Dear Fred,
>Long before anyone can decide whether there is such a phenomenon as
>Globalisation, the question has to be put: what is capable of being
>Globalised? .. but only if we mean to engage in social science analysis ..
>rather than in "safe politics". The next point is obviously sacrilegious to
>many: the answer to this question can have nothing to with "facts" and
>"cases", for the relevance of facts and cases are only thereby determined.
>Nor can we arrive at an understanding, and/or resolve whether there is or
>is not such a phenomenon as Globalisation by throwing cases at the question.
having said in one way or another that the task of identifying of the
subject of 'globalization' presupposes the actuality of the phenomenon
(even if only until the moment of falsification), I'm curious as to why
consistently throughout your post you give this illusive concept the
dignity of a capital letter.
The actual problem you point to is an important one of course: that of
confirming our assumptions about social reality by looking for certain
features, as we would the features of our own faces in a mirror. As we
step before the glass we will usually look first at our own eyes, gaining
for a moment only a peripheral view of the total form. Yet in that split
second our imaginations fill-in the blanks, giving us reassurance ahead of
time of the integrity of our familiar 'appearance'. With the study of
social relations this 'moment of suspension' can outlast its name, giving
way indeed to a kind of historical blindness, or willful illusion. As our
own century has taught us (I have in mind Cassirer's thesis regarding the
'myth of the state'), hundreds, thousands, millions of people can be ripped
up and scattered, suppressed or passed over, mobilized and militarized,
depending upon the nature of the illusion in question. And thus it is with
'globalization'. And so it seems to me that your question comes too late.
For having arrived at the stage of suspension already, we are faced with a
kind of historical blindness, where in the meantime - whether we like it or
not - globalization is becoming as deeply embedded as any such concept has
been prior. I have doubts as to whether we can overcome this suspension,
this possible blindness, by identifying only the circularity that called it
forth. In a sense that would demand we travel back in time! It would seem
to me then that some other gesture is necessarily (perhaps, as I have
argued, a kind of 'active forgetting', in the Nietzschean sense). Instead
of projecting our minds forward until falsified, we might make the effort
to 'forget'; in a sense (though this sounds rediculous) looking in the
mirror to find something and someone other than oneself. Interesting
indeed - if we take forward the analogy - to be caught looking for someone
other in the attempt to *escape* the anonymity of the 'suspension in
history' that so clearly runs hand-in-hand with the telelogy and mythology
of globalization!
These are just thoughts: no doubt other techniques can be found for the
cure of blindness.
I share at least with others the caution of being too sure, too soon,
about the actuality of 'globalization'. Let's leave it - for the moment -
to negotiation.
_______________________________________________________
Ian Robert Douglas,
Visiting Lecturer & Fulbright Fellow,
Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute of International Studies,
Brown University, Box 1831,
130 Hope Street,
Providence, RI 02912
tel: 401 863-2420 (direct line)
fax: 401 863-1270
"Great is Justice;
Justice is not settled by legislation and laws
it is in the soul .. " - Walt Whitman
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