Newsweek
called A Way in the World
an unenjoyable book, an annoying book. The
New York Times said it was a
disturbing meditation. A reviewer for New
Statesman & Society said
you could accept the author's decision to call it
a novel only by "the most extremely elastic
definition."
I too found
the book in some ways unsatisfying. But it is a
valuable book. It is partly so because it comes
in the burnished style of an old master writer
(this is his 22nd book). Mainly its value comes
from Naipaul's resolve to pick the scab of
experience at the periphery of empire over time.
He wants to get beneath the surface of the
experience, painful though it was. He seeks to
see the influences of growing up in Trinidad. He
wants to confront the consequences of his
becoming unmoored in a European world insensitive
to--ignorant of--his full inheritance as a
person. That inheritance is a complex one,
possible only in the milieu of worldwide modern
empire: his family was of India, the jewel of the
British Empire at one periphery, from which it
emigrated to the other periphery in the West
Indies. Family memory for Naipaul is doubly
complex, doubly hard to examine satisfactorily.
It spans the world. His experience touches
distant time past.
Naipaul is
stubbornly determined to wonder about the
experience of the individual in the turmoil at
the volatile periphery of European empire. This
takes him beyond his personal story. His
determination runs so deep that it destabilizes
narrative itself. He declares this book is a
novel. Yet it treats of real people--Sir Walter
Raleigh, Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan
precursor to Simon Bolivar, oddly representative
men he knew in Trinidad, at Oxford, in Africa.
All were like the author in experiencing the
encounter with the Americas.
The looping
form of this book seems suited to the
difficulties Naipaul feels in finding in the
colonial past the trails of himself—and the
trails of selfhood itself in the lives of others.
It is those difficulties that seem to force him
to declare that the frame around his factual
pastiche is fictitious. They seem to require him
to tell about stories that he finally cannot
craft. They make him transform the real stuff of
his life and that of others into the elements of
what, over-all, may indeed be a fictional
construct. It shapes up to be a construct,
fictional or not, that is terrible with meaning.
It immerses the individual in the forces of
empire. It vibrates with the background roar of
Europe's engine of control. The roar is that of
the global project of modern colonialism, fueled
by Enlightenment certainty about the need of the
periphery to accept the European center.
End of part 1. Go
to part 2.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
2.
How do individuals
find themselves in a globalized framework?
"I am a
man!" Odysseus shouted. "Know
thyself," Socrates said. "I think,
therefore I am," Descartes decided.
"Man thinking," Emerson said, defining
the American Scholar.
I carve out
my little being, an individual man, and think
about its significance. I know myself better than
anyone else knows me. It's all here, within this
skin, all there is of me. Surely I can tell the
world what it is, why it is significant. I can
cry and laugh and tell about it, the world's best
authority on me.
Still I
catch myself in moonlight wondering how strange I
am. How can I really know this self that I know
so well? In such moments the long drama preceding
my presence on the earth shimmers at the edge of
consciousness like Northern Lights. So much time
gone on the planet, so little of it mine, all of
it somehow bearing in upon me out of the past,
touching me, nudging me this way instead of that.
It is then
that I think how simplistic it is for me to
believe I can have "me" at my command
within my skin. I don't know the threads that
reach up from the experience of my forebears and
wrap around me. How can I know the full effect on
me of my culture, my biology? How can I know the
way the world-wide human fabric weaves in and
around me? It is complex beyond understanding.
On a
pleasant Sunday not long ago I was walking along
a wooded path beside the Schuylkill River near
the towpath along the old Mont Clare canal, a
familiar scene of my boyhood adventures. The path
at water's edge ended at the high railroad bridge
and curved back onto the nearby canal towpath,
once literally the path where the donkeys pulled
barges. Now it was a paved roadway for people
seeking recreation along the picturesque canal.
At the point where my river path joined the old
towpath, a mother and father were busy teaching a
boy how to ride a bike. They didn't see me until
after I had moved past them. Behind my back, I
heard the mother say, "Where the hell did he
come from?"
She had
unkowingly expressed the question that I had been
pondering as I had walked along the rushing
river. I had appeared to her from a certain
familiar place in my remembered experience, to be
sure; but a farther shore had been forming in my
head as I had walked along the river bank. It was
not as easy to know where that was or when it was
or how it intertwined with the person I thought
myself to be. Could I ever clarify such a shore?
Could I situate myself there? Could I ever
measure the depth of complex human striving I was
seeking to identify and relate to my little life?
A Way in
the World entered my reading
regimen while I was thinking about "globalization."
The word has become a familiar incantation in
transnational corporate rhetoric. It is a marker
for a commerically grounded culture that takes
the whole world as its venue. It evokes pictures
of images shooting around the globe on digital
wings. Whatever we think postmodern culture is,
we know at least that it somehow involves
"globalization." I was interested in
getting past these familiar popular uses for a
look at the deeper roots of the term.
How does the
contemporary concept of the globe-and-us alter
familiar questions about individual identity and
about politics, economics, and culture? What
makes a global perspective now so different from
a global perspective in past eras, when imperial
imaginations harnessed vast colonies and defined
systems of control across the seas and all the
continents of the globe? Why do we think we are
in a globalized period in a way that Amerigo
Vespucci was not when he was the first to
envision the New World between Europe and India?
V. S.
Naipaul too, in his different way, in A
Way in the World, a book
made strange by its mix of personal and colonial
history with a fictional spin, was trying to come
to a personal peace with a world that could spawn
questions like these.
End of part 2. Go
to part 3.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
3.
Domination and
liberation contest in the globalized space
My thinking
about globalization at the time focused on papers
from The Globalization and
Culture conference sponsored
by Duke University and the University of
California, San Diego. The papers were gathered
into the following volume:
Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The
Cultures of Globalization. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Jameson in a
preface conveniently lays out some guidelines for
considering globalization. It is not an
established discipline and offers itself up to a
multiplicity of definitions, he says. (Nor did
the conferees aim to establish it as a new
discipline.) Yet, Jameson suggests, it lives in
some slippery but meaningful way that involves
the unprecedented expansion of worldwide
communication and the world marketplace. Jameson
offers a working definition in the notion of "an
untotalizable totality which intensifies binary
relations between its parts--mostly nations, but
also regions and groups, which, however, continue
to articulate themselves on the model of
'national identities' (rather than in terms of
social class, for example)."
(xii) The globalized relations, Jameson further
says, are predominantly relations of
"tension or antagonism when not outright
exclusion: in them each term struggles to define
itself against the binary other." (xii)
So, through
this prism, he sees globalization itself with two
antagonistic faces. One appears as transnational domination
and uniformity. The other
shows itself as a source of
liberation from restrictive
local tradition. The medieval idea of a civil
society, having been destroyed by modernism,
seems to return in the contemplation of a global
network, Jameson says. However, the global
totality before us creates a tension between
"the political 'freedom' of the various
social groups to negotiate their political
contract" and "the economic 'freedom'
of the marketplace itself, as a plural
space...." (xiii).
He presents
us with globalization as an intellectual
"space of tension" rather than a
formulation for resolving tensions. The
"problematic" of the idea of
globalization has yet to become clear, as Jameson
surveys the papers in the conference.
"What
seems clear is that the state of things the word globalization
attempts to designate
will be with us for a long time to come;...and
that its theorization necessarily uniting the
social and cultural sciences, as well as theory
and practice, the local and the global, the West
and its Other, but also postmodernity and its
predecessors and alternatives, will constitute
the horizon of all theory in the years
ahead." (xvi)
That is,
globalization as an idea casts a shifting net
over the whole intellectual world as we know it
today, just as it captures the whole physical
earth. This typical Jamesonian maneuver made me
wonder when I first thought about it whether
globalization means anything we want it to mean,
yielding precious little meaning whatever in the
end.
Then I
thought again of Naipaul's sad, layered book.
Here was a text that would not have come into
being if it had not been for something like the
idea of globalization advanced by Jameson and his
conference colleagues. Naipaul's chapters were a
composite of personal antagonisms and tensions;
yet they were shadows in a worldwide human drama,
darkly and sadly performed, powered by boundless
human desire to control and to acquire.
Naipaul
presented his vulnerable self as a repository of
the personal anguish and ambiguity created by
this globalizing process. But his personal
testimony depended for its narrative power on the
dynamics of national, regional, and group
conflicts and adventures spanning oceans,
reaching back to 1492.
End of part 3. Go
to part 4.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
4.
Eurocentric
modernity will produce its own dissolution
Mention of
these conflicts and adventures at once brings to
mind the familiar story of European expansion
into the New World, beginning with Columbus--into
the very place in the West Indies from which
Naipaul's personal narrative sprouts. We tend to
think of the playing out of that original
European expansion into the West Indies and on
around the earth as the essential story line of
the global narrative as we tell it today. Europe
developed cultural superiority, the story goes,
based on its modern scientific and technological
knowledge; and Europe responded to the inner
imperative to take its superior culture to the
far ends of the less developed world.
One
of
the participants in the Globalization and Culture
Conference, Enrique Dussel, gave a theory of
globalization dramatically different from this.
("Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and
the Limits of Modernity," pp. 3-31.) Dussel
argued that the expansion of European hegemony
did not arise fundamentally from a European
motive force. It arose fundamentally as a phase
in a planetary
system.
Europe, in
Dussel's theory, was in service from the start to
a world-system of resource management; the world
was not in service to a European hegemony, except
in passing. It is worthwhile examining Dussel's
theory a little further, for it offers
possibilities for a better reading of Naipaul's
strange book.
To follow
Dussel's argument, you have to see modernity as
the essential character of the first (and so far
only) "world-system." It was predated
by a pre-modern "inter-regional" system
centered in the Ottoman Empire. That system
lacked the "comparative advantage" that
finally gave the world center to Europe. The
comparative advantage lacked by Baghdad and
gained by Spain/Netherlands/Britain lay in the
resources of the West Indies, beginning in 1492.
Dussel minimizes the importance of a putative
European cultural superiority in its successful
move to the center of the world system. "It
was the economy, stupid," a
sixteenth-century Bill Clinton might have
said--an economy that, for the first time,
girdled the globe.
You have to
envision the old inter-regional system as a
three-part arrangement on the face of the globe.
One part took in India and the whole Middle East,
with Baghdad as the center of that center.
Another took in China and the rest of the Far
East. The third took in Spain and Europe as a
whole. The energy of the inter-regional system
moved inward toward the center of these three
regions, India/Baghdad. Portugal's first
successful voyages from the peripheral region in
Europe followed that imperative; it went around
Africa to India, sailing east. Blocked by
Portugal from sailing east, Spain sought the same
center by sailing west. By stumbling on the
Americas, it added the fourth component and
created the first world-system. The human capital
and precious minerals--and sheer space--that it
and other European countries won from
"Amerindia" enabled Europe to become
the center of the system, leaving Baghdad in the
dustbin of interregional history.
The
fundamental problem for Europeans, in Dussel's
view, was to manage
the new planetary system that arose from the
opening of the Americas. Its answer to that
management problem was--modernity itself! "Modernity
was the fruit of the 'management' of the
centrality of the first world-system."
(13)
Faced with
the obligation to manage the far-flung
world-system, Europe found just the right tool in
simplification--at
every level, intellectual, spiritual, physical.
Modernist reform yielded a newly simplified
relationship with nature (technological not
teleological); a newly simplified subjectivity
(understanding of the self in its own right); a
newly simplified idea of community (with new
intersubjective and political relations); and a
newly simplified economic arrangement
(capitalism). Put these simplifications together
and modernity emerges. (p. 13)
And the
final simplification was the
"superideology" of Eurocentrism itself.
It finessed the ultimate ethical question that
haunted modernity from the moment the Spaniards
spotted the first Amerindian. "What
right has the European to occupy, dominate, and
manage the recently discovered cultures,
conquered by the military and in the process of
being colonized?" (p.
14) asks Dussel. The answer is that Europe
decided that its culture was superior. This
answer skirted the ultimate ethical issue of
modernity until it erupted in the liberation
movements of the 1960s. The Eurocentric
oversimplification then finally came to be called
what it had been for centuries, an ethical
disaster.
(Parenthetically,
I note stark evidence of the
"superideology" of Eurocentrism in my
current reading, Hegel's Philosophy
of History. His
characterizations of the old cultures of China
and India read like exaggerated Swiftian satires
today, but they were quite seriously taken, I
assume, through the nineteenth century.)
Dussel
concludes his provocative essay by wondering how
we can resolve this disastrous ethical fallacy of
a Eurocentric modernity. One initiative is that
of Juergen Habermas's project--to
"complete" the Enlightenment, which is
the vehicle into the present of the essential
modern idea of simplification. But Dussel sees
inadequate theoretical power in either a
Habermasian or a postmodern solution. The
postmodern thinkers fail, in his eyes, because
they remain uncritical of the art and media that
are the "fruit of a rationalization proper
to the management of the European centrality in
the world-system." (p. 18) They are part of
the problem not of the solution.
This failure
leads Dussel to look for a different way to
resolve Eurocentric modernist simplification
(what in postmodern criticism is commonly called
terrorizing metanarratives). He would go to the
periphery of the world-system and "recoup
what is redeemable in modernity." He would
"halt the practices of domination and
exclusion in the world-system." (p. 19) He
thus supports an ethics of liberation for those
oppressed and excluded by the central
management's simplifications.
Dussel
identifies the natural and human limits to
modernity--it can only exploit so much of the
planet and so many of its people before
exhausting itself. As it wears itself out it will
produce--from within itself--"a locus of
'resistance' from whose affirmation the process
of the negation of negation of liberation
begins." (p. 21)
In Dussel's
view, then, heady Hegelian world dialectic thus
ends the illusion that modernity is a unique
flowering of European hegemony. It is, rather, a
phase in a larger global flow. Though just an
outline of a theory, which I only partly grasp,
the Dussel argument is useful. It resonates with
the struggle we see in Naipaul to account for the
effects of modernity on individual lives at the
periphery of power.
End of part 4. Go
to part 5.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
5.
Naipaul speaks of
the individual heart from the periphery
The awful
truth from Naipaul is that that process of
modernity--a process, let us grant, with Dussel,
that managed the world-system by means of vast
simplification at the conceptual and operational
levels--produced hate, humiliation, cruelty,
slavery, all intertwined with individual and
national vanity and greed. The religious and
political conventions, which purported to address
the awful ethical message at the center of
modernity, reduce to glosses on the basic action,
which was economic exploitation.
I want to
say, yes, Dussel explains this situation. His
theory permits you, V.S., to point at the
indignity, the limits, and the blindness to the
human heart that furrow your brow as you
contemplate your life and the other lives you
recount. But more important, it gives a license
to your voice. You speak from the very periphery
that harbors, in Dussel's view, the beginning of
the negation of the modernist ethical tyranny. In
his theory, A Way in the
World is evidence that the
process of transforming modernity even beyond
postmodernity has already started.
The glorious
themes of Western civilization, derived from
Greece and Rome--individual heroism, tragic
grandeur in the face of inescapable fate--pale
when we think this way about Western civilization
in the modern period. From Naipaul's pages we
distill a smallness of experience, a meanness in
the way of the world. We lament the ignoble
strategies intelligent people seized upon, just
to keep from disappearing into the cracks of
modernist machinery.
Naipaul did
not set out to explain all this. In the spirit of
the present period, which is hostile toward
general answers, he told something about his
experience and something about the experience of
others in Trinidad, Venezuela, Africa. You know
that he is not amassing evidence to support an
explanatory hypothesis to the awful question--how
can the consequences of globalization
(interchangeable with colonialisation,
modernization, simplification, universalization)
on people like me be justified?
You sense that he is seeking his personal peace
at whatever price. And the price he is able to
pay is prose, story that re-fashions what has
happened. In that re-fashioning, or the
half-successful attempt to do so, in the exercise
itself, he seems to say, he will find all the
explanation, all the redemption, all the peace
that the world is likely to give to individuals.
It is not
that Naipaul is saying that none of this should
have happened. The story of Raleigh, believing in
the fiction of gold at the bend up the river,
willingly returning to the Tower when he failed
to find it for the Crown, conveys an
inevitablity. The man would strive. The strange
new part of earth would beckon. Dreams and
obligations would compel. Damn the consequences.
You get the sense from Naipaul that the classic
encounter was beyond ethics; ethics would have to
find its energy within the folds of that grander
narrative of discovery and quest and conquest.
In one of
his "unwritten" stories, "New
Clothes" (pp. 45-69), Naipaul dramatizes the
encounter of a hermetically sealed primitive
world with its European conquerors. His roughly
sketched narrative takes us into the deep forest
of the Guiana Highlands, "an Amerindian no
man's land on the frontiers of Venezuela, Brazil,
and what is now called Guyana." (p. 45) His
English narrator-protagonist, inspired by the
remoteness of the forest and the naiveté of his
youthful native guides, imagines the people of
the forest living in a world that lacks an
understanding of passing time. He learns in the
deep forest village from one of the boy's uncles
that the English had been there long ago. They
had taken one of the natives, his grandfather, to
England and had returned him, promising to come
back and build houses,
European miracles about which the returned native
spoke with awe. The English never came, but they
sent clothing to the grandfather--"modern
clothes, for the houses
they were going to build." (p. 69) The uncle
shows the narrator the carefully preserved
clothing. It is of Tudor times, 350 years old. A
mockery. The boys on their forest trek had built
shelters for the narrator each night, perfectly
adapted to the conditions there. Their
idealization of English houses
was thus culturally crazy.
In this stab
at a story, based on some facts about his travels
in the early 1960s, Naipaul sums up much of the
crazy incongruity that flowed from the
globalizing encounter of the civilized and the
primitive. The wildly differing senses of time
undergird a vaster difference. The narrator feels
love, pain, shame, and grief when he contemplates
the people of the forest. These feelings
intensify from his silent erotic encounters at
night on the trail with one of the native youths.
The physical encounter only accentuates the
impenetrable barrier between them. The episode of
the "new clothes" perhaps provides as
much general interpretation on globalization as
Naipaul dares to attempt.
End of part 5. Go
to part 6.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
dance
6.
Globalization
means the dance of categorical opposites
Identity.
Difference.
The self and the other. The threads weave through
the complex episode in the deep forest. They are
the "inseparable Opposition" that
Fredric Jameson finds lying at the very center of
the process of globalization, a process he is
willing to call Hegelian. In addition to his
introduction to the conference papers, cited
above, Jameson contributed his own paper,
"Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical
Issue" (pp. 54-77). It gives me a convenient
way to close out this ramble around Naipaul's
book. By pointing us toward a theoretical
approach to globalization, Jameson incorporates
and goes beyond personal search for inheritance
such as we see in The Way of
the World. He might enable
us to leave the anecdotal and the personally
saddened domain of a Naipaul. He might let us
cast it in a frame that offers a more general
apparatus for understanding.
I summarize Jameson's
paper systematically in a separate page. For present purposes,
I simply latch onto Jameson's inimitable vision
of globalization as a dance of categorical
opposites, leading to the contradictions that may
in part, at least, explain. The "ideological
structure" of globalization, he suggests,
presents us with contrasting concepts.
It is first
a "communicational concept" (55) about
a new world culture that celebrates difference as
cultural pluralism.
It is second
an "economic concept" that celebrates
increasing identity in a world market leading to
a single world-system.
Jameson then
plays with the way these two concepts transfer
onto each other depending on the location and
circumstances in the world. "Everything
depends," he says, "on the level at
which a malign and standardizing or despostic
identity is discerned." (74)
So, for
example, if a nation state is despotic, then its
people in a globalized situation are able to
oppose it by turning to transnational markets and
culture. These will enable them to resist the
state's totalitarian urge to unify and
standardize. On the other hand, if the people see
transnational capitalist products as a threat to
their cultural identity, then they can oppose
"Americanization" by interposing their
nation state as a defender of their authentic
culture.
In other
words, for Jameson, no general theory mediates or
harmonizes the never-ending paradoxes generated
by the globalized condition of postmodernity. He
would have us address each paradox categorically
and dialectically, and the most useful in
addressing globalization are the categories of
identity and difference. Jameson turns to Hegel's
Logic
for guidance in this and says,
"You
begin with Identity, he [Hegel] says, only to
find that it is always defined in terms of its
Difference with something else; you turn to
Difference and find out that any thoughts about
that involve thoughts about the 'identity' of
this particular category. As you begin to watch
Identity turn into Difference and Difference back
into Identity, you grasp both as an inseparable
Opposition....But after learning that, you find
out that they are not in opposition, but rather,
in some other sense, one and the same as each
other...." (76)
I want to
see an irony in the way Jameson (the theorizer
who will not offer a final theory to explain
globalization's paradoxes) turns to Hegel (the
theorizer who authored the grand metanarrative to
explain everything). Such a desire for irony
comes naturally to a reader after an immersion of
any length in the Jamesonian rhetorical funhouse.
I also want
to see a resemblance between Jameson's
theoretical notes and V. S. Naipaul's stories of
himself and others caught up in the globalizing
world-system in his time and in times past. From
each I take the comfort of the incompleted effort
to explain. Both Jameson and Naipaul can give us
fragments of globalization--one theoretical, the
other anecdotal--but neither can give us anything
like the whole truth of it. I am ending with the
working opinion that there is no whole truth of
it to be grasped by inquiring human minds.
Jameson and Naipaul can reduce the strangeness of
what is going on to some extent; for the rest,
they give us the satisfaction of their remarkable
manners of expression.
A manner of
expression--this is probably the most that anyone
walking in search of himself in the grinder of
modern time can realistically hope to find.
End of essay.
PARTS OF THE ESSAY:
1.
In a globalized dynamic, individuals become
strangers to themselves |
2.
How do individuals find themselves in a
globalized framework?
| 3.
Domination and liberation contest in the
globalized space
| 4.
Eurocentric modernity will produce its own
dissolution |
5.
Naipaul speaks of the individual heart from the
periphery
|
6. Globalization means the dance of categorical
opposites
Related reading notes: Hegelian oppositions
help explain globalization has
reading notes on Fredric Jameson's "Notes on
globalization as a philosophical issue."
On
globalization: "Global
literacies" empower corporate leaders:
Lessons on business leadership shed light on the
globalized postmodern marketplace.
