Global Modernity
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Global Modernity

Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism

Arif Dirlik

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Global Modernity

Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism

Arif Dirlik

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"A compelling essay on the contemporary human condition." William D. Coleman, Director of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University "An unusually perceptive and balanced appraisal of the globalization hype and its relation to the reality of global capitalism." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University In his provocative new book Arif Dirlik argues that the present represents not the beginning of globalization, but its end. We are instead in a new era in the unfolding of capitalism -- "global modernity". The fall of communism in the 1980s generated culturally informed counter-claims to modernity. Globalization has fragmented our understanding of what is "modern". Dirlik's "global modernity" is a concept that enables us to distinguish the present from its Eurocentric past, while recognizing the crucial importance of that past in shaping the present.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317258926
Subtopic
Sociologia
Edition
1
Image
1
Introduction
Global Modernity
Is the world unifying, creating a common organizational structure and a new culture to bolster it, or is it fragmenting into units of various kinds and sizes that are at odds with one another and themselves fractured in many ways internally? Is it looking to a future of expanded if not general welfare and prosperity, or is it about to flounder as it runs out of those resources without which the present organization of political economy will be drained of its life force in a matter of decades? Does the future lie with a new system of world governance that will bring with it peace, equality, and democracy to the billions who are deprived of them, or does it point to a despotism of unprecedented power and reach, with the technological ability to make and remake individuals and societies organizationally and culturally, as has been achieved to some measure already with colonialism, nation-states, and transnational capital, whose convergence has been fundamental in creating the world of the present?
These questions, and others similar to them but with different emphases, have been on many minds globally for the past decade. It was from the early 1990s that globalization rapidly and insistently emerged as a concept with paradigmatic claims, demanding attention not only as a guide to the present, the future, and the past of the world we live in but also as a resource for the reevaluation and reorganization of the social and the human sciences—and our ways of knowing in general. There has been no shortage of answers to these questions as globalization has turned into the most recent fashion in and out of academia. The answers usually have been products of conflicting ideological efforts to appropriate it for different visions of the future, as well as different appreciations of what the concept implies, which have become more and more complicated as the term has spread across diverse fields. More often than not, such answers are notable for their reductionism and the wishful (if not self-consciously ideological) thinking that motivates them. The world we live in is too complicated to lend itself to clear-cut answers demanded by either/or questions of the sort cited here. It is both unifying and fragmenting, depending on where we look. Some places and some people are doing much better than before, thank you, while far greater numbers seem to be caught in a frightful—and irresistible—race to the bottom and oblivion. Yes, greater numbers are consuming more than ever before, which all of a sudden makes the nightmare of disappearing resources into the reality of the next generation, if not toward the end of this one. We may have reason to celebrate the diffusion of values of democracy and human rights into all corners of the world. Yet, more often than not, the whole thing is spoiled by the rendering of these fundamental values and rights into instruments of empire, giving plausibility to a widespread perception globally that globalization is little more than a euphemism for old-fashioned imperialism. This perception itself goes far in negating the very idea that the world is globalizing.
What may be certain in the midst of all this uncertainty is that some of the positive promises of globalization better be realized before its negative effects become a total reality; doing so may require a restructuring of the world as we know it. This conclusion is not very common these days among those who speak of and write about globalization, even among many former leftist radicals, who are embarrassed by the failure of past efforts to restructure the world that ended up betraying the very promises that had legitimized them in the first place. And yet there seems to be a pervasive feeling around the world that something has gone terribly wrong, that the wrongs are deepening, and that there may be no way of correcting them as things are going presently—toward what seems to be widespread disaster and destruction. To speak of restructuring the world is to say something that is radically different from what we find in most discussions of globalization. It is associated mostly with globalization’s foes, rather than those who celebrate it or are simply convinced of its inevitability.
It is possible to observe, nevertheless, that a world in which the promises of globalization may become a reality is not to be achieved through teleologies built into the idea of globalization as we have it presently, which points to more of the same as before, albeit reconfigured in its patterns of production and consumption by contemporary circumstances. This is quite evident in efforts to rewrite the past in accordance with contemporary perspectives on globalization, which reconfigure the past but, in the process, also render it into a prison for the present, ruling out the imagination of global possibilities that can overcome the legacies of colonialism, environmental destruction, and assorted social inequalities and political oppressions that are very much part of the constitution of globality as we know it. If the assumptions underlying these perspectives are to be taken seriously, the present is a product and terminal state of globalization, not a point of departure for a future that offers any hope of breaking with these past legacies. The future is now.
Such historicism serves more to avoid consideration of alternative possibilities to the future by once again rewriting the past to render the present into its inevitable outcome, rather than to uncover the alternatives that had to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility. The question it raises, in an immediate sense, is whether the realization of a just and democratic globality is possible under the current regime of capitalism, which, ever since the dissolution of all systematic efforts to create alternatives to it, has acquired the guise of a force of nature. Opposition to it, such as it is, finds inspiration not in imagining globality differently but in deploying other pasts to assert identities of one kind or another within the social and political parameters demanded by the capitalist reorganization of life globally. It is true that disillusionment with the effects of globalization has produced or revived, depending on the larger political and ideological context, a multiplicity of political orientations that draw inspiration from radical left legacies, ranging from hopes of a universal anarchist society to the generation of place-based and indigenous alternatives that challenge the concentration of economic and political power at levels of global hierarchies that are ever more distant from the everyday lives of the people globally—more distant for some than for others.
But most conspicuous, and of fundamental significance in shaping contemporary world politics, is the struggle for dominance within the capitalist world economy, which contrasts with an earlier period of modernity when struggles took the form of struggles between the globalization of capitalism and resistance to it, most importantly in the guise of socialism. Current struggles over the future of capitalism find ideological expression increasingly in imagined cultural legacies that have come to replace not only radical left but also liberal ideologies of modernity that shared a common ground in the elevation of reason over history. Even as something called globalization is supposedly happening, world politics is dominated by imperial visions of ideological (if not physical) world conquest. The rhetoric of human rights and democracy that long has served to legitimize Euro-American imperialism increasingly is infused, especially in the case of the United States, by religious values that supposedly should have been washed away by modernity. Religion, likewise, infuses the language of resistance to imperialism, as well as of claims to cultural identity.1
There is nothing new about clashes among reactionary fundamentalists, with their conflicting claims to absolute, universal truth. What is new is that these clashes are now being played out on the grounds of a globalized capitalist political economy. Unlike in an earlier period of modernity, with its teleological assumption of the ultimate victory of certain truths deemed to be universal, it seems that these conflicting claims to truth are not likely to disappear anytime soon and that they are as crucial to grasping a contemporary condition of globality as is the common grounding in a capitalist economy. Normalized as constituents of cultural identity in a world that has given up hope in any shared universalism, these values, which appeared earlier as markers of religious and cultural right-wing politics, not only are endemic to politics globally but have come to be identifying features of a contemporary modernity.
In this book, I seek to bring some clarity to these problems thrown up by a contemporary world situation that globalization as paradigm is intended to describe and explain. Globalization in my reading refers both to world processes and to a way of thinking about the world. I make every effort in this undertaking to remain “worldly,” to be attentive to the relationship between the concept and what goes on in the world. But the primary stress in this discussion is on the concept itself, not only in its reference to the world but also in its reference to other concepts it has come to replace, such as modernization and world systems analysis, as well as to concepts contemporaneous with it in intellectual, academic, and artistic circles—notably, postmodernity and postcoloniality.
I make no attempt to define globalization. The precision gained by defining concepts of necessity exacts a price by placing closure on both their form and content. This is especially the case with a contested term like globalization. Defining it may serve ideological purposes in privileging one sense of the concept over another. For the same reason, it would deprive the concept of its historicity and work against any serious possibility of grasping the fluid world situations that it is intended to comprehend. The fruitlessness of efforts to define the concept of globalization is evident in the many efforts to do so, which are most notable for their failure to establish a plausible correspondence between their definitions and the realities of the world. The qualifications offered in order to achieve such correspondence in the end overwhelm the definitions, depriving the concept of coherence even as an idea, let alone in its relationship to those realities.
It makes sense, instead, to view globalization as an ongoing discourse in search of its object and to comprehend it within a broader constellation of concepts; to place it as paradigm in historical context, considering the material and ideological associations that attended its emergence in the 1990s, with an examination of what it has come to replace: the modernization discourse of the post–World War II years, as well as the radical challenges offered to it in the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from revolutionary ideas of development to more circumscribed theorizations of development in world system analysis, dependency theory, and so forth. Globalization as a discourse needs to be understood as both a continuation and a disavowal of an earlier modernization discourse. Its erasure of radical alternatives to modernization discourse is more direct and less ambiguous (and less dialectical, I might add). At the same time, as a social scientific discourse, globalization resonates (and is contemporaneous) with postmodernism and postcolonialism in cultural studies. Exploration of a possible relationship between these phenomena, different aspects of an emerging world situation, may have much to tell us about the intellectual history of our times, where we have come from, what we have left behind, and where—if anywhere—we might be headed.
One of the more interesting problems presented by globalization as a discourse is whether it is an end or a beginning, or both—in other words, whether the teleology built into it as a concept is one that already has been realized and represents a present state of affairs, or whether the world has only reached a state to appreciate a vision that still lies in the future. Ideologues of globalization claim that it is both, that the future, the present, and the past together provide evidence of both its historical necessity and its moral goodness. The past is in the process of being rewritten presently to accord with the demands of this vision, even as the present provides little hope that the vision may ever be reached, as globalization so-called has brought to the surface fractures so deep that they may be overcome only by the unprecedented exercise of power on the part of the powerful, which confounds the relationship between globalization and imperialism and throws into question its conceptual integrity by exposing the ideological struggles at its core.
This is the state of affairs that I describe in the following pages as global modernity. I also suggest that global modernity (which I take to be in the singular) is a product of globalization rather than its harbinger, and it bears upon it the contradictions of the history that has produced it—both as the realization of that history and as its negation, the most crucial issue being its relationship to the colonial past.2 Globalization may be viewed as the process whereby modernity—capitalist modernity—has gone global, universalizing not only the material and ideological practices but also the contradictions of modernity, including the very negation of its claims to universality. Global modernity may promise liberation from the past globally, including from the past of modernity itself, but it also bears the stamp of the colonial economically, politically, socially, and culturally, perpetuating past inequalities while adding to them new ones of its own.
It is also possible to think of globalization as a pointer to the future, one that is an improvement materially and morally over the present. I believe that will require a different kind of globalization, freed from the teleologies that drive contemporary understandings of the world and the word. It will be a globalization that can be fulfilled only by overcoming global modernity to create a different kind of globality than what passes for it at the present, which is in many ways little more than the fulfillment of a colonial modernity. The colonialism of an earlier day has been restructured to accommodate new kinds of power, products themselves of colonial modernity. There no doubt also has been a change of personnel in the engineering and operation of the structures that embody the global materially and endow it with the ideological persuasiveness that it has come to command. But there is little evidence to support claims that the world we live in has been freed in its structuring from the prerogatives of colonial power. Claims that revivals of local histories and practices (from the place based to the national or regional) represent liberation from the hegemony of colonial modernity or that they point to alternative or multiple modernities are not very convincing, as most such claims already take for granted the global victory of capitalism in material life, leaving it to the realm of culture to carry the burden of difference. A deeper historical perspective enjoins us to question, on the one hand, whether cultural difference can survive a modernity, of necessity understood presently as capitalist modernity, that thrives on the production of simulacra—including the simulacra of cultural difference. On the other hand, we need also to ask whether such a modernity can survive material, cultural, and intellectual decolonization, the key to which may be not the reassertion of imagined histories and cultural differences but a recognition of the coloniality of the modernity in which we live, which surely must be the first step in any reconsideration of the future. The “decolonization of the mind” was an important ideal when it seemed for a short while that material (including political) decolonization had been achieved already.3 The end of that illusion requires that the “decolonization of the mind” attend not just to matters cultural but to issues of culture where they pertain to the transformation of material life.
What kind of globalization may help achieve a globality beyond the colonial is something that needs urgent attention. I will return by way of conclusion to my own “wishful thinking.” The primary goal of the discussion that follows is to offer a perspective that renders visible contradictions in contemporary global modernity that I hope will show why we should think of globalization as we know it as a fundamental formative constituent of the present, which for the same reason may offer little help in overcoming the present to reenvision the future.
Notes
1.  The relationship between religion and globalization is a very important but underexplored problem. In some ways, the relationship brings out the contradictions of globalization more eloquently, if tragically, than any other area. Religion and globality produce one another. It may be for the same reason that religious conflict also has taken a deadlier form as it plays out on the terrain of the global. For a preliminary discussion, see Arif Dirlik, “Modernity in Question? Culture and Religion in an Age of Global Modernity,” Diaspora 12, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 147–68.
2.  That globalization is over is a point made forcefully in a recent book, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, by the noted Canadian author John Ralston Saul (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005). There is much in common between Saul’s argument and mine, although his emphasis is on the last three decades of neoliberal globalization, whereas I am more concerned here with issues of the relationship between modernity and globalization.
3.  The term is Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s. See Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Currey, 1986).
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2
Thinking Globalization Historically
When I joined the faculty of the history department at Duke University in 1971, one of my tasks was to teach in a course, already in place, titled “From Tradition to Modernity.” It was a team-taught, two-semester course that covered China, Japan, South Asia (India), Africa, and Latin America, more or less corresponding to the “areas” of area studies. The first semester was devoted to traditions, the second to modernity. In the first semester, following an introductory lecture on Talcott Parsons’s “pattern-variables,” we each took three-week turns to discuss tradition in our respective societies, in the order of religion, social, and political structures.1 We followed the same pattern the second semester, although we had more to say to one another as the various societies we covered seemed now to have more in common with one another.
By the end of that decade, the sixties had caught up with the course. It was renamed “The Third World and the West,” the tradition/modernity binarism was dropped to be replaced by premodern and modern, and the content of the course shifted to discussion of economic relationships, coloniali...

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