Abteilung für Stadt- und Regionalentwicklung Department of Urban and Regional Development

Globalisation as a process of increasing internationalisation based on the dominance of finance capital is a material process. This article, however, focuses on globalisation as a discourse, distinguishing between discursive strategies as deliberate efforts of social actors and discursive structures as stabilized social orders unaffected by simplistic voluntarist attempts at change. Taking Brazil and a presidential speech as a case study, three discursive strategies can be identified: globalisation is portrayed as radically new, as unjust, but unavoidable and as a power field only accessible by the elite. Globalisation as a discursive structure in the Foucauldian tradition is shown to be structured similarly to the dispositive of sexuality as a flexible arrangement of actor-less and borderless markets, hereby, abandoning the old discursive structure of development which was focused on sovereignity and territory. Using marxist political economy we will unmask this rhetoric as a sophisticated power game that serves for hiding the deep-rooted dominant structure of capital and state. Only then can we fully understand the decisive role that social struggles play in the making of history and geography. This article aims at unmasking the discourse on globalisation. In general, instead of helping to understand current restructuring, talking about globalisation serves ideological and political purposes. However, the concrete functioning of this ideological attack is not very clear. On the one hand, globalisation seems to induce the total dissolution of the old order, resulting in a widespread feeling of powerlessness. On the other, hand, globalisation seems to offer unknown potentialities and perspectives for individual self-realisation. These seemingly contradictory interpretations have to be understood as moments of a specific dialectics between agency and structure. In this article, globalisation will be analysed as a discourse which has a strategic and a structural side. Therefore, a hermeneutical as well as a structural method will be used. Hermeneutics, on the one hand, is about the understanding of texts embedded in a concrete context. The reader and his/her capabilities to understand a concrete historical-geographical situation structure reality. Sensitive reading 1 The article is part of a research project financed by the Austrian Science Foundadtion (FWF P12378SOZ; see: www.wu-wien.ac.at/inst/sre/fwf). It deepens insights developed in an article written with