----- Original Message -----
From: "Catherine Driscoll" <catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au>
> >
> > From your perspective vis a vis your son/lover/students, yes. From theirs,
> > not necessarily
>
> in fact, in all their understandings undoubtedly so
> no student believes the power relation between them and i is the same outside
> the classroom,
===================
They may not even agree with how you perceive their relationship to you within the setting of the classroom.
>when the course is over, when it's subject feedback time, or
> that i have any kind of absolute authority over their grades let alone the
> right to do anything i want in a class. moreover, none of them are not aware of
> their power to ignore me, be distinterested, not read things i set, shoose a
> different class or leave mine in other ways, not participate in class, alter
> the tenor of a class or a whole course, criticise me formally or informally to
> a range of degrees, contest my marking, curricula and other apparent forms of
> power, even if they were forced to attend or their were strict rules about how
> they had to communicate with me
>
> i could expand on this and make similar statements about the other examples
>
> > and in that dehiscence they can use their understandings
> > of "power-over" to frustrate the very manner in which the mutuality and
> > emergence of "power-over" operates within that context, with either an
> > escalation of conflict or a recognition of non-coerced consensus with each
> > participants sense of their role transformed; they may come to feel that
> > they no longer need school --"I've learned enough for now to meet the
> > challenges of my future", your son may leave home, your lover may fall
> > even more deeply in love with you or, depending on the issues at hand,
> > breakup with you.
>
> and all these are... powerful. they must impact on me.
=======================
And this is simply to define them as power, which as we've been discussing, raises the issue of whether, when we begin to define every aspect of human relations in terms of power, we dissipate the ability to use power, in the sense of power-over, as an explanatory term.
>
> > Moving to the level of the institutional/discursive field within which
> > that event takes place simply takes the "power-to" and "power-over" dyad
> > to another "level," the realm of medium-to-large-scale of collective
> > action. The institutional/discursive field is an ecology of "power-to" and
> > power-over" capabilities too, and those are clearly malleable over time
> > when they encounter legitimation challenges.
>
> no it's not another level or scale, it's a different way of thinking about
> where power is and how it's shaped
>
> Catherine
==================
Well that's just a quibble over words, then, because I interpret no difference in your use of *where* and what I intended by level and scale.
Ian