Essay explores how codification influences power structures, highlighting implications for political realities.
This essay develops a perspective on power by linking Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra to theories of reality construction through a model of codification. Drawing on historical materials from Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times and contemporary cases, it shows how allusion, illusion, and delusion operate through processual social constructions. Allusive codification draws power from authority, illusive codification gives social life to imaginable objects, and delusive codification uses reasons and data to defend fragile realities. To understand how political realities are composed, stabilized, and destabilized, scholars must study codification at close range and in detail.
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Chang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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