Text, portrayal, and power: a critique of the transformation of the state thesis

摘要

Celebrations of transformation abound: globalization, global civil society, cosmopolitanism, increased 'development', and, within this cacophony of celebration, an allied transformation of the state thesis which proposes that we have entered an era in which power is competitively distributed through post-liberal democratic governance networks. By way of refraining how we understand power relations within the transformation of the state thesis, in this paper I demonstrate how seemingly apolitical texts disguise the political economy of epistemological practices within what have been called democratic governance networks. 1 conclude that democratic transformation must take place not according to declarations of shifting state structures, but, rather, according to the intersection of knowledge and its associated practice of value, which, following Ben Agger, Timothy W. Luke, and Dorothy E. Smith, I identify as being embedded in texts.