The Social Sciences, Epistemic Violence, and the Problem of the "Invention of the Other"

Abstract

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, postmodern philosophy and cultural studies developed into important theoretical currents that impelled a strong critique, inside and outside the academy, of the pathologies ofWesternization. Their many differences notwithstanding, both currents attribute these pathologies to the exclusive, dualist character thatmodern power relations assume.Modernity is an alterity-generating machine that, in the name of reason and humanism, excludes from its imaginary the hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency of different forms of life. The current crisis ofmodernity is seen by postmodern philosophy and cultural studies as a historic opportunity for these long-repressed differences to emerge. I hope to showhere that the proclaimed “end” ofmodernity clearly implies the crisis of a power mechanism that constructs the “other” by means of a binary logic that represses difference. I also argue that this crisis does not imply the weakening of the global structure within which this mechanism operates. What I will refer to here as the “end of modernity” is merely the crisis of a historical configuration of power in the framework of the capitalist world-system, which nevertheless has taken on other forms in times of globalization, without this implying the disappearance of that world-system. I argue that the present global reorganization of the capitalist economy depends on the production of differences. As a result, the celebratory affirmation of these differences, far from subverting the system, could be contributing to its consolidation. I defend the claim that the challenge now facing a critical theory of society is precisely to reveal what the crisis