the human in globality

7/30/2019 the human in globality

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Sonderdruck aus

Zhang Longxi (ed.)

The Concept of Humanityin an Age of Globalization

With 5 figures

V&R unipress

ISBN 978-3-89971-918-5

ISBN 978-3-86234-918-0 (E-Book)


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Contents

Acknowledgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Zhang Longxi

Introduction: Humanity and the Diversity of Conceptualization . . . . . 9

Fred Dallmayr

1. Who Are We Now? For an Other Humanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Jrn Rsen

2. Towards a New Idea of Humankind: Unity and Difference of Cultures

at the Crossroads of Our Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Djelal Kadir

3. Ecce homo: Somewhat Human, Particularly Global, Conveniently

Universal, Relatively Unique, Comparatively Incommensurable . . . . . . 55

Balmurli Natrajan

4. The Problem of Difference in Discourses of Civilization and Culture 67

Patrick Colm Hogan

5. The Trouble with Moral Universalism: On Human Cognition, Human

Bias, and Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Dieter Sturma

6. Humanism and Intercultural Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Georg Essen

7. Who observes religions? Negotiating Faith, Politics and the Idea ofHumanism in an Era of Terrorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113


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Sophia Rosenfeld

8. Humanity and Its Common Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Donald D. Stone

9. The Theme of Forgiveness in Western Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

David Stern

10. The Idea of Humanity in Jewish Tradition: From The Image of God

to the Jews of China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Oliver Kozlarek

11. Towards a Practical Humanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Zhang Longxi

12. What Is Human or Human Nature? Different Views in Ancient China 189

Krishan Kumar

13. Empires as Bearers of Global Ideas of Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

G.E.R. Lloyd

14. Humanities in a Globalized World: Vive lUnit, Vive la Diffrence . . 217

List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Contents6
http://www.v-.de/dehttp://www.v-.de/de


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Djelal Kadir

3. Ecce homo: Somewhat Human, Particularly Global,Conveniently Universal, Relatively Unique, ComparativelyIncommensurable

The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the

dominion of the earth the compulsion to large-scale politics.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

In a time of globalization such as ours, the human is more vulnerable than ever,

the human condition more precarious, and our humanity under threat on an

unprecedented scale. The intensity of this vulnerability is directly proportional

to the reach of globalizing processes. In this first decade of the twenty-first

century, to be touched by globalization carries an ominous risk, for many people

and many societies often a fatal peril. Globalization as a human phenomenon

demonstrates, yet again, the historical precedent that the greatest threat to hu-

manity could well be the human. Human history illustrates with a certain

consistency this Darwinian paradox and its symptoms as these manifest

themselves with perennial regularity and, now, with unprecedented vigor. I shall

be claiming here that the only possible mitigation of this paradoxical predica-

ment might be the modulation, conditional emendation, and moderating in-

flection that in grammar correspond to the adverbial construct and in rhetoric to

the adversative proposition, and in downright human terms to the inherent

capacity of the human to thwart its own best-laid plans and absolutist con-

structs. In economic terms, this would be tantamount to a form of hedging; in

politics a margin of safety sought in the mitigation of ideological universals.Hence, the string of adverbs in the title of this essay intended to qualify the

categorical implication of the phenomena, adjectival or nominal, that they

modify. Without such modulation, daily experience demonstrates in the first

decade of the twenty-first century, survival and suicide as human possibilities

become functionally, and paradoxically, synonymous. This now quotidian tactic

of self-destruction as desperate response and as contradictory last resort for

individual and collective survival marks a defining limit of the human condition

in extremis.

Globalization is the simultaneously centrifugal and implosive force that

would banish the mitigating shield of these modulations. Though itself a human


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project, the ultimate target of globalization is what defines the human as human,

what the ancient Greeks called phronimos in logos, which Aristotle called ergon

and which we are given to translate, in mirrored resonance, as the language of

reason and the reason of language. In this sense, globalization views the capacity

for language, especially contestatory, oppositional language, and the critical

potential of reason as impediments that it would rather were muted, or at best

subsumed into globalizations own reasons of homologation and vested inter-

ests. Globalization, in other words, would rather eradicate aporetic qualms,

qualifying conditions, and contingent modifiers. In this regard, the verve and

mtier of globalization have tended toward absolute circumscription, total-

ization, and full spectrum hegemony. In its ultimate form, the global would leave

no edges, no borderlines, no compromising imbrications, no points of entry, and

certainly no exits or possible de-linkage mechanisms. The perfect globe is aperfect form, as precise as it could be lethal in its symmetry. Or so it would be,

were it not for the fact that globalization too is a human phenomenon all too

human and, therefore, somewhat short of perfection, though no less perilous for

the randomness of that fact, and no less treacherous for its performative con-

tradictions.

If logos or reason is what distinguishes the human species from the rest of the

animal kingdom, to characterize the members of humanity as reasonably human

might not be all that unreasonable. If the previous sentence should be a ra-

tionalization, it might well be inevitably so. It is after all, uttered by a human.

Rationalizing humanity might well be the humans way of reflecting on the

human, that is, of exercising the humans defining characteristic. The only

safeguard, risky at best, against falling into the global self-circumscription of

tautology, that is, against imploding into inseparable coincidence with ones

human reflection in the act of reflecting, might be the adverbial part of logos, a

part that is also a distinct human attribute. In other words, the adverbs that

modify, condition, and qualify the defining acts and qualities of the human

could well be the precarious margin of difference between absoluteness thatleaves the human undifferentiable and the relative differential that makes a

modicum of discernable identification somewhat possible. The ancient Greeks,

as far back as Parmenides, referred to this escape clause as the diaphora, which

we have variously translated as the capacity in the human to differentiate itself

from itself, a differentiation that, ironically, makes identity possible. Global-

izations impetus consists in undoing this possibility by subsuming into its

circumscription all the differentials that might escape its englobing symmetry.

And, contrary to the rhetorical ruse, in economic discourse, particularly,

globalization is eminently symmetrical with its own ends, even if asymmetricalin its consequences, as I shall attempt to explain in due course.

Thus, though the adverbs in the title of this intervention somewhat, par-

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ticularly, conveniently, relatively, comparatively interject a dissonance into the

term they modify, a dissonance that perhaps verges onthe paradoxical, this is the

margin of safety against the unqualified totalization that would otherwise leave

the second term in each of these binomials human, global, universal, unique,

incommensurable incomprehensibly absolute, totally globalized, and relent-

lessly globalizing. To seek this margin of safety, a pursuit, incidentally, that in

itself might be reflexively inevitable and therefore far from elective, could well be

humanitys default survival mechanism in an age of globalization, that is, in a

time when unconditional absolutes threaten to englobe the human into un-

qualified and unmitigated totality with no definable attributes, thus, forging a

human without qualities, except for the singular attribute of being global and, by

this logic, otherwise un-specifiable. We glimpse the contours of this dissonance

or paradox at a number of wildly diverse cultural/ historical sites that range froma Prussian village philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant, whose philo-

sophical project culminates in his self-confessed failed attempt to found a sci-

entific anthropology. It ends, in anticipation of our postmodern awakening to a

general theory about the impossibility of theory, by being a treatise on the

impossibility of the enterprise Kant felt obliged to entitle Anthropology from a

Pragmatic Point of View (1798)1 that, by the way, was the subject of Michel

Foucaults 1961 doctoral dissertation. At the other end of the world and a century

later, a Brazilian mulatto novelist named Machado de Assis, son of a manumitted

slave, proposed a philosophy he called Humanitism, a philosophy based in the

second-century b.c. Cynic Greek philosopher Menippus of Gadara, a slave

himself by birth, whose philosophy has come down to us as Menippean Satire.2

Theirs, the Prussian philosophers and the Brazilian novelists, are human top-

ographies whose horizons extend into the twenty-first century. Here, as the

predicament of our New Humanism would indicate, human possibilities become

sharply prominent in their urgent encounter with a particularly relentless

process of subsumption by an empirical world and its paradoxical intractability

that today we see starkly in what we call globalization, which is yet another modeof being rather somewhat human, inevitably.

Before proceeding further, I would like to share with you what I understand by

the term globalization, even though you might well gather an implicit defi-

nition from my remarks already. Philosophically, any attempt at defining

globalization implies an act of logical defiance. If globalization is globalization,

anyone engaged in attempting a definition is an integral part of what is being

1 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, transl. Victor Lye Dowdell

(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Press, 1996).2 Joachim Maria Machado de Assis, CXVII Humanitism, The Posthumous Memoirs of BrsCubas (1881), transl. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 161 64 et

passim.

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defined and, thus, symptomatic of it, not unlike the philosopher Kant in his

anthropological project, or Machado de Assis Voltaireian character Quincas

Borba in his self-ironic philosophy of Humanitism. Globalization, as the term

avers, is an all-encompassing phenomenon whose processes of absorption and

voracity for incorporation preclude any external discursive position or per-

ceptual vantage point from which it can be viewed and diagnosed. To define, or

even describe the phenomenon, then, is to engage in a task from the inside of

what one is attempting to characterize. Thus, the possibility that any such at-

tempt might be integral to and complicit with globalizations processes cannot

be altogether discounted. The author of the essay you are reading at the moment

is addressing you in his third language, English. As an American of European

provenance, he is already marked as a symptom and, inexorably, an exemplary

instance of the phenomenon of globalization. The unforeseeable diversity ofyour own origins, locus of reading, and academic background, and linguistic

repertoire, dear reader, only exacerbates this inevitability. How, then, do we

speak of what we embody and exemplify as writer and reader without falling into

logical tautology or rhetorical pleonasm? In this sense, the question of the

human condition in an age of globalization has its inexorable demonstration in

us ecce homo!, to echo the words of Pontius Pilate and of his epigonic acolyte

Friedrich Nietzsche.

More than a decade ago, in his Preface to a volume of essays based on a Duke

University conference he co-edited with Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Glob-

alization, Fredric Jameson hedged on venturing a definition of globalization,

noting that Globalization falls outside the established academic disciplines

[]. There is thus something daring and speculative, unprotected, in the ap-

proach of scholars and theorists to this unclassifiable topic, which is the in-

tellectual property of no specific field, yet which seems to concern politics and

economics in immediate ways, but just as immediately culture and sociology, not

to speak of information and the media, or ecology, or consumerism and daily

life. [] Nietzsche famously warned about the inevitable recursiveness of def-initions. In much the same way, one often has the feeling that the call for a

definition of globalization, preliminary to any discussion of the thing itself,

betrays a certain bad faith.3 The inevitable recursiveness of definitions, to

join Jameson in recalling Nietzsche, does not have an expiration date. Rather,

that inevitable recursiveness of definitions is fated to recur periodically in

perpetuity with each defining transvaluation. And now, after more than tenyears

of preliminary discussion, by Jamesons calendar, it seems, we might dare to

ask, are we there yet? I believe we are, and by the beginning of this second decade

3 Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1998), xi.

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in the twenty-first century globalization has revealed itself to be as far-reaching

as Jameson noted in the case of academic disciplines, and just as far-reaching in

its consequences in the life world of the planet and its human inhabitants.

Jameson was correct in observing that globalization falls outside the es-

tablished academic disciplines, and his monitory advertence on the risks and

vulnerability implicit for those who dare approach the topic points to the con-

comitant question he did not pose, namely, if globalization falls outside the

established academic disciplines, do, or could, the academic disciplines exist

outside globalization? At the risk of shading into a petitio principii, or begging

the question, I posit the issue because our academic enthusiasm often gives the

impression that we feel we are immune from the entailments of the subject we

investigate. Thus, in the human sciences, especially, we have a penchant for

overlooking the fact that our sciences are firstly human, that our social sciencesare foremost social, that our political sciences are irremediably political, our

economic sciences hopelessly economical, and our natural sciences inexorably

un-natural, all of which foregrounds the question of what we understand, here,

today, as I write and you red this, by social, political, and natural. Glob-

alization, as all-subsuming process, is less than forgiving on this score. I suspect

this is what Jamesons admonition on the unprotected nature of our daring is

pointing to as the risk of countenancing the topic. Thus, to the degree that our

academic disciplines, in the human and natural sciences, are inexorably inside

globalization, globalization is inescapable. In fact, it could well be the defining

horizon for our disciplines, research, pragmatic applications, pedagogy, and

institutional discourses. Integral to globalization are the capital-intensive nature

of our scientific practices and their outsourced sponsorship, the corporatization

of our universities, and the privatization of our public institutions. As a con-

sequence, globalization and its processes are at once visibly and imperceptibly

woven into our professional and personal life worlds, into our sciences and

humanities and into our humanity. I believe, then, that globalization as planetary

phenomenon has a sufficient track record by now to justify the necessary re-cursiveness that Nietzsche, per Jameson, saw as the inevitable requisite of def-

initions. What, then, does this record consist in and what definitional yield

might it offer, even from a defining position inside itself ?

I believe one of the principal, if not the principal, defining characteristics

(and I am acutely aware here of the inevitable epistemic slippage in offering not a

global or overarching definition but a sketch through the enumeration of

characteristics) of globalization is the most occluded and the least examined

across the disciplinary discourses, namely, that globalization is not a cause but a

consequence; it is an effect, not a source, a rationalization, not a reason. Byconfounding this differentiation, globalization obfuscates analytical and ac-

tionable imputability, in other words, it screens out and hides responsibility for

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the processes and results created by the actant subjects of globalization and its

subsequent outcomes. Thus, what is most often investigated and diagnosed are

not the causal movers or etiology of globalization but the symptoms of the

process. Symptomatology is a serviceable analytical and descriptive under-

taking. However, it does not divulge, examine, or explain the cause or causal

agency of those symptoms, and it certainly does not ameliorate the effects. It

only furthers the occlusion and obfuscation of their origin. Once a global for-

mation is achieved, all traces of its constitutive steps are erased, all seams sealed,

the surface smoothed and sanitized. Globalization, then, is made to seem in-

evitable, its entelechy necessary, its constructedness natural, its reasons in-

arguably sufficient. Globalizations organs thus organize themselves into a

systematicity that immunizes itself against analytical parsing, leaving only un-

traceable residual effects susceptible to inquiry, its capital actions hidden behindthe derivative results. The academic disciplines inadvertently, but inexorably,

become complicit in this process. Inasmuch as our diagnostic efforts deposit yet

another layer on the sedimentations that cover over cause and responsibility, our

investigative endeavors in the natural and human sciences turn into in-

strumental accessories, if not outright unwitting accomplices of the process

under investigation. Our own efforts are not exempted from this predicament.

And this capacity of globalization to instrumentalize the human could well be yet

another of its most salient characteristics. The resultant human condition as

instrumentality, then, would be a defining consequence of globalization as well

as an inevitable attribute that defines the human in the current planetary reign of

globalization.

Ultimately, our own humanity might be the only humanity we could glimpse,

even with the skewed perception implicit in the distorting optics of self-re-

flection. An even greater risk is to speak of the human condition in general, no

matter our wakefulness to the perils of essentialism and reification in the task of

representing the humanity of others. Part of the way our own humanity as

engaged academics and investigators in our respective disciplines is implicatedin globalizations systemic organization had already been described by Michel

Foucault as a transition from a regime of disciplines to a regime of control.4 The

pressure on the disciplines to wade into the confluent jurisdictions of inter-

disciplinarity may well have been driven by a simultaneous dual impetus for

disciplining knowledges and knowing subjects within strictures of their in-

dividualized fields, even as these were being pushed into integrative nodes where

their sites of convergence could be more efficiently mediated, more econom-

ically administered, and more effectively surveilled and controlled. In our age of

4 See Michel Foucault, The Means of Correct Training. (From Discipline and Punish), in PaulRabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 188 205.

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globalization, integration and convergence have certainly been accorded near

fetishistic status by the discourse of institutional hierarchies, whether academic,

governmental, scientific, economic, or political. In this sense, this dual impetus

that has sought to align differential epistemologies of discrete disciplines, even

as it sought to discipline epistemic modes into global nodes of convergence, has

bound the knowledge of globalization to the globalization of knowledge. The

most advanced communication technologies have been put at the service of this

transaction, to the point that actual human presence and physical human en-

counter, in this age of teleconferencing might seem to some a rather quaint

vestige of another era.

Advanced communication technologies serve as more than epistemic in-

struments, of course, whether for our intellectual endeavors and academic

disciplines, or for extending the reach of globalizing forces to hitherto in-accessible target points, whether in the minutiae of human physiology and its

genetic structures, or the farthest corners of the planet. Most importantly for

planetary life worlds, communications and informatics are an integral part of

scientific deployments in the service of human sustainability and, just as crit-

ically and more ominously, for purposes of war and destruction on a global scale.

In the age of the microchip, some of the farthest-reaching processes of global-

ization in geographic distance and temporal durability are in inverse ratio to the

magnitude of technologies that make such globalizing possible. There is, in

other words, a diametrical disproportion between the mega-transformations

and the scale of the nano-technologies that make those transformations possi-

ble. In the process, no human life or human environment, collective or in-

dividual, is beyond the reach of globalizations current processes and perpetual

consequences for posterity, especially when one considers the effects of bio-

technological warfare and the nuclear residues in what is euphemistically called

spent uranium bombing and industrial nuclear reactor meltdown.

In the semiotic revolution, no less than in the shifting epistemologies that

these technologies imply, human agency has re-discovered the object world ofscience, engineering, and technology once again as a universe in its atomic,

genetic, and cosmic interconnection, a universe whose diverse elements can be

synaptically integrated into nodes of convergence. This is most symptomati-

cally, and most menacingly, exemplified in the transition from analytical to

synthetic biology and the privatization of life forms and their autonomous self-

mutating potential beyond controlled environments and, as we are currently

witnessing, in remote sites of the globe targeted for military purposes, or for

private profit in the case of corporate science such as bio-engineering and ge-

netic modification.5 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ominous

5 ETC Group, Extreme Genetic Engineering: An Introduction to Synthetic Biology (January

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dangers of these developments for human ecology and other life forms loom as

never before in human history. This portentous state of human affairs, in which

the most foreboding threat reaches the human condition on a microscopic and a

global scale never before experienced in human history has its explanation, at

least in part, in the mutated sense of what is to be understood by universe and

the universal at this historical moment of the twenty-first century. In the

convergence of science and technology with the socio-economic theory postu-

lated by such social thinkers as Immanuel Wallerstein as early as 1974, the year of

his seminal publication entitled Modern World System,6 which he followed up a

decade later with The Politics of the World Economy,7 we find a resonant se-

mantics that etymologically opens up the term universe to its literal singu-

larity. If in Wallerstein and socio-economic theorists this turn meant the con-

vergence of a multi-world system (i. e., first, second, third worlds) into one, therecent techno-scientific developments rediscover the universe as such in their

inexorable passage from the diffuse analytic to the suffused synthetic and from

the complex poly-system to the reductive nano-techne. The institutional val-

orization of these developments and their saturation of our life worlds are amply

demonstrable: The 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Albert Fert, a professor

at the University of Paris-Sud, and Peter Grnberg, of the German Research

Center in Jlich , who, in 1988, independently discovered giant magneto-

resistance and its potential applications to the field of nanotechnologies. The

2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine was conferred for work that was made possible by

these nano-technologies in genetic engineering, specifically in deactivating

particular genes in the bio-physiology of mice. The political implications for the

human condition of these advances in areas such as eugenics are momentous, as

much in their promise as in their portentous political possibilities. Some of those

possibilities are already in play as applications in the healing arts of medicine.

Alas, they are also in play in their more ominous deployment as lethal tech-

nologies of war, operating as remote-controlled, or as unmanned self-pro-

gramming weapons systems for which the human being is nothing more than anopportune or high-yield target in a video game. These bio-informatic tech-

nologies, in effect, are the scientific analogues, or the pragmatic concomitants of

philosophical and theoretical prolegomena adumbrated, often with uncanny

prescience, by thinkers in the human sciences such as Wallerstein. In the last

decade of the twentieth century, Frederick Buell summarizes those integrative

16, 2007) at http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?id=602. See also Ste-phen Leahy, Synthetic Biology: Group Seeks Ban on Living Machines, Inter Press Service

(Sunday, January 21, 2007) at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/012101.htm.6 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).7 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1984).

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theorizations in a book whose title resonates with Wallersteins seminal works.

Buells book is entitled National Culture and the New Global System, and its

fourth chapter is particularly revealing in its synoptic distillation of the eco-

nomic and socio-political thinking of the previous two decades. That chapter is

suggestively entitled From Three Worlds to One: Two Decades of Rapid

Globalization.8

The cultural diagnostics of Buells book through the integrative impetus of a

mono-world system, a uni-verse, literally, that Wallerstiens world-system

theory implies is a useful bridge among the various disciplines in the human

sciences. In view of the scientific realities and the pragmatics of Realpolitik that

dominated the first decade of the twenty-first century and continue to be

dominant still, some of those prognoses seem quite prescient. The world-system

concept, as an early step away from the three-ordinal-worlds view still carried aternary scaffolding that Wallerstein had revised into a core, a semi-periphery,

and a periphery. While the schematics of this structural trinity moves away from

the developmentalist teleology of the three-worlds view, it is still hierarchical in

ways that allows for conceptual distortions in the realm of cultural and, espe-

cially, literary theory, most notably in critical assessments with global ambition

such as Pascale Casanovas La rpublique mondiale des lettres.9 Such distortions

lend themselves to unwitting performative contradictions in the critical dis-

course itself. Thus, Casanova, whose use of Wallerstein and world-system theory

often borders on the literal, would warn against localized hegemonic impulses of

the monopolists of universality [who] command others to submit to their

law,10 even while projecting such hegemonic hierarchies from her own dis-

course as, for example, in her mapping of the world system of letters with a

Franco-centrism that converts Paris into the pivotal metropolis of world liter-

ature and literary culture. Thus, in assessing the role of supranational in-

stitutions like the Nobel Prize in Stockholm and their emancipatory role in the

autonomization of cultural and literary production from local regulative de-

terminacies, Casanova affirms: This new degree of autonomy came about as aresult of the structural complementarity obtaining between the Nobel Prize and

the power of consecration enjoyed by Paris. In effect, the Academy affirmed (or

reaffirmed) the verdicts of the capital of literature and, as it were, grounded them

in law: by making these decisions official, the Swedish Academy with few

exceptions at least through the 1960s endorsed, ratified, and made public the

8 Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1994).

9 Pascale Casanova, La rpublique mondiale des lettres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999); TheWorld Republic of Letters, transl. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 2004).

10 Casanova, The World Republic, 154.

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judgments of Paris.11 Whatever grain of truth there might be to this observation

becomes tainted by the fact that the author is French and Parisian and, thus,

speaking from and within a highly local discursive formation that reduces the

world system to the narrow prism of her particular site of assessment and

enunciation. While this is an inherent danger in the literal transference of world-

system theory from one human science to another, it is also symptomatic of the

potential that Wallerstein himself anticipated for world-system theory to en-

gender a hegemonic Archimedean point from which to leverage a dominant

discourse of global supremacy. It would be salutary to recall Wallersteins

epistemological caveat in this regard: Anthropology, economics, political sci-

ence, sociology and history are divisions of the discipline anchored in a

certain liberal conception of the state and its relation to functional and geo-

graphical sectors of the social order. They make a certain limited sense if thefocus of ones study is organizations. They make none at all if the focus is the

social system. I am not calling for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of

social systems, but for a[n] undisciplinary approach.12

The result of ignoring Wallersteins caveat in training the focus of the dis-

ciplines on the social system, rather than on organizations is readily ap-

parent in the perils of self-contradiction illustrated by Pascal Casanova in the

case of a literary system she calls the republic of world letters. But Wallersteins

own monitory perspicacity bifurcates as well. His reticence toward a multi-

disciplinary approach is very much on point, an insight that has since been

vindicated by the institutional pragmatics and managerial practices of uni-

versities. We have come to learn from recent institutional practices, as I have

already suggested in these remarks, that the administrative hectoring of inter-

disciplinarity is not for the furtherance of an epistemic position or a pedagogical

and investigative instrument but a managerial strategy, really, more a tactic than

a strategy, given the shortsightedness of management decisions. Through what

historical experience has taught us, in other words, Wallersteins hesitations

about interdisciplinarity have been vindicated. Interdisciplinary constellationhas, more often than not, proved to be little more than a device of a form of

institutional globalization for the greater efficacy of command and control over

disparate and plural discursive formations. What remains questionable is

whether the alternative Wallerstein proposes, what he calls a[n] undisciplinary

approach, has any epistemic and operational viability. There is something

uncharacteristically Romantic in the presumption implicit here that any ap-

proach is a spontaneous act or a random movement that is free of any governing

disciplinarity and its preconditioning determinacies. Some, in fact, might well

11 Ibid., 153.12 Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 11.

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read the formulation a[n] undisciplinary approach as a catachrestic construct

or as an oxymoron. Within the systematicity of world systems, theoretical and

otherwise, such a possibility, if at all plausible, would constitute a performative

contradiction.

The dynamics of globalization, astutely adumbrated by Wallerstein, in fact,

have since elevated such contradictions to a level of transformative processes in

which certain key precepts in the logic of world systems have become spec-

tralized, that is, morphed into reversed mirror formations. For example, in the

convergence of neo-imperial Realpolitik with globalizing economic and bio-

political forces in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we witness an

egregious reversal in what is one of the key principles of Wallersteins singular

world system, what I have referred to as uni-verse, namely, the relationship of

the local to the global, or, in Wallersteins terms, of the national to the in-ternational. Wallerstein posited in 1984: National homogeneity within inter-

national heterogeneity is the formula of a world economy.13 Today, at this

advanced stage of globalization, what Wallerstein referred to as a world econ-

omy, which obviously meant more than economic factors, operates on the

reversed principle, namely, on the principle of an international homogeneity

that derives its efficacy from the conflictive heterogeneity of national and local

dis-functionality. Under the inordinate pressures of neo-liberal economics,

predatory capital, ideological onslaught, and political machinations, the con-

tradictory and contending elements that had come into conjunction to form

local and national homogeneity are, once again, sundered, fragmented, their

conflicts exacerbated. This advanced phase of globalization, in fact, derives its

realization from the consequences the systemic striations, uneven distributions,

differential returns, and asymmetrical repercussions perpetrated on local and

national formations.

The human condition at the most egregious target points of these globalizing

processes endures internecine strife, civil war, ethnic and religious conflict, and

suicidal depredations of human ecology, all of which reinforce the short-termsustainability of a global homogeneity. Where these self-homogenizing global

processes have their origination, there prevails a cloak of immunity from any

responsibility for the consequences of those globalizing processes. The most

frequent target points of this globalization are now referred to as the global

south, though cardinal points may be no more viable as differentiating de-

scriptors today than ordinal worlds have been since the implosion of the three

worlds into one at the end of the last century and the infiltration of the periphery

into the core. The point could be made that the core-semiperiphery-periphery

triad of Wallerstein has now become moot, since the periphery could just as well

13 Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy, 353.

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be in metropolitan London, Los Angeles, Paris, Baghdad, Johannesburg, Lima,

or Shanghai. The core remains central, though no less mobile and portable, in

roaming corporate headquarters and in the political capitals of client states that

serve as franchise holders and comprador agents of global interests. In a global

era of imperial Realpolitik such as the present one, striated globalization es-

sentially means that globalizing processes occur ubiquitously, relentlessly, and

inexorably, with their strata in perfectly inverse symmetry that is, with the prime

movers and beneficiaries of globalization diametrically situated contrapuntally

to the status of the targets of globalizing processes. This is what I meant when I

refer to globalization as perfectly symmetrical, a process that reflexively oc-

cludes its own instrumental symmetry behind the asymmetrical, and at times

chaotic, though ever-purposeful, consequences of its strategic calculus. The

differential quotients between the counterpoised worlds of globalization con-tinue to grow exponentially, and they do so with progressively corrosive effects

on the human and on the humanity not only of the targets of globalization, but

also of those that benefit most from that globalizations uneven distributions.

Experience seems to indicate that if there should be a universal human con-

sequence to todays globalizationthat is foremost propelled by predatory capital,

it is likely to consist in the dilatory effects on the humanity of all members of the

species. Nonetheless, as always, such universality seems to be mitigated by lo-

calized modes of resistance, as well as by the reflexive survival response and

contrariety of the human. These reactions inject relative modulations into

would-be absolutes and totalizing systems, often at terrible cost to life and its

wellbeing. Even at a time when imperial force and hegemonic coercion collude

with ideological absolutisms, a time when state formations endowed with le-

gitimate violence are transformed into capital franchises and instruments of

enforcement, something incorrigibly indomitable in the humanvitiates the most

systematic attempts to globalize humanity. This human incorrigibility may, in

fact, be humanitys only hope.

Djelal Kadir66

the human in globality

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