TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 54, 1/2017
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Žiga VODOVNIK*
THE BLUE NOTE OF DEMOCRACY 
Abstract. The article starts from the assumption that 
old criteria for analysing the state and perspectives of 
democracy – e.g. sovereign state, party pluralism, elec-
tions, representation, national identity, market econo-
my etc. – are wholly obsolete categories that no longer 
have any connection to the current dynamics of demo-
cratic innovations. For these reasons, the article appro-
priates the jazz idiom as a convenient metaphor and 
discourse to highlight epistemological and methodologi-
cal challenges entailed in understanding democracy. In 
the last part, the article indicates deeper and substantial 
affinities between democracy and jazz that are useful 
for clarifying the democratic unruliness that is often 
missing in current discussions on democracy. The arti-
cle concludes that an entirely new approach to democ-
racy is required, building on a new grammar, meta-
phors and methods. 
Keywords: democracy, jazz, politics, representation, 
depoliticisation 
Introduction
In a recent reflection on the state and the perspectives of democracy, 
John Keane (2015) concludes that what we need in the current discus-
sion on democracy is primarily “new thinking”. With the development 
and mutual enrichment of democratic ideas and practices in the last dec-
ades, the language, institutions and normative ideals of democracy have 
changed completely. The old criteria, such as sovereign state, party plural-
ism, elections, representation, national identity, market economy etc., are 
today wholly obsolete categories that no longer have any connection to the 
current dynamics of democratic innovations. This is why an entirely new 
approach is required, building on a new grammar, metaphors, perspectives, 
theories and methods themselves. 
It is only through questioning the standard narration about democracy 
and revealing its “hidden” chapters that the idea of democracy can shake off 
DEMOCRACY AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION 
* Žiga Vodovnik, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana.
TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 54, 1/2017
6
Žiga VODOVNIK
the ideological dross that has gathered throughout the years of uncritically 
following the teleology of the “end of history” or the use of “maritime meta-
phors” like the ones we find in Huntington (1993/1996). It is only by under-
standing its universality and the common “ownership” of its history that 
democracy can become not only a general ideal but also a possibility for 
political action in various contexts. But how? Isakhan and Stockwell claim 
that recovering the original meaning of democracy and thereby correctly 
understanding its state and perspectives is possible only 
[b]y encouraging people to engage with their own diverse traditions 
and indigenous cultures … to recover those moments, those practices, 
and customs, those traditions and narratives which emulate the spirit 
of democracy and are already inherent in their own society. Opening 
awareness of the breadth of democratic forms gives people the means 
to deepen, strengthen and develop democratic practice and the oppor-
tunity to promulgate democracy more widely (Isakhan and Stockwell, 
2012: 223). 
Tormey (2015) also concurs that the thesis about the crisis or even the 
death of democracy depends on our perspective. The political class under-
stands the decline of voter turnout, the decline of political party member-
ship, disinterestedness in institutional politics and above all complete 
distrust in the political elite as contours of the decline or even the death 
of democracy. However, it is clear that this crisis of representation does 
not entail less democracy, that is, democracy is not threatened by a slow 
demise. From the hegemonic perspective, the subaltern democracy, which 
is today very much alive and thriving, has never actually been seen or heard. 
Alongside the media explanations of apathetic and selfish citizens, we can 
quickly frame another/different reality – citizens who are not apathetic, 
but no longer wish or allow for undemocratic policies to be justified or 
implemented in their name.1 This is why new citizens realise their politi-
cal demands directly. New citizens do not vote, they act. They do not join 
political parties, but establish new networks, affinity groups, assemblies and 
projects. They do not wait for elections and the policies of politicians, but 
prefigure their political aspirations here and now. They do not follow the 
media propaganda because they themselves are the media (ibid.: 2).
The purpose of the article is to explore further, how is democracy to be 
understood today? How is democracy to be studied in order to overcome 
the Procrustean logic of hegemonic theories that reduce democracy to a 
1  Moses I. Finley (1996: 11) even concludes that “the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the 
electorate” is the main discovery of the study of Western democracies. 
TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 54, 1/2017
7
specific constitutional system? How is the original meaning of democracy 
to be rescued from theories that relate the democratic idea to the political 
model of the 1% based on the rule of the best or aristoi, political represen-
tation and, above all, a specific economic paradigm? As André Gide (1949) 
might have said, everything that needed to be said about democracy has 
already been said, but because nobody listened, everything needs to be 
repeated. It is only thus that we can manage to deconstruct the hegemonic 
accounts of democracy, which, with their refined processes of economis-
ing everyday life and especially their theological-moral explanations, lead to 
new and as yet undetected processes of naturalising the political. It is only 
thus that we can come to see that the common denominator of the count-
less political utterances and “scientific” theories about democracy should 
be sought in political agoraphobia (Dupuis-Déri, 2011) or the oligarchic 
notions of democracy that merely co-opt the word, but at the same time 
reject its content. The dark side of such doing is of course a tacit collabo-
ration in the defense of existing socio-economic relations and the inhibi-
tion of politics, because it marginalises and trivialises the political subjec-
tivities and forms of action found in the ontological register that rejects the 
establishment of sovereign power. What actually hides behind the façade of 
democratic formalism is a fear of the masses that can endanger the pastoral 
governments of the neoliberal project. 
The articles in this thematic issue of Teorija in praksa, entitled Democracy 
and the Crisis of Representation, respond to the need to examine the mod-
ern political transformations that have accompanied – and to some extent 
preceded – the crisis of the hegemonic economic paradigm and simultane-
ously disclosed a crisis of politics per se. Numerous authors (e.g. Crouch, 
2004; Harvey, 2007; Mouffe, 2013; Graeber, 2013; Rancière, 2014; Tormey, 
2015) note that the crisis of representation, participation and legitimacy in 
contemporary political communities is accompanied by depoliticisation 
processes, which naturalise the political and thus accelerate regression into 
post-democracies. The thematic issue calls for a new chronotope in order to 
analyse the state and perspectives of democracy. We argue that to allow us 
to measure the ‘pulse’ of democracy we need a completely different spatial 
and, above all, temporal framework – i.e. not merely the context of the 2008 
crisis. It is only in this way that we can demarcate democracy from the cri-
sis of modernity and its political forms, whose persistence on nation states, 
sovereign territory, the hierarchies of power and people and, last but not 
least, the equating of ethnos and dēmos has pushed it into an irreversible 
crisis (Rizman, 1991). 
Although the following articles reflect on democracy and representa-
tion from different perspectives and in various contexts, the overall focus 
of this thematic issue is on the systemic transformations and ideological 
Žiga VODOVNIK
TEORIJA IN PRAKSA let. 54, 1/2017
8
re-orientations that led to the depoliticisation of politics and en acte to the 
reconfiguration of political relations. The articles will, inter alia, examine 
the new (post-modern) political topography characterised by the crisis of 
(interest and political) representation, and the emergence of new politi-
cal subjects and quite new forms of collective action (e.g. flash mobs). 
Consequently, the crisis of citizenship and political inclusion will also be 
addressed. 
Years ago, while analysing the situation in Iraq, former US Secretary of 
Defence Donald Rumsfeld pointed out there are different categories of 
knowledge: known knowns, known unknowns, and the most demanding 
and dangerous category of unknown unknowns.2 Following the Rumsfel-
dian epistemological taxonomy, we might argue that our analysis of the 
state and the perspectives of democracy will instead be more modest: its 
aim is not to reveal the known unknowns of democracy or the unknown 
unknowns about democracy; rather, our analysis will actually be a very 
modest endeavour dealing exclusively with the recovery and reaffirmation 
of what is known and sometimes forgotten about democracy. Namely, our 
analysis will talk about the original meaning and purpose of democracy and 
its hollowing out upon the emergence of republicanism and representation. 
We nevertheless have a demanding task before us since the discussion of 
the known and the occasionally forgotten about democracy – starting with 
the very definition of democracy as the ‘rule of the people’ – will also mean 
an attempt at disclosing the cracks in the ideological matrix of the existing, 
not so easily penetrable political and economic paradigm. Such a recover-
ing of the original meaning of democracy soon reveals that the discussion of 
the known knowns about democracy must actually also include the fourth 
category of the (un)known about democracy – the unknown knowns or the 
things we do not know we know about democracy. Put differently, in addi-
tion to the hegemonic discussions on democracy, which are in fact based on 
distrust of the dēmos or the very idea of democracy, there is also a ‘vernacu-
lar’ knowledge of democracy, which we do not detect due to its closeness, 
everydayness and systematic marginalisation. 
The Ancient Greeks had a special name for such knowledge – mētis, 
meaning practical, local knowledge based on experience or life (Michel de 
Certeau thus calls it simply arts de faire) and is often in complete opposition 
to scientific knowledge about the same thing or problem. Mētis has no uni-
versalistic pretensions and in this regard is also more pluralistic, inclusive 
and open to modifications than scientific knowledge or episteme and partly 
2  The Unknown Knowns is the title of a documentary about Donald Rumsfeld made in 2013 by Erol 
Morris. The fourth category of the (un)known about the situation in Iraq was also discussed by Slavoj 
Žižek.
Žiga VODOVNIK
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also techné. The last two differ from mētis also in the way they are organised, 
codified, transferred and changed. If mētis is local, particular and contex-
tual, then scientific knowledge is a system of universality, standardisation 
and disciplinarity where there is no space for local idiosyncrasies (cf. Scott, 
1998). What we have in mind in our case are of course the ideas and prac-
tices of democracy that appear in everyday life, in the pockets of resistance 
on the edges of the political map. For democracy is not a matter of memoris-
ing definitions, it is not a matter of an exegesis of holy texts or an uncritical 
following of expertise, but a matter of intuition and improvisation. It is not a 
matter of abstract knowledge but of concrete practice. Not a predetermined 
direction and rhythm but an incredible dynamics and contingency. 
Excursus: ‘setting the tone’
It should come as no surprise that many studies attempting to recuperate 
the original meaning of democracy invariably invoked the history and spirit 
of jazz. Of course, here we do not have in mind the musical performances or 
preferences of various politicians – e.g. Bill Clinton joining Lionel Hampton 
or Wynton Marsalis for a short session, or Barack Obama confessing in a 
recent Rolling Stone interview that he keeps Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and 
John Coltrane on his iPhone. What we are referring to are deeper and more 
substantial affinities between democracy and jazz.
Already in 1938 Thomas Mann delivered a lecture, later published as a 
short booklet meaningfully entitled The Coming Victory of Democracy, in 
which he argues that the aesthetics and practice of jazz best embody the 
democratic idea. More recently, this line of thinking about jazz continued 
with Ralph Ellison (1964), Cornel West (2005), Stanley Crouch (2006) and 
Walton M. Muyumba (2009), who argue that democracy is in fact a political 
manifestation of jazz. Jazz practises and develops democracy, only in a dif-
ferent, sonic form. Ornette Coleman, one of the giants of jazz, also admits 
that his ‘free jazz’ is a democratic experience or even a sound of democracy. 
When comparing jazz and democracy we can find that both build on pro-
cess, play, innovation, listening and, above all, improvisation. We can argue 
it is not a specific musical genre or political form, but a way of life or specific 
attitude or approach to the world. Therefore, it cannot be reduced to rules – 
either sheet music or a constitution.
What, then, connects jazz and democracy? Amiri Baraka (in Magee, 2004: 
166) concludes that jazz process is democratic in form: “It is about singu-
lar and collective spontaneity, and composition, both formal and mise en 
scène”. Similarly, Ralph Ellison defines jazz as “an art of individual assertion 
within and against the group. Each true jazz moment springs from a contest 
in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, 
Žiga VODOVNIK
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represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his iden-
tity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of 
tradition” (Ellison, 1964: 234). What defines jazz and democracy is therefore 
not a passive repetition of rules, but their relativisation; not the conservation 
of parochial identities, but political subjectivation. At the very same time 
jazz links improvisation with traditional materials, rebellion with respect for 
basic rules, originality and innovation with already defined tones and instru-
ments, so “the jazzman must [indeed] lose his identity even as he finds it” 
(ibid.). 
In comparison to conventional music, jazz is not performed, but ‘made’. 
Kerry T. Burch insists that “part of the significance of the musical idiom 
resides ‘in the making of jazz,’ that is, in the moment-to-moment, impossible 
to predict construction of beautiful sounds”. The radical essence of jazz-as-
democracy does not acknowledge true or false improvisations, therefore 
jazz does not acknowledge hierarchisations and absolutes. Prout Rancière, 
we could add that democracy, like jazz, is defined by the complete con-
tingency or complete absence of arkhē: “Democracy is not based on any 
nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne 
along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted 
to the constancy of its specific acts” (Rancière, 2014: 97).
As jazz is improvised through intersections of individual self-expression 
and collective collaboration, the democratic political process is constituted 
only through our self-realisation resulting from mutual cooperation. We 
could define both as a tension: a tension between the (historical) way things 
are (natura naturata) and the (philosophical) way things could become 
(natura naturans); between theory and praxis; between the attractiveness 
of a one-off act and the inevitability of a complex process; between (short-
term) goals and (long-term) visions; between despair and joy; between soli-
tude and solidarity.3 In fact, jazz and democracy both result from a redefini-
tion of individual/community that is often missing in the canon of Western 
political thought, or at best is marginalised and trivialised. Recognising the 
ontological radicalism of jazz, Martin Williams suggests that 
[j]azz depends on the individual, [but] it also depends on group co-
operation. In all its styles, jazz involves some degree of collective ensem-
ble improvisation, and in this it differs from Western music even at those 
times in its history when improvisation was required. The high degree 
of individuality, together with the mutual respect and cooperation 
3  In The Contradictions of Jazz (2008), Paul Rinzler offers a similar explanation of the democratic 
impulse in jazz. According to Rinzler, jazz results from a dyamic tension between individualism and inter-
connectedness, assertion and openness, freedom and responsibility, and creativity and tradition.
Žiga VODOVNIK
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required in a jazz ensemble carry with them philosophical implications 
that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contem-
plate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater 
individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but 
that such individuality, far from being a threat to a co-operative social 
structure, can actually enhance society (Williams, 1993: 263). 
Williams stresses that the ‘Western’ political tradition builds on the uncrit-
ical reproduction of the Ancient Greek and Cartesian understanding of man 
as a thinking animal. In contrast, jazz ethos suggests it is possible to tran-
scend the Cartesian dualism of mind and body since for “a jazz musician, 
thought and feeling, reflection and emotion, come together uniquely, and 
resolve in the act of doing” (ibid.). With the intersubjectivity of a jazz ensem-
ble, jazz surpasses yet another dualism (object and subject) and offers a 
floating ontological and epistemological position that does not start from an 
atomised individual or anonymous collectivity, but is closer to the Thoreau-
vian idea of a “majority of one” (Thoreau, 2001: 212). According to Williams, 
jazz cannot exist without an individual – without individual interpretation 
of melody, creation of sound and articulation of emotion. But, paradoxi-
cally, it is exactly because of this that jazz also demands group cooperation, 
reaffirming the singularity of each individual and, concurrently, intrinsic 
equality of all. Jazz is therefore a philosophical and aesthetic manifestation 
of democracy and its collective individuality (Ellison, 1964; Magee, 2004). 
Our brief ‘jazz excursus’ was necessary for clarifying the democratic 
unruliness that is often marginalised and trivialised in current discussions 
on democracy. But we also appropriated the jazz idiom as a convenient 
metaphor and discourse to highlight the epistemological and methodologi-
cal challenges of understanding democracy (Burch, 2012: 167). What do we 
mean by that? If we inattentively listen to a jazz session, we might wrongly 
conclude that it is only noise that is connecting the ensemble, completely 
missing the harmony and rhythm co-created and kept alive by all the mem-
bers. Max Roach, in discussing jazz as a democratic form of music and the 
“infinite art of improvisation” in jazz, points out that:
When a piece is performed, everybody in the group has the opportunity 
to speak on it, to comment on it through their performance. It’s a demo-
cratic process, as opposed to most European classical music in which the 
two most important people are the composer and the conductor. They 
are like the king and the queen. In a sense, the conductor is also the mili-
tary official who’s there to see that the wishes of the masters—the compos-
ers—are adhered to, and as a musician your job may depend on how 
you conform to the conductor’s interpretation of the composer’s wishes. 
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However, in a jazz performance, everyone has an opportunity to create 
a thing of beauty collectively, based on their own musical personalities 
(in Berliner, 1994: 349). 
As Saul Newman notes, political theory still has to catch up with this new 
terrain, since it “generally looks for visible, representative identities situ-
ated on an ontological field organized by sovereign power; it is concerned 
with how we are governed, or with the normative principles or constitutive 
logics upon which political power is founded” (Newman, 2014: 94). From 
that (hegemonic) position, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus or Art Blakey 
may well truly sound as just noise, while Zapatista’s La Otra Campaña, the 
Vía Campesina global network or the new politics of Occupy might merely 
appear like an inarticulate and opportunistic swagger. The irony is that 
many widely accepted theories of democracy are totally unfamiliar to the 
humanistic spirit of jazz – acknowledging the declassé elements of modern 
society. Also, they are unable to comprehend new localisations of the jazz/
democratic process, merging jazz and democracy in multi-ethnic clubs, gay 
and lesbian bars, soup kitchens, alternative media, free universities, free 
clinics and even sex worker unionisation. The scandal of jazz-as-democracy 
lies exactly in its rejection of any avant-gardist logic (of a conductor or sov-
ereign, for instance), since good jazz, like good democracy, depends on 
everyone involved. Lastly, both depend on the blue or melancholic note, the 
much needed dissonance, violation and openness of the process.4 
Conclusion
In stressing the importance of the seemingly non-political, we closely 
resemble the idea of infrapolitics that, according to James Scott (1990: 184), 
“provides much of the cultural and structural underpinning of the more 
visible political action on which our attention has generally been focused”. 
Infrapolitics is as much a product of political necessity as of political choice 
so we should understand it not only as a form of political opposition in the 
conditions of tyranny, but, above all, as “the silent partner of a loud form of 
4  Scott Saul (2005) refers to jazz as an extension of the idea of direct action. Adopting jazz means 
accepting the idea of prefigurative politics in the struggle against hierarchy and domination embodied in 
the liberal etiquette. “Different ensembles might represent different kinds of publics and counterpublics 
… but the one assurance … was this: that the music would not sound like the quietly humming consen-
sus deemed normative during the Eisenhower era. To be free in a jazz context meant being part of ‘the 
action’—a very simple point, perhaps, but also a challenging idea for a society struggling to reconcile demo-
cratic ideals with the increasingly bureaucratic order … Just as so many political activists in the 1950s and 
1960s tried to embody a preagurative politics … so the musicians of hard bop gave voice to a world beyond 
the Cold War consensus, where everyday people might be virtuosos and provocateurs at once” (Saul, 2005: 
6).
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public resistance” of modern democracies. Although it is not always part of 
the mainstream, it is still real politics, “in many respects conducted in more 
earnest, for higher stakes, and against greater odds than political life in lib-
eral democracies” (ibid.: 200). These forms of struggle are, nevertheless, still 
marginalized and trivialized – from the political Right and Left advocating 
real political action – as: (a) unorganized, unsystematic, and individual; (b) 
opportunistic and self-indulgent; (c) with no revolutionary potential/conse-
quences; and (d) implying only accommodation with the system of domina-
tion (Scott, 1985: 292). 
In the article we have argued, that to understand the original meaning of 
democracy, we need a cognitive transformation that Boaventura de Sousa 
Santos (2014) perceives also as a prerequisite for any social justice. Unfor-
tunately, we are still witnessing epistemological ignorance, a form of epis-
temicide, that strengthens the status quo and at the same time dismisses, 
discredits, and trivializes ideas and praxes not in line with the hegemonic 
epistemological position—a hegemonic notion of truth, objectivity, and 
rationality. Paraphrasing Arjun Appadurai (2004), we can conclude that 
research on democracy is a peculiar optical challenge. Many democractic 
innovations are namely too elusive for traditional disciplines, classical theo-
ries, and Western epistemologies, therefore the analysis must be founded 
on a new, more flexible epistemology and methodology.
In “Racism and the perpetual crises of representation in the American 
republic – From its constitution to the Trump phenomenon”, Blaž Vrečko 
Ilc ponders the discrepancy between the normative and the actual in con-
temporary representative democracies, focusing on the historical devel-
opment of the United States. The article identifies racism as a constitutive 
feature of the American project, revealing the exclusionary character of the 
new republic already evident in the Declaration of Independence and its 
racist discourse about the Native Americans as “the merciless Indian Sav-
ages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of 
all Ages, Sexes and Conditions”. Vrečko Ilc lucidly examines the post-rev-
olutionary period and the gradual subsumption of democratic sentiments 
under republicanism that were finalized with the new constitution and 
its legitimation of the slavery of African-Americans and the eradication of 
Native Americans. What follows is the analysis of the (post-)Civil War politi-
cal and economic arrangements that once again codified and strengthened 
the racial segregation defining the American project. The article concludes 
with a brief analysis of the Trump phenomenon as the continuation of the 
identified perpetual crisis of racial/racist exclusion and/or hierarchical 
inclusion. 
In “Lost in Translation: The Original Meaning of Democracy”, Žiga 
Vodovnik follows suit and offers a theoretical demarcation of democracy 
Žiga VODOVNIK
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and republicanism – i.e. political representation, elections and majoritarian-
ism. Vodovnik warns that democracy never meant the rule of the people, 
but was born as an idea foregrounding the power or the capacity (krátos) of 
the people (dēmos). Following Jacques Rancière, he argues that democracy 
is neither a form of society nor a form of government, but is rather precisely 
the ‘ungovernable’ on which every government is based. He stresses that, 
although today representative democracy does seem merely a pleonasm, 
it has in fact always been an oxymoron. Vodovnik ascertains that a cursory 
overview of the main theoretical discussions of democracy in the “short 
20th century” reveals that the prima facie very heterogeneous and mutually 
exclusive theories share a similar sentiment – political agoraphobia or fear 
of the people and the related desire to depoliticise political communities. 
The result are the hegemonic accounts of democracy that have recuperated 
merely the word, but at the same time rejected its content – that is, politics. 
With their refined processes of economising everyday life and especially 
their theological-moral explanations, they lead to new and as yet undetected 
processes of naturalising the political.
In “Representation in crisis and redefined citizenship in the aftermath of 
the 2012 Maribor protests”, Cirila Toplak relates her experiences as an activ-
ist-scholar participating in and analysing the 2012–2013 protests, in particu-
lar those in Maribor. Toplak identifies the overarching context in which the 
protests were emerging: the economic crisis, in which polities and demo-
cracy were being forced to redefine their position and purpose. However, 
Toplak concludes what the “All-Slovenian Uprisings” of 2012–2013 shared 
was more than just the rejection of a particular economic model. Specifi-
cally, the protests were not inspired by the narrow economic reduction-
ism and determinism. Instead, they were placing emphasis on the crisis of 
representative democracy at the global, national and local levels. Although 
the protests came to be gradually marginalised and instrumentalised, what 
lingers on are the innovative forms of direct action redefining the idea of 
democracy and citizenship. Namely, the protests and various grassroots col-
lectives that later emerged were able to deconstruct the hegemonic accounts 
of democracy in Slovenia which, with their refined processes of economis-
ing everyday life and especially their theological-moral explanations, have 
led to new and as yet undetected processes of naturalising the political. 
The thematic issue closes with “E-participation as a technology of citi-
zenship” in which Marinko Banjac looks at ICT, especially e-participation 
tools, as a possible panacea for the shortcomings of representative democ-
racies. Banjac identifies a crisis of the prevailing political order – a crisis of 
participation, representation and, consequently, legitimacy – that calls for 
novel forms of governance and/or new modes of citizen participation and 
collaboration with government. However, Banjac warns that the practices, 
Žiga VODOVNIK
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tools and techniques of e-participation are always mediated by power and 
should be understood as a technology of citizenship. He articulates the per-
formative dimension of e-participation, revealing the multitude of forms, 
directions and actors upon which power is founded. The article reframes 
the thesis about the crisis of citizenship – usually related to the restriction of 
democratic forms of organisation, especially with the decline of the welfare 
state – reminding us about citizens’ collaboration on the exercise of power 
and, therewith, the often forgotten discrepancy between potestas and poten-
tia or, expressed differently, between Power and the power that actually 
produces it. 
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