Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory

Introduction: Epistemic Hubris and Dialogical Cosmopolitanism

How Not to Know Globalization is to many pure ideology, and it is an ideology that operates at different levels, with different degrees of effectiveness, to the evident benefit of a very few. To many, globalization helps describe and name a new societal situation that is different not just in degree but also in kind from what preceded it, even if a precise dateline is not forthcoming. To many others, it is certainly a conceptual and theoretical utopia. The term is used as a noun although it is a verb, but it can also be marshaled as both an adjective and an adverb. The term is as versatile and seemingly innocuous as Martin Heidegger’s Sein. Like Heidegger’s Sein, it is complicit in concealing degrees of responsibility, deception, and self-delusion. It invites Gelassenheit and Entschlossenheit, letting be and resoluteness: Globalization will come of its own accord, or, alternatively, we must seize society and try to emulate the West and globalize—become global, globalize our modernity, and form part of globalization. In its uses and confusions, globalization resembles closely the other great word of contemporary social theory: modernity. I argue in this book that globalization has taken over the tasks that modernity used to perform. Like modernity, globalization is a term that helps us order societies in hierarchical and invidious ways that always put the United States and the so-called West, or Occident, in enviable and also unattainable positions. Like modernity, globalization is a theoretical grid that distorts the world, as it reveals aspects of it, while also distorting our place as epistemic subjects and objects. If modernity was the avant-garde position of the West—the European West—globalization is the avant-garde position of the United States, which has taken over the mission civilisatrice of the West. The United States is the latest, most forward point in a world-historical narrative and time line. This narrative and time line, which some have called a metanarrative, harkens back to the idea of divine history (Heilsgeschichte), which has as its underbelly a theodicy that exonerates humans of all culpability for their Introduction Epistemic Hubris and Dialogical Cosmopolitanism 1 inequity and injustice. Today globalization is the name of this gospel. It promises salvation, but also the convenient alibi that globalization’s devastating effects and exacting costs are both inevitable and, in the end, worth the sacrifice. Like God’s salvation plan with its math of punishment and expiation, globalization offers wealth to some but a calculus of destitution, starvation and exclusion to far too many.1 Globalization is indeed ideology, part self-deluding fantasy, part distortion of reality, part epistemology in search of corroboration, part critical thought grappling with its own historicity and limits. Theodor W. Adorno’s take on the concept of totality is instructive with respect to the ideological dimensions of globalization, and guides my analysis in this book. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno wrote: “Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself—of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept.”2 Indeed, the entire world is not globalized, does not form part of globalization, is not even actively globalizing. Furthermore and on the other hand, there are forms of globalization that are either elided or entirely negated by the type of globalization that gets the most press time in the West and the United States. Adorno also took a stand against “universal history.” This history led from the sling shot to the atom bomb must be both “construed and denied.”3 This book operates under this kind of imperative, of having to construe, visualize, and represent a world that is conceptualized under this shibboleth “globalization” in order to convict it, to indict it, to deny it, because under its very conceptual light, the spreading darkness of its demise is concealed, negated, and dismissed. Under globalization, the world has become more fragmented as economic inequality shears continents and societies from each other as they grow more interdependent on the wellbeing of the planet. The other side of globalization, that celebrated by the West and the United States, is the cosmopolitan dimension of its political, ethical, and moral values. Human rights have become a global standard, even as the United States, to its own discredit, tramples them. Feminism and religious tolerance are also global standards. The rights of religious, ethnic minorities, and cultures on the brink of extinction are also a major global concern. The development of a global ecological movement...