21ST CENTURY TALKS EXAMINE
FUTURE FORMS OF CULTURAL GLOBALISATION
Paris, December 5 (No.2000-132)
- The 16th session of the 20th Century Talks, at UNESCO Headquarters on
December 4, focused on the subject “Are We Moving Toward One or
More Forms of Cultural Globalisation? How Can Cultural Diversity Be Preserved?”
with the participation of French sociologist Alain Touraine and Iranian
philosopher Daryush Shayegan.
Jérôme Bindé, Director of
UNESCO’s Division of Anticipation and Prospective Studies, who is in charge of
the 20th Century Talks series, suggested that cultural globalisation,
dating back centuries, cannot be described in terms of market forces alone.
Thinking on globalisation is not unanimous, and can be divided into four
distinct approaches: “There are those who believe in a happy globalisation:
some consider that the planet is headed towards a harmonious coexistence between
culture and civilisation, while the other consider that ‘the steamroller’ of
globalisation will erase cultural differences. There are those who believe that
the world is heading towards a clash of civilisations or towards some kind of
cultural war. There are also those who think that globalisation will, by
definition, be cultural because it will favour the hybridisation of cultures in
various combinations and syntheses of tradition and modernity. Finally,
concerning the fourth approach, globalisation appears to be a fundamentally
cultural process which engenders different forms of violence.”
“Is the world heading towards
a multi-tiered cultural globalisation with the networks revolution and the third
industrial revolution? Is there not a danger that the new media and the new
technologies will contribute to the divorce between cultures and give rise to
cultural dualisation?” Mr Bindé asked. According to him, the struggle for
cultural diversity is not lost: “The 21st century will no doubt see the
arrival of new cultural syntheses of hybrid forms, and the revolution of the
virtual is very likely to contribute to this phenomenon.”
“But what do we mean by
identity?” asked Daryush Shayegan, arguing that identity was formerly embedded
in culture, each culture having its own world, its own history: “Each culture
existed in a closed world, was egocentric. Cultural egocentricity has been
splintered by modernity. Nowadays, the cultures of Islam, China, India, are
poised between the ‘not yet’ - that is to say, a modernity which is taking
root but is not yet assimilated - and the ‘never more’, i.e. a tradition
which is collapsing and which will never revert to its original form.”
Daryush Shayegan’s view of
today’s world, and his understanding of the consequences of the splintering of
identities, led him to declare that “there is no absolute truth nowadays”.
He added: “Cultures fit into one another. Each interprets the world according
to its subjective values. There is no dominant philosophy of interpretation.
Events are pointing towards the rejection of wholesale, monolithic, belief
[systems]. On the other hand, they favour nomadic thinking and hybridisation.”
Mr Shayegan contended that we
live in a world in which we have several identities: “Every being, regardless
of origin, lives in contemporary time and therefore has a modern identity.
Endowed with critical faculties, the modern identity can be multiple and be
considered from an external vantage point. We are at the cross-roads of several
anthropologic fields and we can, as Diderot said, speak in twenty tongues all at
once.”
Alain Touraine, for his part,
focused on the West, the “inventor of modernity”. He considered its
characteristic, and what it is that made it, over six centuries, get such an
amazing head-start and acquire such overwhelming power. The French sociologist
considered that “the West is the only part of the world which has accepted to
base itself on [constant] fracturing. The West, from a cultural standpoint, can
be defined as accepting the total separation between the world of instruments
and the world of self-consciousness.”
Mr Touraine took this point
further still and said that the West will have been the place where the
religious died and where total fracture occurred: “The construction of social
categories, of both action and thought, has followed a single principle:
opposing the positive to the negative, reason to unreason, man to woman, holder
of capital to provider of labour, coloniser to colonised. What characterises the
West, and modernity, is its definition through this fracture, and therefore, the
absence of an ideal model, neither a just society, nor the end of history as a
reference.”
The central question posed by
Mr Touraine is whether it is possible to envisage a rebirth of that which has
disappeared with the advent of “modernity”, i.e. the notions of civilisation,
society and religion. “Is it conceivable that these notions exist again, will
they never exist again?” he asked. “Today, there is a total separation
between the globally present instrumental world and various forms of
desocialised quest, or self-consciousness. We live in a world in which nothing
remains of what could be called a society.”
Mr Touraine considered as
irreversible the process of destruction affecting all societies, cultures and
civilisations. But he argued that it “is possible, perhaps, that a
reprocessing will occur of all the experiences through which the individual is
formed, along with the ability to become an active player, poised to combat this
impersonal, communal and calculating world represented by the world of power. We
seek to live outside this social framework, its rules of organisation and
intervention, we find again the ability to communicate with the part of the
world in which we find elements for reconstruction or for managing all the
dimensions of the individual so as to resist a world devoid of sense, the world
of instrumentality and profit.”
This session of the 20th
Century Talks represented a prospective contribution ahead of the Round
Table of Ministers of Culture (December 11 and 12) which will focus, this year,
on the theme: 2000-2010: Cultural Diversity: Challenges of the Marketplace.
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