No monopoly on modernity

This is an old point if you've read Baudrillard or Stockhausen on what we're forced to call 9/11 instead of 11/9, but it's worth repeating in the light of these explosives parcels found on cargo planes originating in Yemen.

The globalisation model asserts that bringing western capitalism to the rest of the world should somehow 'civilise' them, dissolve old ideologies such as race or religion. One world under consumerism. Once everybody has a McDonald's, the argument suggests, we'll live in a shiny world of modernity in which technology and efficient markets will serve our needs, cutting out the fighting and barbarism of the past.

The counter-argument is that modernity has made us more savage: the Holocaust wouldn't have been possible without an efficient, modern railway network, high-tech chemical factories to produce Zyklon-B and IBM's accounting machines. We wouldn't have considered dividing the world between capitalism and communism, leading to the horrors of Vietnam, Cambodia, Matabeleland and many others were it not for the shiny clean tech of nuclear weapons.

The latest bombing attempt underlines this. Modernity has given everyone the chance to participate in globalisation, but only the West is shocked when globalisation is used as a weapon against us. '9/11' used the air network: this weekend's attempt utilised the fact that even a failed state like Yemen has access to DHL. Where governments fear to tread, a capitalist parcel delivery operation still has offices. No global parcel network, no bombs sent to very specific addresses in Chicago.

Baudrillard talks about this in terms of 'potlatch', the sophisticated system of gifting and obligation employed by 'tribes' (as if only Others live in them). We're outraged that we've 'given' Others the privilege of joining us and DHL and McDonald's and the UN etc. etc. etc. and they've turned those networks against us because the 'gift' is too unbalanced, too great for comprehension.

Fukuyama and his fans who claimed the 'End of History' were utterly wrong. Modernity didn't settle the old arguments, it swept them under the carpet until the Others realised that they too could turn the structures, systems and mechanics of Modernity against us. All this is encapsulated in a bomb-maker going down to queue at a postal office in some flyblown Yemeni village.

Steve Bell sums it all up rather well:

More pages rustled

Only two books in the post today: 'The Complete Edition' of Alastair Campbell's Diaries: Volume One; Prelude to Power and a free inspection copy of Suman Gupta's Globalization and Literature (or, as the cover has it, suman gupta's globalization and literature).

The complicated title of Campbell's memoir is because he lost power a few years before New Labour did. Needing a large injection of cash, he wrote a censored version so that he could profit without sticking the knife into his party comrades too hard. Like a fool, I bought it. Now that Labour's out of government, Campbell can spin away to his heart's content and not worry about turning the public away from the party. Still, now I have both, there's a comparative critical discourse analysis project waiting to happen. I would like my money back after buying the first version though.

The other book is, under the new regime I live-blogged last night, destined to be contraband because it considers literature within a social, cultural and political context. Going by what I heard yesterday, we're meant to be telling students that they are 'singularities' who shouldn't see themselves as part of ethnic, racial, political, gendered or sexual categories at all. Never mind that many of my students are only just discovering that there are real reasons for their social positions, rather than luck: they're now to be treated as floating points in time - existing in a world of Twitter feeds and status updates, in NOW - rather than as part of humanity.

Basically, a privileged white academic from an imperialist nation is going to tell my students that they need to get over being black/white/Islamic/atheist/Christian/poor/gay/straight because 'identity' turns you into a victim scared to experience new things. Which is utter, utter bollocks, isn't it children? I recommend Dyer's White as corrective reading.

As a colleague points out, Orwell spotted this as elitist manipulation a long time ago: the proles in 1984 are refused a past, a history and therefore an identity. Gupta's book looks like a really good primer in the ways that literary texts have dealt with globalization in its many forms. It also suggests that there are potentially rich rewards to be had from cross-fertilising globalization studies and literary studies. I look forward to getting to grips with it.