...

"GLOBALIZATION"

The "Globalization" Homepage

........

GLOBALIZATION & POSTMODERNISM COMPLEMENT AND CONTRADICT ONE ANOTHER

Late capitalism is the common ground for globalization as well as postmodernism. Yet they generate contradictory visions of world culture. What will come of that?

An essay in 11 hypertext jumps Plain text version without hypertext jumps

19 August 2001 Copyright © 2001 Richard P. Richter .........................................

1

The Enlightenment offered a universal application of reason to human affairs. It sought to reduce the particularistic, localized, "irrational" manifestations of human endeavor. Those who advocate globalization today inherit that Enlightenment orientation. Mainly they favor a regime of free trade, grounded in eighteenth century notions of laissez-faire economics. This also predisposes them to favor the transformations of culture and selfhood that follow in the wake of economic change.

2

According to James H. Mittelman (The Globalization Syndrome), contemporary globalization started in 1973, with the end of the Bretton Woods agreement. That agreement controlled international monetary flows after the end of World War II.

Fredric Jameson (Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) also chose 1973 to mark the start of the postmodernist period. Jameson saw in postmodernism a new era of "late" capitalism that precipitated a comprehensive cultural change in the West. It marked a transition away from the high modernist culture that the Enlightenment had spawned.

3

Globalization and postmodernism, as descriptions of a period of human experience, thus join at the hip because of their grounding in post-Bretton Woods world capitalism.

Yet, those descriptions lead to contradictory visions of a world society. Globalization resurrects an imagined totality of human culture. Postmodernism rejects any such overarching "metanarrative" that would pretend to erase the irreducible differences of human experience.

4

In the belle époque from 1870 to 1914, Europe seemed to be moving steadily toward the Enlightenment vision. World War I (1914-1918) halted that perceived progress. Military, political, and economic crises from 1918 to 1945 continued to squelch a universalistic program. In the Cold War between 1945 and 1973, the threat of a final crisis in nuclear holocaust combined with economic recovery to provide a strange kind of post-World War II normalization. But the dark presence of the Iron Curtain delayed any renewal of the quest for the Enlightenment vision.

5

The changes in world economics that followed the end of the Bretton Woods accord in 1973 started the world on a new course, as both Mittelman and Jameson in their different ways explain. Globalization as we see it today began to take shape; when the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, the momentum toward a globalization system accelerated. The entire globe finally could appear to be a space where the economics of late capitalism could operate. With that possibility, the universalistic cultural expectations of the Enlightenment vision could also re-emerge.

6

From the perspective of postmodernists, however, the world after 1973 did not need a return to the discredited universalistic vision of the Enlightenment. Sober critics, after all, implicated that vision in the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, the world needed an adaptive strategy that would allow people to deal in a different way with the dysfunction of society that came to a boil in the '68 uprisings around the world. When postmodernists insisted that there were no grand solutions, no language that could apply universally, their denial was itself an ironic solution of a kind. By rejecting the Enlightenment, they were trying to free the future from its dark totalitarian underside.

7

By the late 1990s, vigorous protests by opponents of globalization showed that the original contradictions of globalization and postmodernism persisted. Their common grounding in the economics of late capitalism contributed nothing to a resolution of the two conflicting formulations.

8

Facing us, then, is a conceptual opposition with real-world consequences. On one hand is a refreshed idea of globalization that has blossomed since the end of the Cold War. On the other is a mature postmodern project, the vigor of which depends on aging or deceased thinkers at the peak of their production in the 1970s and 1980s.

How shall we decide what will follow from this opposition? Does the postmodernist attack on grand narratives still invigorate the intellectual circles from which the politics and practices of the operating world take energy? Or, is the synoptic nature of globalization already establishing a new dominant note? If so, will postmodernism take its quiet place in history as a completed strategy for dealing with the awful circumstances of the final decades of the Cold War?

9

Simultaneously, we have to interrogate contemporary globalization. Does it carry forward the universalistic pretensions of an Enlightenment culture? Or, is contemporary globalization a new hybrid syndrome driven by people who limit their vision to an economic universalism without expecting a corresponding social and cultural uniformity worldwide? Could a hybrid variety of globalization incorporate the postmodernist legitimization of social and cultural difference, which sought to limit totalitarian madness?

10

If these questions make sense, they could begin to frame the combined analysis of globalization and postmodernism as complementary and contradictory fields of thought. Such a framing might have practical political value. Globalizing forces by now have become so powerful that they have provoked backlash with staying power. Would that we had a map on which to chart a reliable course through the conflict.

The concept of globalization in the 21st century may depend for its viability on lessons found in the adaptive strategies and novel insights into time and space that postmodernist thought produced in the past thirty years.

Postmodernists may avoid the dustbin of history by acknowledging the universalistic implications of postmodernism's roots in late capitalism.

11

The contradictions between globalization and postmodernism may not in the end prevent clever minds from drawing up a program that accentuates their complementarity. From such minds we might derive a map for the future that neither the Enlightenment's Diderot nor deconstruction's Derrida would understand.

In any case, by coupling the complementary and contradictory features of globalization and postmodernism in a single analytical project, we would be dealing with the weightiest contemporary issues. We would be trying to explain what might be happening in the emerging world order so that we could live in it with insight--at least without panic.

end of essay

Plain text version without hypertext jumps