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more often, as in the
contemporary us, the construction of place with memory, loss,
and nostalgia plays directly into the hands of reactionary popular
movements. this is true not only of outright nationalist images
long associated with the right, but also of imagined locales and
nostalgic settings such as small-town america" or the frontier,"
which often play into and compliment anti-feminist idealization of the home" and "family. |
"
we need to give up ideas of communities as literal, or stable,
entities. we need to understand the powerful role that place plays
in the lived experiences of people in specific locales, but at the
same time we need to understand that there are differences
within a locality. "multiculturalism"?the capitalist leftwing's
construction of society of difference that can live and consume in harmony? is both a feeble recognition that cultures have lost
their morrings in unquestionable places. it is, also, an attempt to encompass this plurality of cultural strategies within the
framework of a national identity. in the same light, the conception
of "subcultures" attempts to preserve the idea of distinct, or pure,
"cultures" while acknowledging the relation of different cultures
to a dominate culture within a given geographical and territorial
space. |
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such concepts are problematic because they attempt to stretch
the naturalized association of culture with place, but they fail to interrogate this assumption in a truly fundamental manner. we
need to ask how to deal with cultural difference, while
abandoning received ideas of naturalized and localized culture. it is instead the contemporary
partner of globalization. to identify its main features, it is
necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly
of its relationship to the singular and the universal. universalization has to do with human rights, liberty,
culture, and democracy. globalization
appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be
on its way out. at least, it appears to be retreating as a value
system which developed in the context of western modernity and was
unmatched by any other culture. |
| any culture that becomes universal
loses its singularity and dies. that's what happened to all those
cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. but it is also
true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally
valid. the only difference is that other cultures died because of
their singularity, which is a beautiful death. we are dying because
we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values.
and this is a much more ugly death.
we believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become
universal. but we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a
quest presents. |
far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a
downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. in the
enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and
forward progress. today, by contrast, universalization exists by
default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the
most minimally common value. this is precisely the fate of human
rights, democracy, and liberty today. their expansion is in reality
their weakest expression.
universalization is vanishing because of globalization. the
globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of
values. |
| this marks the triumph of a uniform thought [3] over a
universal one. what is globalized is first and foremost the market,
the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the
perpetual flow of money. culturally, globalization gives way to a
promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact.
indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks
is pornographic. no need for sexual obscenity anymore. all you have
is a global interactive copulation. and, as a result of all this,
there is no longer any difference between the global and the
universal. the universal has become globalized, and human rights
circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for
example).
the passage from the universal to the global has given rise to a
constant homogenization, but also to an endless fragmentation.
dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization. |
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excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where
concentration once stood. similarly, discrimination and exclusion are
not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather
globalization's own logical outcomes. |
in fact, the presence of
globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not
already been destroyed by its own critical mass. it also makes us
wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of
some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. for us
today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. but
this may actually be an opportunity. in the fragments of this broken
mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. those singularities we
thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost
are revived.
as universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things
become more radical. when universal beliefs were introduced as the
only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for
such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation
in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. but they
cannot do it anymore because the triumphant spread of globalization
has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal
values that used to advocate difference. |
| in so doing, globalization
has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture. from the moment
when the universal disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure
has been left alone to dominate. but this techno-structure now has to
confront new singularities that, without the presence of
universalization to cradle them, are able to and savagely
expand.
history gave universalization its chance. today though, faced with
global order without any alternative on one hand and with
drifting insurrectionary singularities on other, the concepts of
liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. they remain as
ghosts of past.. .. |