Race, class . . . all that . . . but isn’t all that just history?
Aren’t people bored with it all?

The way she spoke those lines, sort’ve flaunting them with a kind of faux naïve provocation, suggested that she knew that Adrienne Rich poem, the one that ends with a young woman asking that very question. You know the poem I mean, the one about an older woman, somebody roughly our age, whose participation in the movements of the sixties or late eighties becomes part of her ethical mission in the classroom.  The poem that starts with a woman thinking

not I have joined a movement but    I am stepping in this deep current
Part of my life washing behind me. . .    
part of my life waiting for me

I was getting desperate.  I even ventured my own recent offering, English 925, an Adam Smith-Joseph Conrad combo—“Mistah Kurtz…he dead:  Military Authority, the Moral Economy, and the Arts of Darkness”—as carrying a remarkable contemporary relevance. My leaden performance drove her away.  Suddenly, the scholar’s gown seemed like a shroud, the mortarboard a fallen soufflé of sententiousness, and although I maintained my mustachioed stiff upper lip, in the image of those who exude moral authority, I knew that the game was lost.

She got up to leave, saying some sharp stuff about the obsolescence of the “politics of difference” and how all that “pomo” and “poco” theorizing just doesn’t “get” globalization . . . its mobile networks . . . its postmodern marketing strategies . . . its nomadic subjects. And then, as she strode away, she fixed me with a stare and threw me a rather ungainly sentence that, for a tense minute, I thought I had written myself:  “[Global] power has evacuated the [binary] bastion [that you postmodernists and postcolonialists] are attacking . . . in the name of difference.”   The “name of difference” now hoisted by its own petard? Postcolonialism in shreds?  Binary thinking busted by global capitalism?  Was the moral fervor of my youth so misconceived? Was there nothing left to bring joy to my middle years?

“Hey, why do you keep throwing these things at me,” I ran after her, “first Adrienne Rich . . . Deleuze . . . Jameson . . . Hardt and Negri. Listen . . . I never said . . . I didn’t mean. . . .” But she had had the last word, and as I ran after her I kept thinking: Isn’t all that just history?

It would be heartening to agree with the growing chorus—Hardt and Negri amongst them—that global “empire” has deserted the bastions of binary thinking.  The aftermath of 9/11 has made even more urgent the endeavor to think of issues relating to political and cultural differences beyond the polarities of power and identity. Immediately after the WTC attacks there was a worldwide resurgence of Samuel Huntington’s thesis on “the clash of civilizations” with an enraged and righteous Islam pitted against the liberal and Christian West—an argument that the author himself was in the process of revising.  Newspapers from Germany to Brazil cited the book as essential reading. More recently, with Iraq in our sights, there is another ruling binary in our midst—this time, known as the bipolarity of global power. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times,  Thomas Friedman argues that 9/11 has introduced a new division of the globe—the World of Order and the World of Disorder:

The World of Order is built on four pillars: the U.S., E.U.-Russia, India and China, along with all the smaller powers around them. The World of Disorder comprises failed states (such as Liberia), rogue states (Iraq and North Korea), messy states—states that are too big to fail but too messy to work (Pakistan, Colombia, Indonesia, many Arab and African states)—and finally the terrorist and mafia networks that feed off the World of Disorder.

There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open borders, and a highly integrated global financial and internet system, very small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World of Order.  Individuals can become superempowered.  In many ways, 9/11 marked the first full-scale battle between a superpower and a small band of super-empowered angry men from the World of Disorder.

There is no old-style polarity here of East and West or North and South; nevertheless, the presence of a networked universe and diffused technologies doesn’t prevent the discourse of world power from being represented, ubiquitously and influentially, as bipolar: The World of Order and the World of Disorder.  The reasons why the differences between superpowers and the superempowered should somehow assume a pattern of polarity is a question for another time.  However, the critical labor of interrogating the binarized bastions of world power still has an important role to play if we want to understand why the World of Order elicits such deep anger, anxiety, and ambivalence from those who belong to rogue, failed, or messy states.  Why the failure? What is the history of the mess? To suggest that the world has moved decidedly into “global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures” is at best only half true (E, p. 151).  True perhaps for the al Qaeda network and its operative nodes.  But hardly true for much of the rest of the word; not true for the U.S. or the U.K.; nor true for the worldwide demand, on streets and in secretariats, that any hostile action should be undertaken under the supervision of the UN, fully ratified by international law, and supported by the community of nations.  The two sides of the global truth amount to something less than a whole truth: first, the idea that the specter of binary or bipolar explanation rises to exert order and meaning when we are confronted by realities that seem contingent, contradictory, and fearsome;  and, second, that national territories and network societies coexist with each other in relations that are, at best, problematic and proximate.

The discourses of cultural globalization have become a major intertextual and interdisciplinary highway between the humanities and the social sciences; and the traffic of ideas and methods that passes between them shapes much of our thinking in the arts and the humanities. And it is to this junction of ideas that I now want to turn. The global influence of world markets—their cunning commodifications—must not be underestimated; nor, however, must the world’s trade zones be celebrated as a bricolage of borderless bazaars  (“Differences [of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth] seem to multiply infinitely in the world market” [E, p. 150]). It is true that financial markets and capital flows have  been disproportionately globalized in comparison with other important  sectors of the world economy, but nowhere near the extent to which diverse rhetorics of globalization claim . At a rough estimate, almost 90 percent of all worldwide trade policies and tariffs are still controlled by nation-states in their interests rather than interregional bodies. The European Union and MERCOSUR are exceptions to this global trend, setting their tariffs according to “customs union” regulations, but this represents only a modest variation in the persistence of trade barriers across the world.  However, one’s idealism and optimism about these interregional bodies should not conceal the fact that national hegemonies still prevail over transnational agreements.  For instance, the common agricultural policy of the European Union is heavily tilted toward the advantage of the French and their influence on the agricultural lobby in Brussels.  The rhetorical zeal with which it is claimed that world markets are now postnational needs to be tempered with a contending perspective, one that foregrounds elements of the economy that have become increasingly regulative and conservative in the face of global fluidity.

When it is argued that  “postmodernism is indeed the logic by which global capital operates” or that “the world market establishes a real politics of difference,” these influential views seem to turn the world into a metaphor of mondialization in which the persistence of national or international governance is wrongly seen as a withering remnant of the Westphalian system (E, p. 151).  It would be more accurate to suggest that the “national” system is being reinvented and hybridized to deal with the governance of globalizations—its formal institutions and informal arrangements that strive for sovereignty in a world economy that is still substantially “national.”  Culturalist globalization often works by analogy, mapping an equivalence between the conceptual language of cultural studies and selective aspects of the political economy—financial flows, capital transfers, outsourcing, flexible accumulation.  These economic processes can, with relative ease, be appropriated into the spatial and semiotically informed languages of cultural description and representation that have become the lingua franca of humanistic discourse post the linguistic turn.  The circulation of commodities, the opening up of free trade zones, the technological transfer of financial flows bear a certain formal resonance (if not resemblance) with the circulation of images, the exchange of cultural signs, the flow of signification, the intertextual transfers of meaning.  The elements of the global economy and polity that can be most readily inscribed under the sign of a quasi-semiotic “circulation” are then mobilized for a wider political and ethical argument that suggests that the goal of a global ethic lies in “the struggle against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity—is entirely positive. Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of virtue, as the first ethical practices on the terrain of Empire” (E, pp. 361–62).

The “free movement” of peoples and labor may be a fine aspiration.  However, it cannot credibly support a “global ethic” at a time when, according to the most recent estimates, only 3 percent of the world’s population are part of global migratory flows. Now this does not mean that in a world of migratory movement—whether in the nineteenth century or today—those who don’t move, stay still. The more fundamental challenge by far is to rethink “indigeneity” or “nationality” in the partial and incipient conditions of global, cosmopolitan itinerancy. What does it mean to “resettle” or repeople a “poor” globalized nation of compromised sovereignty in a partially denationalized context, where financial remittances from migrant communities abroad far outweigh any other form of “foreign investments.” How do these “nonnationalized,” largely private forms of funding shape public culture and the global economy? What does it take to “revision” a people in a wealthy multicultural society where migrant or diasporic groups seek a mode of binational and bilingual belonging that may change our most cherished norms and modalities of cultural citizenship? These are some of the most enduring epistemological and ethical issues raised in the Satanic Verses, which have been occluded by the affaire Salman Rushdie. The Satanic Verses suggests that the migrations of canonical and pedagogical knowledges—classic and modernist—are rearticulated by the voices of a vernacular cosmopolitan tradition that redress—and readdress—the precarious balance between indigeneity and internationalism.  For instance, “[Mimi] went icy: `I have read Finnegan’s Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West. . . . We had exploitation when you-plural were running round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly sometime. You’ll beg to be black. Excuse my french: brown.’”

And if that’s the view from the postmodern academy, there is another more classical conversation going on at the Shaandaar café, locale of migrants and émigrés, where Lucretius and Ovid are being debated—“`You hear, good sir? Our spirits . . . . are still the same forever but adopt in their migrations ever-varying forms. . . . [or] some demonic and irreversible mutation is taking place.’”

Migrants, refugees, and nomads don’t merely circulate. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and education, assert their economic and cultural rights, and come to be legally represented within legal jurisdictions.  From this perspective, monetary policy and taxation rather than “markets” and financial flows provide the crucial infrastructure for enabling an ethic of free movement. It is salutary, then, to turn to less semiotically and figuratively supple forms of the economy like taxes and monetary policy, which are contextual and conjunctural and much less open to metaphoric appropriation. And yet taxation or trade tariffs are no less a matter of concern for cultural globalization, which places the problems of migration and the accelerated movement of peoples and things at the heart of the new global polity.  Indeed, to the extent to which global equity and justice demands the free flow of peoples and goods, taxation has a crucial role to play in providing migrants and the “poor” with social welfare, public goods, medical care, and educational benefits at the national level. Positive global relations depend on the protection of these nation-based resources of the redistribution of wealth. To suggest that “`the very idea of a [national] economy is becoming meaningless’” or that the “world market is liberated from the kind of binary divisions that nation-states had imposed“ is to claim too much too soon (E, p. 151).  For the global economy is, as yet, a transitional and translational category. As the economic historian Saskia Sassen argues,  it is the “insertions of the global into the fabric of the national  [that create] . . . a partial and incipient denationalization of that which historically has been constructed as the national.”   Our experience of the global is not a face-to-face encounter with a “new” social or cultural phenomenon; it only comes to life as a representational reality when the nation-space cedes its sovereignty in order to accede to the transnational or global reality that embeds itself, or intercedes, into the ongoing life of the nation.  Any turning point in history, Gramsci once wrote, can only be experienced as an “incubation” of temporalities, old and new, past and present.

Those who experience the partial and incipient conditions of global life with the greatest intensity, and inequity, are minorities—those movements with which I began—who have always been partially denationalized subjects—“partial citizens at the edge of the nation”— as  DuBois once described them. Such “minoritarian” conditions of life do not exist exclusively at the margins of society or the peripheries of the globe. They exist wherever there is an attempt to deny the choice of freedom or to refuse the recognition of equality on the grounds that there must be a normalization or neutralization of “difference”—in other words a majoritarian bias—in the moral ordering of society and its allocation or regulation of resources.

At its best, I believe, the politics of difference lives on to rethink the minority not as an identity but as a process of affiliation (rather than autonomy) that eschews sovereignty and sees its own selfhood and interests as partial and incipient in relation to the other’s presence. This form of minoritarian identification converts the liminal condition of the minority—always partially denationalized—into a new kind of strength based on the solidarity of the partial collectivity rather than sovereign mastery.  In this sense, Etienne Balibar has brilliantly argued, seeking liberation is “a ‘right to difference in equality,’ that is, not as a restoration of an original identity or as a neutralization of differences in the equality of rights, but as the production of an equality . . . [as] the complementarity and reciprocity of singularities.”    Equality and rights are the products of a mode of personhood that emerges through the processes of shaping diverse lifeworlds of freedom and self-expression “in the name of difference.” Such rights of equality are not then presumed to be universal because they rest on an unmarked, “neutralized” humanity that exists before and beyond the “representation of difference.” This is an important lesson that the Human Rights NGOs of our times—that other globalization of an international civil society—are learning every day. In working towards “a right to difference in equality,” we need to affirm the careful virtue of tolerance, but also to move beyond it to achieve an imaginative virtuosity of “identification” which we humanists—artists, poets, historians, literary scholars—enact every day in our attempts at writing, reading, and interpretation:

—And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in
the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class…all that……but isn’t all that just history?
Aren’t people bored with it all?. . .
She’s a mermaid
Momentarily precipitated from a solution
which could stop her heart   She could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal.

New mornings dawn this way; and other histories haunt this day.