Abstract
![CDATA[With the governmentalization of the field of the social, a special relationship between civil society and the state is effected, one in which distinctions between institutions of the state and those of civil society are indiscernible, and where intersections and connections are diagrammatic. What, however, has happened to this constitutive relationship within our current era, one in which these sort of relationships have undergone a crisis as a result of new socio-economic forces that go by the name of neoliberalism? What sort of new institutions are best suited to the organization of social relations and creative labour within an informational paradigm? And what bearing, if any, do they have on inter-state and supranational regimes of governance and control? In short, how do civil society movements articulate their values and how do they procure a multi-scalar legitimacy once the constitutive relationship between civil society and the state has shifted as the nation-state transmogrifies into a corporate state (or, in the case of developing countries, a state that is subject, for instance, to the structural adjustment conditions set by entities such as the World Bank and WTO)? Clearly, civil society values have not disappeared; nonetheless, the traditional modern constitutive framework has changed. Increasingly, civil society values are immanent to the socio-technical movements of networks. Issues of governance, I would suggest, are thus best addressed by paying attention to the technics of communication. 1 In the case of the WSIS project, this means shifting the debate from the ‘multi-stakeholder approach’ - which takes bureaucratically organized institutions (or networked organizations) as its point of departure - to one which places greater attention to the conditions of tension and dissonance as they figure with ‘the political’ of informationality. In other words, a focus on the materialities of networks and the ways in which they operate as self-organising systems would reveal quite different articulations that, in my view, more accurately reflect the composition of sociality within an information society.]]
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Towards a Sustainable Information Society: Deconstructing WSIS |
Place of Publication | U.K |
Publisher | Intellect Books |
Pages | 97-116 |
Number of pages | 20 |
ISBN (Print) | 1841501336 |
Publication status | Published - 2006 |