Global Discipline and Dissent in theLongue 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 orderingfrom 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.

Ethnography, Commitment, and Critique: Departing from Activist Scholarship

“…As Drainville () argues, transnational social forces have often defined themselves in relation to abstract proxies that substitute actually existing subjects bound up in the realities of place and context. Whether by reference to the “global civil society” hailed by governance institutions or the “We‐multitude” supposedly incarnated by the World Social Forum, the definition of struggles by reference to abstract global subjects is to open them to incorporation into order, through problem‐solving logics that serve to consolidate “a false sense of global purpose and unity” (Drainville :416; see also ). So too can this feed into the neutralization of struggles that cannot be read as counterparts of a liberal civil society in which “persons meet to arbitrate … pre‐existing interests which have been ‘self‐authored’ in the private sphere” (Hopgood :1).…”

“…Commitment to the struggles of others also requires us to take seriously the relations to truth that they establish, even if we also step back to critique those codifying practices. Engagement within struggles on the ground obliges us to consider situated and contingent entanglements between power and counter‐power with an eye to the “big picture” in ways that are, as Drainville (:411) puts it, “respectful of the ways in which actually existing human beings negotiate lives sutured at the intersection of the local and the global.” In translation between the praxis of struggle and the lexicon of critique, we cannot avoid betrayal. However, as anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (:5) suggests, the best translations are those that betray the destination language more than they do their source.…”

“…Through struggle, and through connections with struggles elsewhere, a greater sense of broad structural orders comes to invest struggles back at their sites of origin. “The world economy” in this rendering does not exist in advance and define resisting subjects according to their position in relation to “it,” but is defined in relation to struggle—a “shifting, non‐contiguous assemblage of contingent terrains” that “is,” in a recursive way, simply “wherever social forces meet world ordering” (Drainville :414).…”