Globalization/Coloniality: A Decolonial Definition and Diagnosis

UC Merced TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World Title Globalization/Coloniality: A Decolonial Definition and Diagnosis Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt7p9n6 Journal TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 8(4) ISSN 2154-1353 Author Davis, Benjamin P Publication Date 2018 License CC BY 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Globalization/Coloniality: A Decolonial Definition and Diagnosis ________________________________________ BENJAMIN P. DAVIS EMORY UNIVERSITY Abstract In this essay, I contend that globalization is less an international process and more a colonial project. I argue that definitions of “globalization” articulated primarily through economic metrics insufficiently account for the violences concomitant with such a project. In response to this insufficiency, I draw on three concepts by three decolonial authors—transmodernity (Enrique Dussel), global coloniality (Aníbal Quijano), and dialogical cosmopolitanism (Eduardo Mendieta)—in order to develop my own definition of globalization. I then offer a preliminary sketch of what I call “affective alternatives,” which could convey ways of life different from the hegemonic social forms that globalization promotes and imposes. At the very least, affective alternatives present a parallax: seen and felt from the perspective of the alternative, globalization is not taken as neutral, normal, irreversible, or desired; rather, it is “distorted” into globalization/coloniality, a project to be resisted. I conclude with reflections on connecting and deepening coalitions of resistance. Keywords: Globalization, Transmodernity, Coloniality, Affect, Coalition, Resistance “Globalization” is a protean term, adopting various forms depending on the purposes of those who employ it. According to the sociological analysis of Zygmunt Bauman, the standard view is that globalization is “the intractable fate of the world,” an “irreversible process” that “affects us all in the same measure and in the same way” (1). For Jagdish Bhagwati, globalization is best seen through the lens of economics. Different from the international flows of media or education, it means the “integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, direct foreign investment (by corporations and multinationals), short-term capital flows, international flows of workers and humanity generally, and flows of technology” (3, 7). Joseph Stiglitz’s definition combines an economic angle like Bhagwati’s with a fatalism like that of standard view, adding in turn a functional approach. Globalization—“the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world… brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders”—, Stiglitz writes, “is here to stay”; indeed, “[w]e cannot go back on globalization… The issue is how we can make it work” (107, 311). 2|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 Stiglitz’s fatalism and functionalism are exemplary of what Enrique Dussel calls functional social science. Dussel distinguishes between functional and critical social science, two rival research programs (Ethics 326-334). Whereas functional social science aims for “the ‘efficacious’ fulfillment, in formal and instrumental terms (means-end), of the dominant system,” critical social science has a “negative” aim, namely, “the hermeneutic understanding, explanation, or dialectical interpretation of the causes of the alienation of the victims” of that system (Ethics 331). In the final instance, the distinction is one of responsibility: functional social science responds to dominant “bourgeois communities” and institutions, while critical social science heeds the call of the victims “to collaborate responsibly in the scientific critique of the system that oppresses them” (Ethics 331, 326). In light of this distinction, Bhagwati, too, falls on the side of functional social science. That is, Stiglitz’s and Bhagwati’s calls for reform and innovation—for the better governance of globalization—ultimately serve to defend globalization as something that, in Stiglitz’s terms, “can be a force for good” (335).1 Similarly, the concept of “super-diversity” in contemporary social science and migration studies also falls on the functional side insofar as its descriptive, methodological, and policy-oriented aspects speak more to reformist management and improvement than to social critique and transformation.2 The definitions of Bhagwati, Stiglitz, and others who conceptualize globalization through economic metrics with a view toward governance share in a certain sense the universalism that Bauman points to as a feature of the standard view of globalization. In these cases, the language of “flow” and “integration” suggests that this process is affecting us all. What this language misses—in fact covers over or dis-covers—are the contingent and differentially felt violences that accompany those changes. Phenomena that illustrate these differentials include today’s refugee crises as well as what Eyal Weizman calls “the humanitarian present,” where humanitarianism is “the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced, the enemy and the unwanted” (4). Against the standard view that globalization is an irreversible process, my central claim is that globalization is an ideological project. Ideologically, it legitimizes—indeed naturalizes—hegemonic material and affective relationships in a given society and across societies. Rather than a process, which suggests merely a continuous chain of organic occurrences, I contend that globalization is a planned undertaking. In making this claim, I employ a method of critical social science in order to address the aforementioned differential violences. These violences are not dis-covered when beginning from and responding to the perspectives and contributions of what Dussel calls the victims—“the oppressed, the impoverished… women, nonwhite races, peoples of the South, Jews, the old, street children, future generations, and so on” (Ethics 56). Specifically, I propose to re-define “globalization” explicitly 3|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 in the terms of decolonial theorists. If coloniality involves an imposition on ways of life, including language, and thus on methods of describing the world, then decolonial efforts will attempt to render concepts, grammar, and logic differently. The recent theoretical move from “colonization” to “coloniality” demonstrates how such terminological shifts can be instructive, suggesting not merely a one-time political subordination rendered as historical, as now in the past, but rather the “perpetuation of its effects in contemporary times” (Moraña et al. 2). I employ decolonial theory, instead of another critical social science, such as certain forms of post-structural theory, because of the former’s emphasis on solidarity with the victims.3 Although I follow Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, in his assertion that “globalization” is “a myth in the strong sense of the word, a powerful discourse, an idée force, an idea which has social force, which obtains belief,” such that it has been “the main weapon in the battles against the gains of the welfare state,” I want to expand my concerns and priorities beyond European subjects (34).4 “The West,” Edouard Glissant explains, “is not in the west. It is not a place; it is a project” (Le discours antillais 14, n. 1, translation mine). As a project, globalization designs and promotes hegemonic relationships while attempting to project itself into areas—e.g. “new” and “emerging” markets—it has not yet affected and comprehended. While “globalization” is often used in decolonial literature, it is less often taken up as a central theme or object of study. For instance, in his Ethics of Liberation in an Age of Globalization and Exclusion, Dussel takes his task to be not a description of “globalization” so that the context from which liberation is achieved can be understood, as his title might suggest, but rather a particular intervention in ethical discourse. Further, even when globalization is taken as central, it is not necessarily defined explicitly and at length; this is the case, for instance, in Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar’s exemplary collection Globalization and the Decolonial Option. When “globalization” is used in a variety of ways, the philosopher is led to ask: For what purpose is the term being defined in this way? What follows, in practical effects, from such a definition? From my definition of globalization as an ideological project, we can make a diagnosis: globalization is not merely a process of change to which all are subjected, but a proposed and planned project that affects subjects differentially, like that project of modernity, such that, just as modernity should be written “modernity/coloniality,” so too should globalization be written “globalization/coloniality.” Below, I follow Enrique Dussel’s treatment of globalization in his Ethics (I), look to how Aníbal Quijano defines the word in his seminal essay “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (II), and turn to Eduardo Mendieta’s recent description of globalization in Global Fragments 4|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 (III). Each of these theorists provides a concept key to my re-definition of globalization: transmodernity (Dussel), global coloniality (Quijano), and dialogical cosmopolitanism (Mendieta). I then define “globalization” as a term and offer a preliminary sketch of what I call “affective alternatives,” which could inform ways of life different from the hegemonic social forms globalization outlines, promotes, and imposes. To conclude, I reflect on how these alternatives inspire and support coalitions of resistance (IV).5 Part I: Globalization and Exclusion Enrique Dussel considers globalization to be constitutive of our times, the age of globalization and exclusion. He intends to write toward a clear goal and from a particular viewpoint: his is an ethics “for everyday life, from the perspective and interests of the immense majority of humanity excluded by globalization throughout the world” (Ethics xx). To develop this claim, he looks to the concept of modernity. As an “unfinished project,” modernity attempts to complete itself, to project itself into all corners of the world.6 And yet, this is a kind of performative contradiction. As the modern project expands itself, it also excludes others through those very mechanisms of expansion (modernization, development, foreign-direct investment, and so on), which are life-denying.7 “Modernity confronts the impossibility of its subsuming the populations, economies, nations, cultures, it has been attacking since its origin, that it has excluded from its horizon and cornered into poverty” (Ethics 40). It is important to note this “origin.” Modernity, for Dussel, begins in 1492—not with the Protestant Reformation or Machiavelli, say, but rather with the year of invasion and dis-covery.8 “Exclusion,” in turn, suggests that in order for some to be modern, others have to remain non-modern—indeed often non-living. Modernity is built on the exploitation of labor and, ultimately, of the lives of others— reified, excluded, cornered, impoverished, and killed.9 The limit of globalization, then, is what it excludes or denies. “[T]he globalizing world reaches a limit inasmuch as it excludes the Other, who resists, and from whose affirmation the negation of the critique of liberation originates” (Ethics 40). In this crucial line, Dussel follows the methodology of critical theory, particularly that of Theodor Adorno, who writes, “Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself—of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept” (147). To begin, then, we see that globalization for Dussel is a totality, or, more precisely, an attempt to be a totality; and yet, according to its own logic, it fails to realize this totality because of its exclusion of “exteriority.” “Affirmation” in Dussel’s line above means affirmation of life; the limit of globalization, 5|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 again, is not just exclusion, but denial of life. For this reason, and against such denial, life-affirmation— “the non-acceptance of the impossibility of reproducing the life of the victim”—is the foundation for Dussel’s response to the violence of globalization (Ethics 279). This response rejects any apolitical sense of the term “globalization” and serves, instead, to recognize and affirm, as opposed to exclude and deny, the Other. This is a point of departure for an ethics of liberation as well as for critical social science: “The recognition of the Other, as an other, and as a victim of the system that produces him or her” is that “which subjects the system or totality to critical questioning” (Ethics 270). While Dussel’s questioning or critique challenges the exclusive terms of globalization, it in fact begins from positivity, not negativity. The system of exclusions that he is calling globalization is the cause of the negativity that denies the life of the victims, and he responds by affirming that very life (i.e. he responds from positivity), opening up to negativity (critique) only from that point of affirmation. Starting from an affirmation of the Other is not only a crucial point for ethics, but it is also important to Dussel’s methodology in considering globalization. To put this differently, such an affirmation informs how Dussel thinks about philosophy today. He argues against both Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas, who treat modernity and its dissent as European phenomena. The counter-discourse to modernity, Dussel asserts, began in the Caribbean with António de Montesinos’ criticism of the injustices committed against the indigenous of that region. “It is that Other who is the actual origin of this counterdiscourse that took root in Europe” (Ethics 46). To subsume this counterdiscourse under the heading of “modernity” is only justified if “modernity” itself is re-thought, for “[t]o say that this counterdiscourse is immanent to Modernity would only be acceptable if Modernity were redefined on a global scale. In that case, Modernity must be understood to include its peripheral alterity” (Ethics 46). This point opens onto conclusions both philosophical and political in its turn to transmodernity. A global philosophy, a method of analysis fit for examining globalization—a method itself a practice of liberation—cannot be Eurocentric. “Philosophy, and ethics in particular,” Dussel contends, “must free themselves from ‘Eurocentrism’ in order to become empirically, materially, and factually global from the perspective of the affirmation of its excluded alterity” (Ethics 52). Any “philosophy of the future,” he continues, should have “from the beginning a global perspective and horizon” (Ethics 260). “Transmodernity” moves us toward this future philosophy. The prefix is important; transmodernity is a modification of modernity, but one conducted from a specific locus and for particular purposes made explicit. Indeed, an ethics of liberation relates to postmodern concerns, but it refuses to identify liberation thought and postmodern thought. Postmodernity remains “trapped” in the modern project because of “the absence of a critical extradiscursive reference—the 6|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 victims of both the globalization of Modernity and of post-Modernity as colonial domination” (Ethics 348). Given its emphasis on exteriority, an ethics of liberation is not trapped, but rather is poised to provide the above description, or diagnosis, of globalization. Transmodernity is a kind of “prescription” given on the basis of this diagnosis. That is, in speaking of a philosophy of the future and life therein, “transmodernity” is the “totality of concrete existent cultures,” positing a new globality as a realization of future humanity, where all cultures (not only those of Europe and North America) will be able to affirm their alterity, and not simply echo a process of “modernization” that implies the imposition upon them of Euro-North American culture of the center or its apparent abstraction (an abstract Modernity that is in essence nothing more than the same Euro-North American Modernity from which some particularly jagged characteristics have been removed). (Ethics 471, n. 241) My reading of Dussel thus offers a question to which I will return throughout this essay: In an age of exclusion, what models of social life indicate the “transmodern”? In order to thicken both my definition of globalization and my presentation of models that respond to it, particularly through concerns of race and power, I now turn to Aníbal Quijano. Part II: Hegemonic and Affective Models In his seminal essay “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Aníbal Quijano begins with a definition of globalization.10 He writes, “What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power” (533). On this account, globalization is a product of the interlocking forces of colonialism and capitalism. Quijano’s language of “process” and “constitution” are suggestive. Both terms suggest human action, making or fabricating a way of living; thus, they de-naturalize globalization, indicating its layers of artifice from the start.11 This implies that it can be changed, or set in a different direction, through different human actions or makings.12 While Quijano uses the language of process, he does not think it is irreversible or affecting all in the same way. To understand globalization, one must understand how it operates. The concept of race as a “technology of domination” is part and parcel of globalization (537). Race legitimizes and naturalizes relations of domination and serves as the criterion to rank populations of the world as well as to structure an international division of labor. As colonial domination advanced and expanded globally, colonizers imposed this criterion for social classification on populations they dis-covered. This global 7|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 standardization occurred not only materially (especially physically, with reference to the control of racialized bodies through roles of labor) but also cognitively, as “the colonization of cognitive perspectives, modes of producing and giving meaning, the results of material existence, the imaginary, the universe of intersubjective relations with the world: in short, the culture” (541).13 What does it mean, concretely, to say that such a way of life was imposed globally onto the periphery?14 Here we see the ideological aspects of globalization in full relief. To colonize meaningmaking and to colonize imagination is, in part and at least, to control the desires and dreams of others. Thus, for instance, Lacoste shirts are a standard sign of middle-class status in the West Indies, while youth with an aptitude for academic writing in Martinique hope one day to study in Paris.15 In abstract terms, global standardization through colonization introduce(d) and enforce(d) what I call “affective models.”16 By “affective,” I mean to suggest the ways in which models of living include emotional and sensible dimensions, such that subjects feel and relate to each other based on the standards of the model. As the billboard along the highway in Fort-de-France teaches me, I consider good and beautiful, and feel attracted to, the woman in the pink Lacoste shirt; I must work to establish a certain income to purchase such a shirt so as to be attractive to her. The West thus created a “new intersubjective universe” (543).17 In this context, not only quotidian thinking (what to wear, what to eat, etc.) but also what is felt as reasonable and beautiful is conditioned and enforced, and done so in racialized ways.18 Aimé Césaire underscores the pain of this imposition in likening reason to “the whip’s corolla” and continuing in his next line: “Beauty I call you petition of stone” (93). That is, certain contingent forms of what is reasonable, thinkable, beautiful, aesthetic—indeed sensed and felt—are thus violently internalized.19 Quijano refers to what I am calling affective models as a system because different institutions are interdependent. He focuses primarily on labor, capitalism,20 sex, the bourgeois family, the capitalist corporation, and the nation-state, all of which fall under a model of Eurocentric rationality in light of the hegemonic system of global power that is coloniality. “[E]ach sphere of social existence is under the hegemony of an institution produced within the process of formation and development of that same model of power” such that “there is a basic level of common social practices and a central sphere of common value orientation” (545).21 If Quijano is positing a global system, then is he also suggesting totality or finality in a way that forecloses resistance? He does not think he falls prey to such a critique. Indeed, it is precisely because capitalism, as the primary economic form of modernity, features relations of oppression and domination, that modernity itself creates a “horizon of liberation” (548). Modernity here is “a question 8|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 of conflicting social interests,” such that “every concept of modernity is necessarily ambiguous and contradictory” (548). This is to conceptualize modernity not exactly as homogenizing and continuous, even if it is generalizing and linear, but more precisely as heterogeneous and discontinuous at different times, in different places, and internal to itself, including its conflicts. This conceptualization will bear on my theory of change or resistance. Given the conflicting textures of modernity, the process of change of capitalist totality cannot, in any way, be a homogenous and continuous transformation, either of the entire system or of each one of its component parts… Historical change cannot be linear, one-directional, sequential, or total. The system, or the specific pattern of structural articulation, could be dismantled; however, each one or some of its elements can and will have to be articulated in some other structural model. (554) Quijano, then, is not arguing for a necessary and determined class revolution, event, or institutional reform. He is attempting, rather, to open space for alternatives even if he does not conceptualize such possible models. To expose the coloniality of power is not to dismantle it, he recognizes, perhaps especially with regard to race as a technology of domination. As a result, “[W]e now find ourselves in a labyrinth where the Minotaur is always visible, but with no Ariadne to show us the exit we long for” (569-570).22 He concludes, nevertheless, with an emphasis on liberation: “[I]t is time to learn to free ourselves from the Eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. It is time, finally, to cease being what we are not” (573-574). Quijano’s theory of the global coloniality of power is crucial point in building my definition of globalization today. His attention to race and self-determined liberation, as well as his call for alternative “models” that challenge hegemonic structures, enriches the question I posed after reading Dussel. On this basis, I can ask: What transmodern affective and alternative models could provide a response to the hegemonic models of globalization? Eduardo Mendieta’s work allows me to address more concretely the material conditions at present, as well as to consider globalization more specifically in relation to epistemology. Part III: Globalization and Daily Life Like Dussel and Quijano, Mendieta begins his text with globalization: “[G]lobalization has taken over the tasks that modernity used to perform” (1). That is, just as modernity stipulated hierarchies of lives that matter and of ways of life that count, globalization, in its projection, imposes a model of life that 9|Davis, B. P. Transmodernity. Fall 2018 elevates the West, such that countries in the Global South feel pressure to attain the status of Western development. For Mendieta, globalization is different from modernity, however, in both its place of reference and its relation to universality: what modernity was to the European West, globalization is to the United States, a kind of pax Americana; and globalization “seems to have abandoned all strong universalistic claims and pretensions, as was fundamental to modernity” (Global Fragments 90-91). Indeed, calls for diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism purport to allow for difference within and throughout globalizing projects.23 And yet, Mendieta’s “seems” is crucial; a more detailed study of globalization, especially from a decolonial point of departure, recognizes that globalization does not appear universal merely superficially, but rather is universalizing constitutively. In projecting certain U.S. ways of life as goals to be attained, globalization is, in Habermas’s term but with Mendieta’s update, a self-perpetuating “unfinished project.” It claims to see the world entire, including differences therein, but it only sees itself—thus the world is “a mere tabula rasa for the actualization of one global design” (Global Fragments 91). This is seen not only in advertising and military invasion, but also, and perhaps most egregiously because most insidiously, in the “continuation of the [modern] civilizing project by the United States, under the flag of the war against all wars that is benignly called the crusade for human rights and its condition of possibility, globalization” (Global Fragments 94). In sum, globalization, as driven by the U.S., discloses the world in a certain way in its ideological function and permits, encourages, and legitimizes certain colonial impositions, particularly of its own global expansion, in its operation as a project. The language of disclosure above suggests that the implications of globalization are not only political but also epistemological: it is “a theoretical grid that distorts the world, as it reveals aspects of it, while also distorting our place as epistemic subjects and objects” (Global Fragments 1). This is not to say that there is an undistorted, authentic, True, or essential grid. Rather, it is to suggest that any concept, including globalization, shifts how subjects approach their object, and that globalization leads to particular, and particularly oppressive, distortions. There is no clear sight, on this account. In addition to a grid, as well as a related “epistemic matrix,” globalization is a logic (Global Fragments 19). As a logic, preserving its own truth and inferring in accordance with its own self-contained rules, it at once Westernizes and Orientalizes: it renders the same in its affective force while immunizing itself— in its walls, migration policies, and other barriers to entry—against difference.24 What does such a theory of globalization say about its theorist, and what, in turn, are the responsibilities of that theorist and of theory itself? Any treatment of globalization—political, epistemological, or otherwise—that attempts to respect particularities, places the thinker in a 10 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 paradoxical position, namely, a perspective that tries to be local and global at once. This is the situation of thinking today. Each of us is socialized within a certain collectivity, and as we try to recognize that contextual specificity, it is also the case that we face “global problems” that demand that we “look to the world, even as we are indisputably rooted in specific ethical traditions” (Global Fragments 8). In response to this situation, Mendieta proposes “dialogical cosmopolitanism,” which avoids certitude but attempts to take responsibility for a shared world. “Dialogical cosmopolitanism,” he explains, “situates us in our global fragments, but also turns our moral look to our global responsibilities and duties toward others” (Global Fragments 13). In its emphasis on learning from the underside, as opposed to a call for better governance, Mendieta’s invocation of responsibility is different from Stiglitz’s. The key difference is one of constituency: the former’s call to dialogue resonates with a disposition of openness to and learning from the underside, responding to those with whom one is living and in dialogue. Management or governance, by contrast, is a domineering position that presupposes epistemic superiority and suggests formal reports to functional, “humanitarian” bureaucrats.25 Further, through dialogue about globalization, as opposed to dominance through globalization, we implicate ourselves as participants (not simply as observers) and thus own up to how our own actions, on an everyday level, advance globalization. More specifically, each is a particular participant, and hence theory should provincialize, naming its space, time, and position, so as to avoid universal claims.26 This attention to context is not only a sensitive theoretical maneuver, but it is also a result of material changes globalization generates. In regard to the day-to-day experience of difference, globalization de-transcendentalizes alterity (Global Fragments 21). In cities and on screens, walking to the farmer’s market and using the internet to read The Guardian, different people appear less as completely foreign, as Other, and more as concretely different, as others. These repetitions make contact with difference more quotidian; when others are not held in reverence or discounted in abjection, the promise of engagement and collaboration becomes possible. Such contacts involve “an uncoupling of identities,” a process that both deflates the importance of the familiar (e.g. local area, nation) and introduces what is strange or felt as contradictory (Global Fragments 29). In this context, to put this uncoupling in slightly different terms, a “productive undoing”—the “difficult task” that “look[s] carefully at the fault lines of the doing, without accusation, without excuse, with a view to use”—can occur (Spivak, An Aesthetic Education 1). For those harmfully attached to local connections, for instance those who support excessively nationalistic political parties, this is one way that the local/global paradox can be transformed productively, leveraging local positions without necessarily remaining loyal to their ties. I 11 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 will evaluate further how such uncoupling, ab-using, or diffracting of identities could contribute to resistance in Part IV below. Given the polyvalence of globalization as a concept, including its “threats and promises” (Roelofs 207) that move at once toward destruction and rehabilitation, two (among other) responses are required: “greater attentiveness to detail” in theory (hence a pluralized, fragmentary method) and “greater circumspection concerning our conceptual apparatuses” (Global Fragments 113). This might mean refusing to employ certain concepts, such as “modern,” without the historically and materially present slash of “modern/colonial.” It could also mean working with alternative words, creating a new vocabulary.27 This vocabulary must be formed through dialogue, including taking responsibility for one’s actions as well as listening to and learning from others. The task of globalization, if it is to have any promise in addition to its threats, is in part to “give an account of itself, to others, as well as to itself” (Global Fragments 160). The line of inquiry I have been weaving becomes: How to sketch provincial and transmodern affective and alternative models that, in responding to the hegemonic models of globalization, also give an account of themselves to others? Part IV: Affective Alternatives as Parallax and Resistance I have followed Dussel, Quijano, and Mendieta in order to re-define globalization not just as a present reality, but also as a product and continuation of modernity/coloniality (in its universalizing, totalizing project), an epistemological apparatus (in its distortions and disclosures), and an artifice (in being not naturally occurring, but planned, proposed, undertaken, made). Protean, “globalization” functions at once in all of these ways. In sum, my working definition of “globalization” is as follows: Ideological rather than neutral, a project rather than a process, globalization is the metastasis of a particular European modernity to the rest of the world, advanced predominantly at present by the U. S. This violent and uprooting project involves the always already weighted transfers, extractions, and “development” of capital, people, resources, and information across borders.28 If modernity ought to be written “modernity/coloniality,” and if globalization is an update on the modern project, then globalization ought to be written “globalization/coloniality.” Moreover, the definition I articulate above—the central claim of this essay—attempts to show that if coloniality is “a term that encompasses the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and the perpetuation of its effects,” then “globalization” is in fact an insidious synonym of “coloniality” (Moraña et al. 2). The logic of globalization, like that of modernity, is to subsume “the Other under the Same,” a project or goal achieved through the imposition of hegemonic models, e.g. race, gender, standardized 12 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 affect (Dussel, Invention 45).29 Therefore, some decolonial theorists might conclude, it must be rejected wholesale. I want to suggest an alternative path, however.30 Indeed, a transmodern response to globalization/coloniality not only calls into question the epistemic and political solipsism that is the myth of modernity as “the original uncaused cause or self-moved mover” by emphasizing “planetary spatialization” over and against “the linear and geographically enclosed timeline of Europe’s myth of autogenesis,” but it also suggests alternatives, even and especially if transitory and fragmentary, to the hegemonic models of globalization/coloniality (Alcoff 63). A decolonial conception of globalization/coloniality could work to de-couple identifications with the hegemonic models while also both allowing for some local (provincial) senses of belonging and recognizing “knowledge and hard work already carried out,” alternative positive practices already underway (Ortega 513). To re-define “globalization” as “globalization/coloniality” is to provide a backdrop against which the contours of critical alternatives can be drawn, where “critical” invokes again the responsibilities of Dussel’s critical social sciences.31 I find one such response to globalization in what I am calling “affective alternatives,” always concrete (material and embodied), provisional (subject to experimentation and critique), and provincial (locally grounded) social bearings32 that are alternatives to—part of the structural models different from—Quijano’s list of hegemonic and interdependent institutions: hierarchical labor, capitalism, sex, the bourgeois family, the capitalist corporation, and the nation-state (545). 33 I am articulating a response, then, to the basic level of shared practices instituted by globalization.34 I am suggesting that there are other ways. One point of departure is to look to the models that the hegemonic models take as their “reverso” or “occluded other,” such as horizontal labor practices, co-operative units of production, queer kinship units, and indigenous political organization (Mendieta, “Editor’s Introduction” xxii). From this underside of globalization, legible affective models could provide bearings with social traction among the elite, or, when that fails, coalitional and material challenges to the powerful in an age of exclusion. I will conclude with an example of an affective alternative emerging from the underside of globalization/coloniality—part of these “other places,” characterized “as dead, or epistemically barren” yet “alive with a distinct difference barely legible to the center” (Alcoff 66). One move toward an “affective alternative” occurred in the fall of 2016 as indigenous and non-indigenous activists responded to the Dakota Access Pipeline by forming communities of resistance. It is important to note from the outset of this example that resistance at Standing Rock was not uniform or monolithic; it was, rather, internally contested, including divisions between white and indigenous activists as well as within indigenous nations, especially among generations, in regard to 13 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 tactics to be pursued. In Mendieta’s terms, it could be said that this was a “fragmentary resistance.” Perhaps this fragmentary form made the efforts stronger insofar as groups were able to build solidarity in a pluralistic, dialogical manner, among diverse voices, maintaining a kind of overall coherence as individuals frustrated, for instance, by a camp that emphasized direct-action tactics, could move from such a camp to another that conducted international advocacy. Given that Standing Rock emerged as a (global) site of resistance in response to the Dakota Access pipeline, it is an example of what Dussel calls a pueblo, a term that can be roughly translated as a “people.”35 “[T]hrough the indigenous influence that permeates the continent,” Dussel writes, “the world pueblo means something more profound than merely ‘the people’ in romance languages”; “pueblo,” he continues, “establishes an internal frontier or a fracture within the political community” (Twenty Theses 74). George Ciccariello-Maher has gone as far as to say that Dussel’s pueblo represents “the very embodiment of rupture” (129). On a first glance, this category would seem to cut against any coalitional action; rupture implies that vocabularies, tactics, and aims could not be agreed upon. Indeed, what keeps a pueblo from fatiguing itself in internal conflict? It is important, in response to this objection, to understand how the pueblo comes into being. It is, Dussel writes, a “strictly political category” (not sociological or economic), and it features an ambiguity that “does not result from misunderstanding but rather from inevitable complexity” (Twenty Theses 73). I take this complexity to refer to internal tensions or contestations. What brings a pueblo together in spite or because of these differences is its oppositional nature; it is united in challenging the status quo. Ciccariello-Maher comments that “the people is not something that exists, but instead a political identity that dynamically comes into being,” and “comes into being against” (130). That is, an alliance against a hegemonic system is the overarching form of unity that allows for internal difference that is not destructive. In regard to providing a specific alternative to the globalized models Quijano describes, several camps at the pueblo of Standing Rock organized multiple rows of tents for two-spirit individuals. In some cases, kinship models across generations and races allowed for some to participate in directaction protests while others prepared camp, worked with journalists and other activists, and rested. Noticeably, several camps featured no billboards or corporate advertisements—the heartbeat of urban life and constitutive features of a capitalist global model. This is not to say that camps at Standing Rock were outside of globalization and its myriad models. Rather, I am suggesting that Standing Rock featured sites of resistance that offer alternatives worth considering as new models—positive practices—continue to be cultivated. That is, the status of affective alternatives vis-à-vis globalization/coloniality is at least to present a parallax: seen from the view of the alternative, 14 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 globalization is not taken as neutral, normal, irreversible, or desired; it is distorted or inverted into globalization/coloniality, a project to be resisted continually, where resistance requires dialogue and communication.36 Larry Towell / Magnum Photos Here one might ask with a view toward praxis: Can such a pueblo be predicted or planned for in advance? Dussel notes that there cannot be “perfect planning”; however, a “minimal and necessary level” of planning could advance critical efforts (Twenty Theses 146-147, n. 111). In keeping with the scope of this essay, I will consider an imperfect planning less in terms of predicting new pueblos and more in treating how existing pueblos could foster additional coalitions. I do this by addressing how to connect and deepen these coalitions. To build upon the work of the pueblo emerging at Standing Rock, it is worth a final comment to point in these directions. In regard to connecting such coalitions, we can consider what Cindi Katz calls a politics of “countertopographies,” “a politics that maintains the distinctness of a place while recognizing that it is connected analytically to other places along contour lines that represent not elevation but particular relations to a [project] (e.g. globalizing capitalist relations of production)” (1229). This oppositional politics allows for connections of pueblos through 15 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 “analytic relationships” and “common interests” (1229-1230). Ultimately, against the abstraction of globalization, such countertopographies provide “alternative abstractions” that are “interwoven with local specificities and the impulse for insurgent change” (1232). In regard to the deepening of coalitions, and to some extent pace Dussel and Katz, we can consider coalitions different from those founded on what María Lugones calls an oppositional “coincidence of interests,” which can be “epistemically shallow”; indeed, deeper coalitions could feel as orienting not a shared vocabulary so much as “an openness to the interlocutors as real” (“On Complex Communication” 76). Coalitions need “a loving connection toward liberation,” with this “toward” signaling that alternative models or coalitions are not themselves the mark of a revolution, but rather are in a sense “a preparation, a creative preparation” (“On Complex Communication” 79). In this preparation, in an embodied way, “critique is lived as self-transformative… against the grain of dominating power” (“On Complex Communication” 81, 84). Indeed, affective alternatives to the models of globalizations are lived, dayto-day, in new terms and entangled feelings, creatively in relational identities with others. 16 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 Notes 1 I recall Simone Weil’s insight that the nature of force is to reify and dehumanize, no matter if one is wielding it or victim to it; force cannot move toward good, only toward subjection. It strikes me that both the promoters and the victims of globalization are subjected to its force, caught in it, in this way. That said, it is important to note that Stiglitz is at times critical of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, which, he rightly notes, pursue financial and commercial interests while claiming to pursue “the general interest” (305). In his analysis, however, globalization is ultimately “a force that has brought so much good,” where that “good” is defined as growth, particularly the growth of “developing” countries (102). 2 To be fair, Meissner and Vertovec recognize that “conditions and processes surrounding superdiversity both produce, and are produced by, a range of differential power relations and modes of inequality”; their recognition of this fact “in the context of how different configurations of super-diversity are dealt with, including how such configurations can be better addressed through innovative policy solutions,” however, suggests the functionalism of the term in the final instance (551). Insofar as “innovation” sounds the bell of business and “policy” of liberalism, the decolonial theorist remains skeptical. 3 Though I think it is a necessary approach to understand the term, is not my claim that decolonial theory is the best way to consider “globalization”; indeed, I have learned from, and support, the efforts of other critical social sciences (e.g. postcolonial and feminist theory). My hope is that this essay, from its particular perspective, contributes to ongoing attempts to re-define the term. 4 Bourdieu’s next sentence is: “European workers, we are told, must compete with the least favoured workers of the rest of the world” (34). 5 In beginning this article, I recognize that it features a certain difficulty. My “locus of enunciation,” to use Walter Mignolo’s term, is on the colonizing side of the “colonial difference”: white, male, U.S. American (Local Histories x; see also Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge” 225-258). I follow Spivak’s point in acknowledging, in regard to the “masculineimperialist ideological formation,” that “[n]o contemporary metropolitan investigator is not influenced by that formation. Part of our ‘unlearning’ project is to articulate our participating in that formation” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 284). 6 See Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” Habermas writes, “I believe that we should learn from the aberrations which have accompanied the project of modernity and from the mistakes of those extravagant proposals of sublation, rather than abandoning modernity and its project” (51). Numerous decolonial theorists differ with Habermas precisely on this point: modernity is modernity/coloniality, such that its project, as it develops toward being “late” or “finished,” only continues massive destruction against its racialized and gendered victims. 7 Hence Mendieta calls institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF “necrophilic idols” (“Foreword” xiii). 8 See Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” 66. 9 The logic of totality is a logic of “the alienation of exteriority” or “the reification of alterity” (Dussel, Philosophy 42). 10 One important criticism of this essay is María Lugones’s argument that Quijano attends insufficiently to the coloniality of gender, which needs to be historicized (see “Heterosexism”). 11 This relates to what Dussel calls the “invention” of the Americas (see Dussel, Invention). 12 The etymological link of “poetry” to “making” corroborates my introductory claim that a new vocabulary or a different way of employing words is part and parcel of a decolonial practice that re-makes the world, or at least certain provincial parts of it. 13 Quijano notes that colonialism was not the first time that a certain perspective attempted to become hegemonic; however, “the current model of global power is the first effectively global one in world history” (544). 14 It is also the case that certain models were imposed within Europe in its consolidation and bureaucratization; my focus, given my decolonial approach, remains on how those models affected the periphery. 15 As a political scientist from Guadeloupe recently told me: “You will find people no more French than people from the French West Indies.” 16 I am responding in part to what Edouard Glissant calls “the disturbing affective standardization of peoples, whose affect has been diverted by the processes and products of international exchange, either consented to or imposed”; in response, Glissant continues, “it is necessary to renew the visions and aesthetics of relating to the earth” (Poetics 148). In regard to decolonial work, Glissant is particularly concerned with the epiphenomenal aspect of identification in a context of coloniality: “For more than two centuries whole populations have had to assert their identity in opposition to processes of identification or annihilation triggered by these invaders. Whereas the Western nation is first of all an ‘opposite,’ for colonized peoples identity will be primarily ‘opposed to’—that is, a limitation from the beginning. Decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit” (17). 17 Decolonial thinkers, by contrast, have been calling for a “pluriverse” (see e.g. Mignolo, The Darker Side). 18 Alejandro Vallega notes that “this very field of sensibility has always been under attack through the unfolding of Western modern instrumental rationalism and its colonization of power and knowledge”; and he adds that “[t]oday we find 17 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 ourselves isolated in our bodies, wonderers under the dazzling lights of the markets, like entities feeding on empty desires and dreams” (72, 73). 19 John Drabinski comments: “Reason appears here as an affliction that inflicts pain from the interior, yet, in its interiority, functions at the same time as an external force. Indeed, Césaire’s imagery links reason to the whip, and so to slavery’s cruelest discipline which has now become a psychic device” (147). 20 Modern capitalism, on Quijano’s account, is a particular product of the invasion of America: “[B]efore the emergence of America, it was nowhere structurally articulated with all the other forms of organization and control of the labor force and labor, nor was it predominant over any of them” (550). Therefore, “capitalism as a system of relations of production, that is, as the heterogenous linking of all forms of control on labor and its products under the dominance of capital, was constituted in history only with the emergence of America” (551). 21 Quijano’s discussion of models suggests that new models are required. I will present initial contours for such models in Part IV. When I employ “hegemony” following Quijano, I also mean to suggest more than just a dominant projection that conditions our historical present; hegemony is equally imposing in regard to what it renders absent. As David Lloyd and Paul Thomas describe, in conditions of hegemony “certain paradigms become so self-evident as to relegate alternatives to the spaces of the nonsensical and the unthinkable; it is not so much that hegemony represses,” they continue, “as that the dominance of its ‘forms’ of conceptualization renders other forms, other imaginaries, unreadable, inaudible, and incomprehensible” (Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State 21). 22 I am attempting not to provide an “exit” but to define globalization in a way that is also a diagnostic, and thus that could lead to responses or prescriptions. 23 We would do well to heed the following warning: “Difference seen as benign variation (diversity), for instance, rather than as conflict, struggle, or the threat of disruption, bypasses power as well as history to suggest a harmonious, empty pluralism” (Mohanty, Feminism 193). 24 This strategy inevitable fails. Dipesh Chakrabarty writes those on the underside, in turn, “fracture from within” (94). Further, Mendieta writes: “The West has never been (solely and entirely) Western, albeit it is being westernized; and globalization has never been global, albeit it is being globalized” (Global Fragments 107). 25 Glissant observes incisively: “As we see, there is social progress. The master’s house and the overseer’s cabin are replaced by Offices, Bureaucracies, Agencies” (Le discours antillais 85, translation mine). 26 At the very least, with regard to European sources this means “to historicize them or to put them in their European intellectual contexts” (Chakrabarty 6). He continues: “Histories that aim to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narratives of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in ‘history’” (45). 27 Mendieta says elsewhere: “I think philosophy is about generating new terms, new ways of thinking and saying what we are just beginning to realise… We could say that we philosophers are in the business of making everyday language uncanny by making it say things we did not associate with a certain expression or language” (Mendieta, “Decolonising Epistemologies” 19-20). For an instance of such a working of language, a way of thinking neologisms that are less jargon, more used from below, see Cardenal, Gospel. 28 In conceptualizing these borders, it is fruitful to think of them not only geopolitically, but also metaphysically and abstractly—as processes and procedures that manage or govern others and otherness. 29 For the discussion of race, gender, and affect as impositions, see respectively: Lugones, “Heterosexism”; Quijano, “Coloniality”; and Glissant, Poetics. 30 This puts me close—perhaps uncomfortably close—to Habermas’s view toward “modernity,” which I mentioned above, q.v. n. 6. 31 In the language of Glissant, this is a move from the “standardized dilution” of globalization (mondialisation) to the relational promises of globality (mondialité); the distinction can be considered in terms of responsibility: globality is only valid or achieved “if it is verified in the oppressions and the exploitations of the weak by the powerful” (Traité du ToutMonde 192, 176, translation mine). 32 In employing this term, I am thinking with Glissant. “Thus, within the pitiless panorama of the worldwide commercial market, we debate our problems. No matter where you are or what government brings you together into a community, the forces of this market are going to find you. If there is profit to be made, they will deal with you. These are not vague forces that you might accommodate out of politeness; these are hidden forces of inexorable logic that must be answered with the total logic of your behavior. For example, one could not accept state assistance and at the same time pretend to oppose it. You must choose your bearing [allure]” (Poetics 152). 33 My conceptualization of “affective alternatives” resonates with Alejandro Vallega’s re-description of “aesthetics.” Contra a narrow definition of aesthetics as a study of the beautiful, Vallega opens the term to “the experience of liberation and configuration of consciousness in the undergoing of bodily life, a development of living consciousness not yet discursive 18 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 or institutional” (72). “Aesthetics” in his sense—underscoring the felt, embodied basis of liberation—can be read in conjunction with my modifier “affective” to “alternatives.” 34 In affirming An Yountae’s call that “political theology in the age of capitalist, neocolonial globalization needs to take a decolonial direction,” a long note on globalization and religion is required—and indeed fruitful, speaking to my question of coalitions (121). Cornel West writes, “Notwithstanding the secular sensibilities of most leftist intellectuals and activists, religion permeates and pervades the lives of the majority of people in the capitalist world… any serious scrutiny of this sphere [of culture and everyday life] sooner or later must come to terms with religious ways of life and religious ways of struggle” (“Religion and the Left” 9). He continues: “[T]o take seriously the culture of the oppressed is not to privilege religion... It is to believe not simply in the potential of oppressed peoples but also to believe that oppressed people have already expressed some of this potential in their actual products, their actual practices” (18). In attending to the quotidian and the underside, we can also consider Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s problematization of “the impetus of modernity,” namely, “the enchantment with technique, the dominion of instrumental rationality, and the identification of modernity with secularity and premodernity with religion” (12). Hence it is also crucial to add alternative forms of spiritual life as another response to Quijano’s list. “In the age of global transformations,” Mendieta adds, “the new church cannot and will not be able to serve as an agent of globalization for the new imperial masters that began to profile themselves on the horizon—namely, a united front of European nations (an expanded NATO), a technological elite bent on redesigning nature, and a cosmopolitan nobility without controls, allegiances, or consciences” (Mendieta, Global Fragments 54). Those interested in challenging the “impetus of modernity” will be suspicious of any worship of techne or any sense of religiosity, including the idolatry of the nation-state, tied to a global elite. They will also be particularly careful to listen and attend to the calls and cries, the affective appeals, of those who have been on the underside of the hegemonic models under globalization/coloniality. As Gustavo Gutiérrez has shown, these cries often emerge through religious reflections. 35 It is important to note that the Standing Rock Sioux have long resisted forms of U.S. imposition; their resistance in the fall of 2016 was global, I am arguing, (a) because its leaders spoke to an international audience through social media and television and (b) because international actors joined in resistance. For a recent account of indigenous resistance that is not a new phenomenon, see Beatsamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done. 34 I thank Catherine Fullarton for guiding me to notice the concept of “parallax,” both through communication and in her unpublished paper, “Living with Ghosts: Being Haunted as a Structure of Experience.” 19 | D a v i s , B . P . T r a n s m o d e r n i t y . F a l l 2 0 1 8 Works Cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. “Enrique Dussel’s Transmodernism.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 1, no. 3, 2012, pp. 60-68. 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