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

Rockhill, Gabriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822369761 ISBN 13: 9780822369769

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822369761
• ISBN 13: 9780822369769
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 162
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande