Global Discipline and Dissent in the Longue Durée

Abstract

Inquiries into global discipline and dissent are apt to carry thinking from the most situated and specific instances of power and counter-power to broad structural orders, in a manner that is remarkably independent of political mediation and thus respectful of the ways in which actually existing human beings negotiate lives sutured at the intersection of the local and the global. This article is part of a broader theoretical project that is informed by historical research on a wide variety of movements of resistance against world ordering—from slave revolts at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to coolies uprisings in the twentieth, to gas and water wars at the beginning of the twenty-first. In it, I come to distinguish between two modes of relation to the world economy. In creative dislocation, situated life gets resolved before being carried off, neat and bereft of possibilities, into the global. In the process, a putative subject gets made that carries a reified sense of itself. In the dialectics of presence, the unresolved lot of situated life gets taken whole to the world economy. Wars of position give way to wars of movement. Dialectically, positions come to be charged with a sense of context and possibilities. World-historical subjects sometimes make themselves for a while, from conditions that were not of their choosing.

Las investigaciones dentro de la disciplina y disidencia globales están aptas para acarrear el pensamiento desde los casos más específicos y situacionales de poder y contrapoder a las órdenes estructurales más amplias, de una forma que resulta notablemente independiente de mediación política y por tanto, respetuosa en las manera como los seres humanos existentes negocian sus vidas en la intersección de lo local y lo global. Este artículo es parte de un proyecto teórico más amplio, cuya información se tomó de la investigación histórica, sobre una amplia variedad de movimientos de resistencia contra el ordenamiento mundial—desde las revueltas de esclavos al inicio del siglo diecinueve, a los levantamientos de los culíes en el siglo veinte, a las guerras de petróleo y agua al inicio del siglo veintiuno. En este artículo, llego a distinguir entre dos modos de relación a la economía mundial. Dentro del desplazamiento creativo, la vida situacional logra resolverse antes de destruirse, simple y despojada de posibilidades, dentro de lo global. En el proceso, se produce un supuesto tema que lleva un sentido concreto de sí mismo. En la dialéctica de la presencia, la parte sin resolver de la vida situacional, se toma enteramente por la economía mundial. Las guerras de posición abren el paso a las guerras de movimiento. Dialécticamente, las posiciones vienen cargadas con un sentido de contexto y posibilidades. A veces, los temas históricos mundiales se hacen a sí mismos por un tiempo, de condiciones que no fueron de su elección.

对全球规训和异议的研究，倾向于从最情境化、最具体的权力和反权力的实例到广泛的结构性秩序角度进行思考，以一种完全独立于政治调解的方式，对当今人们在本土和全球交界处进行生存谈判的方式表示尊重。本文是对各种反抗世界秩序的运动——从19世纪初的奴隶起义到20世纪的劳工起义到21世纪初的油气、水资源战争——进行历史研究的更大理论工程的一部分。在文中，我对世界经济关系的两种模式进行了区分。在创造性的变位中，固有的生活在被完全和毫无选择地带入世界经济之前消解了。在这一过程中，假定的行为主体产生了并带有具体的自我意识。在生存辩证法中，固有的生活未消解的部分就被完全带入世界经济中。地位战争让位于运动战争。辩证地说，地位承担着脉络感和多种可能性。世界历史的主体有时是在并非自我选择的条件下塑造自己的。

Keywords:

• globalization
• dissent
• global discipline
• resistance

Acknowledgements

The ideas presented here were first discussed at the ‘Disciplining Dissent’ workshop, University of Bristol, September 2009. I wish to thank Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker for their invitation as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Global Insecurities Center and the Department of Politics for their hospitality. A book-length presentation of the argument in favour of a plebeian conception of global history, entitled A History of World Order and Resistance: The Making and Unmaking of Global Subjects, is forthcoming.

Notes

Walter Benjamin's eight theses on the philosophy of history are cited here from his Illuminations (Benjamin, 1973, p. 257).

On evental sites (sites événementiels), see Badiou (2007, 2009).

The term longue durée is a reference to the Annales school of history in general and to Fernand Braudel in particular. Key here is a concern for the articulation between practices, mentalities, and habitus within the relatively coherent and enduring ensembles of économies-monde. Courte durée history, by contrast, is the history of events.

This should be recognized as a variation on arguments about structural violence in the world economy presented in the 1960s and 1970s by dependency and world-system theories. See, for instance, Mathias and Salama (1983).

The on-line Marxist encyclopaedia defines ‘practico-inert’ as ‘a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) […] defined as a field of activity, which despite being the outcome of a successful struggle by some group, has ceased to be responsive to that group's needs. Bureaucracy is the classic example of a “practico-inert.” The “practico-inert” is the same as “objectification,” but Sartre has a particularly negative view of the prospects for social struggle, perhaps reflective of his experience as a “fellow-traveller” of the French Communist Party. The “practico-inert” responds to the subject's continued struggle by accommodation, resisting the action of the Subject to which it owes its existence. Thus, whereas the activity of the group is intelligible as dialectic, Sartre describes the movement of the natural world and the “practico-inert” as an “anti-dialectic.”’

Altermondialisme is untranslatable in English, except awkwardly as ‘alternative-globalization movement’. The term began to enter common usage in English after the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (2001), in acknowledgement of the role played by ATTAC-France and the Monde Diplomatique in giving political shape to the ‘movement of movements’. It has since gained broad currency, replacing ‘new left internationalism’ (in fashion at the beginning of the 1980s), ‘anti-globalization movement’ (in fashion immediately after WTO protests in Seattle, and now used sparingly, almost always pejoratively). On the rise of altermondialisme, see Collectif (2003), Groupe d'étude et de recherche sur les mondialisations (GERM) (2002), Madeley (2003) and Mertes (2004).

The term stimmung—otherwise confined to rhythms and harmonies—is borrowed here from the usage defined by Tiqqun, a post-situationnist avant-garde group. Most remarkably in La Théorie du Bloom, Tiqqun (2000) designates by this term the essential tonalities of the world, in accordance to which a Bloom-like subject makes itself (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/index.htm).

The citation is from John Womak's (1970) introduction.