Fouad Makki

Fouad Makki, a professor in the department of development sociology, writes in his article, “The Empire of Capital and the Remaking of Centre-Periphery Relations”:

“By taking at face value the claim that globalisation is a universal process propelled by its own interior logic, we give it a coherence it does not possess. Passive acceptance of the claim that the current form of globalisation is a fate we have to resign ourselves to has become a convenient alibi for governments who willingly or unwillingly subscribe to the dogmas of market purism. To counteract this tendency, we need to highlight globalisation’s contingent and contradictory history and identify the forces that regulate its dynamics.”

Published in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1, After the Third World? (2004), p. 163.

As some of you know, I spent virtually all of last semester reading and thinking about Walter Benjamin. All of my final papers dealt with some aspect of Benjamin’s thought, and I’ve identified Benjamin as one of the primary theoretical sources for my developing thesis work.

My particular interest in Benjamin has to do with his concept of history. For Benjamin, the primary targets are notions of historical continuity and progress. I don’t have the time or space now to describe his theory of history in depth, but its general thrust is perfectly echoed in the above quote. For both authors, capitalism has a unique ability to create the appearance of continuity where no such continuity exists. This apparent continuity is a powerful force for naturalizing what are in fact human social processes. If we can imagine a continuity between various epochs of economic or historical development, it becomes easier to imagine their extension into the future: progress. In this way specific social configurations, however exploitative for the working poor, can be thought of as organically unfolding, natural processes not to be tampered with by human institutional intervention. Makki and Benjamin contend that we must not see the economy or history as natural, continuous processes, but as highly contingent human endeavors. Doing so breaks down the appearance of historical progress (the “rise and fall” phenomenon of succeeding empires), allowing us to more critically engage their social effects. If the various forces of what Benjamin calls “the victor” aim to represent themselves as natural forces akin to the movement of the earth and moon, our duty is to continually insist on their imminently human character.

I wonder if there are clues in this appraoch -which, as articulated, seems primarily temporal- for my own thoughts on Shanghai, which are both temporal and spatial.