A first way to grasp this relation is through the problem of knowledge infrastructures. Mounier and Dumas Primbault argue that knowledge in the digital age depends upon infrastructures: repositories, standards, identifiers, platforms, governance arrangements, archives and maintenance practices. These systems do not merely support research; they shape what can circulate as legitimate knowledge, who can access it, and under what conditions it remains sustainable. Field-making here is infrastructural: the scholarly field is produced through material and institutional arrangements that determine visibility, preservation and authority. Strategy emerges in the governance of these infrastructures, particularly when open science attempts to resist enclosure by private platforms while still requiring stable technical and financial support. Power lies precisely in this tension: the capacity to make knowledge appear open, closed, accessible, indexed, measurable or invisible.
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Research Report 2018–2020 extends this insight by presenting science itself as a historically situated field made through archives, laboratories, instruments, collaborations and digital methods. Scientific knowledge is not produced outside history; it is constituted by changing systems of epistemic practice. The report’s emphasis on historical epistemology shows that fields of knowledge are shaped by material and technological conditions, including computational tools, data infrastructures and institutional networks. Strategy, in this sense, includes the historian’s methodological decision to treat science not as a sequence of discoveries but as a changing ecology of practices. Power appears in the ability of scientific institutions to define scales of analysis, legitimate research questions and organise the relation between past and present.
This infrastructural account of knowledge becomes politically sharper in Pasquale’s The Black Box Society. Pasquale argues that contemporary institutions increasingly exercise power through opacity: algorithmic systems rank, score, classify and exclude individuals while concealing the criteria through which decisions are made. Search engines, finance, reputation systems and automated assessments operate as fields of judgement in which individuals are visible to institutions, but institutions remain obscure to those judged. Strategy under these conditions becomes asymmetrical. Citizens, workers or borrowers are compelled to adapt to systems they cannot fully understand, while corporations and financial actors use secrecy, complexity and trade protection to preserve control. Field-making occurs through hidden classification: the credit field, employment field or informational field becomes organised around scores and rankings that acquire social force without public accountability. Pasquale’s demand for an intelligible society is therefore a demand to democratise field-making itself.
Galloway’s Protocol offers a complementary account of digital power. He argues that decentralisation does not eliminate control; rather, control persists through protocol, the technical rules that permit networked communication. TCP/IP appears horizontal and distributed, allowing machines to communicate across networks, while DNS introduces hierarchical control through naming and address resolution. The field of the internet is therefore made through a paradoxical combination of openness and regulation. Strategy within this field includes hacking, tactical media and artistic intervention, but these practices must operate through the very protocols they contest. Power is not external to the network; it is immanent to its architecture. This is crucial for understanding contemporary field-making: the rules that enable participation also condition its limits.
O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction translates this problem into the domain of everyday algorithmic governance. Her concept of Weapons of Math Destruction identifies models that are opaque, scalable and damaging. Such models do not simply describe reality; they participate in producing it. A teacher evaluation algorithm, a credit score, a predictive policing system or an employment filter can generate feedback loops in which disadvantage is reinforced by the very metrics that claim to measure risk or merit. Power here is mathematical but not neutral. It is embedded in proxies, assumptions and definitions of success. Strategy for those subjected to these systems becomes almost impossible when the model cannot be appealed, audited or understood. Field-making occurs through automated categorisation: the educational field, labour market, insurance field and criminal justice system are reorganised around predictive scores that distribute opportunity and punishment.
Yet power and field-making cannot be reduced to the digital. Illich’s Tools for Conviviality provides a broader critique of industrial institutions. Illich argues that tools cross a threshold when they cease to enlarge human freedom and instead produce dependence, regimentation and professional monopoly. Medicine, schooling and transport initially solve practical problems, but once they pass a “second watershed” they begin to undermine the very goods they promise: health, learning and mobility. Field-making here occurs through institutional capture. The school defines education, the hospital defines health, and the transport system defines movement. Strategy becomes constrained because individuals are forced to seek recognition through institutional channels rather than through autonomous, convivial practice. Illich’s alternative is not anti-technical; it is a politics of limits, in which tools remain accessible, governable and subordinated to human purposes.
Simondon’s philosophy of technical objects deepens this account by refusing to treat technology as either neutral instrument or alien enemy. In Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, he argues that technical objects possess a mode of existence that must be culturally understood. Alienation arises when culture excludes technical beings from meaning, reducing machines to utility or threat. Field-making, from Simondon’s perspective, requires a new technical humanism: a cultural field in which humans understand the genesis, relationality and concretisation of technical objects. Power does not lie only in possessing machines, but in mediating relations among technical systems, human knowledge and collective life. Strategy becomes the work of coordination rather than domination: the human is not master of machines, but interpreter, organiser and inventor within technical ensembles.
The ecological dimension of field-making becomes central in Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life. Moore rejects the dualism between Society and Nature, arguing that capitalism is a world-ecology: a historical way of organising human and extra-human nature together. Capitalism does not act upon an external nature; it works through nature, just as nature works through capitalism. His concept of Cheap Nature shows how capital accumulation depends on appropriating unpaid or low-cost work/energy from labour, food, raw materials and energy systems. Field-making here is planetary. Capitalism makes fields of value by classifying some work as paid and other work as external, natural, feminised, racialised or free. Strategy for capital has historically involved locating new frontiers of cheapness; strategy for ecological critique requires exposing the false separation between economy and environment.
Prigogine and Stengers’ Order Out of Chaos offers a scientific and philosophical vocabulary for understanding such fields as dynamic rather than static. Their argument that reality is marked by irreversibility, instability and becoming challenges deterministic models of order. Systems far from equilibrium can generate new structures through fluctuation and bifurcation. This matters politically because field-making is never merely the imposition of fixed order; it is also the emergence of new configurations under unstable conditions. Strategy, then, must attend to timing, thresholds and uncertainty. Power is not only the capacity to preserve order, but also the capacity to shape the conditions under which disorder becomes productive, destructive or transformative.
Meadows’ Thinking in Systems makes this operational. She defines systems as organised wholes composed of elements, interconnections and purposes. The behaviour of a system often arises less from individual actors than from feedback loops, delays, stocks, flows and underlying goals. Field-making can therefore be read systemically: a field is not merely a set of participants, but a structure of relations that produces patterned behaviour over time. Strategy requires identifying leverage points, especially those deeper than surface-level interventions: information flows, rules, goals and paradigms. Power resides in the capacity to define the purpose of a system, because the purpose silently organises its behaviour. This is why reforms that change personnel but leave structure intact often fail.
Lugones’ “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” shows that fields are also made through colonial categories. Her concept of the coloniality of gender demonstrates that colonial modernity imposed hierarchical dichotomies: human/non-human, man/woman, civilised/primitive, rational/bestial. Gender was not simply added to colonial domination; it was part of the colonial production of humanity itself. The category “woman” was constructed through whiteness, bourgeois respectability and colonial civilisation, while colonised females were placed outside its protection. Field-making here is ontological and epistemic: colonial power creates the field of the human by excluding those it racialises and dehumanises. Strategy for decolonial feminism begins from resistance at the “fractured locus,” where colonised subjects are shaped by colonial imposition yet never fully exhausted by it.
Puar’s The Right to Maim, as reviewed by Ben Zeev, similarly reframes power through the management of bodily capacity. Puar’s concept of debilitation challenges frameworks that focus only on disability recognition, showing how states and imperial formations may actively produce injury, exhaustion and bodily vulnerability. The “right to maim” names a form of power that does not simply kill but injures, weakens and incapacitates populations while presenting itself as restrained or humanitarian. Field-making here operates through differential exposure to harm: some bodies are made governable through their debility. Strategy becomes both biopolitical and geopolitical, as regimes of control manage populations by distributing capacity and incapacity.
Wendell’s The Rejected Body complements this by arguing that disability is not merely a biomedical condition but a socially mediated experience produced through built environments, cultural norms and institutional definitions. The disabled body becomes a field of social judgement: believed or doubted, supported or abandoned, recognised or excluded. Power appears in the capacity to define which bodies count as legitimate, productive or dependent. Strategy for disability justice involves challenging not only physical barriers but epistemic ones, especially the refusal to believe disabled people’s testimony about their own bodies.
Across these works, power is best understood not as a possession but as a structuring relation. Strategy is not merely planning, but situated navigation within fields made by infrastructures, categories, protocols, tools, systems, ecologies and bodies. Field-making is the central process through which power becomes durable: it names the construction of domains in which certain actors, forms of knowledge, bodies, technologies and values become legible while others are excluded, naturalised or rendered invisible. The political task is therefore not only to enter existing fields more fairly, but to question how those fields were made, whose strategies they reward, which forms of life they damage, and what alternative infrastructures, tools, categories and relations might make different futures possible.
Mounier, P. and Dumas Primbault, S. (2023) Sustaining Knowledge and Governing its Infrastructure in the Digital Age: An Integrated View. HAL preprint. Available at: HAL, hal-04309735.
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2021) Research Report 2018–2020. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
Pasquale, F. (2015) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books.
Ben Zeev, N. (2018) ‘The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, by Jasbir K. Puar’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 48(1), pp. 131–133.
Simondon, G. (2024) Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Nouvelle édition augmentée, established by I. Saurin and N. Simondon. Paris: Flammarion.
Moore, J.W. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
Illich, I. (2009) Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars.
Meadows, D.H. (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Edited by D. Wright. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Galloway, A.R. (2004) Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lugones, M. (2010) ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia, 25(4), pp. 742–759.
O’Neil, C. (2016) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.
Wendell, S. (1996) The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York and London: Routledge.
