What is the global response to western expansion or globalization? What are the consequences for the populations targeted for conversion to Christianity, for development, and now for human rights and democracy? Maya in Guatemala, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan. These are notes from Mignolo's The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options where he carefully puts forth his argument for the rhetoric of modernity as the darker side of coloniality -- a rhetoric that follows the logic of coloniality which began in the 1500s and continues to today. He presents several options that will shape global futures -- none of which are THE option -- while specifically elaborating the option of decolonial thinking and doing.
The notes here are really a collection of key concepts that Mignolo uses to make his argument, but I should say that during and after reading (and it was quite a lot to unpack) this book, I watched a documentary Breaking the Maya Code (2010), which reveals elements of Mignolo's argument as it presents Western efforts to understand Maya "glifs." While there is a lot to say about the connections between these pieces, as well as a great deal that I am reading on the topic of genocide and literature of atrocities, one important note is how the rhetoric of modernity actually interfered with "breaking the Maya code"; in other words, it was because efforts came from the "zero point" Mignolo talks about and the belief in the classification of humanitas and apropros, and because of racism, that the complexity of the Maya "language" was underestimated, and that researchers missed the history (the narrative of life, story-telling -- stories that had scribes or authors Ahtz'ib rendering the stories of their people ). Furthermore, it seems that scholarly disciplines - and first world approaches to such disciplines -- also prevented consideration of knowledge that came from a second world scholar ("behind the iron curtain").What might be an interesting extension of the argument of the logic of colonialism from 1500 to present, might be to look at classic Maya civilization in AD 822 whereby the cities from the 3rd to 9th centuries also underwent an expansion, which ended the two or three superpowers wanting to expand their rule.Tikal and Calican degenerated into warfare of the Southern lowlands -- the political and environmental exhaustion.
The people survived but the system did not. The scribal tradition was so strong that even the violence of the Spanish conquest could not destroy it. After the burning of the Maya books, the hieroglyphics were banded but 16th century scribes had learned from the Spanish friars to write in the Latin script. They transcribed histories, geneologies and myths using the Latin alphabet. Ceclio Can Canul was a scribe who survived using Latin script and the Maya language -- they never attended school or learned to write in a formal setting but these scribes learned to write one from the other. The Maya have preserved texts, guided explorers, shared knowledge of their beliefs and customs. Finally, the decipherment has come back to Guatemala. In the 1980s the villages were under siege, and through this, Maya people began attending conferences to preserve their languages and traditions with their culture under attack, and so history became especially precious. Nikte Sis Iboy, director of OKMA Language center, Antgua -- they learn the history of the Maya glifs and the classic language in workshops there and in other places in the region. They saw that the ideas that persist today existed in ancient times finding strength in the identity as Maya. Knowing the history of your country that had been kept from them by Western scholars brought a voice to the silences, the 400 years of the suppression of the language and writing of Maya; the children were given Christian names and Spanish language. The history places people in time; the process of deciphering the language was a small step to understanding world view and history. What did the script contribute to the humanity; and it is something that each generation creates for itself and is thus never ending. The words of the ancient Maya scribes have begun to speak.
The notes here are really a collection of key concepts that Mignolo uses to make his argument, but I should say that during and after reading (and it was quite a lot to unpack) this book, I watched a documentary Breaking the Maya Code (2010), which reveals elements of Mignolo's argument as it presents Western efforts to understand Maya "glifs." While there is a lot to say about the connections between these pieces, as well as a great deal that I am reading on the topic of genocide and literature of atrocities, one important note is how the rhetoric of modernity actually interfered with "breaking the Maya code"; in other words, it was because efforts came from the "zero point" Mignolo talks about and the belief in the classification of humanitas and apropros, and because of racism, that the complexity of the Maya "language" was underestimated, and that researchers missed the history (the narrative of life, story-telling -- stories that had scribes or authors Ahtz'ib rendering the stories of their people ). Furthermore, it seems that scholarly disciplines - and first world approaches to such disciplines -- also prevented consideration of knowledge that came from a second world scholar ("behind the iron curtain").What might be an interesting extension of the argument of the logic of colonialism from 1500 to present, might be to look at classic Maya civilization in AD 822 whereby the cities from the 3rd to 9th centuries also underwent an expansion, which ended the two or three superpowers wanting to expand their rule.Tikal and Calican degenerated into warfare of the Southern lowlands -- the political and environmental exhaustion.
The people survived but the system did not. The scribal tradition was so strong that even the violence of the Spanish conquest could not destroy it. After the burning of the Maya books, the hieroglyphics were banded but 16th century scribes had learned from the Spanish friars to write in the Latin script. They transcribed histories, geneologies and myths using the Latin alphabet. Ceclio Can Canul was a scribe who survived using Latin script and the Maya language -- they never attended school or learned to write in a formal setting but these scribes learned to write one from the other. The Maya have preserved texts, guided explorers, shared knowledge of their beliefs and customs. Finally, the decipherment has come back to Guatemala. In the 1980s the villages were under siege, and through this, Maya people began attending conferences to preserve their languages and traditions with their culture under attack, and so history became especially precious. Nikte Sis Iboy, director of OKMA Language center, Antgua -- they learn the history of the Maya glifs and the classic language in workshops there and in other places in the region. They saw that the ideas that persist today existed in ancient times finding strength in the identity as Maya. Knowing the history of your country that had been kept from them by Western scholars brought a voice to the silences, the 400 years of the suppression of the language and writing of Maya; the children were given Christian names and Spanish language. The history places people in time; the process of deciphering the language was a small step to understanding world view and history. What did the script contribute to the humanity; and it is something that each generation creates for itself and is thus never ending. The words of the ancient Maya scribes have begun to speak.
The task is the unveiling of Rhetoric of modernity, showing its darker side, advocating and building global futures that aspire to the fullness of life Esther than encouraging individual success at the expense of the many and of the planet (122)... Thick democracy
Salvation:saving souls conversion to christianity, managing bodies outside europe in emerging nation states through bio politics, make citizens consumers of biotechnology and pharmacology...turning health into market; the corp stage on controlling bodies; civilization mutated into economic development
Decolonization education: 80 percent no access to tech; will they become aware that they are the majority of the population and build a world in which tech is at the service of humanity rather than humanity in service of tech? Otherwise the matrix with reproduce. Get us out of the mirage of modernity and the trap of colonialist
Teach a poly centric world order; many lines of history coexist
5 trajectories and options that will shape global futures:
Rewesternization: save capitalism, us leadership maintenance, promote science and tech geared toward corp, knowledge for development, create consumer subjects living to work to consume
Reorientation of the left: a Marxist background,
Dewesternization classification (45) a pillar of western knowledge and epistemology ; calls into question the foundation of western knowledge, how to modernize without reproducing coloniality so that not only middle. Class enjoys standards of living but the entire planet; not sameness by inclusion but equal, separate, discrete and equivalent in power and authority without forgetting the colonial wound inflicted by racial difference; humanity in difference is to delink to think
Decoloniality: working and consuming to live, non exploitative world; decolonization means struggles to detach from capitalism and communism describing a period of struggles of non aligned states to expel imperial admin for independence ; Decoloniality is epistemological focusing on decolonizing knowledge rather than territory; it is the analytical task of unveiling the logic of coloniality and the prospective task of contributing to a world in which many worlds will coexist
The spiritual option : religions invented, spirituality can be found beyond religions, ways of life beyond capitalism and developments that keep consumers in dreamworlds; what are the options that westernize has held hostage? Spirituality is connected to land which is not a commodity nor private property nor as a provider of natural resources but modern society does not allow lifestyles not capitalist to prosper
Decolonizing: taking democracy seriously instead of using it to advance imperial designs or personal interests
capitalism: economic transaction , exploitation of labor, control and management of knowledge and subjectivities
Objectivity with out parentheses, Manturana: Management and obedience closed political system ready for totalitarian regimes and economy if production and wealth over human life
Objectivity with parentheses: open for inter epistemic dialogues cooperation in building a nonimperial world; we can in no way claim to be in possession if truth but there are numerous possibilities; with parentheses, truths are options
Zero point: to manage is to be in control of knowledge; establishes criteria for classification and who classifies, who removes the parentheses, global linear thinking (85))Believing society is divided between humanitas and anthropos
Exteriority: people who inhabit the outside in the process of defining the inside created from the perspective of the zero point of observation
Decolonial narratives incorporate nodes that have been silenced by imperial narratives do we can see the past and present as heterogeneous historic structural nodes (84)
Anthropos Assimilation : admit defeat repress what you are and embrace something that you were not
The task: anthropos to claim and assert through argumentation his or her epistemic rights to engage in barbarian theorizing in order to decolonize humanitas and in knowledge building to show that the distinction between anthropos and humanitas is a fiction controlled by humanitas (90)...not to resist but to re-exist in building Decolonial futures... The beginning if decolonizing authority and economy ; the right of western civ to exist among others but not to posit itself as the savior of the other
The house of modernity/coloniality: we have been born and raised and been classified from the perspective if the zero point among humanitas or anthropos... The built- in constructions of modern epistemology; it is our ethic responsibility up know and understand this house
M argues the illogic rationality of the hubris of the zero point and if the humanitas placing itself in the position of domination through the partition of the earth and classification of its people
Immigrant consciousness , 109: assumed condition if existence, for being in a place whose history is not the history of their ancestors; for indigenous who built their history in the land they inhabited then found themselves out of place when their form of life was displaced, destroyed , and replaced with ways of life and the institutions of migrants from Europe-- the awareness of coloniality of being
Sociogenic principle, Fanon :To speak means to use a certain syntax, to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization (maya indigenous lang); a man who has a language possesses the work expressed and implied in that language; mastery of language affords remarkable power (110)
Decolonial scientia: the scientia needed not for progress or development but fit liberating the actual and future victims of knowledge upon which progress and development are predicated; a culturally programmed sense of self; the experience of knowing that i am being perceived, in the eyes if the imperial other, as not quite human; it requires an act of humility to realize that there is no longer room for abstract universals and truths without parenthesis; and it takes a moment of rage and of losing fear to move from the colonial wound to decolonial scientia (114)1. Zero point denies the contributions of places, races, and sexes.2. Explore the consequences that western expansion had for the environment like natural resources needed by imperial economy exploring global responses the past 500 years; it's an imperial trap to just look locally.3. Generate knowledge to build communities in which life has priority over economic gains/ growth/development
Geopolitical being: how imperially made regions shape and conform people living in that region; the place that the region and it's inhabitants occupy in a global order of coloniality
Moving from the enunciated to the enunciation: who and when knowledge is generated, why and where knowledge is generated; anthropos who are now engaging in epistemic disobedience and delinking in order to be independent shall not behave like humanitas through Dewesternization or Decoloniality-- rejection of being told from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what we are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas, and what we have to do to be recognized (121); engage in epistemic disobedience to take on civil disobedience, but in modern western epistemology it can only lead to reform not transformations, so it starts from epistemic delinking
Body politics 140: the Decolonial response to state managed bio politics; it describes technologies ratified by bodies who realized they were considered less human and the very act of describing them as human was a radical un human consideration -- Sociogenic-- racism was the result of two conventions of imperial knowledge that certain bodies were inferior to others and inferior bodies carried inferior intelligence and languages-- if you argue that there are bodies in need of guidance from developed bodies saying you Want to work with local what agenda will be implemented yours or theirs? 143
Put human lives first rather than transformation if the disciplines...
Benveniste, the formal apparatus of enunciation: pronominal system , I/we if the enunciator with spatial and thirdly markers in reference to him/ her; frame of conversation or context familiar to participants; formation of disciplines; cosmological frames of theology and philosophy science in European schools and imperial languages
Discipline : Decolonial puts disciplinary tools at the service if the problem; anthropology puts the problem at the service of the discipline -- am I studying for my discipline or for the problem ???
Institutions: train new epistemically obedient members, control who enters and what knowledge making is allowed, disavowed, devalued, or celebrated
Time; 152,whatever the conceptualizarion of time in the social sciences today if us caught and woven into the imaginary ic the modern/ colonial world system... The way a culture has of perceiving and conceiving the world...colonial matrix of power located barbarians in space and then primitives in terms if time; Deloria159: the very essence of western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of western Europe became guardians of the world
But what is the difference between cultural relativism and colonial and Imperial differences and why is time so important, 160-- the distinction between modernity and tradition is made through the concept of time by which cultural differences were classified according to their proximity to modernity if to tradition, and now there is the sense of falling behind. The time and the west; all time concepts- progress,development; they need a defining point of arrival and by creating it's own tradition to show progress, the concept of tradition now seems universal. Doesn't every place have a tradition? Oh but you are beyond the times. See how far we've come. So now we have history, a linear time line ; recording the past in a linear fashion is one way; coloniality is much more than colonialism it is the matrix through which world order has been created an managed
Conflict : negotiate in non imperial ways; there is no trajectory or option that has the right to prevail over the other...pluriversality means unlearning modernity and learning to live with people one does not agree with of even like 176,
Chrono politics is a civilization principle that servicer ostracize all who do not conform to the
modern conventions of time; what it is a mean weapon to promote competition encouraging fast speed success consuming energy of millions of people who live their lives thinking of going faster and getting had being a winner avoiding the shame of being a loser
From Kant to a decolonial viewpoint: (189) The first are objectivity without parenthesis and an institutional viewpoint enunciated; the second set are objectivity in parenthesis and in enunciation.
1. What can I know? Who is the knowing subject, and what is his/her material apparatus of enunciation?
2. What out I to do? What kind of knowledge/understanding is he/she engaged in generating and why?
3. What may I hope? Who is benefiting or taking advantage of such-and-such knowledge or understanding?
4. What is the human being? What institutions (universities, media, foundations, corporations) are supporting and encouraging such-and-such knowledge and understanding
Kant would say that answers would come from the disciplines of study -- metaphysics and anthropology -- but Mignolo would say answers cannot come from the very disciplines that are part of the problem. And the process of answering these questions comes from Western methods of gathering information, reasoning and interpreting. So to change the terms of the conversation, the questions and answers have to be epistemically disobedient to the hegemonic ways of knowing and doing.
Double concsiousness and sociogenesis: at once reveal the forced coloniality behind the rhetoric of modernity and instead of assuming universal human nature as a starting point, they decolonial thinkers start with humankind divided between humanitas and anthropos; by changing the questions, we change the terms of the conversation, so instead of engaging Kant in his own rules to question the content, Mignolo wants to change the rules, to delink from Western presuppositions. Disengage in from categories of thought and assumptions; acknowledging modern categories are dominant in many if not all of us; delinking means to think from the silences and absences produced by imperial modern epistemology and epistemic practices
change the terms of the conversation:
imparative method: Pannikar -- the effort at learning from the other and the attitude of allowing our own convictions to be fecundated by insight of the other; focuses on dialogue, praxis, and existential encounters -- that is , reasoning from the senses and from the locations of the bodies in the colonial matrix of power
comparative method -- privileges dialectics and argumentative reasoning
chapter 7 -- Cosmopolitan Localisms
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality but Mignolo wanted to consider this in light of globalization -- linking them in ideology at first, but globalization came to mean political economy when markets were deregulated and profit was equated with growth. What was development and growth of a civilization became economic and so in the 1980s (Reagan and Thatcher), it came to mean imperial designs and a remaking of global coloniality and the concern for the expansion of the poverty line and the divide between the haves and have nots (and perhaps humanitas and the anthropos?).
How is cosmopolitanism possible in light of globalization? Mignolo seems to see this as a "civilizing mission" as opposed to the freemarket mission of globalization; nevertheless, both are projects of Western expansionism. He traces this to the 18th century Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to show how because this project was tied to civil security and thus citizenship that it was under the rule of government -- so the temporal aspect was connected with the acceptance of the Declaration and the spatial aspect was where this rule was, which was Europe.Therefore, M concludes this was a civilizing mission and cosmopolitanism appeared to be an underlying project of Western expansion. (259, the Kantian vision of cosmopolitanism)
mid-1500s -- theologians considered to what extend the Indians of the New World were human and to what extent, as a consequence, they had property rights. The coloniality of this question is clear for the Indians did not have concept of property nor right and land was a source of life and not a commodity.
Cosmopolitanism in a decolonial vein shall aim at the communal and not as a universal model but as a universal connector among different noncapitalist socio-economic organizations around the world (275) -- a model of organization and not society; many models will arise out of histories, memories, practices, languages, religions, categories of thought. First, delink from capitalism/communism/socialism.
International law (276) -- the historical and colonial foundation of international law was a the same time the foundation of rights and racism; natural law -- all human beings are born equal (ius genium) and endowed with the rights of people or nations; De Vittoria argued for the rights of Indians not to be invaded or dispossessed (specifically by the Spaniards); However, when he moved to the classification of "los barbaros" and "principles Christianos," and in doing so his argument becomes more about cultural systems/practices and an assessment of an ideal of natural law placing human beings into this system where there is a hierarchy. Thus, this classification and this system was not created by the Indians but De Vittoria -- onotlogically equal but epistemically unequal and thus not sovereign. Thus, we see that colonial differences are built on the presupposition that epistemic deficiencies indicate ontological inferiority (racism 279). Now we see justification in nivading, punishing and expropriating the inferior -- if and when he or she violates the preferred cultural practice. European states were considered sovereign
What is globalism? Manfred Steger suggests "an Anglo-American market ideology that reached its zenith in the 1990s and was inextricably linked to the rising fortunes of neo-liberal political forces in the world's sole remaining superpower" (281). Interested with reducing costs and increasing gains under the rhetoric of developing the underdeveloped. Who is more or less human is less important than people who can work and consume, disregarding their religious beliefs, their skin color, their sexuality
Decolonial cosmopolitanism/Cosmo-polis of the future: composed of communal nodes around the planet cooperating rather than competing with each other , and there will be no node that envisions itself extending all over the planet in a grand cosmopolitan mission (planetary anthropos and European humanitas); what are the needs and demands being expressed around the world?Your location in the colonial matrix of power shapes the way you look at the world. To what extend cosmopolitan localism may lead to a polycentric and noncapitalist world is still a question (294).
Comments from DeStigter: 8/8/12
Anyway, you're right that I was the one who recommended Walter Mignolo'sThe Darker Side of Western Modernity. I've long been interested in
Walter's work, ever since I took a class with him on Latin American
literacy when I was a grad student at Michigan. Back then he was doing
work that looked at language systems in ancient Central and South America,
with an eye toward deconstructing modernist claims that literacy (as the
Europeans defined it) led to more rational and sophisticated thinking.
His most recent book on Western Modernity I thought might be of interest
to you because I think that Walter's critique of modernity as having a
colonialist imperative might be relevant to your thinking about genocide.
More specifically, I was wondering whether modernity's emphasis on
rationalistic forms of control might be a framework that creates
circumstances leading to and attempts to justify genocide. To be sure,
genocide happened in ancient cultures–I'm thinking, now, of the Israelites
genocidal invasion of Palestine under Joshua, etc. Still, I think in
modern times, one might say that genocide is a method or strategy of
imposing control over what some people see as the premodern, primitive,
unruly, ungovernable Other. Genocide seen in this way would amount to a
purging of whatever doesn't fit within or cannot be controlled under
rationalistic systems of thought and social organization.
Regarding Walter's wariness of critical theory and Gramsci, my reading is
that Walter is suspicious of all forms of Western European thought,
whether that be classical liberalism or Marxism. Instead, it seems to me
that Walter is interested in honoring local forms of thought that are
based in specific non-European communities, and any kind of ideology
imported from Europe, even a Marxist perspective like Gramsci's, is going
to be seen by Walter as potentially colonialistic in that it imposes on
indigenous communities certain (modernist) ways of viewing/constructing
the world .
I agree with you that Walter's writing is sometimes a little opaque, but
for my money it's worth the time and effort. I say that in part because I
think so much of the critical theory and political theory that we in the
US have inherited is a product of Europe, France and Germany in
particular, and I'm attracted to the emerging scholars from Central and
South America (Mignolo among them, as was Freire) who bring what I see as
a fresh perspective.
