Luks, Fred und Timpf, Siegfried (Hamburg) 1998

Sustainable Development, neue Akteurkonstellationen und Diskurslogik im Globalisierungsprozess
(The Dispositive of 'Sustainable Development')

In the first instance, the notion Sustainable Development is referring to the effort to link traditional development goals with environmentally reflected economising. The fact that Sustainable Development was regarded with interest by a large part of the public, can be seen as resulting from the advantageous moment in which this symbolic invention has been developed. Before this turning point, the societal dynamic of development and the maintenance of natural foundations of life had been regarded as not compatible. In this respect, the, in the first instance so called, discourse on Sustainable Development opened up the possibility to combine goals which were supposed not to be compatible before.

In my analysis, I use Michel Foucaults approach to focus on questions, which should open up accesses to an area of aspects of symbolic structuration: Of what kind are the instruments of knowledge and which meaning is given to rule and power (Macht und Herrschaft) in the analysis technique? Differing from the current literature perspective, the further exploration supposes that the occurrences in respect to 'Zukunftsfähige Entwicklung' can be regarded as a Dispositive.

Dispositives are not just located hierarchically above discourses, but also do influence the discursive practice, ergo the appearance, the maintenance and the disappearance of certain institutions and processes, which are indispensable for the production of discourses. Dispositives contain discourses, but also ruling-strategies and the institutional and procedural components of the discursive practice. Furthermore, the thesis develops a perspective of the phenomenon, which Foucault would have called the 'discursive constellation'.

Globalisation has - similarly to Sustainable Development - to be seen as a process of symbolic construction. It seems, that Globalisation succeeded over the paradigm of Sustainability. The relation of this symbolic orders and its internal structuring are determined here. The development of the dispositive is linked to the construction of a crisis or 'state of emergency'. The symbolic construction of this crisis is transformed within intervals. The dispositive of a Zukunftsfähige Entwicklung reacts to the crisis with the development of new forms of knowledge, which contain to the same extend scientific processes and everyday life knowledge based on experience.

Considering these outlined positions, the genesis of the Dispositive of a Zukunftsfähige Entwicklung should be regarded as the trial to construct the societal area of possibilities semantically and to influence it. In the following part, the thesis examines two actors (Shell/Greenpeace) just in respect to the question how they navigate themselves in the symbolic structuring process. The Dispositive of a Zukunftsfähige Entwicklung is forming an effective net for the production of truth and subjectivity. Who tries to find a position inside of the Dispositive, has to be aware of the differential order and the materiality of certain symbolic orders in the net.

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