Europe/Worlds

This article is the text of a lecture given by Etienne Balibar as the introduction to a debate that took place at Panteion University in Athens on the evening of 14^th June 2010. Participants in the round table discussion included Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas, Pavlos Klavdianos (from the journal Epochi), Yannis Millios (from the review Thesseis), Vanghelis Bitsoris (Aletheia), and Vicky Skoumbi (Aletheia ). The event was chaired by Dimitris Vergetis.

We publish here a shortened version of the paper ordered by IDEA International to the author for the round table «Democracy and Development in the Globalized World», held in New Delhi on the 17^th and 18^th of June, 2008. 

To understand postcolonialism in its present-day postmodernist reincarnation requires a simultaneous grasp of the ways in which disparate notions—e.g. tradition as a political-cultural construct in resistance to modernity, neo-traditionalism as the recasting of “tradition” in an age of mass media, heterogeneity as oppositional gesture in a world subject to abstraction and homogenization, not to mention the subsumption of difference to the gravitational field of Orientalism’s spatialized imaginary, and away from a encounter of the present with the past and future as radically distinct social forms—come together in a specific historical conjuncture.  The conjuncture in question—the post-1989 collapse of a world order inaugurated by the October Revolution of 1917 and radical anti-colonial struggles in subsequent decades—has, in effect, abolished the future.  As an expression of this post-1989 world, and the diminished political possibilities it seems to offer, the “post” in postcolonialism no longer refers exclusively to colonialism as a historical phenomenon but to revolution as a punctual political  rupture with the actually existing capitalism.

Today, globalization is reorganizing knowledge and its institutions in new and seminal ways.  Can we delineate the way this process is affecting the nature of sociological knowledge?