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Globalisation and universality are not equivalent terms; in fact they could
be considered to mutually exclude one another. Globalisation pertains to techniques,
the market, tourism, information. Universality pertains to values, human rights,
freedoms, culture, democracy. Globalisation seems to be irreversible, the universal
on the other hand appears to be almost an endangered species. At least in so
far as it constitutes a system of values for Western modernity with no counterpart
in any other culture. No word for a value system which claims to speak with
a single voice for all cultures and their difference, but which, paradoxically,
does not think of itself as relative and sees itself quite ingenuously as the
ultimate transcendent goal of all the others. We do not imagine for one moment
that the universal might refer only to localised Western thought, a product
that is specific to the West, which, original though it may be, is in the final
analysis, every bit as difficult to export as any other local product. Yet that
is exactly how the Japanese see the universal, as something specifically Western,
and far from adopting this abstract concept, they take what for us is universal
and, in a curious reversal, make it relative and incorporate it into their own
singularity.
Any culture worthy of the name loses itself in the universal. Any culture that
makes itself universal loses its singularity and, gradually dies. This is the
case for the cultures we have destroyed by assimilating them by force, but it
is also the case for our own, in its claim to be universal. The difference is
that the others have died of their singularity and that is a noble death whereas
we are dying from the loss of all singularity, from the extermination of our
values, and that is not a noble death.
We think that the destiny of any single value is its elevation to the /universal
without taking heed of the mortal danger that this promotion represents. Rather
than an elevation, it is a reduction or shall we say an elevation to a degree
zero of value. At the time of the Enlightenment, universalisation was a top
down affair, in a process of continuous advancement. Today, it is bottom up
and involves a neutralisation of values as a result of their proliferation and
their endless dispersal. And so it is for human rights, for democracy, etc.,
they expand according to the law of the lowest common denominator, to a point
of maximum entropy. The Xerox degree of value. In fact, the universal perishes
with globalisation. When the dynamic of the universal as transcendence, as ideal,
and as utopia becomes a reality, it ceases to exist as transcendence, as ideal,
as utopia. The gobalisation of exchange puts an end to the universality of values.
It is the triumph of monothought over universal thought.
What is globalised is first of all the market, the promiscuity of exchange
of anything and everything, the perpetual movement of money. Culturally speaking,
this is the anything goes promiscuity of the signifier and of values; in other
words, pornography. The endless stream flooding the net with anything and everything,
this is pornography. No need for sexual indecency, the simple existence of this
interactive copulation is all it takes. At the end of this process, there is
no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal
is itself globalised, democracy, human rights circulate in exactly
the same way, through exactly the same channels as any global product: like
oil or capital.
What happens with the passage from the universal to the global is at once a
homogenisation and an infinite fragmenting of the system. The global interconnection
of networks is doubled by a dislocation of the fragments moving further and
further apart from each other - like a sky rocket that explodes and shatters
at its highest point then scatters in a thousand fragments. What takes the place
the central is not the local, it's the dis-located. What takes the place of
the cencentric is not the de-centered but the offcenter. Disintegration of the
universal. Virtual totalitarianism: "www:// ization of the world"
and fragmentation.
Globalisation is both homogenisation and increasing discrimination. Marginalisation
and exclusion, are no accident: they are in the very logic of globalisation
which, unlike the universal, breaks apart the existing structures, all the better
to assimilate them. On every level the gaps grow wider, become irreversible.
A little like the universe where the galaxies are moving away from one another
at such prodigious speeds. If this is the case, one might well ask whether the
universal hasn't already succumbed under the weight of its own critical mass,
whether it ever had any real existence other than in official discourse and
moral codes. In any event, for us, the mirror of the universal is shattered
(one could even see it as a kind of mirror stage of humanity). But this is perhaps
a good thing because, in the fragments of this shattered mirror of the universal,
all singularities reemerge. Those that we believed threatened are surviving;
those we believed had disappeared are coming back to life. Japan, once again,
is a remarkable case in point. Japan, better than any other country, has made
a success of globalisation (technical, economic, financial) without going through
the phase of the universal (the succession of middle-class ideologies and forms
of political organisation) and without losing anything of its singularity, despite
what is said to the contrary. One could even say that it is precisely because
Japan was never lumbered with the concept of the universal that it succeeded
so well technically and globally, by bringing together the singular (the power
of tradition) and the global (the power of the virtual, that is, the internet
revolution ).
Behind the increasingly fierce resistance to globalisation, social and political
resistance which can seem like an archaic refusal of modernity at all costs,
one cannot but read a reaction against the domination of the universal, a kind
of painful revisionism in respect to the achievements of modernity, and in respect
to the idea of progress and of History, a rejection not only of the (in)famous
global techno-structure, but of the underlying monoculturalism, the mental structure
that places all cultures, from every continent under the one sign of the universal.
This resurgence, or, one might even say, this "insurrection" of singularity
can take on violent, anomalous, irrational forms from the perspective of (so-called)
"enlightened" thought; ethnic, religious, linguistic, but also on
an individual level, forms of neurosis and personality disorder. But it would
be a monumental error (the same error which can be seen in the moralistic orchestration
of political correctness common to all power structures and the majority of
"intellectuals") to write off these movements of revolt as populist,
archaic, or even terrorist. Every event that makes its mark in the world today,
does so in reaction to this abstract universality (including the antagonism
of Islam towards Western values - it is because Islam is the most violent critic
of this Western globalisation that Islam is public enemy number one today).
If we refuse to understand this, we will exhaust ourselves in an endless contest
between a universal thought sure of its power and sure of its rightness, and
an ever increasing number of irreducible singularities. Even in our societies,
which are thoroughly acculturated to the universal, it is clear that nothing
that has been sacrificed to this concept has truly disappeared. It has simply
gone underground. And what is being played out in reverse today is an entire
history supposedly progressivist, an entire evolutionism cristallised around
its ultimate end, which, moreover, has been completely lost sight of in the
meantime. Today this utopia is dislocated, and its dislocation at the deepest
levels is proceeding even faster than its imposition by force.
What we are dealing with here is a complex three level process: the globalisation
of exchange, the universality of values and the singularity of forms (languages,
cultures, individuals, character types, but also chance, accident etc.- everything
the universal is bound to reject as exception or anomaly). But, the situation
is changing and is becoming more and more extreme as universal values lose their
authority and legitimacy. As long as they were accepted as mediating values,
they succeeded (more or less) in integrating singularities as differences within
a universal culture of difference. But today they are no longer able to do so
because globalisation triumphant is razing to the ground every difference and
every value, generating a perfectly indifferent (non)culture. And all that is
left, once the universal is gone, is the all-mighty global techno-structure
on the one hand and singularities abandoned to their own wild devices on the
other.
The universal has had its day in history. But today, caught between a monolithic
global order, an unconditional globalisation, and the stubborn insurrection
of singularities erratic, concepts of freedom, democracy and human rights pale
into insignificance, mere ghosts of a lost universal. And it is difficult to
imagine that they could be reborn from their ashes by the mere play of the political
- which is caught up in the same process of deregulation and whose foundations
are almost as flimsy as those of moral and intellectual authority.
But the die has not yet been cast, even if for universal values, all bets are
definitely off The stakes have risen and globalisation is by no means a sure
winner. Everywhere its dissolving and homogenising force is being challenged
by emerging forces heterogeneous in nature, which are not only different but
antagonistic and irreducible.
What may emerge, out of the shattering of the global system, are singularities.
Now, these singularities are neither negative nor positive. They are not an
alternative to global order, they are on a different scale. They are not subject
to value judgements; so they can be either the best or the worst. Their one
absolute saving grace is to allow us to break out of the straitjacket of totality.
They cannot be federated in a single historical move. They are the despair of
every would-be dominant monothought. But they are not a monocounterthought.
They invent their own rules of the game, and their most likely fate is the fate
of heresies: to be eradicated by global orthodoxy.
This is what the Fourth World War will be about, and it will be the only truly
world war, since its stakes are globalisation itself. Culture itself started
off as a singularity. That is, an incomparable, irreducible, inexchangeable
form. Then came the concept of universal culture. Then the current globalisation
of a culture which had become a global product. I would like to talk a little
more about this "fate of culture" which poses for each of us, within
the context of the global, the problem of cultural identity.
I remember a highly symbolic conference on European culture held a few years
ago in Venice - highly symbolic in a city of such perennial fame, yet which
is continuously disappearing and being restored. [The Argentinian writer,] Jorge-Luis
Borges, who was there, summed up the situation revealingly by saying that he
was in fact the only "true European" present in that gathering. The
only one (together with the representatives of certain Eastern European countries)
to have a positive dream for Europe, to have kept a living image of Europe,
to cultivate the idea of Europe, that is, an idea of the universal, of culture
and not merely the idea of a defense organisation desperately seeking its identity.
America, for its part, has no real identity problem. It is a product of the
simultaneous performance of contradictory forces. America is all about excess;
Europe is about default. And the problem of this virtual Europe, of this entity,
constructed artificially, often against public opinion and peoples, is without
doubt its current difficulty in sustaining its historic role in the global power
game.
Europe proposes, politically no doubt, and economically with the Euro, to create
an original entity, a kind of European exception (on the model of the "French
cultural exception"), in any case, a counter weight to globalisation -
the globalisation which in our imagination we associate with the United States.
But, on the one hand, even as a unified concept, Europe is only ever a way-station,
a by-product, a branch office of this globalisation. On the other hand, America,
by the very fact that it is everywhere, and that it permeates - in terms of
culture, economics, mores, technology - every country, every continent, every
individual, for this reason America is not the real site of globalisation. The
entire world is the site of globalisation and the entire world is the site of
resistance to globalisation.
In other words, and however much we may resist it, America is in each and every
one of us and we are, each and every one of us, in some way Americans. At the
same time, America is really nothing more than an all powerful idea, a concept,
and what the rest of the world has to oppose this concept with is the fact of
its real existence. Beyond its economic, political and strategic power, over
a century or more, America has become our primal scene. The primal scene of
modernity. Which should not be confused with its origin. The historical origin
of modernity is in Europe. But for some time now, in everyone's mind, its mythological,
trans-historical and almost unconscious point of reference has been America.
It is the catalyst or the strange attractor of all modernity, the dynamic principle
of a planetary "New Frontier" of globalisation and no-one can say
where this globalisation is leading us. If anyone is to be responsible for this
process, it can only be America. And even if Europe, or later the rest of the
world, follows suit and adopts the same model, it will be within the context
of a relationship that is ever more ambiguous and ever more competitive. For
strange attractors attract counter-motivations which are every bit as strange.
Globalisation itself is an ambiguous concept. It is not really a concept at
all, it is a fact, an apparently irresistible one, but precisely because no
one has a monopoly on it, it runs the risk of becoming a fact at everyone's
expense. What it produces above all, is an increasing global inequality - in
every country (including America) a larger and larger mass of excluded people,
who may one day reach a point of critical mass. There are, as they say, the
winners and the losers of the universal. In any case, the absolute canonization
of any model creates insoluble contradictions. For the enemy no longer comes
from the outside. It comes from the inside, from the absolute success of the
model. Besides, it is not at all certain that modernity itself has been fundamentally
accepted, as a product of a kind of universal evolutionism, and as an indisputable
utopia. The idea of modernity is universally accepted but not the fact. And
Europe remains the scene, the historical platform of a conflict between modernity
and challenge to modernity (also evident in the contradictory play of the signs
of modernity). Or rather one gets the impression that modernity and counter-modernity
overlap like tectonic plates, that behaviour patterns, whether they be traditional,
religious, linguistic, nationalistic or individual, irrational and archaic,
exist side by side with the automatic reflex behaviours of modernity or that
these behaviours are simply layered over the others without changing them in
any way. No doubt, even reactionary behaviour is strengthened as a result of
the movement of modernity, instead of being absorbed by it. If this is so, it
is a conflict for which there is no solution. In Europe at least, the suspense
and the ambiguity remain total.
In any case, culture itself, as a universal form, is a figure of exile and
of transcendence. The aesthetic and critical charm of European culture came
from this virtual quality - at least in the modern period - from the exile,
physical or mental, of the great creators and the great works from their own
societies. Culture does not translate the identity of a society, the immanence
of a system of values. On the contrary, culture is transcendence, disavowal,
challenge, distance, (the "pathos of distance" as Nietzsche, the first
great European put it himself, and he spoke always, of Europe from the depths
of exile). This is why, whatever one does, culture is irreducible and ungraspable
- this is what remains of its singularity even at the heart of the universal.
This is why all ministries of culture are a joke. Nothing can be done for culture.
Either a society is capable of this act of brilliance, of this brilliant singularity,
of this prestigious form, and then it, does not even ask questions about its
own culture. It simply is, that is all, (primitive cultures, anthropological
cultures are an obvious case in point). The same is true for communication;
if and when communication happens, the question of communication is not even
put, there is no word for it. Or else, a society is incapable of creating a
true culture, and then, its cultural identity becomes an issue, and at that
point all is lost, for a society can never identify itself, will never verify
its reality in its culture. At best, it ??????????? of its own disappearance
in its most beautiful or most radical forms. To put it simply, in plain language,
culture is the ?????????????????? Culture is a luxury. If it is not a
luxury, it loses its raison d'être, it is nothing. No society ever waited
until everyone had enough to eat to play with words and signs. If culture is
to be subordinated to needs or problems of under-development, if it is to become
the ration of messages and information to which every individual is entitled
(that he/she is compelled to consume or else become a social outcast) if it
must be produced and promoted at all levels as purely and simply a form of communication,
then it is clear that culture has completely lost its meaning. And this is not
a nostalgic, elitist recrimination. Neither luxury nor culture have any meaning
when the supreme goal has become the economic and functional management of existence.
Culture loses all meaning when it is defined by cultural identity, that is by
a pure and simple statement of existence - when it becomes nothing more than
a signature…
Culture is a form of glory - it implies notion of sovereignty. Identity is
a poor value: there is always something vain and useless about demanding identity.
It is an aftereffect of the colonisation of mental space and the failure of
its decolonisation. Culture is a symbolic pact. Once it solidifies as a heritage,
as power, as appropriation, as identity, once it becomes signature, that is,
a material image of this power, it is all over. Finished. We could repeat what
Hannah Arendt said of power: "What saps and ends up killing political communities",
she said, "is the loss of power and ultimate powerlessness. But power (and
culture) cannot be stockpiled and kept for emergencies, like instruments of
violence: it exists only as act. Power which does not become action disappears
and history demonstrates with a host of examples that the greatest material
riches cannot not make up for such a loss."
That is what culture is, in its highly singular and original form. Let us now
look at what it has become at the global level.
Culture (understood as cultural production and consumption) is a mirror of
material production. And material production, since the 1929 Crash, has been
in a state of overproduction, or in a state of threatening overproduction. Already
in 1929, growth was giving way to excessive or "over-growth". And
ever since, this "overgrowth" (and not growth) has kept our societies
in a state of increasingly acute economic crisis - interrupted, on by wars and
the economic recovery that destruction carries within it, all of this being
only cure for excess growth. We can say then that the fundamental catastrophe
remains the excessive growth that globalisation continues to intensify. The
other antidote to exponential growth, besides wars, is the Stock Market Crash
(but the latter would appear to be less and less effective, since it is now
only virtual and involves only speculative capital.
The same diagnosis could be made of culture, and the other Crash threatening
us is that of cultural overproduction. The powers that be would have us believe
that in the cultural market place, unlike in the commodity marketplace, demand
still exceeds supply and will continue to do so for a good while yet. The people
supposedly have an insatiable hunger for cultural goods. And so we get a guaranteed
boom in all cultural "values or securities". In fact, this is not
at all the case. In the cultural economy of the average citizen (if such a thing
exists), there is a noticeable surplus of supply over demand. It is like/just
the same as at the supermarket. The illimited promotion of cultural products
already far exceeds human capacity to absorb them. The average person no longer
even has the time to consume his own cultural products, let alone those of others.
The public does its best: people run round from one exhibition to another, from
one film festival to another but their capacity or cultural labour is stretched
to the limit. What results from this is an original form of cultural alienation,
not due to lack or deprivation, but to surplus and saturation. In this new context,
the degree of cultural alienation, that is of being held hostage by culture
(by its ads., its media, its institutions) comes close to the degree of voluntary
submission in politics. The public supposedly wants even more of this culture;
one can never have too much of it. Well that is a colossal illusion and error
of perspective. The same is said about information too: one can never have too
much of it. Always more information. Always more transparency And we can see
the effects that are as murderous as they are contradictory. But in the case
of culture, the situation is even more serious. For, either culture is a singular
language, the idiom of a particular group or society and in that case it has
its own finality, and is not at all infinitely expandable (its promotion and
its proliferation on the contrary signify its death); it is like natural languages,
both open to an infinite internal complexity and strictly limited in their structure
and constitutive elements - if this were not so, they would not be languages.
Well, either culture is a singularity of this kind, or else it is what it has
become: a market with all the effects of artificial shortage, spiraling values
and speculation. And, as soon as one tends to confuse these exponential market
factors with irresistible cultural progress, what looms on the horizon is the
same reversal as occurred in the 1929 crisis in material production: overproduction,
priority of supply over demand, the end of `natural' assumptions about an economy
that had become speculative, virtual and completely cut off from real wealth
and real economic requirements. This is exactly what lies in wait for culture
and a cultural market turned speculative. And there could very easily be like
Black Thursday on Wall Street in 1929, a Black Sunday of culture.
The expansion of cultural production far surpasses the expansion of material
production, and the result is cultural bottlenecks that are even more monstrous
than blockages in the economy or our constantly paralysed traffic systems. For,
in the open field of communication, anyone can produce gestures, texts, colours,
signs and meanings, spontaneously and indefinitely in a kind of uninterrupted
interchange. Anyone can stage his or her own performance, unfortunately in total
indifference to the other, or with only a token superficial consent and in a
certain sense this is unavoidable for how can these countless productions be
adequately provided for? And if, to a certain extent, we have managed to, ward
off economic crisis by opening cultural markets (particularly in France, where
it is actually obvious that culture is a political instrument) who will save
us from cultural overproduction when this market, in its turn, is saturated?
Perhaps we will have to undertake a massive destruction of cultural values to
save the stock market value of the sign, the stock market value of the cultural
artifact, just as they once burned coffee in the furnaces of steam engine locomotives
so as to to save the world price of coffee.
Already most non-material goods are meeting the same fate as material goods:
forced production, forced advertising, accelerated recycling, built-in obsolescence.
Art becomes ephemeral, not so as to express the ephemeral nature of life, but
to adapt to the transience of the m?..arket. Rather than decadent, art is now degradable
in line with the biodegradability of the physical world. Such is the fate of
our cultural signs, be the disinvested or of transvestite nature, they are part
of the pure and simple discount of degradable products.
Multimedia technology is presented to us as a marvelous means of access to
culture - a technology that is at last able to meet this need, this cultural
demand. But the very terms of "need" and "demand" are completely
false and reductive. As for the expression "access to culture", it
is nothing short of monstrous, with the impression it gives that we queue up
at a box-office window and finally get our cultural entitlement. What we have
here is a frightening demagogy, under the dual sign of cultural entitlement
and universal consumption. In fact, culture has become a kind of undifferentiated
universal, into which everything can be incorporated as separate elements progressively
disseminated, consumed as quickly as they are produced. If everything is information,
the corollary is that everything is culture. And if culture is a product, then
in fact it must be marketed, it must circulate, everyone has a right to it,
like the right to healthcare, etc. But the cultural deficit, like the health
budget deficit, will increase with the increase in demand. In fact, the consumption
of health care and of medicines has only a distant relationship with health.
Similarly, the consumption of cultural goods has only a distant relationship
with the singularity of culture. And so one is forced to ask the question: what
if information referred not to an event but to the promotion of information
itself as event. And if communication no longer referred to a message, but to
the promotion of communication itself as event and as message? And, enfin, -
last but not least - what if culture itself referred not to the world of the
senses or the imagination, but to the promotion of culture itself as event or
pseudo-event? It is at this point that McLuhan's forty year old formula becomes
absolutely luminous: the medium has swallowed the message, and it is the multimedium
that proliferates in all directions.
In the globalisation of exchange, culture becomes another fetish product, like
Levis, Coca-cola, McDonalds - totemic brand names which penetrated the imaginary
at the same time as they penetrated the real market. They are part of a universal
language, the language of advertising, untranslatable into any other language.
There is no other definition of these products except that of their brand, their
code name. Jeans, for example, cannot even be inscribed within a system of clothing
and fashion, other than as its vanishing point, its degree zero. It is in this
capacity that jeans have become the universal non-dress, its birthday suit so
to speak, (at least as they were first conceived). You could also say that the
Big Mac is the degree zero of food, that Coke is the degree zero of drinks.
You could also say that the Human Rights are the degree zero of democracy, and
that the postmodern is the degree zero of the concept.
All these globalised objects are the reflection of an undifferentiated society,
or of a society in the process of becoming undifferentiated. To reach this point
(of indifferentiation), in the case of jeans, for example, an entire process
had first to be set in motion: a progressive in-difference of the body to clothing,
a progressive indifference of clothing to gender and social status. A specifically
modern process of liberation was necessary. Not liberation as we understand
it: historical, political, sexual, but liberation in the sense that beings,
objects, functions, have been liberated one from the other, and have thus become
"indifferent" to one another. Clothing has been liberated from the
body, it no longer signifies moral constraints, or specific cultural identity
- it is no longer a singular object. It is a global object.
Jeans, coca-cola are thus part of a whole series of concrete universals, of
products, of goods, of signs which have achieved a kind of imaginary consensus,
which have invaded a global space that has become a giant bill board, in the
image of Hollywood stars and show-biz, and which have taken the place of the
good old universals of thought and of philosophy - of which they are still,
none the less, perhaps, the ironic incarnation. Could jeans be the ironic postmodern
incarnation of the Rights of Man? Once there were Universals: general concepts,
generic concepts. There are now global objects, which, take the process even
further than jeans and Mcdonalds: and these are: the market itself, pornography
and, one could even say, pourquoi pas, why not - culture.
A final note on. globalisation.
It is not the fact that cultural goods become a market and a marketable product,
that is dangerous, it is not the fact that aesthetic values become an exchange
value or a speculative value, that is pernicious. What is dangerous, we might
say, is the fact that economic values, market values, prices, money, speculation,
become an aesthetic value, the source of judgement, of pleasure and of aesthetic
fascination.
There is no shortage of protest at the potential of cultural products and works
of art to become marketable goods: this is considered as the ultimate in alienation.
But true alienation is that everything becomes an aesthetic and cultural object
and that the worst banality of everyday life itself becomes a work of art, in
sit-corns, reality TV or Big Brother [Temptation Island]. It all started with
Duchamp and now it's ending as generalised "culturisation." The true
violence done to people and things, the violence of globalisation, is not a
commercial and economic violence, it is a cultural and aesthetic violence (in
the same way that true genetic violence is not that of biological cloning but
of cultural cloning).
All singular cultures, politics, art itself are giving in to culture as universal
standard - design culture, Disney culture, which are the opposite of culture
as destiny.
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