Original scientific paper

Globalization, Power and Knowledge Policy: Eleven Antitheses on Globalization

Zlatan Delić ; University of Tuzla, Faculty of Philosophy, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

This work is about social and epistemological criticism of globalization (“hyperglobalization”) that functions as a privileged image of the world or a privileged paradigm. The relationship between globalization and power, and/or globalization and knowledge policy is analyzed in this work by proceeding from the crisis of knowledge legitimacy – the crisis of the purpose, role and social function of university as the highest institution of knowledge. At the beginning of modernity, knowledge was designated as power. At the end of modernity, in the global society of knowledge, the very power – the power of imposing knowledge in the form of technical science – prescribes what is to be treated, tested and acknowledged as knowledge itself. Eleven crucial statements on globalization are expressed in the form of grammatologically supplementing antitheses on the contradictory dynamics created by mutual interweaving of the (global) knowledge policy, power and the market fundamentalism ideology. Most of these antitheses result from a deliberate opposition to the hyper capitalist ideology of market fundamentalism. This ideology is settled in the very basis of the predominant economical notion on globalization. The aim of this work is to re-examine critically the widespread popularity of the positivist narration on globalization, especially when related to “global society of knowledge” and “new economy of knowledge”. The problem is that the dominant economic-mimetic conception of globalization presumes in a highly uncritical way that the positivist use of the term globalization is self-understandable, coherent, uncomplicated, legitimate and justified. On the contrary, globalization does not appear as a clear, but a very ambiguous “term”, “concept”, “paradigm” etc. Our work results from the conviction that it is not possible to legitimate globalization scientifically as a new scientific paradigm. Therefore, the fact that globalization gathers enormous power within the main streams of science represents a special auto-referential paradox. The contemporary economical globalization is a result of mutual activities in the form of a scientific, technical-technological, symbolical (economical, cultural, political etc.) and real predominance of a certain commercializing and globalizing discourse, globalizes institutions of knowledge and other mechanisms. These mechanisms impose, promote, create, re-create and support globalization as a unique project carried out in the name of establishing a new “global society of knowledge”.

Keywords

globalization; power; knowledge policy; modernity; post/modernity

Hrčak ID:

41063

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/41063

Publication date:

22.4.2009.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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