Forms of legitimation, power and the word constitute a single theoretical problem once one recognises that no social authority is sustained by force alone, and no relation of domination reproduces itself without producing a vocabulary capable of making it appear acceptable, normal, technical, moral, natural or even desirable. Legitimacy is not merely the legal recognition of authority; it is the historical process through which a contingent relation of power comes to present itself as reasonable, inevitable or self-evident. In this sense, the word is not a secondary instrument that merely describes power after the fact; it is one of power’s conditions of possibility. To name something as “science”, “family”, “market”, “democracy”, “map”, “care”, “progress”, “nature” or “normality” is to produce a framework of intelligibility that determines which practices become visible, which subjects may speak, which injuries can be recognised, and which alternatives remain thinkable. The authors examined here allow us to construct a shared argument: Star and Griesemer show that scientific authority emerges not from full consensus, but from practical coordination across heterogeneous social worlds through boundary objects; Luhmann radicalises this insight by relocating the social from individual consciousness to communication, making the word an operation that produces social reality; Fortunati demonstrates that the capitalist family legitimates reproductive exploitation by naming it love, service or nature; Tronto shows that democracy is impoverished when care is excluded from public language; Kurgan warns that maps and satellite images acquire authority because they appear to speak truth without interpretation; and Muñoz argues that the word queer must resist pragmatic capture if it is to retain its utopian force. Taken together, these works suggest that legitimation operates as a grammar: it organises what may be said, what must be obeyed, what can be measured, and what can be imagined. Power, therefore, does not only repress; it also translates, classifies, naturalises and projects futures. The legitimate word is the word that succeeds in concealing its own conditions of production and presenting itself as if it emerged from reality itself.

A first form of legitimation appears in science and technocracy, where power clothes itself in methodological neutrality. Star and Griesemer allow us to understand that science does not advance because all actors share identical convictions, but because certain material and linguistic devices enable cooperation without fully resolving difference. Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology functioned as an institutional ecology in which professional scientists, amateurs, administrators, patrons, collectors, animals, maps, forms and collections could participate in a common enterprise even while assigning different meanings to the same objects. Scientific legitimation emerged through a double operation: on the one hand, standardisation of methods disciplined practices of collection, labelling and archiving; on the other, boundary objects—specimens, repositories, maps, species categories and standardised forms—allowed each social world to preserve a degree of autonomy while contributing to generalisable findings. Thus, an animal skin, a label or a field note was not simply a natural datum, but a word materialised within a protocol; its authority depended upon having been correctly inscribed into a chain of translations. Kurgan transfers this problem to the contemporary regime of satellite imagery. In that context, the digital map, aerial photograph or remotely sensed mosaic acquires legitimacy because it appears to offer an objective view from nowhere. Yet this apparent transparency is profoundly political: every satellite image is mediated by sensors, resolutions, algorithms, owners, military interests, commercial infrastructures, humanitarian claims and expert interpretation. Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations presentation on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction makes this especially clear: annotated satellite images were offered as facts, not as interpretative arguments. In both cases, power legitimates itself through the production of evidence that appears to speak for itself, although it actually speaks through institutions, procedures, conventions and hierarchies of credibility. Science and cartography are not false because they are mediated; they are powerful because they transform mediation into public truth.

A second form of legitimation lies in the naturalisation of historical relations of exploitation, especially when language converts labour into destiny, affection or private responsibility. Fortunati offers one of the most forceful critiques of this process: capitalism does not exploit only waged labour in the factory, but also the unwaged reproductive labour that produces and restores labour power. The family appears as a space of love, intimacy and nature, yet it functions as a capitalist institution in which women’s domestic labour is mediated through the male wage and indirectly appropriated by capital. The legitimating operation consists precisely in denying that this labour is labour at all: cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring, sustaining emotional life and reproducing the labouring body are coded as femininity, vocation, conjugal duty or personal service. The word “love” can therefore operate as mystification: not because affection is unreal, but because its presence helps conceal a relation of production. Tronto extends this critique by showing that liberal democracy has inherited a division between public and private life that removes care from the centre of citizenship. When care is imagined as domestic, feminine or marketable, society avoids democratically debating who cares, who receives care, under what conditions, with which resources, and according to which hierarchies of race, gender and class. Neoliberal legitimation displaces collective responsibility onto isolated individuals: each family must manage its dependency, each consumer must purchase care, each worker must administer precarity. As a result, the word “responsibility” is narrowed until it means individual self-sufficiency, even though all human life is structured by interdependence. Tronto’s concept of caring with politicises this problem: to care democratically is not to sentimentalise politics, but to publicly contest the just distribution of caring responsibilities. Fortunati and Tronto therefore converge in showing that power is legitimated when an entire architecture of dependency appears as private nature rather than political organisation.

A third form of legitimation resides in the communicative structure of the social itself. Luhmann enables us to think of society not as composed primarily of individuals who then communicate, but as composed of communications that produce systems, positions, expectations and possibilities for action. This does not deny the existence of persons; rather, it displaces the foundation of the social from consciousness to recursive operations of meaning. From this perspective, power should not be understood only as external imposition, but as the capacity to reduce complexity, stabilise expectations and make communicative continuity probable. An institution becomes legitimate when its communications succeed in presenting themselves as relevant within a system: law speaks in terms of legal/illegal, the economy in terms of payment/non-payment, politics in terms of government/opposition, science in terms of truth/untruth. Each system produces its own authority through codes that select what counts as valid. This perspective also helps us read Muñoz differently. If the heteronormative present attempts to close the horizon of possibility through a pragmatic grammar—marriage, military inclusion, state recognition, respectability—the word queer must resist becoming a fully administrable identity. For Muñoz, queerness is not simply “here”; it functions as a horizon, an anticipation of a world not yet realised. Its political force depends on not being exhausted by existing forms of recognition. Hence his critique of assimilationist LGBT politics: when the word “liberation” is reduced to access to existing institutions, it loses its utopian charge and becomes a legitimation of the present order. Aesthetics, performance, the memory of bars, poetry, punk culture, public sex and ephemeral gestures preserve, for Muñoz, fragments of a futurity that cannot be fully absorbed by dominant rationality. While Luhmann shows that every social order depends upon communications that reduce complexity, Muñoz insists that certain words and practices must keep the complexity of the possible open. Legitimation stabilises; utopia destabilises. The word may serve the system when it codes obedience, but it may also exceed it when it names what does not yet exist.

In synthesis, the forms of legitimation examined here reveal that modern power rarely presents itself as naked domination. It prefers to speak the language of evidence, nature, responsibility, efficiency, normality, inclusion or objectivity. Science legitimates itself when its protocols transform heterogeneous practices into generalisable facts; cartography legitimates itself when its images conceal the interpretation that sustains them; capitalism legitimates itself when it converts social reproduction into feminine love or private service; liberal democracy weakens itself when it excludes care from its public vocabulary; social systems reproduce themselves when they stabilise communicative codes; and queer politics loses force when its words are absorbed by institutional pragmatism. Yet these texts do not lead to absolute relativism, in which every word is merely manipulation. On the contrary, they allow us to distinguish between words that close discussion and words that open responsibility. The task is not to abandon science, maps, family, democracy, communication or utopia, but to interrogate their conditions of legitimacy: who speaks, from what position, through which mediations, on whose behalf, with which silences, and with what material effects. A just word is not one that pretends to stand outside power, but one that recognises its inscription within relations of power and remains open to public contestation. A critical theory of legitimation must therefore analyse both the devices that produce obedience and the practices that allow another organisation of the common world to be imagined. The central conclusion is that power consolidates itself when it monopolises the language of reality; it becomes contestable when its names are reopened, translated, disputed and redirected towards futures that are not guaranteed. Ultimately, politics begins when words cease to appear natural and become common matter for conflict, care and collective invention.

Bibliography
Fortunati, L. (1995) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Translated by H. Creek. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

Kurgan, L. (2013) Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books.

Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems. Translated by J. Bednarz Jr. with D. Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Muñoz, J.E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York University Press.

Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989) ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science, 19(3), pp. 387–420.

Tronto, J.C. (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York and London: New York University Press.