Theory, Culture &

Society http://tcs.sagepub.com

The Enlightenment
Couze Venn
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 477
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062701

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/477

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:
The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University

Additional services and information for Theory, Culture & Society can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations (this article cites 2 articles hosted on the

SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms):
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/477#BIBL

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 477

The Enlightenment
Couze Venn

Abstract For different reasons, and with different political goals at stake, the funda-
mental principles advocated by the Enlightenment are being challenged by both the left
and the right. This entry sets out to clear a critical space for examining what is at stake
in the present in interrogating its legacy as discourse for imagining alternative transmod-
ern and transcolonial futures. A re-evaluation of the Enlightenment by reference to
concepts of equality, liberty, emancipation, justice and becoming(s) is central to that
task.
Keywords counter-Enlightenment, emancipation, evolution, informationalization,
project, reason, transmodernity

The Enlightenment
In 1984, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’,
Foucault wrote an essay of the same title in order to examine its legacy for the present. His
claim that this event ‘has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, what we
do today’ (1984: 32) triggers many questions and suggests an inheritance that needs to be
interrogated, and not only in relation to the modern discourse of philosophy that Foucault’s
rhetorical ‘we’ is meant to signal. To begin with, the invocation of a communal ‘we’ in the
context of a supposedly postmodern age, while harbouring the spirit of the cosmopolitan
universalism that the Enlightenment championed, comes up against the evidence of increas-
ing and systematic inequalities and differences at all levels that obliges one to consider who is
the addressee of the statement. Furthermore, inheritance today is bound up with a notion of
inhabitance that directs attention to the reality of diasporic and contested places and spaces
that trails the whole history of modernity with it. It is necessary therefore to make visible not
only the broader epistemic and cultural context of the Enlightenment as a grand narrative, but
also to question it regarding the purchase it may have now in the current moment of a world
re-ordering which is set on countering its convictions about equality, liberty, fundamental rights
and the promise of emancipation.
Kant, of course, did not invent the Enlightenment, though his reflections on the topic have
given us key passages about the essential role of reason and critique in the progress or ‘maturity
of humanity’, as he saw it, that have indeed come to encapsulate for many the salient features
of Enlightenment as a project. Foucault’s own discourse, by focusing on Kant, refigures this
project in terms of a particular trajectory towards ‘a critical ontology of ourselves’ that, unfor-
tunately, obscures its more explicitly political dimension. For these reasons, I want to present
here a different reading of the Enlightenment, not in order to engage in some futile critique
of Foucault or Kant – since their essays are in fact both still productive from the point of view
of an interrogation of the present – but in order to re-examine the stakes in posing the problem
from the point of view of knowledge today and against a background of emergent socialities
and great turbulences in the world that remind one of the conditions of emergence of the
Enlightenment.
When conceptualized as a project, the Enlightenment invariably calls up, and merges into,

Copyright © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society (http://tcs.sagepub.com) (SAGE Publications,

London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(2–3): 477–498. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062701

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 478

478 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

the concept of modernity as a project. At the theoretical level, Habermas would be the figure
that one associates with this convergence, both in his critique of the subversion of its radical
potential because of the privileging of instrumental rationality in the historical elaboration of
the project, and in his enduring faith in the possibility of the completion of its emancipatory
goals. Lyotard counterposes a different perspective when he argues that the distinguishing trait
of modernity is precisely that it presents itself in the form of a universal project, that is, as an
Idea to be realized. According to him, its main goals expressed in the metanarratives of
modernity are ‘the progressive emancipation of reason and of freedom, the progressive or cata-
strophic emancipation of labour (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enhancement of
the whole of humanity through the development of capitalist technoscience’ (Lyotard, 1988:
31). To contextualize this idea of project, I will point to the fact that emancipatory discourses,
or at least discourses that promise the possibility of escape from a presumed initial imperfec-
tion of the human being, have existed in all cultures, grounded in the idea of redemption or
salvation or maturity, necessitating sacrifice and a process of self-reflection and discovery. This
is often expressed in the idea of a journey towards something like the purification of the soul,
a liberation from all-too-human defects through the acquiring of wisdom. These narratives of
emancipation require that we free ourselves from the hold of the desires that keep us in a
state of dependency or immaturity; the ‘pilgrim’ is counselled to seek out instead the knowl-
edges that are meant to have a liberatory and transformative effect. Before modernity, such
narratives referred to a religious discourse and inscribed their own grand or master narratives,
so that the promise of the salvation or perfectibility of souls, and what that meant from the
point of view of being saved from the abyss of finitude, cycles of rebirth, or the state of fall-
enness, was guaranteed by a transcendental realm or force to which it was imperative for the
believer to submit. This foundation in religion is far from the notion of the history of eman-
cipation that aligns it with the linear and progressive unfolding of humanity’s destiny that one
encounters in the discourse of modernity; instead one encounters different temporalities where
it is a matter of fixed trajectories and returns, of obedience and sacrifice, of listening to the
proper.
By contrast, the master narratives of the Enlightenment insist on the secular foundation of
its emancipatory enterprise, and on linear temporality. It distinguishes itself from other stories
of human becoming by placing itself under the banner of reason and in the directing hand of
the autonomous subject rather than that of religious doctrine and a divine being or purpose.
The discourse of modernity, in breaking with previous systems of thought, refuses ideas that
refer emancipation to a transcendent authority: God or fate/Karma. It claims to owe nothing
to anyone except the effort of rational subjects and agency. It becomes its own authority. From
the Enlightenment onwards, this authority is vested in Science. One needs to bear in mind
the metaphysics of presence (Derrida, 1982) which this episteme covers over, though I shall
draw attention rather to the break with the relation of faith to knowledge that this implies;
it is something to which I will return presently, for it relates to conditions supporting contem-
porary servitudes. Today, as Lyotard (1993) notes, the idea that one has to labour and wait for
emancipation is erased in the postmodern condition that not only desires to shorten the delay,
but to instrumentalize the project of emancipation in the idea of development, and I would
add, the equation of the latter with the notion of modernization itself.
I think it is important to highlight yet another feature which I will argue is determining,
and that opens up the question of the political, namely, the idea of revolution. Kant locates
its centrality for progress, and Lyotard has explained the extent to which it is precisely the
‘enthusiasm for revolution’, that is, the desire for a sociality yet to come, rather than specific
advances in knowledge or progress in some aspect of society, which itself functions as the sign
that attests to the ‘maturity of humanity’ (Lyotard, 1983: 244, 245). What I am thinking about
here is the willingness to imagine and seek through action an unprecedented world, guided by
nothing more than this idea of a possible or alternative world, brought about through human
action. The readiness or disposition to contemplate such revolutionary change, inspired by the
Enlightenment thought, is one of the key marks of modernity. It finds its initial instantiation

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 479

Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Enlightenment/Cosmopolitanism 479

in the French and American Revolutions, exemplary gestures of starting anew that have been
repeated many times since. It could be pointed out that religions too have explicitly sought
to effect such total transformations, for example, in the case of Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
which explicitly condemned the previous system of beliefs and values against which they
defined themselves and advocated an entirely new form of sociality. The difference, however,
is that religious revolutions do not imagine their own disappearance or mutation as an integral
part of the process; indeed quite the opposite, for, in rejecting the previous world, they propose
a new order that would forever be founded on the new unchanging and unquestionable
doctrines and principles – the commandments of God, the Book, the scared texts – (though
schisms abound). Buddhism, interestingly, does not quite fit any of these models. By contrast,
modernity posits a process of becoming. It brings the command of temporality itself within
the perimeter of human agency, no doubt an excessive ambition with its own totalizing and
totalitarian temptations. In this it differs from all other projects of emancipation or salvation.
It could, of course, be argued that other periods have known ambitious universalizing
projects that similarly sought to establish a social order with a global, imperial reach, for
example, in China at various points and with regard to Islamic expansion that stretched from
the Balkans to Indonesia and central Africa. In relation to modernity’s expansionary enter-
prise, one could point to the emergence of vernacular modernities, and counter-modernities,
in response to colonial subjugation and capitalist exploitation, and indeed to modernity’s own
subjugating grasp (Gilroy, 1993). A brief look at the ideas that motivated the Enlightenment
will bring to light the specificities of its discourse that enable one to judge competing projects
of emancipation, as well as to rethink the narratives that continue to be both the stakes in the
legacy of the Enlightenment and the inspiration for imagining different futures.
Central to the politics of Enlightenment thinkers was the rejection of the deep-seated belief
that inequality and poverty were inevitable and reflected the natural state of human societies.
This situation – of fixed social ranks, including gender relations, legitimated and essentialized
on the basis of an idea of natural order or an idea of divine law, coupled to the claim of the
divine authority of sovereigns – prevailed not only in Europe but in all other cultures (except
perhaps small tribal communities). By contrast, people like Voltaire, Condorcet, Rousseau, or
Diderot blamed existing social arrangements, and what they called civilization, for the unjust
systems that had appeared everywhere. They thought change necessitated the rejection of the
doctrines and values, including religious ones, that sustained such ‘imperfect’ systems, and that
rational knowledge would be the means to put an end to them and bring about the ‘perfectibil-
ity of human kind’. Emancipation therefore meant precisely this break with the old, mostly
feudal and ‘traditional’ societies, with their fixed relations of power and religious ideologies
and restrictions. It is a fundamental shift, especially when one reflects that today new forms
and doctrines of naturalizing inequalities have emerged, for example in socio-biology and
neoliberalism, supported by large sections of the press, while older religious doctrines continue
to be used to underwrite inequalities of gender throughout the world. Enlightenment thought
therefore still presents a challenge to such common sense and the dogmas they inscribe.
Condorcet, for example, believed that the new ‘social art’ based on rational knowledge
would abolish the inequalities that existed within nations as well as between nations; it would
bring about equality between men and women and among the ‘races’. He argued that a system
of social insurance rather than charity should be established, and ‘free trade’ instituted (though
this was proposed in opposition to the prevailing trade monopolies and the licensing and restric-
tions of trade enforced by the state). He, like many of the encyclopaedists, advocated the
abolition of slavery and the independence of the colonies, while he thought that the Enlighten-
ment would help free Asia and Africa from ‘our trade monopolies, our treachery, our murder-
ous contempt for men of another colour or creed, the insolence of our usurpations’ (in the
Sketch, 1795). Paradoxically, the same Condorcet talked about the ignorance of ‘Savages’ and
described Africans as barbarous, therefore needing the West’s helping hand, or ‘aid’ in today’s
terminology – a familiar scenario. Kant, of course, expressed it in terms of Europe’s responsi-
bility and destiny to ‘give laws’ to the ‘less advanced’ regions of the world, as Derrida (1997)

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 480

480 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

points out in his discussion of the cosmopolitical. This paradox reveals the tension that existed
between, on the one hand, the ethical and political goals of the Enlightenment as a project
and, on the other, its instrumental purposive thrust, in alliance with capitalism and colonial-
ism, which increasingly became dominant, especially with Liberalism and in the mechanical
and scientistic version of Marxism; thus, it is possible to argue that elements of a counter-
Enlightenment were latent inside Enlightenment thought.
Other elements need to be added to give a firmer purchase on conditions today, and on the
debate about contemporary counter-Enlightenment. I would underline Montesquieu’s far-
reaching argument that the separation and balancing of powers, between the executive, the
judiciary and the administrative elements of state power – a principle enshrined in the American
Constitution, but threatened almost everywhere by recent strategies seeking to secure the
‘society of control’ – were absolutely essential to guarantee democracy and to avoid despot-
ism. Diderot, similarly, in arguing against the foundation of sovereignty in religious dogma,
warned that there was but ‘one step’ from ‘fanaticism to barbarism’ and the curtailment of
liberty. Interestingly, given contemporary developments in neurological and life sciences, in
complexity theory and particle physics, he also supported the view of the interconnections
between mind and matter and living and inorganic matter. One must note that the basis for
his support for a flat ontology rested in the materialism prevailing among radical intellectuals
at the time, though a different basis was proposed by Emilie du Châtelet – mathematician and
translator of Newton, Voltaire’s lover and collaborator – who belatedly came to favour the
Leibnizian standpoint and defended vitalism, after her earlier support for the prevailing
Newtonian world-view. If one were to add the birth and disputes about political economy, prin-
cipally as developed by Turgot, whom Adam Smith visited and learned from, and about natural
history, say, the differences between Buffon and Linnaeus regarding taxonomy, and the views
about speciation developed by Cuvier and Lamarck, we would have many of the key areas and
questions that have now resurfaced as part of the critique of modern regimes of truth.
These then radical ideas, debated for years by Enlightenment intellectuals, translated into
a project of social change based on planned progress and development for which education,
social contract and social insurance were central. The Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and
D’Alembert from 1751, not only promoted these positions, but was itself seen as the vehicle
for the gathering of knowledges from across the world and their diffusion to all parts of the
world. By the time of Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment in 1784, knowledge was equated
with what we now understand as science, and reason was allied with the view of freedom as
the unconstrained use of one’s reason in the critique of prevailing conditions and ideas; this,
he asserted, was a necessary condition to achieve the ‘maturity of humanity’. Let me add that
these revolutionary principles were widely supported, evidenced in the French and American
Revolutions and the principles they defended, such as liberty, equality, fraternity, enshrined in
slogans and in the American Constitution, though fraternity, as we know, did not in practice
include non-white people; Tom Paine’s Rights of Man notably sold 250,000 copies in 1793.
I am going to propose that we regard Darwin’s idea of evolution through ‘natural selection’
as the exemplary product of the Enlightenment, although it came a little later, initially in the
Notebooks of 1837–40, the Sketch of 1842 and the Essay of 1844. The early arguments in
Darwin’s writings, bearing revealing titles like ‘Man, Mind and Materialism’ (1838), ‘Essay on
Theology and Natural Selection’ (1838), the Transmutation Notebooks (from 1837), system-
atically addressed the issues and positions as formulated by many of the key thinkers of the
Enlightenment, rehearsing the arguments about Creationism, about taxonomy and speciation
(Buffon, Cuvier, Lamarck, Linnaeus, Herder), about rational necessity, the naturalization of
reason, and so on, citing many of the authors who contributed to the Encyclopédie and refer-
ring to all the key debates (Venn, 1982). Evolution inaugurates the break with Creationism
and the idea of divine intervention, and with accounts of nature and the place of human species
in it that tried to preserve the thesis of a divine order in nature, specifically in the theories of
Natural Theology (that rationalized nature) and Design (that conflated purpose and necessity
in nature), and the notion of the Great Chain of Being. Today one associates the theory of

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 481

Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Enlightenment/Cosmopolitanism 481

evolution with the linear temporality and the eschatology that supports the standpoint of
progress and development, markers of modernity. Clearly, the Darwinian problematic of speci-
ation could not have been put together without the theories established in the age of the
Enlightenment; correlatively, it re-inscribes all the ambivalences that one finds in the discourses
constructing its episteme, correlating history, life, causality, subjectivity, and emancipation.
Thus, on the epistemological and ontological side, the theory of evolution supports the central
pillars of Enlightenment discourse yet lends a hand to positivism by adding scientific weight
to the identity: rational = scientific = natural = lawful that began to be formulated with the
Enlightenment; one finds this epistemology at work in the sciences of the social and in the
emergent biopolitics of the 19th century (see Venn, 1982, for a detailed analysis). On the
political side, the shifts it encouraged feed into the radical movements for fundamental change
in society, inscribing a loose alliance between the ‘dangerous classes’ and dangerous ideas.
Furthermore, one is struck by the way in which the positions in dispute split along politi-
cal lines in the 19th century, with those supporting Design and a providential cosmology opting
for a politically conservative status quo while the materialists and evolutionists aligned against
them and for a secular and radical political philosophy of progress directed by human inten-
tions. One must emphasize that the correspondence between theory and politics is far from
the neat and straightforward relationship one might imagine, for evolution has nourished both
radical and conservative politics, depending on context, e.g. invoked in support of women’s
suffrage in the 19th century, as well as in support of the later eugenics movement, socio-
biology, and racism. In radical re-readings today, it is aligned with the recognition that differ-
ence, chance, variation, multiplicity and the processual are immanent to temporal becomings
(Grosz, 2004).
We need to bear in mind also that the 18th-century context of the elaboration of the
Enlightenment saw a major transformation in Europe as a military, colonial, economic and
technological power, so that by the mid-19th century China, Japan, and the Arab world that
had so far paid little attention to Europe, convinced that it was merely an insignificant part of
an underdeveloped and ignorant backwater of the world, suddenly realized they had a major
power to contend with. The turn to Europe and to the ‘West’ from that time to seek out their
knowledge and their way of doing things, and the shift in power relations that accompanied
the post-Enlightenment period, is well known and has shaped the process of modernization.
The relation of knowledge to social change played out differently outside Euro-America, for
instance, in the view about an Asian project of modernity proposed by Fukuzawa Yukichi and
others in Japan from the 1860s, and Tagore and Gandhi in India from the 1920s, according
to which (what they understood as) Asian knowledge and values would combine with Western
technologies and science to serve different, non-Western modernizations. In the Arab world it
was both a matter of accommodating the new ascendant modern spirit, for example, with
regard to the foundation of the state, and of the reconfiguration of Islam (in the work of S.H.
Nasr and I. al-Faruqi, for example) as part of countering the Enlightenment’s epistemology
that asserted an opposition between religion and science, faith and reason.

The Long Counter-Enlightenment

What does it mean for the present? First, I’d like to point to the instrumentalization of the
project of the Enlightenment, discussed by Habermas and the Frankfurt School. I have shown
in Occidentalism (2000) that the privilege of instrumental or technocratic rationality is histori-
cally and conceptually tied to the co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in the unfold-
ing of modernity. Furthermore, technocratic rationality is affiliated to key elements of
Enlightenment epistemology such as logocentricsm, mechanism, rationalism; it rhymes with
the world-view of history as linear progression and its hierarchization and homogenization of
cultures.
One must also note the postmodern and postcolonial critique of modernity’s grand narra-
tives, especially concerning the Eurocentric privilege in the discourse of humanism and its

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 482

482 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

claims about the greater good of society that the modern project was meant to deliver.
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984) is the text that brings the different elements of
this critique together, pointing to two key developments: first, the bankruptcy of the claims
of the master narratives in the light of Auschwitz as sign of the failure of modernity’s project
at the ethical level – one should add in this context the violences and pauperizations caused
by European colonialism and capitalist imperialism, often under cover of the liberal-humanist
‘civilizing mission’ as Frantz Fanon noted nearly 50 years ago.
Second, the elimination of the critical dimension central to any project of emancipation
through the operationalization of knowledge in the performative criteria of efficiency and
productivity. Drawing attention to the transformations occurring since the Second World War,
for example, in linguistics, informatics, cybernetics and intelligent machines, in problems of
computers and their languages and the effects of information-processing machines, Lyotard
says:
The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general trans-
formation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is trans-
lated into quantities of information . . . The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge
is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming
obsolete and will become even more so . . . Knowledge is and will be produced in order to
be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both
cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its ‘use-value’
. . . Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive
power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the world-
wide competition for power. (1984: 4, 5)
There is much more in the text that I must leave aside. My aim here is simply to highlight
the altered role of knowledge in the wake of the mutation of instrumental rationality into the
‘tele-techno-media-scientific, capitalistic and politico-economic’ figures of truth, to use
Derrida’s (2002) terminology. It is important to underline that the opposition between religion
and science, which a ‘certain tradition of the Enlightenment’ decreed, dissolves the relation-
ship between faith and knowledge and erases the distinction between the two that alerts
critique to be vigilant about the ‘theologico-political heritage’ of claims to truth and trust that
religion and science both make (Derrida, 2002: 63–6). The Enlightenment’s absolute opposi-
tion to religion replaced the monotheism of divine order with the monotheism of reason, and
allowed the monolingualism of positivist science to speak the truth of being. Thus, without
this recognition of a relationship between faith and knowledge at the level of foundation, and
without the recognition of what cannot be presented or translated – from one faith to another,
from one experience to another, from one episteme to another – it is tempting for either
religion or science to constitute itself as a self-referential system that maps into itself, so that
visions of alternatives are erased through the kind of informationalization analysed by Lyotard.
What is erased in the process is the domain of the ethical itself, and thus the promise of justice
or liberation from oppressions and iniquities that are the ultimate ends of emancipation. Fertile
grounds for fanaticism and fundamentalism are opened up, cultivated in contemporary
counter-Enlightenment conditions.
My second point about the relation of knowledge to a project of emancipation relates to
the mutation of the modern imaginary of modernity into the postmodern problematic of
development. The latter retains the idea of linear temporal sequence whereby what come later
is seen as always better than what had preceded, with the implication that this earlier stage
must be rejected to allow the new to emerge. However, this newness is not judged by refer-
ence to a project of emancipation as understood within the Enlightenment’s vision of increas-
ing equality and liberty and ethical maturity, but within the scope of efficiency and
productivity. Thus, not only does this problematic of development re-inscribe and naturalize
the colonial and evolutionary classification of nations in terms of a hierarchy of development,
a model which is still powerful in political economy and that dictates that ‘developing’ states

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 483

Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Enlightenment/Cosmopolitanism 483

will always have to play ‘catching up’. It eliminates the grounds for imagining alternative forms
of sociality and alternative polities consistent with the Enlightenment ideals of historical
becoming as emancipatory. Thus it ensures that development can only be understood within
the conceptual frame of a (re-)modernization equated with neoliberal ‘structural adjustments’
and ‘liberalization’ programmes and the sufferings they inflict. Knowledge, instrumentalized
and informationalized, has come to operate as counter-Enlightenment. It is Benjamin’s vision
of progress as the angel of history leaving ruins behind as it rushes towards a sightless future.
I will use two examples to briefly examine some implications of the arguments I have been
presenting, namely, the case of the market in derivatives, and the case of genetically modified
foods.
The derivatives market concerns trading on the stock exchange centred on the predicted
future values of assets; it is thus a trade in virtual assets, ultimately based on nothing but finan-
cial and information technologies that combine probabilistic knowledge and calculations with
computer simulations of the future. The derivatives market generates value out of the future
as resource. Derivatives have quickly become by far the most important element of finance
capitalism. For example, the figures for the past five years indicate that this trade in its various
forms has expanded to become the biggest business in the world, exceeding in value annual
world GDP. Even in 1997 its combined annual value was $675 trillion compared with a world
GDP of $147 trillion in 2000 (Arnoldi, 2004). But, like all capitalist ventures, it must calcu-
late and manage risks and intangibles like market moods even as it bets on uncertainty. In
particular, it must attempt to minimize risk by making risk itself the object of a system of
calculation as well as what provides the ground for the complex practice of gambling that
trading on the futures market involves.
My point is not about this virtual world of finance that informational technology has
produced (a good account is given in Lee and LiPuma, 2002). It is about the fact that it is
time itself which is being traded, and the extent to which the drive to minimize the risks
involved means the abolition of the future as emergence and as indeterminate becoming. Basi-
cally, with the derivatives market, capital is obliged to organize the present in such as way as
to ensure the future conforms to what has already been predicted by the probabilistic calcu-
lations. In order to ensure the future happens more or less as anticipated, capital must abolish
contingency even as it plays with it, and it must bring everything within the order of the order-
able and the calculable – paradoxically using the sophisticated, and potentially disruptive,
mathematics of complexity theory, chaos theory, fractals. The future thus becomes an exten-
sion of the present, and the present an intensification of the future. Capital controls the present
by controlling the future. Extending some ideas from Deleuze and Guattari, one can say that
it is time itself which is being colonized. Information and its maximization are crucial here –
as were statistics and probability theory (of Quetelet) for the Enlightenment’s ‘social art’ –
and so is the predictability of human action. But risk continues to haunt capital in the form
of the indeterminate and the event – not only natural disasters, climate change, corporate
crashes, but also the fact that the ‘natives’ get restless and think of resistance, and knowledge
is always provisional, and newness erupts out of the complexity of world (and from the Thing,
which I must leave out). Capital deals with the uncanny spectrality of the event by killing:
the future-as-difference, and anything and anyone who introduces uncertainty and resists
calculation and informationalization. The temptation of totalitarian thought is precisely to
abolish recalcitrant difference; in this way it makes truth and faith coincide. And, importantly,
this coincidence of truth and faith is the basis of all fundamentalisms.
The implication for transmodern and transcolonial critique is the extent to which the post-
colony and its resources – water, power, labour, forests, minerals, products, etc. – are the assets
that function as ‘supplement’ for the virtual assets derivatives trade upon. Without the oil,
foods, diamonds, critical materials like coltan, uranium, and so on, the rest of the machinery
and imaginary with and on which finance capitalism operates would not work; the ratio of
market value to assets would break down (as it did in the case of the dot.com crash). Capital
must acquire these material assets and control them, indeed informationalize them, that is,

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 484

484 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

own them as immaterial property. But this immaterial property has the capacity for material
actualization: as capital, as corporate and individual wealth. Another implication is that the
abolition of the future as difference eliminates the possibility of alternatives. This too is part
of a new form of colonization. Indeed, a global map of the location of the kinds of assets I
have mentioned, e.g. oil, coltan, uranium, coincides with a map of military and ethnic violence,
and a map of postmodern ‘enclosures’ and pauperizations. If we were to define the post-
colonial, or rather the transcolonial as a virtual space, that is to say, a space of potentiality and
unprecedented becomings, it follows that it must resist the logic at work in these intensifica-
tions of inequalities.
My second case, that of GM foods, will reinforce the arguments about ownership and the
society of control (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Today anyone, anywhere can grow wheat or corn,
raise chicken, and so on, that is to say, survive without having to pay a licence to anyone for
the genetic information of the wheat or the corn. Let us call the knowledge that makes this
agriculture possible wealth-knowledge, in contrast to property-knowledge, bearing in mind
here the important distinction between wealth and property that Arendt underlines. Wealth-
knowledge, as collective capital, is a form of inheritance, belonging to a collectivity, it is part
of the common good, it belongs to the language of heteronomy (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002).
What GM foods introduce through new varieties of seeds and, soon to come, biotechnologi-
cally modified animals, are new strains and specimens that are supposed to be more resistant
to pests and diseases and also have greater yields. But knowledge of new plants and animals
as genetic information is owned by the biotech corporations. The GM seed as bar-coded infor-
mation is the property/knowledge that one must buy and use under licence. The logic of
genetic modification in the current global economic system is that knowledge that was once
free will in the future be owned by those who already have most of the wealth and economic
power. Indeed, the industry is producing varieties with ‘terminator genes’ that make the seeds
infertile so that farmers cannot use them. The interesting scenario then is to imagine the situ-
ation in which the biotech companies will own most varieties of seeds and breeds of animals,
the native varieties will have become contaminated through genetic pollution and eliminated
as viable crops and species. Wealth-knowledge will have been converted into property-
knowledge worldwide, privately owned in its immaterial form. Once again, the logic of the
informationalization of knowledge in the context of capitalism, institutionalized in Trade-
Related-Intellectual-Property-Rights or TRIPs, is to acquire as assets the wealth of the world.
As with derivatives, the future is being bar-coded.
Already the experience where GM seeds have been introduced, as in Canada, India, Africa,
Brazil, is that farmers must buy new seeds each year and are not allowed to save them from
their crops. The history of the Green Revolution points to the real dangers for ‘developing’
countries. Introduced from the early 1970s, the new varieties of, for example, rice were meant
to have greater yield, but needed new pesticides and chemical fertilizers to fulfil their poten-
tial, and could not be grown alongside other crops. Only the wealthier farmers could afford
them, and poorer ones were made destitute. Interestingly, from 1974–2000 farm gross income
grew by 300 percent but net income fell because the suppliers took 100 percent of farmers’
increased gross returns. For example, the Green Revolution did help India to increase food
production, but the poor cannot afford to buy this extra food which is kept in vast silos where
it mainly rots away or is eaten by rats. The mechanisms I am describing reproduce and deepen
inequalities of wealth and power.
The decisive issue is the implications for subjectivity and for politics of the emergence of
the biomediated body, the prosthetic body and its mediatized prosthetic memory, that
advances in bio-info technologies promise. From the point of view of the ownership of
knowledge-as-information, one wonders who will own one’s genetic information and one’s
body. For instance, what will happen when one can no longer rent or pay for the body parts
one has ‘acquired’, or the medicines and nutrients that will maintain the biomediated body?
And, shall we see in the near future the emergence of human farming, concerned with the
production of human babies, kidneys, blood plasma, and so on, sold as commodities? Does the

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 485

Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Enlightenment/Cosmopolitanism 485

commodification of knowledge produce the commodification of life and a new biopolitics (of
the biomediated and genetically modified body)? And what does all this mean for the role of
knowledge in the process of political liberation from exploitation and oppressions?
A few brief points to conclude. Through the examples and the transformations that I have
described I have tried to show that the location of knowledge by reference to a project of
emancipation such as that of the Enlightenment has become very problematic and is in crisis.
The capitalist context is crucial, and so is the legacy and continuities of colonialism in other
forms, including the colonization of time – I should note here that I understand colonialism
to refer to any system of subjugation and exploitation based on the homogenization and
privileging of a centre, an origin, a sovereignty or a world-view, or their permutation. The infor-
mationalization of knowledge without an archive and without a critical language and practice
undermines any politics that aims to alter the relations of power and privilege. The politics of
knowledge within Enlightenment thought, in spite of its ambivalence with regard to Europe’s
others and to capitalism, intended to bring about forms of socialities that would be more just.
We now have a great deal more knowledge than in the 18th century, yet inequality and poverty
and the gap between rich and poor, after a period of improvement, is moving back towards
the distribution of opportunities and freedoms as it was at the time of the Enlightenment.
Globally, inequalities of wealth, gender, and race are once more being normalized in the form
of new servitudes, hastened by kleptocracies. The commodification of knowledge, incited by
its mediatization and informationalization, amplifies tendencies inherent from the beginning
in the great shifts that announced modernity. An age of fanaticism has appeared, evidenced in
market fundamentalism as much as in a variety of religious fundamentalism, preparing the
ground for a century of despotism. The question for knowledge now is about the kind of world
for which it is being recruited and repositioned, as a postmodern technics or techne, divested
of ethical substance. What emerges for the work of reorganizing knowledge which the New
Encyclopaedia Project is undertaking is the interconnections between a politics of memory, a
politics of information and knowledge, and the link between the encyclopaedia and a new
discourse of emancipation, that is, a new, necessarily post-colonizing, thus a transcolonial
‘enlightenment’.

References
Arnoldi, Jacob (2004) ‘Derivatives: Virtual Values and Real Risks’, Theory, Culture & Society 21(6):
23–42.
Darwin, Charles ([1837–39] 1974) Darwin on Man, Including Darwin’s Early and Unpublished
Notebooks, ed. Harry Gruber and Paul Barrett, transcribed P.H. Barrett. London: Wildwood House.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London:
Continuum.
Derrida, Jacques (1982) Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1997) Le droit à la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique. Vendôme: Editions
UNESCO.
Derrida, Jacques (2002) Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler (2002) Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek.
Cambridge: Polity.
Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2004) The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lee, Benjamin and Edward Li Puma (2002) ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imagination of Modernity’,
Public Culture 14(1): 191–213.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1983) Le différend. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1988) Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Paris: Editions Galilée.
Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007
© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
26_enlightenment_062701 10/5/06 10:26 am Page 486

486 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

Lyotard, Jean-François (1993) Un trait d’union. Sainte-Foy: Le Griffon d’argile.

Venn, Couze (1982) ‘Beyond the Science–Ideology Relation’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Essex.
Venn, Couze (2000) Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity. London: Sage.

Couze Venn is Professor of Cultural Theory at Nottingham Trent University. He is a co-author

of Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, and author of Occi-
dentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity and The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative
Futures (Sage, 2005).

Cosmopolitanism
Pheng Cheah

Abstract In modernity, the concept of cosmopolitanism has changed from an intellec-

tual ethos to a vision of an institutionally embedded global political consciousness. The
central problem that troubles cosmopolitanism from its moment of inception in 18th-
century philosophy to the globalized present is whether we live in a world that is inter-
connected enough to generate institutions that have a global regulatory reach and a global
form of solidarity that can influence their functioning. Examination of Kant’s pre-nation-
alist cosmopolitanism, Marx’s postnationalist cosmopolitanism, and decolonizing social-
ist nationalism indicates the normative attraction of the nation as a mode of solidarity.
Contemporary arguments about new cosmopolitanisms focusing on the rise of trans-
national networks of global cities, postnational social formations created by migrant and
diasporic flows and Habermas’s recent revival of Kant’s project of cosmopolitan democ-
racy have likewise failed to address the persistence of nationalism as a normative force
within the field of uneven globalization.
Keywords cosmopolitan democracy, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, global civil society,
globalization, Habermas, Kant

T
he story of the concept of cosmopolitanism in modernity is that of a passage from an
intellectual ethos to a vision of a global political consciousness that is generated and
sustained by institutional structures. The central problem that troubles the modern
concept of cosmopolitanism from its moment of inception in 18th-century European phil-
osophy to the globalized present is whether we live in a world that is interconnected enough
to generate, on the one hand, institutions that have a global reach in their regulatory function
and, on the other, a global form of political consciousness or solidarity, a feeling that we belong
to a world that can take root and be sustained within these institutions and influence their
functioning in turn. Any theory of cosmopolitanism must therefore address two related ques-
tions, first, an empirical question concerning the cosmopolitan extensiveness of a regulatory
power embedded in institutions, and, second, a question about the normativity of these insti-
tutions, whether they can be in a relation of mutual feedback with a global political conscious-
ness that voices the universal interests of humanity and tries to maximize human freedom. If
both these questions cannot be answered satisfactorily, cosmopolitanism remains an intellec-
tual ethos of a select clerisy, a form of consciousness without a mass base.

Downloaded from http://tcs.sagepub.com at KoBSON on June 29, 2007

© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.