The Romantic Control of History and the Politics of Difference

The Romantic Control of History and the Politics of Difference

&nbsp;&nbsp;Once the universal history of Christian teleology weakened its own authority with the rise of modern society, individual (national or personal) histories started to have their own internal telos. That is, the gradual decrease of theological monism leads to the valuation of time-dependent change. Now temporal differentiation characterized as irreversible, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable rises to the surface as a new parameter of the modern notion of time. What is at issue here is that as soon as eschatological totality loses its influential power, individual histories have their own totalizing programs. I define the diachronic ordering of different histories as Romantic time discipline.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In her poem, "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" (1812), Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) becomes involved in this Romantic chronology in a global context. She reveals how the British Empire is determined to incorporate local others into its own master plot. I term this kind of globalization Romantic globalization.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The politics of difference, which celebrates local differences against global capitalism, emerges as an alternative to Romantic globalization especially in an era of global capitalism. In the name of the politics of location, the war of positions or the politics of postcoloniality, the politics of difference values non-classed, non-national, local identities as an epistemological center, a subject-position, and a site of resistance to guard against global capitalism. It argues for local differences tackling the totalizing pressure of Capital that serializes them at a global level. The presence of heterogeneities, led by local subjects troubling the conceptual authority of thc classed or national subject, regionalizes the master plan of transnational capitalism.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The politics of difference, however, has two problematic postulates. One is that it tends to abandon any kinds of the interconnectedness of differences as a repercussion of its rejection of monolithic totalization. The other is that although thc politics of difference, of course, has its own advantage in that the existence of local histories can question global totalization, it is likely to fall into the de-historicized essentialization of differences. Avoiding both the totalizing repression of global totality and the fetishized notion of difference, I suggest the decentered netting of local differences. This new paradigm is characterized by the multifocal, glocalized flow of differences.