries of words and their meanings, producing the catalogue of truth, producing the catalogue of which social truths matter.

Only by producing narratives can each individual within society be turned into a silent, frictionless cog in the machinery of a system of power. The work of systems of power is to produce these cogs and the command structures that set them turning. Our first responsibility is to make certain that we are not one of those cogs.

I would like to end this piece by returning to the importance of narratives in the life and endurance of our shared historical consciousness as a nation. Ferdowsi, following those enduring lines, “Come, let us not surrender the world to evil,” tells us:

Words will remain from you as a memorial;
do not hold words in such little worth.

With remarkable insight, he understood the value of his own speech and the power it would set in motion through the history of our shared consciousness. By retelling history and speaking of the historical roots of Iranians, he gave these people—whom the Arabs called *ajam*, rendered here as mute or unable to speak—an enduring narrative that even after a thousand years remains a source of shared wisdom and self-awareness.

Life will pass sooner than we imagine and another world will begin. We will join the millennia of eternal silence and this house will have other guests. This brief opportunity to live will end and there will be no second opportunity to narrate. Yet perhaps our story, and our honest narrative of the world in which we lived, may even after we are gone add weight to truth in the world and break the silence of history.

While we are here, let us surround despotism and falsehood with whatever capacities we possess: with art, poetry, music, literature, stubbornness, passion, genius and invention, and with the strength and courage to tell our own story and speak the truth of what has happened and what is happening.