Knowing Doing Governing: Realizing Heterodyne Democracies

Abstract

Political divides are intense, not only around the means to stated shared ends in governance, nor just concerning what any particular declared intent might imply in any detail. Substantive general questions also emerge about the credibility, sincerity and the very meaning of existing governance understandings and discourses themselves. Indeed, fundamental queries arise not only about the modalities and instantiations of governance as an objective focus, but about what kind of phenomenon the knowing of governance as a subjective process actually is. For instance, how literally should the knowing be taken as a separate process from the doing of governance? Are – as is conventionally portrayed – practices ostensibly concerned with the knowing of governance, a prior factor informing subsequent intentions and actions? Or are understandings themselves better understood as functions of already-realised practices and interests? Perhaps it is this that helps explain the dissonance? To cut straight to the chase, serious questions might be asked over the entire performance of ‘governance’ as a field for supposedly disinterested academic or policy analysis.