Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy - Softcover

Rockhill, Gabriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822369761 ISBN 13: 9780822369769

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2017

Synopsis

In Counter-History of the Present Gabriel Rockhill contests, dismantles, and displaces one of the most widespread understandings of the contemporary world: that we are all living in a democratized and globalized era intimately connected by a single, overarching economic and technological network. Noting how such a narrative fails to account for the experiences of the billions of people who lack economic security, digital access, and real political power, Rockhill interrogates the ways in which this grand narrative has emerged in the same historical, economic, and cultural context as the fervid expansion of neoliberalism. He also critiques the concurrent valorization of democracy, which is often used to justify U.S. military interventions on the behalf of capital. Developing an alternative account of the current conjuncture that acknowledges the plurality of lived experiences around the globe and in different social strata, he shifts the foundations upon which debates about the contemporary world can be staged. Rockhill's counter-history thereby offers a new grammar for historical narratives, creating space for the articulation of futures no longer engulfed in the perpetuation of the present.

About this title

About the Author

Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and the author, editor, and translator of many books, including Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, also published by Duke University Press, and Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Counter-History of the Present

Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy

By Gabriel Rockhill

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2017 Gabriel Rockhill
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6976-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INTRODUCTION Toward a Counter-History of the Present, 
CHAPTER 1 A Specter Is Haunting Globalization, 
CHAPTER 2 Are We Really Living in a Technological Era?, 
CHAPTER 3 hat Is the Use of Democracy? Urgency of an Inappropriate Question, 
AFTERWORD Taking Charge of the Meanings and Directions of History, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

A Specter Is Haunting Globalization

The concept of globalization imposes itself with such force today that its historical provenance has been concealed. The word seems to describe an undeniable reality by encapsulating — via a reckless desire for conceptual abbreviation — all of the new phenomena of our age, whether economic, political, social, cultural, industrial, or technological. Although the attempts to discern the onset and the precise characteristics of globalization are numerous, the debates around these nonetheless tend to obscure the provenance of the idea itself as well as of its conceptual and historiographical categories, as if forgetting the past was the key to understanding the present. Yet this past continues to weigh "like a nightmare on the brain of the living," and bringing it to light via counter-historical investigation will help provide new perspective on this apparently natural and necessary world-image.

Globalization: Between Words and Things

We are repeatedly told that globalization has created a more unified world with a single economic market, a network of new technologies, the proliferation of a more or less homogeneous culture and novel structures of governance. Such a process is not only new, or at least relatively new; it is also supposedly inevitable — despite setbacks or slowdowns — given the nature of its driving forces and the general course of history. Looming over our existence like the dominant trait of a profound and widespread Zeitgeist, globalization allows us to resist its consequences only if we are already subject to its effects. Novel, inevitable, almighty: such is the force that has supposedly been transforming our world from top to bottom.

Yet there is no agreement on the precise definition or the exact date of so-called globalization. To take only a few examples, can we really talk about a global information and communication system when regular Internet access is restricted, as I indicated in the introduction, to less than half of the planetary population (43.4 percent)? Does a rhizomatic system of air transportation — mostly connecting major economic centers, airport hubs, and tourist sites — constitute a truly global system of transportation, especially considering all of the necessary documents (passports, visas, etc.) and the substantial financial resources required to use it? Are the archipelago of economic exchange and the extremely unequal development of the planet signs of the existence of a global village? Are the rejection of the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe and the presence of strong nationalist movements in European countries so many symptoms of a global age? And what about the drastic increase in the number of slums since the end of the 1970s, which accounted for approximately a sixth of the population of planet Earth at the beginning of the twenty-first century (more than a billion people lived in slums in 2003 according to the report The Challenge of the Slums, published by the United Nations)? These shantytowns constitute, moreover, regions that are not only outside the preferred trajectories of the globe-trotters, but that are also sometimes disconnected from national and transnational governance, if not veritably "cut off from the world" (this is to say that there are several spaces in "the world" and that one of the fundamental problems haunting the notion of globalization is precisely that of reducing them to a single, more or less homogeneous spatiality). Finally, how can we speak of the unification of planet Earth when so-called international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been responsible for redistributing wealth from the poorest countries to the richest ones? Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, indeed, that "after twenty years of failing to pay attention to the social and human consequences of unfettered global capitalism, the president of the World Bank has come to the conclusion that for most of the world's population the word 'globalization' suggests 'fear and insecurity' rather than 'opportunity and inclusion.'"

The defenders of globalization would probably argue that these issues are only temporary slowdowns in an inevitable process. Such a stance, rooted in a veritable historical faith, and often founded on a theodicy capable of integrating all of history's evils into a grand eschatological narrative, could, at least in principle, withstand the presentation of any series of empirical facts. It is therefore necessary to start by reminding ourselves that the notion of globalization is purely relative. Everything depends on the scale of analysis, the reference points, and ultimately on the question "Globalization in relation to what?" For some, the "discovery" of the "New World" at the end of the fifteenth century would be a sign of globalization, while for others globalization only began with the invention of mass communication and the spread of so-called post-Fordist capitalism. And in a few decades it is highly probable that such characteristics will be replaced by others (in situating ourselves in time, we should be wary of according an absolute privilege to the past, since the future constitutes a fundamental dimension of any history). There are no objective criteria that enable us to distinguish with precision true cases of globalization. In the absence of objective criteria of analysis, the participants in the globalization debate invent criteria in order to demonstrate the pertinence of their own distinctions between the global age and the preglobal era.

Let us take, as examples, two quotes:

Today, as commerce [and] travel [...] bring together diverse people, and their lifestyles are constantly being brought closer together through frequent communication, we see that certain national differences have diminished.

When has the whole earth ever so universally converged together on so few united threads as now? When have more power and machinery been possessed for shaking whole nations to the core with one press, with one movement of a finger?

Are these so many signs of globalization? Are not the overcoming of the national framework and the unification of the planet by commerce, travel, technology, and communication characteristics of globalization? Yet the authors do not explicitly refer to the process of globalization, and with good cause: the word did not yet exist. Despite what one might think (and in spite of the slightly dated language), these quotes were not randomly picked out from recent newspapers, nor do they appear in one of the numerous books devoted to the question of superseding the nation-state. They date from 1754 and 1774 respectively. Their authors are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and J. G. Herder.

Does this mean that the reality of globalization precedes the invention of the term? This question touches on a fundamental philosophical problem that must be dealt with head-on: the relationship between words and things. There are two ideal-typical positions that are readily identifiable. The first, the realist position, is surely the dominant one in this domain. It consists in affirming that there is an autonomous world and that language is a system of communication enabling us to speak about it, if it be correctly or incorrectly. In this case, globalization would indeed be a real historical phenomenon and the late emergence of the term would simply correspond to an intellectual advance allowing us to talk more precisely and concisely about this reality. The second position, which might be qualified as lingua-centric, denies the existence of an autonomous reality and asserts that language is what delivers "the world" to us. Far from being a real phenomenon, globalization would simply be a term in a system of signification, a differential marker in a network of intralinguistic references.

It is advisable to distance ourselves from these two ideal-typical positions, founded on the opposition between language and reality, and ultimately on the dichotomy between human beings and the world (language often being conceived of as a human phenomenon). If an autonomous world existed independently from our practical, conceptual, perceptive, and discursive schemas (which seems more than probable), we would only have access to it through these. This does not come down to saying that the world is reducible to our apprehension of it or that we are free to construct reality from scratch. It means, rather, that the world only delivers itself to us as a world insofar as we are beings of the given world, with theoretico-practical dispositions and specific modes of experience. To cite one of Thomas Kuhn's distinctions to which I will return later, I would say that we never have a direct experience of stimuli or raw definitive facts. The primary elements of our experience are data, which present themselves as the lived, unquestioned givens of our world. As far as language is concerned, we should not consider it to be a largely autonomous and all-encompassing system that structures the totality of our thoughts and experience. Language is a dynamic and historical practice that, far from being an autonomous element, is intertwined with social, political, economic, and other practices. Hence the choice is not between globalization as a word and globalization as a thing. Nor should one accept as such the question that structures a significant portion of the globalization debate: is a word such as globalization appropriate for describing a thing such as the current state of the world? What needs to be pointed out is that the notion of globalization emerges from practices linked to a specific schematization of the world, practices that have, moreover, been effective insofar as they have helped produce "the thing" supposedly described by "the word."

Marx's Unexpected Recuperation

By making the debate on globalization into a controversy regarding the relationship between a word and a thing, we promptly forget the historicity of the discursive, theoretical, and practical categories allowing us to apprehend "the historical real." In this respect, it is essential to recall that the emergence of the notion of globalization is very recent. Its origins date back to the 1950s and 1960s, but it was in the 1980s and especially the 1990s that it started to impose itself as one of the key concepts of our conjuncture. The number of articles in the New York Times discussing globalization can serve as an interesting barometer. Prior to 1970 there were no articles, and the statistics for the ensuing decades are relatively revealing: 1 article in the 1970s, 172 articles in the 1980s, 911 articles in the 1990s, and 3,012 articles between 2000 and 2010. The results for other databases, such as LexisNexis or the archives of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, follow the same pattern. We could also cite the number of works indexed under the keyword globalization in the Library of Congress, which confirm a similar, though deferred, tendency in the world of books: 1 book in the 1970s, 14 in the 1980s, 1,076 in the 1990s, and more than 10,000 between 2000 and 2010. "'Globalization [mondialisation],'" writes Frédéric Lebaron, "has become in a few years one of the key notions of the economic and social debate. It is in particular at the beginning of the 1990s that the use of it spreads significantly in France, in competition with the word 'globalization [globalisation],' directly transposed from English."

Instead of simply being a neutral concept used — or not — to describe new realities (other terms such as internationalization or international development were already available), it is a practical concept rooted in a very specific historical and geopolitical conjuncture, marked in particular by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's politico-economic project, as well as by other important political and economic actors such as Paul Volcker (former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve), Augusto Pinochet, and Deng Xiaoping. This project was perfectly summed up by Thatcher's slogan: There Is No Alternative, or TINA. This means at least two things at once: there is no structural alternative to the neoliberal economic system, and there is no historical alternative insofar as it is inscribed in the very destiny of this system to impose itself throughout the world. This obviously does not mean that every use of the concept of globalization is necessarily linked to the various metamorphoses of neoliberalism, but it is of the utmost importance to highlight the fact that the filiation of this concept is directly tied to the reconfiguration of the geopolitical world since the 1970s. This reconfiguration was fueled in the preceding decades by decolonization and later by the collapse of the Soviet Union. These two political events sometimes gave the impression that a world divided between imperial zones or ideological blocs was giving way to a more and more unified planet, in which the reign of the alleged freedom of the free market promised, via an implacable theodicy, one market under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice (for some). In other words, the concept of globalization is not a purely descriptive notion used to depict new historical phenomena. It is a concept linked — directly or indirectly — to a recent political imaginary and a new world-image in which the expansion of the free market is supposed to go hand in hand with the spread of freedom in the "crusade of popular capitalism."

This expression is borrowed from the speech that Margaret Thatcher presented at the Conservative Party Conference in 1986, which is in perfect alignment with the discourse in one of neoliberalism's manifestoes, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom: "The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other." In referring to globalization in what follows, I will therefore be focusing on the term's historical center of gravity, without pretending to sum up the totality of its uses. And by historical center of gravity I mean the linguistic practico-inert of the term, that is, the residues of former linguistic practices that, in becoming inert, continue to haunt the word and intervene in practices. In short, the practico-inert of a term is a set of effects that produces effects.

The best explanation of the part played by this practical concept (at least at the level of its historical center of gravity) in the construction of a new world-image consists in underscoring the way in which this praxiconcept has surreptitiously and paradoxically appropriated a set of conceptual categories considered to be obsolete: those of vulgar Marxism. What I mean by this is a certain social idea of Marxism, which does not necessarily correspond to what Marx himself wrote. Let us begin by outlining these categories, and we will later explore specific examples. According to a very widespread form of conventional wisdom, Marxism was refuted by history for at least three reasons:

(i) It was founded on a reductive technico-economic determinism.

(ii) It put forth a teleological conception of history in which the totality of the past was directed toward a single end, following a linear or dialectical trajectory of progress.

(iii) It held this teleological progress to be inevitable, like an organic process that historical actors would be incapable of stopping.

The "factual" refutation can also be summed up in three points:

(i) Technico-economic determinism failed because all capitalist societies did not engender communist revolutions.

(ii) History did not keep its promise insofar as its telos — the communist revolution as the harbinger of a classless society — actually produced totalitarian regimes that later collapsed, for the most part at the feet of democratico-capitalist countries.

(iii) The supposedly natural and inevitable evolution of history encountered significant resistance, including most notably from capitalism itself and from liberal democracies.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Counter-History of the Present by Gabriel Rockhill. Copyright © 2017 Gabriel Rockhill. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822369761
• ISBN 13: 9780822369769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160