Globalicities Terror and Its Consequences G A Y A T R I C H A K R A V O R T Y S P I V A K Columbia University four models of globalization are currently in circulation. first, that there is nothing new about it: attempts to take in the available world in a system are as old as history. In other words, globalization is a repetition. Second, that globalization as such can be identified with the efforts at global governance signaled by the Bretton Woods Conference, remotely inaugurat- ing a postcolonial and a postnational world. Third, that the entire globe is now in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. And finally, that globalization is distinguished from world trade and world systems through the ascendancy of finance capital, helped by the silicon chip and the Fall of the Wall. In other words, that globalization is a rupture. You have coined “globalicities” to focus on the limitations and implica- tions of theoretically determining the relations of globalization. You want it to stand in the same way that temporalities and historicities stand in rela- tion to conventional time and history. In response to this, the keynote I want to strike is that changes in the subject are neither isotemporal nor isomor- phic with institutional change. ● 73
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
Globalicities
Terror and Its Consequences
G A Y A T R I C H A K R A V O R T Y S P I V A K
Columbia University
four models of globalization are currently in circulation. first,
that there is nothing new about it: attempts to take in the available world in
a system are as old as history. In other words, globalization is a repetition.
Second, that globalization as such can be identified with the efforts at global
governance signaled by the Bretton Woods Conference, remotely inaugurat-
ing a postcolonial and a postnational world. Third, that the entire globe is
now in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. And finally, that
globalization is distinguished from world trade and world systems through
the ascendancy of finance capital, helped by the silicon chip and the Fall of
the Wall. In other words, that globalization is a rupture.
You have coined “globalicities” to focus on the limitations and implica-
tions of theoretically determining the relations of globalization. You want it
to stand in the same way that temporalities and historicities stand in rela-
tion to conventional time and history. In response to this, the keynote I want
to strike is that changes in the subject are neither isotemporal nor isomor-
phic with institutional change.
● 73
But you can’t make words mean what you want. “Globalicities” carries a
pun: a sexy way of spelling “global cities.”
Globalization as urbanization seems to me one of the least speculative
strands in the thinking of globalization. It is yet another example of assum-
ing the most visible violence to be violence as such, an inability to perceive
(or ruse not to perceive) the invisible power lines that make and unmake the
visible. We can see cities exploding their spatial outlines and virtualizing
into nexuses of telecommunication, or indeed being halted from such easy
virtualization. That is part of our everyday; that is the canonical account of
globalization. The other scene still requires archaeology, genealogy; and, in
Derrida’s felicitous words, “Whatever one does with it, one must begin by lis-
tening to the canon.”1
In an argument connecting only incidentally to globalization, but quite
head-on to globalicities as global cities, Edward Soja has insisted that the
motor of history as synoikismos or “homes together” is urbanization as
such.2 Speaking of the Amazon Valley as the rural, he describes its transfor-
mation into data of various sorts (pharmaceutical patenting, ecological
databasing, and the like) as urbanization. Here, my argument has been, for
some time now, that when we think of the virtualization and transformation
of space to data, it is not the rural getting urbanized. City and country are
both transformed from space to data, in structurally related ways.
But today I will sound another keynote. I will ask why Kabul—behind it
Gaza, Karachi, Ulan Bator and bien d’autres encore—cannot emerge as
global cities.
The traditional Left, here and in Europe, has by and large understood the
events of September 11, 2001, as a battle between fundamentalism and
democracy. Even Noam Chomsky has suggested that “‘globalization,’ or ‘eco-
nomic imperialism,’ or ‘cultural values,’ [are] matters that are utterly unfa-
miliar to bin Laden and his associates and of no concern to them.”3 If, on the
other hand, we think of the actual actants involved, politicized graduate stu-
dents (rather unlike Chomsky’s stereotype), we do not have to withhold from
them the bitterness of understanding that, as the stakes in the Great Game
shift, and Russia and the United States maneuver to come together over the
black gold of the Caspian, bypassing the Taliban, there is no hope that their
G l o b a l i c i t i e s : Te r r o r a n d I t s C o n s e q u e n c e s74 ●
CR4.1 02 4/16/04 4:10 PM Page 74
city will participate (to quote one of the innumerable World Bank Policy and
Research Bulletins—this one entitled “Creating Cities That Work in the New
Global Economy”) “in the changes [attendant upon world trade reaching
more than $13 trillion in 1998, that] carry the promise of large gains for
developing countries, but [only suffer from the] expos[ure] to greater risks”
promised in the same sentence.4 Why can’t Islam be a liberation theology for
leftists from the middle-class elite? I hold no brief for liberation theology. I
am just trying to imagine something different from the sorry stereotype.
The book that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have co-authored has
given us a definitive account of the politics of globalization—from imperial-
ism to empire. Within that context, they have declared the emergence of a
new pluralized subject of resistance and given it the name “multitude,”
unconnected to national liberation, confronting Empire head-on like the
net(work) that brought down Agamemnon. I would like to read the impos-
sibility of locating or grasping such subjects in the destruction of the World
Trade Center. I would like to suggest that the “irreducible vis-à-vis” (to quote
Foucault) of Empire and multitude as a felicitous binary opposition can only
be recoded as the infelicitous binary opposition between Empire and Osama
bin Laden. Such a recoding, bypassing the sublimity of the event, is an inter-
nal necessity, for every rupture is also a repetition.
The only discursive arsenal belongs, as usual, to an earlier semiotic field,
even the discourse that produces “Empire” as a rupture belonging to the truly
global. That is the banal way in which every rupture is also a repetition. The
case against Osama bin Laden must be constituted as precisely that: “a case”
for capital punishment by international law. The United States says it has evi-
dence, which it has released to its NATO allies but cannot release to the pub-
lic. Pakistan says it is convinced that there is a case against him. The Taliban
says if the United States provided enough evidence against him, they would try
him by the Shariat. None of this is the impersonal movement of data, caught
in a global network of telecommunication that we recognize as the trademark
of our world. We must realize that the discursive resources for the globalized
planet are still culled from various older axiomatics—here, the juridico-legal.
The law has never worked in its abstractions without the deployment of
power. This necessary resistance to law written in it as its own transgression
G a y a t r i C h a k r a v o r t y S p i v a k ● 75
CR4.1 02 4/16/04 4:10 PM Page 75
here thematizes itself because power sees itself as absolute. Thus, the invo-
cation of the law is left unanswered. The only possible response of those
without power has been, alas, to withhold, to refuse to give in. Even when it
is perfectly clear that the question of law is irrelevant, the answer is: we will
try him when you produce evidence, by our law. But also, by the law of hos-
pitality, we will not give him up. I hold no brief for the Taliban, and indeed,
I understand they are defecting—if CNN is to be believed—as who wouldn’t
in the face of the ferocity of the United States? But one must be able to imag-
ine beyond the stereotypes.
This (non)exchange would have been possible at a time before electronic
missiles—although they too, as we have seen, are amenable to technical fail-
ure and human error. Perhaps the movements of finance capital are so
abstract that error can correct itself or constitute itself as felicity. I don’t
really think so. What we do know is that in the field of the juridico-legal, the
political, the military, the ideological, the pedagogical, and the like, the man-
agement of human and technical error—troubleshooting—is what consti-
tutes the field. When we describe globalization as seamless unification of
the globe achieved, we describe the dream of globalization as achieved.
There are other kinds of ruptures that I will go on to describe. But this con-
stitutive rupture is something that we should keep resolutely in mind as we
investigate the impossibility of tracking the loci of labor injustice because
the factory has become so thoroughly virtualized and diversified. Or when
we hear the spin doctors for globalization, on the Right or on the Left, some-
times hardly distinguishable in their consequences, dazzle us with
meganumbers and assure us of transformations in international urban cul-
ture, or of transformed subjectivities. Some of us in the humanities used to
know, theoretically and practically, that changes in the subject, as distin-
guished from modes of agency, are neither isotemporal nor isomorphic with
institutional change.
Indeed, perhaps the fall of the World Trade Center was achieved with
such success in detail because it was middle- and low-tech, as Mahmood
Mamdani reminded us in New York on 20 September: commercial airplanes
and box-cutters, in the service of human fearlessness and singleness of pur-
pose.
G l o b a l i c i t i e s : Te r r o r a n d I t s C o n s e q u e n c e s76 ●
CR4.1 02 4/16/04 4:10 PM Page 76
Let us remain on the track of how older ways of doing and thinking are
still tangled up with what we think of as the new “global.” Indeed, the con-
frontation between the NATO allies can be seen as between two global con-
junctures, if you will cast your mind back upon the list of contending views
of globalization with which I began.
I have no ontological commitment to these globalities as actually exist-
ing social formations—“real,” isolatable globalicities. Indeed, it is my strong
feeling that in our craze for recounting the magicalities of globalicities, we
have sacrificed theoretical and practical sophistication. I have long held that,
insofar as something called “culture” can be accessible, either inside and/or
outside, either to its theorists and/or practitioners, culture is the explana-
tions of culture. As to the etiologies of contending cultural explanations, one
can no doubt plot historical narratives, themselves part of the network of
explanations; but the search for absolute etiologies is as fascinating and elu-
sive as the search for the origin of language. Please keep this in mind as I
speak of global conjunctures: Euro-U.S. globality with its well-documented
history, and the anterior globality of “Islam,” which can, unfortunately, only
carry the name of religion and offer itself as explanation by way of the dis-
cursive practice of religion. What is noticeable is that the Euro-U.S. global-
ity, which is tacitly offered as the unmarked global as such, with the endless
invocations of the transnational subject and satellite dishes in Nepalese vil-
lages, is the one that is conjuring with nation-state alliances. It is the other
globality, “Islamic” within quotes, where archaico-residual, global(izing)
frontiers on the move are in conflict with the idea of the nation-state. As in
the case of the Gulf War, it is the case of men one way and the state another.
As is my custom, I will end with the question of woman. For now, we must
complicate the global in order to get a grip upon the thighs—I quote Yeats—
of this fast-evolving situation.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Amir Abd-ur-Rahman of
Afghanistan had tried to think through such explanations between the pro-
visional globality of something called “Islam” and the urgency for the emer-
gence of a practical nation-state. I do not have access to his autobiography
in Farsi, but I have studied it carefully in its English translation, attempting
to read, as much as possible, between its lines. Not all of it is by his hand, of
G a y a t r i C h a k r a v o r t y S p i v a k ● 77
CR4.1 02 4/16/04 4:10 PM Page 77
course; one is not gullible about the evidentiary strength of autobiography,
just as one is aware of the lineaments of the autobiographical under the
most “objective” organization of facts. This characteristic, of devising and
charting a course between the existing solidarity of “Islam” and the consol-
idation of the frontiers and boundaries of the state loosely established in
Afghanistan by Ahmad Shah Durani in 1727, is so pervasive in Abd-ur-
Rahman’s autobiography that it is hard to isolate a quote or two.
In the archives of the old Royal Ministry of External Affairs in Kabul
were lodged 194 “covenants,” given to Abd-ur-Rahman on 17 August 1896 by
various groups that made up “Afghanistan.” Hasan Kakar has included the
one given by the Mohammadzay Sardars (lit. headmen), since they were of
the amir’s own clan (qawm, people related by blood and “otherwise,” who can
“stand together,” to trade, to fight, to recite their genealogies).5
The Amir named the day “Festival of Unanimity.” The name names a
desire, rather than its accomplishment. Let us remember the constitutive
hybridity of that “unanimity.” The document in Kakar is no singular Declara-
tion of Independence where the performance of the signatures was rused as
the constative statement of the existence of the signatories as declarers—as
declarers specifically of a specific gesture, here unanimity, as their inde-
pendence.6 There were, after all, nearly two hundred such documents. The
example of the Mohammadzay was followed not only by “other groups
[qwams] throughout the country” but also by “Hindus, artisans, business-