>
> > Definitions shape explanations and the other way around. The
>distinction is
> > spurious at best.
>
>=========================
>
>Nice to see that adolescent incredulity still exists among some members
>of the academic class.
You flatterer. Dare I ask? Yeah, why not. In what sense am I adolescent? In what sense incredulous?
> > If power-to and power-over are so dissimilar, how come they're both
> > specifically/definitively modes of "power-"?
> >
> > Catherine
>
>======================
>
>Uh, because the inherited genealogy of discourse regarding the
>predication of power "weighs upon" contemporary grammar? You're the
>academic philosopher, why don't you de-obfuscate the fuzziness of the
>distinctions we've gotten from Machiavelli, Weber, Green, Dahl, Lukes
>etc...........?
From flattery to sheer nastiness. I admire your flexibility. But you're mistaking me for someone else. I don't even know who Lukes is, let alone have read or 'philosophised' anything concerning (at a reasonable guess) him.
Yes a history of thinking about power weighs upon how we now conceive of "power". And if this was all I had to rely on in order to claim that "power" is a concept we can't jettison simply because it's messy, I think it would be enough. However, I meant that not only are we part of an historical field of discourses on power, but your own categories acknowledge the ways in which apparently oppressive power and less hierarchical forms of power cannot be disentangled as neatly as you seem to claim.
I do love the line "de-obfuscate the fuzziness"... it's like something from a Disney song sung by cartoon-Zizek.
Catherine