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241 C H A P T E R T E N Making a Difference Toward a New Structure of Feeling C ontrary to postmodern orthodoxies, something like a metanarrative is required for us to critically engage and effectively transform the kinds of global processes that are currently serving as engines of inequality and inequity. The complex realities of contemporary globalization require us “to go beyond the particularities and to emphasize the pattern and the systemic qualities of the damage being wrought across geographical scales and differences” (Harvey 2000, 81). To use an old Zen saying, anything short of this would be no more effective than “a mosquito biting an iron ox.” This is not to deny that there are very good reasons for postmodern skepticisms about metanarratives and for postcolonial politics of identity which would construct cultural plurality as a shifting array of resolutely particular “localisms.” But these responses to the coercive potentials of universalism as a cultural project have also been troublingly coincident with the widening global dominance of neoliberal ideology and free market institutions. This coincidence suggests that, absent something like a critical metanarrative, efforts to redress inequality and inequity will be ineffective precisely because they will be “partial, focused on short- and medium-term goals, fragmented, and temporally and spatially discontinuous ” (Luke 2005, 20). To effectively address the large-scale structures that are fostering ever-widening gaps of income, wealth, opportunity, and relational quality, we are in need of a holistic and restructuring vision. The historical and philosophical narratives woven together over the preceding chapters hopefully will have served, among other things, to establish strong convictions that this restructuring vision must not 242 Valuing Diversity amount to a cosmetically altered universalism—a repackaging or reimaging of unity as a socioeconomic, political, and cultural ideal. Our attempts to critically restructure and reorient the dynamics of global interdependence and interpenetration cannot take the form of overwriting cultural boundaries and the differences they imply with essentialist affirmations of commonality and homogeneity. At the same time, we have reason to resist aligning this restructuring vision with postmodern valorizations of variety and hybridity. Globalization- and market-driven processes of variation and hybridization have proved to be no less conducive to deepening and expanding power asymmetries than their unifying and homogenizing polar opposites. In spite of the disparity of their overall visions, the metanarratives of global unification (cosmopolis) and free variation (netropolis) have in common the effect of disarming differences, subverting the conditions needed for “making distinctiveness itself possible” (Kompridis 2005, 332), inflecting global interdependence in ways that work against realizing contemporary potentials for new scopes and scales of mutual contribution. In contrast with the metanarratives of unification and variation, valorizing diversification entails a nondualistic refusal either to render differences impotent or to endorse zero-sum competition in de facto acceptance of the inevitability of irresolvable conflicts of interest—a refusal that positively entails realizing the appreciative and contributory potential of difference . As previously noted, however, diversity emerges relationally and cannot be the result of prescriptive exercises of control, no matter how well intended. Stated otherwise, neither the process of diversification nor the metanarrative of diversity are structured around a predictive/prescriptive logic of “if this, then that.” Rather, they express a performative logic of “first this, then that”—a narrative logic in which surprising aptness, not rule-expressing rigor, is the root index of excellence. In practice, then, diversification—and by extension, the realization of enhanced equity— cannot be engineered; diversity can only be evoked or elicited. This phrasing makes it sound as if enhancing diversity and equity may be less a political process than a poetic one, and perhaps this is not entirely misleading. Politics is commonly defined as the art of government—a revealing statement in light of the fact that to govern literally means to direct, control, guide, decide, and determine. As commonly defined, then, politics is a process of distributing and exercising power. And as such, if it is not inherently in tension with diversity, it would at least seem to be in tension with the emergent dynamics of diversification as a nonlinear process of qualitative, relational transformation. Whether it is autocratically, democratically, or by some means in-between, politics aims at getting things done. But in the context of the multiplication and magnification of differences that characterize contemporary global realities, the risk proliferation associated with reflexive modernization, and the tightening network-fostered correlation of economic vitality (and hence political legitimacy) with [18.220.160.216] Project MUSE...

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