On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System

In the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries judged and ranked human intelligence and civilization by whether the people were in possession of alphabetic writing. This was an initial moment in the configuration of the colonial difference and the building of the Atlantic imaginary, which will become the imaginary of the modern/colonial world. Translation was the special tool to absorb the colonial difference previously established. Border thinking, as we shall see, works toward the restitution of the colonial difference that colonial translation (unidirectional, as today’s globalization) attempted to erase. In the sixteenth century, the colonial difference was located in space. Toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the measuring stick was history and no longer writing. “People without history” were located in a time “before” the “present.” People with history could write the history of those people without. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber transformed this lack (of alphabetic writing, of history) into a celebration of the possession of true knowledge, an Occidental achievement of universal value. I have had this overall picture in mind during the process of writing this book, as I was conceiving subaltern knowledges and border thinking as the response to Weber from the end of the twentieth century. Weber never mentioned colonialism, was unaware of the colonial difference and did not reflect on the fact that he was providing such a celebratory picture at the highest moment of European expansion and capital accumulation in the history of the modern/colonial world system. I would like to remind the reader of the initial sentences of the introduction to Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904] 1992) that provoked the reflections evolving into the book the reader has in her hands: