John O'Neill: Why Globalization and Postmodern Cultural Analysis Fail

Описание: In this short video, John O’Neill reports on his 1997 paper, “Globalization, Alienation and the Loss of Other-Wiseness” (O’Neill, John. “Globalization, Alienation and the Loss of Other-Wiseness.” Refuge 15, no. 6 (1997): 11–13).

He argues that the postmodern discussions which emerged in Europe toward the end of the twentieth century—especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—increasingly shifted social analysis from the sphere of production to that of consumption, attempting thereby to understand the global condition through the lenses of globalization and multiculturalism. For O’Neill, this is a myth. In contrast, he insists that we must continue to frame our discussions of the present in terms of “capitalism.” The postmodern global visions developed by thinkers such as McLuhan, Baudrillard, and Jameson, though oriented toward globalization, have understood cultural differences and diversity in an overly superficial way, obscuring the underlying mechanisms of their formation and transmission. Production has merely been displaced, class has merely been concealed, and multiculturalism—posing as a false moral stance—has become a tool for the new global capitalist elites to exculpate themselves.

To ground the discussion in capitalism means to return to the perspectives of production and class, in order to grasp the multilayered nature of alienation: the multiple alienations across gender, race, generation, and occupation, which must be seen as reconstituted within the mechanisms of global capitalism—the common enemy we all face. Postmodern multicultural theory, however, has dissolved this common front, trapping us within fragmented forms of alienation, while insisting that a unified class alienation has been once and for all abolished. This also means that, with the disappearance of left–right antagonistic discourses on the global stage, we have lost the very possibility of understanding the Other—those others who share the same fate with us but who, reduced to one option among many in a pluralistic menu, have vanished from the meaningful world of our personal lives.