Power Is Not Loud: The Art of Not Asking for Permission to Matter

Every culture produces symbols. But not every individual has agency over them.

In an era where power has shifted from volume to representation, mastering the symbolic is not an aesthetic indulgence, but an ontological strategy: those who do not choose their signs end up inhabiting the system’s. And the system is not neutral. It is designed to reward what is functional, sellable, and replicable.

Without personal symbols, the self becomes porous—open to being narrated from the outside. What appears to be a simple lack of style is, in reality, a form of semiotic surrender: dressing without intention, speaking on autopilot, consuming whatever is available. These are not neutral acts. They are ways in which the body ceases to be narrative territory and becomes occupied surface.

In this second part, we explore the consequences of not mastering the symbolic: how identity becomes malleable in the face of trends, how self-worth becomes hostage to the environment, and how symbolic capital—as Pierre Bourdieu suggests—can operate as a form of silent power, capable of legitimizing even those who possess nothing else.

If the world is no longer structured solely around economic capital, but also around cultural and symbolic capital, then the real question is no longer “how much do you have,” but:

What symbols are you emitting?
And who is reading your code?

Environment-Dependent Self-Worth

If you don’t design your rituals—your marks, your gestures—the system will do it for you. And the system is not built to care for you. It is built to categorize, scale, and optimize you.

As Byung-Chul Han argues, we live in a performance-driven society where each individual becomes their own exploiter. In that context, the self ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a measurable project—an emotional KPI.

“The neoliberal subject exploits itself while believing it is self-realizing.”

The problem is that without personal symbols, self-affirmation becomes impossible. And so, self-worth turns transactional: it depends on whether you are liked, whether you perform, whether you produce. You are no longer valued for who you are, but for how useful you are. Self-esteem by performance. Self-love by validation.

This aligns with what Carl Rogers proposed in humanistic psychology: the more conditional the love we receive, the harder it becomes to develop a genuine sense of self-worth. If everything that validates us comes from the outside—sales, likes, approval—then the self is constructed as a façade. A façade without foundation.

From a communication perspective, Erving Goffman offers another key insight. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, he suggests that we are constantly performing in a kind of social theatre. But if we do not choose our own signs—if we lack a symbolic stage of our own—then we end up performing someone else’s script. And when we fail to fit it, we assume we are the problem.

A symbolically impoverished self does not perceive itself as valuable, but as useful. And to live like that is to live under constant evaluation.

Porous Identity in a Liquid World

Zygmunt Bauman described it with surgical clarity: we live in a state of liquid modernity, where nothing is solid and everything is in flux. Relationships, jobs, tastes, beliefs—everything is constantly shifting. And within that instability, identity—which was once built through roots—is now assembled through trends.

“Identity is no longer a given, but a task.”

But what happens when we lack personal rituals to anchor us?

You become like a bottle without a cap—everything from the outside seeps in. Likes, algorithms, external opinions, the “For You” page acting as an oracle.

From a media theory perspective, Marshall McLuhan warned that “the medium is the message,” meaning that the format through which we communicate also shapes who we become. Today, our identities are constructed within systems that privilege the ephemeral, the visual, the viral.

Your subjectivity begins to edit itself according to what the algorithm rewards.

And this is where Jean Baudrillard becomes essential. Through his concept of simulation, he argued that we are surrounded by images that no longer represent reality, but rather other images.

“The real is no longer real, but a series of signs that replace it.”

Without your own symbolic anchors, you begin to replicate aesthetics that hold no meaning for you. You become an interface without a password—open to being programmed, shaped, inhabited.

The danger of symbolic porosity is that it doesn’t feel like loss. It slips in quietly. Until one day, you realize you no longer know whether what you love… is truly yours, or something you were taught to love.

Disconnection from the Body as Symbolic Territory

The body is not merely biological—it is narrative territory. And like any territory, it can be inhabited with presence or colonized through neglect.

In a world that accelerates everything, it becomes normal to dress without intention, eat without pause, move without awareness. But these seemingly minor decisions are not neutral. They are internal symbolic messages. And when repeated, they form a grammar:

“I am not worth care. I do not deserve form.”

Here, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty becomes essential. For him, the body is not something we have, but the medium through which we exist in the world.

“We do not have a body; we are our body.”

To deny ritual gesture—a chosen garment, an upright posture, a conscious act—is to deny language to what we are.

From psychology, Alice Miller and body-oriented therapeutic approaches have explored how the body stores emotional memory, and how persistent neglect can be read as a somatic echo of emotional abandonment. The phrase “I let myself go”—so common in moments of crisis—is not metaphorical. It is literal.

Pierre Bourdieu, through his concept of habitus, reminds us that everyday practices are not random; they are embodied structures of the social world. How we eat, how we walk, how we present ourselves—everything communicates. And when done without agency, these acts reproduce the place assigned to us: the useful, the invisible, the non-decorative.

So when we stop ritualizing the body, we do not only lose aesthetics—we lose symbolic agency.

And without form, there is no figure.
Only repetition.

Aesthetic Surrender to Cultural Hegemony

The symbolic is also political.

Every aesthetic choice is a decision, and every decision positions you somewhere in the world. But when you do not consciously choose your signs—your colors, your words, your ways of being—you end up adopting dominant ones: those shaped by the market, the algorithm, and an elite that observes you, but does not include you.

This is where Guy Debord enters with an uncomfortable warning. We live in a society of the spectacle, where representation has replaced experience, and appearance becomes the center of reality.

“Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into representation.”

Within this spectacle, dominant aesthetics function as invisible uniforms: if you do not adopt them, you fall outside the frame; if you adopt them uncritically, you become part of the set.

From the sociology of fashion, Frédéric Godart reminds us that fashion—far from being superficial—is a system of signs that produces social distinction.

“Fashion is not just clothing. It is a way of inscribing the individual into the symbolic fabric of the world.”

To copy aesthetics that are not yours, without understanding their origins or the codes they carry, is an act of symbolic surrender.

A loss of sovereignty.

Each unprocessed adoption distances you from your own inscription in the world. And without inscription, the self becomes decoration—beautiful, perhaps, but voiceless.

In a world that fragments, accelerates, and distracts, having your own symbols becomes an act of resistance. A ritual is not merely a beautiful gesture—it is a code, a boundary, an intimate declaration that says: this is who I am, and this is what I am not.

Because if you do not choose your signs, the system will. And the system does not want you free—it wants you replicable. Every garment worn with intention, every word used as an emblem, every gesture ritualized becomes a brick in the architecture of your power. This is not about aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake. It is about power. Presence. Personal narrative as an antidote to identity dissolution.

Because symbolic capital—the kind you cannot see, but always feel—can transform even the absence of resources into a form of legitimacy. And when sustained, it becomes magnetism.

Power is not loud.
It is performed.
It is embodied.
It is ritualized.