----- Original Message ----- From: "Catherine Driscoll" <catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 5:40 PM Subject: Re: power
> I think it's about *not* trivialising power.
> But I'm happy to hear you out. Maybe I'm wrong -- it has happened. In
what
> social relation is there no power involved?
>
> Catherine
>
====================
I can't prove there are no power relations involved vis a vis another precisely because I cannot control the/an other's perception of the manner of our encounter[s]. And there is no third-person idiom to settle the issue either way. The irreducibly subjectivity/intersubjectivity of interpreting social behaviors precludes me or anyone else from coming up with such a proof. At the same time I wonder if current discourse of/about "power-over" and "power-to" aren't turning power into a sociological absolute; the sociologist's analog of homo economicus a la "neoclassical" economics. In that sense if we see power everywhere/all the time aren't we hobbling our ability to see behaviors/contexts/events/rituals in which significant forms of "power-over" are completely absent? On a date, say, with a loved one, are we really concerned with our "power-to" all that much, even as we may subscribe to a dispositional ontology of social interaction?
Ian