PERF 2001: CULTURAL LITERACY
OVERVIEW OF TOPICS BY WEEK:
Week 1: Historicising the Present- Culture, Literacy and Innovation in the Americas
The Caribbean as Technology?
Innovation in the Americas- Most of the products that feed the world today (corn, potatoes,
refined sugar, etc.) were developed in the Americas.
Week 2: Problematique 1- Civilization and Water
Geophysical and Historiographical phenomena: understanding problematiques as the major
questions that societies are trying to answer.
Week 3-4: Problematique 1- Ancient History? Technologies, Theologies and Trade Routes
Re-centering Asia and Africa in World History
Week 5-6: Problematique 2- The Occidental Shift: Environmental Conquest, Enslavement and
the Triangular Trade
India and the Slave Voyage; The conquest of China and India; Agricultural Movements
Week 7: Problematique 2- The Era of the Plantation as economic technology, ‘emancipation’
and the birth of the modern city/multinational.
The birth of Fashion; Industrial Revolution; The invention of Race and The Birth of the Nation
Week 8-9: Problematique 2- The Global National Shift- World War and Nuclear Global Society
The Great Migration; The birth of mass consumptive society/ branding/ mass
communication/music- film as industry;
Week 10: Problematique 3- Technology and Nationalization of History- Resistance and Reform
in Diasporas and Colonized Territories
Eugenics and Development-The Olympics; Diaspora, States and Markets in a Three-Tiered
World; Non-violent resistance and media; The ‘Age of Migration’ vs ‘The Grey Dawn’;
Resistance and appropriation of African-American culture in the Americas.
Week 11: - Technology and New Forms of Globalization-1927, Green Revolution and
subsequent information revolutions of the 20th century
Problematique 3: Communications and Energy; Education- The School and Prison as
Technology; Literacy and Class; Fragrances, Alcohol and Consumerism; Drugs and Global
Production Networks; United Nations and the Gender/Human Rights Revolutions
Week 12: The 21st century- The Age of Consequences- The violent return of Problematique 1Environmental degradation, state collapse/environmental refugees and migration; collapse of
financial systems; growing urbanism- can science and technology respond?
Green technology/consumerism; Politicizing climate change; Projections of future past
(Foresight and Global Scenarios- Vision 2020, Future Cities etc.)
CLASS 1:
My Genealogy
Your first structured assignment will be based on the concept of genealogy (of ideas).
In order to be culturally literate, it is central to be able to understand the premises or
foundations that we as people and societies use to build our ideas, beliefs and attitudes.
Genealogy in this case is the family history of an idea or theoretical argument. Genealogy
differs from and adds to the study of history, because it focuses on the history of the present,
instead of presenting human development as a sequence of events that follow logically from
each other.
The intellectual ideas I will present in class are based in part by some of these authors, some of
whom have mentored me personally:
Susan Strange: Structures of Power; International Political Economy
Nicolas Faraclas: Language and Power; Creole Language as Resistance
Anibal Quijano/Agustin Lao/Ramon Grosfoguel: Coloniality of Power
Oliver C. Cox/ Edward Said/Brock: Fourth World Studies
Sidney Mintz/New World Group: Slavery, Plantation and Global Value Chains
Hedley Bull/ Patömaki: Critical Realism
Andre Gunder-Frank/Emmanuel Wallerstein/Herb Addo: World System and World Systems
Theory
Further Reading:
http://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/WorldSystem.pdf
My central argument is that cultures emerge out of humanity’s need to address dynamic
social and environmental questions. I call these questions or complex issues problematiques.
THE THREE PROBLEMATIQUES OF GLOBAL CIVILISATION
The first problematique, Problematique 1, which I term here the modern or colonial
problematique, is centred around the attempt to manage or explain the operation of the global
political economy following the decline of the Asian mid-millennium world system and the
appropriation of massive wealth from the Americas by European polities. This shift is amply
described by Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) and alluded to by Herb Addo (1985, 1988) in his work on
development and multiple modernities.
The development of this Atlantic-centred world system is a complex interplay of movementsthose of goods and resources, financial capital and commercial enterprise, and, most
importantly, social groups, households, individuals and their cultures. I argue that the
‘management’ issue has influenced ideas of human nature, knowledge and culture up to the
present day.
The second problematique, Problematique 2, termed here as the development or postcolonial
problematique, emerges with two waves of nationalist movements in colonies developed in the
modern or colonial era. The problematique of these states is basically the question of state
development and participation in the global Atlantic-based economy in the context of preexisting European empires, states and multinational business and civil society interests. The
pursuit of this nationalist development is articulated in various ways based largely on the
context of colonisation, independence and/or internal colonisation.
I would argue that one essential part of the response to these two problematiques is the
discourse of modern identity, termed here as RAGE (Race/class, Age, Gender, and
Ethnicity/nationality).
HOW RAGE WORKS
Modern identity discourses, termed here as RAGE (Race/class, Age, Gender/Sexuality, and
Ethnicity) are contingent with modern and post-modern regimes of production[1], and are also
the building blocks of identity and are therefore must be included as significant factors in the
development of the global economy.
The term is one of the few concepts capable of demonstrating the continuity and
interpenetration of the modern and postmodern in the historical overlap of transnational
capital movements, technological change, political formulations and reformulations, and
identity discourses.
RAGE is the modern period’s operating system. It is based on the social technology of
enclosure.
Enclosure is a technology that reduces and redistributes access to resources or freedoms. In
some cases, it expands access to these resources or freedoms. However, those whose access is
expanded inherit enclosure’s underlying logic of rational fear of future, sudden deprivation or
scarcity.
One is constantly aware that the enclosure system severely limits access to those who find
themselves on the other side of the walls, so those within the enclosure can never be fully
satisfied with their own needs/appetites. Instead, they operate on the (rational) basis of future
scarcity and must constantly acquire greater levels of access to stave off the potential for zero
access represented by the excluded among them.
1)
Enclosed action to intellectual property rights (separation of creative work from creators)
2)
Identity-Financial System (enclosed access to services and goods mediated by currency
exchange system that renders one less productive simply by changing location-system tied to
centralized control of system of identification/ID)
3)
(W)age-Basic Needs System (access to basic needs of life mediated by wage system which
is itself tied to the life course i.e. working age/retirement age/pre-working age)
4)
Enclosed land access, including state-based bordering systems
5)
Enclosed access to sustainable energy
6)
Enclosed access to information through use of elite/exclusionary literary-linguistic forms,
including formal education
7)
These enclosures contribute to a form of Globalization that favours centralization: the
concentration of control over social, legal, financial, economic, technological, political and
aesthetic forms.
As the global/cosmic environment tends towards a balance of diversity and efficiency, these
enclosures can only be maintained through increased centralization. One major form of
increased centralization is the creation of conditions for mass consumption which are strikingly
similar to the conditions for mass militarization, which together have structured the
'Globalization' we experience presently.
The (re)productive capacity of the woman is an area of massive threat for the enclosure system
as it represents clear proof of the underlying logic of the cosmic environment and is not easily
alienable. The body and mind of the female is therefore an important battleground for the
maintenance of a dependent relationship based on concepts of scarcity and enclosure. In fact,
the enclosure system even tries to replicate the necessary relationship between mother and
baby/child through an unhealthy system of enforced dependence which claims the same logic.
This, in my view, is patriarchy.
The sustaining/centralizing channels/media are formal education, incl. mass religion; mass
media; law and trade. All forms of centralization (e.g. the idea of race as
social/aesthetic/economic centralization) must be constantly dramatized/performed/broadcast
in order to suggest their normalcy. This must be done because empirical studies have and will
show that each of these enclosures reduces growth, wastes talent, time and other resources,
increases environmental and social costs, and reduces sustainable development prospects [3].
The 21st Century is the period in which we are beginning to clearly see the limits of enclosure
and the inefficiency of RAGE. Changes in these forms can only be achieved through conscious
reformulation of the content or logic of these media channels with a view to addressing
centralization in its entirety. Thus an image of access to sustainable energy done through the
use of exclusionary linguistic forms will only reproduce a new type of centralization, and
possibly strengthen the general phenomenon, rather than achieve decentralization
itself. However, an order of precedence can be followed in gradually scaling down the
experience of scarcity and thus promoting withdrawal from enclosure as a system of
thought/action.
My approach to Critical realism allows for the existence of a third problematique,
Problematique 3, which I term the endemic or 5000-year problematique of human society,
which mirrored by André Gunder Frank’s World System approach: the organisation of human
society in localised hierarchies in a global context of anarchy. In other words, how do you
maintain a structured society in a situation of unregulated competition with other structured
societies?
This Problematique is central to many ancient philosophical and religious traditions, which we
will discuss in Weeks 2-4. European imperialism and the very concept of the nation-state, and
their massive impact on culture and cultural production, are recent attempts at addressing this
endemic Problematique.
The endemic Problematique is made up of a cyclical of issues that in many ways has yet to be
managed or addressed properly all at once. The danger is that when one issue is not addressed
it usually adversely affects all the other elements of the Problematique.
I am interested in your ideas on how to define these issues, especially the first four:
1) Environment
2) Peace
3) Individual Privilege/Collective Responsibilities
4) Governance
5) Development: In a context of good governance, environmental stability, one can realise
development (the expansion of capabilities and options for a larger number of persons and
social groups) in its various forms.
6) Reflection: Out of developed society emerges the ability to incorporate the arts, sciences (in
various forms) and other cultural forms for the improvement and discovery of new means of
combining resources and ideas.
7) Reproduction: A reflective society is able to successfully reproduce itself in a context of
dynamic global change. This reproduction includes civilizational components such as family,
government, language, architecture, religion, and other aspects of social ontology.
8) Environment: All this ultimately leads back to the environment. As humans change their
perceptions and actions, they affect their surroundings. This process in turn has implications for
the continued stability of the environment.
References:
[1] Oliver C. Cox’s discussion of race in Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics as an
economic phenomenon is well worthy of note here. Cox views racial prejudice as a historical
phenomenon, “an attitudinal instrument of modern human, economic exploitation…” and
notes the emergence of race from the process of the “commercialization of human labor in the
West Indies, the East Indies, and in America….” (Cox, 1970: 330).
[2] The term “Diaspora” is used to refer to specific diasporic groups, whereas the term
‘diaspora’ is used to refer to the process of dispersal and identity discourse that produces
diasporic identity.
[3] Examples of these studies include:
Richard
Wilkinson
and
Kate
Pickett.
2009.
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level
The
Spirit
Level.
Joe R. Faegin and Karyn D. McKinney. 2005. The Many Costs of Racism. Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Hamilton, Bob and John Whalley. 1984. Efficiency and Distributional Implications of Global
Restrictions on Labour Mobility. Journal of Developmental Economics Vol 14, 61-75.