 |
…
Globalisation does not exist. Ce que nous appelons mondialisation
/ globalisation n’est que la projection / réflexion de nos fantasmes et
de nos peurs. While the former deals with the totality of things and beings in an ordered
system, the latter is concerned with the whole, like a round box, putting
aside the details. But this difference of emphasises does not imply that
one exists more than the other, both being complementary creations of
the mind feeding on each other, giving a raison d’être to each other.
While globalisation is a historical and fundamental contradiction (1) as well as
a mean of control, mondialisation is an utopia and a system of disciplines.
On Jun 29th, 2006, celebrating “one
of the most accomplished bilateral relationship in history”, President
George W. Bush of the United States and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi
of Japan declared in a joint statement a new global alliance for the 21st
century. A new global alliance not only in term of security but also on
the basis of shared “core universal
values such as freedom, human dignity and human rights, democracy, market
economy and the rule of law” (2).
Imagined bodies and rationality
It
seems to me scientifically unsound, politically incoherent and historically
incorrect to talk about the world without talking about what it is made
of. Unless this content is thought of as given, reduced to its lowest
common denominator. This content being people, societies and cultures.
However ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ this content may be,
however ignorant we choose to be of the details, or, by the same token,
however close to god we want to elevate him; whether it is Hobbes’ state
of nature or Sahlins’ original affluent society the object remains: Man
among Men. From the Christ on the cross to the Middle Age public corporal
punishments (3), from the European slave trade to today’s mass consumption
society, traditionally and historically the West has related to the Other
in material terms, whether it is sexuality, war, races, power, wealth
or progress. From the age of enlightenment to North-South relations the
modern world was born out of the body. To clearly understand this continuity
and this function of the body, one must consider separately Mayan human
sacrifice or Japan ritual of seppuku for instance (4). In contact with
the Other and in the absence of a common system to refer to, it seems
fair to assume that the body becomes our first reference, our first common
language. In turn, in contact with the Other and out of the body rationality
as a system emerges. But behind the body, more than life itself, it is
an obsession with death that has filtered through, an obsession that has
driven this modern world. Simply put, death means rupture. Brought to
its theoretical extreme, individual rights, along the line of reason,
means death. But it is death in the first place, the death of the body,
which brought about rationality and the age of Enlightenment (5). Not
only death itself, but also the way it was approached, its incestuous
unity with life, its blurred borders. From here, to try to establish further
causal relationships would lead to nowhere. Individual rights, reason,
consciousness, all are linked to each other in a single closed unit. Death
is a dead end. The philosophical question then becomes: how do we move
forward? And this so more than ever as the natural continuity of life
has been broken. How do we acknowledge history and this broken continuity
at the same time? How do we reconcile death with the present? How do we
bring the present into the future? Because there is no end. There can
not be an end. End cannot be an end in itself, whatever form we give it.
There is only life and movement, only dynamics at work. We thus arrive
at the idea of an open complete system at the edge of which we stand.
The chaos we stare at on the outside is the necessary balance and reflection
of our own fear, of our own chaos in the inside. The backbone of this
system is the movement, the new: the perpetuity of the present in the
future. To quote Michel Foucault in his famous text What is Enlightenment?:
“This philosophical ethos may be
characterised as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture
of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we
have to be at the frontiers” (6). On the other hand, the theoretical
model of the closed complete system is regulated by order on the outside.
That is, an order which does not interfere inside. Order is thereby defined
as elsewhere (7). In either system there is no room for the totality a
globalised world. Commenting on last year war in Lebanon between Israel
and the Hezbollah and trying to explain the wider regional dynamic at
work, John Tierney argued that the honour system in the Middle East was
the main obstacle to peace as it was not possible “to
placate the enemy with the kind of concessions that appeal to Western
diplomats” (8). In Le Monde newspaper, under the headline La résistance du Hezbollah
provoque un débat en Israël, Benjamin Barthe pointed out
that while Israel was unable “to change the rules of the game”, the Hezbollah,
just like the Palestinians people, were waging an absolute war, a war
of totality: “ils appréhendent leur lutte
en termes absolus” (9). A total war, a war of
totalities, a war without peace or collapse, a never ending war. A never
ending dynamic of blood.
Imagined futures and revolution
Now,
can this movement be reduced to a simple mathematical formula, to a series
of closed units next to each other resulting in yet another closed unit?
And what would such a movement be? It is often asked what would you do
if you win the lottery. The answer often given is ‘I would stop working’.
It is not the answer that is quick, thoughtless or even childish but it
is the adult interpretation of this answer that is cold, empty and calculated.
Such an answer is actually the most coherent possible as it is in the
continuation of the dream exposed in the original question. Should the
movement be reduced to a simple mathematical formula the dream would have
to be removed. To reduce man to its lowest common denominator is to kill
the dream and the movement. To reduce man to its lowest common denominator
is to consider the present in a given whole, without movement. To push
to a higher level, to enlarge life, so to speak, to include the dream
is to be on the edge, is to bring the present into the future, is the
movement. This movement is a basculement. A basculement, not a collapse. A movement that necessarily includes ourselves. Recalling
the original meaning of the word revolution, a circular movement, un mouvement qui boucle la boucle, and distinguishing between revolt and revolution, Albert Camus writes
“Le mouvement de révolte à l’origine tourne
court. Il n’est qu’un témoignage sans cohérence. La révolution commence
au contraire à partir de l’idée. Précisément elle est l’insertion
de l’idée dans l’expérience historique quand la révolte est seulement
le mouvement qui mène de l’expérience individuelle à l’idée.
Alors que l’histoire, même collective, d’un mouvement de révolte,
est toujours celle d’un engagement sans issue dans les faits, d’une protestation
obscure qui n’engage ni systèmes ni raisons, une révolution est
une tentative pour modeler l’acte sur l’idée, pour façonner le monde dans
un cadre théorique ”. And Camus to conclude: “C’est pourquoi la révolte
tue des hommes alors que la révolution détruit à la fois des hommes
et des principes. Mais pour les même raisons, on peut dire qu’il
n’y a pas encore eu de révolution dans l’histoire. Il ne peut en avoir
qu’une qui serait la révolution définitive” (10).
A final revolution which is no to be confused with Leon Trotsky’s permanent
revolution: “for an indefinitely
long time and in constant internal struggle, all social relations undergo
transformation. Society keeps on changing its skin. Each stage of transformation
stems directly from the preceding. This process necessarily retains a
political character, that is, it develops through collisions between various
groups in the society which is in transformation. Outbreaks of civil war
and foreign wars alternate with periods of ‘peaceful’ reform ”. And
Trotsky to continue: “Revolutions
in economy, technique, science, the family, morals and everyday life develop
in complex reciprocal action and do not allow society to achieve equilibrium.
Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such”
(11). Both thinkers are faced with the same problem in defining the concept
of revolution. They look in opposite direction for the answer and they
both end up with the same neutralising characteristic. They both try to
assign to the revolution an object, to give it an end, making it thereby
a static and finite social phenomenon. They both miss the point, the dynamic,
the movement. Camus disregards the process of revolt as a témoignage sans cohérence, a protestation obscure and Trotsky fails to recognise the equilibrium contained in the dynamic
he describes. An equilibrium otherwise highlighted by Edwy Plenel, ex
editor-in-chief of Le Monde, when he describes May 68 in France as “une révolte des individus : la conquête des droits
collectifs par les libertés individuelles ; une liberté collective par
le droit des individus” (12).
Imagined worlds and globalisation
In
other word, the revolution does not exist. The revolution is only an image,
a call. The revolution only points to a direction, to an attitude. The
revolution is only a movement. An endless movement. A movement without
object. A revolution that is the object itself, the object of the movement
and at the same time which does not exist. A revolution which only exists
as an aspiration. A revolution whose essence is the dream. In her article
on bergosian politics and the foundation of the open society (interestingly
enough at no point does she use the word globalisation) Paola Marrati
insists on the following: “the opening
is nothing but a tendency or an attitude […]
The opening as opening does not have an object. Every object assigned
to it from the outset, even if it were the entire universe, would close
it.” (13) Given the original meaning of the word revolution stated
earlier, a circular movement, its use in a political context implies a
fundamental change. That is, a change which directly affects time and
/ or space, both dimensions being themselves directly related to each
other. Consequently, the globalisation process is a revolution in the
literal sense. Its scope, the globe, the world, le monde, entitles
it to be characterised as a revolution, even if the two words are rarely
or never put together in an obvious manner. While Pierre Bourdieu talks
of a “révolution conservatrice d’un
type nouveau” (14) and Zakin Maïdi
writes “qu’on le veuille ou non, c’est
le néolibéralisme qui est devenu, à la fin du XXe siècle,
le fer de lance de la révolution mondiale” (15),
none of those two scholars, in those two papers, clearly state that globalisation
is a revolution. And rightly so, because as soon as this relation is acknowledged,
simultaneously, at the exact same time, it is given an object, the world,
and the opening it implies in the first place, the dynamic it is supposed
to be stops to exist. As soon as it is named, it stops to carry the dream
embodied in it. To say that globalisation does not exist is as true as
to say water is wet. What is left however is a consciousness, images,
dreams, feelings, a taste on the tongue, multiple creations of the mind.
Where does all this fit in a world that suddenly does not exist? Suddenly
left on our own with nothing and no one to believe in but ourselves, how
do we move forward, how do we bring the present into the future? Left
on our own, so is every one of us. Left on our own among others we are
left to directly believe in and deal with the other. This is called politics.
A borrowing from the field of psychology will show us that someone who
does not trust himself cannot trust the other. Put the other way round,
to trust ourselves is to be able to trust the other. Politics, precisely
what globalisation is missing. Precisely what the media are failing to
convey at the world level. Of all the media, cinema and the Internet can
probably be considered the most global. While cinema provides a common
mythology, an envelop, a common system to refer to, the Internet and its
associated interactivity create individualities. Individualities, that
is, individual on their own but without politics. There is no spontaneous
dynamics in the Internet system. The only dynamic is structural. (16)
Hence we have an artificial system made of isolated individuals. But isolated
individual who have dreams. Dreams fed by this common mythology. There
are dreams but there is no corresponding reality. A system which can be
compared, at best, to a graft with the dream as its sap.
Globalisation
is nothing but dreams and promises based on faith. To take just one example,
the so-called global village is not meant to be a reality but to be, as
well as to carry, an image of a happy future, a future necessarily better,
a reflection of the original good time before time was created. It is
the promise to close the circle, the promise of Camus’ final revolution,
the promise of Christianity’s eternal peace. La
boucle is indeed bouclée. The inside and the outside, the now and the future, the content and the
container, the dynamic and its river bed: here are the differences that
matter precisely because they no longer do matter. In their presentation
of the project Imagined Futures (17), what Prof. Dr. Thomas Elsaesser
and Dr. Wanda Strauven are talking about is not the future, not even the
future of the past, what they are talking about is history in the making,
is the present, is the movement: “Insight
may prove few of these predictions accurate, but this is precisely their
interest for the media scholar, because of what they tell us of imagined
futures as part of the virtual present in every epoch” (18). To give
it an object, whether it is the world or the future, is to neutralise
it, to close it. In a world in the making, in progress, in a world constantly
looking beyond the horizon, dreams are all the more important, dreams
becomes the reality. How does the dream fit in the political process?
How does the process of globalisation account for the body? From the cold
war to the remaking of Solaris, from the political process of personagification
(19) to Hollywood’s ‘acting renaissance’ (20) how do we move from a body-system
to a character-system and back to the body? On September 1st,
2006, in an article entitled Le nouveau visage de la mondialisation, Frédéric Lemaître, observing the recent trend
of investment from the South to the North exemplified by Mittal’s take-over
of Arcelor, writes “l’actualité fournit chaque
semaine de nouveaux exemples de cette mondialisation à l’envers”. On December 11th, 2006, interviewed in the French public
channel broadcast Complément d’enquête, Bernard Arnault, chairman and managing director of LVMH, observing that
his group was producing in France, declared “mon groupe
français fait un petit peu la mondialisation à l’envers”.…
____________
1 An historical contradiction, that is, from the
perspective of the West. From the perspective of non-occidental cultures
it could be argued that globalisation has always existed. The Supreme
Beings of various societies around the world come to mind. They were /
are not directly concerned with people’s everyday life but with the wider
universe. See, for instance, African
Conversion by Robin Horton in Africa, N° 41, 1971.
2 White House press release on http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060629-2.html.
See also Koizumi, Bush trumpet new
global-scale alliance in The Japan Times, Friday, Jun 30th,
2006, front page.
3 See the first
chapter of Michel Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, 1975: The Body of the Condemned, pp. 9-40.
4 Regarding the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the body mutilations during the Sierra Leon civil war of the 1990s it is again through the continuity and function of the body that one must look to understand what happened.
5 Here, for instance, one can think of the Black
Plague or Black Death which devastated Europe in the mid 14th
century. Up to a third of Europe’s population died according to some estimates.
6 What is
Enlightenment ? in The
Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault, Paul Rabinow Editor, 1984, pp.
32-50: 45.
7 On this idea of open and closed complete systems
the work of Lacan on subject formation is of particular interest.
8 Hezbollah’s
Honor, article by John Tierney in The International Herald Tribune,
Asian edition, Wednesday, July 26th, 2006, page 7.
9 La résistance du Hezbollah provoque
un débat en Israël, article by Benjamin Barthe in the French daily newspaper Le Monde, Thursday,
July 20th, 2006, pages 1 and 4.
10 L’homme révolté (The Rebel), Albert Camus, éditions Gallimard, 1951, Part III (Historical Rebellion): 134.
11 The Permanent
Revolution, Leon Trotsky, Introduction to the first (Russian) edition
published in Berlin, 1931, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/pdf/prrp.pdf: 153.
12 Au vif : En défense de Mai 68, editorial by Edwy Plenel, Le Monde 2, Wednesday,
November 3rd, 2004.
13 Mysticism and the foundation of the Open Society:
Bergsonian Politics, lecture by Paola Marrati at the 2004 international conference on Political Theologies: Globalisation and Post-Secular
Reason held at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA, University
of Amsterdam) and reproduced in the ASCA Annual Report 2004, pp. 75-90:
86.
14 Le mythe de la « mondialisation »
et l’Etat social européen, lecture by Pierre Bourdieu at the
General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) in Athens in October 1996
and reproduced in Contre-Feux,
Liber, Raison d’agir, 1998, http://www.homme-moderne.org/societe/socio/bourdieu/contrefeu/mythe.rtf:
3.
15 Les imaginaires de la mondialisation
(not to be confused with L’imaginaire
mondialisation),
by Zaki Laïdi, published in the French literary magazine Esprit, N° 246, October 1998, pp. 85-98, http://www.laidi.com/papiers/esprit246.pdf:
8. In this paper Zaki Laïdi, researcher at the CNRS in France (CERI),
writes “Si
l’on veut réfléchir à la mondialisation en la considérant comme
un fait social et plus seulement comme l’expression comptable d’interdépendances
croissantes entre économies, il convient alors de la considérer en premier
lieu comme un imaginaire. En effet, la mondialisation n’existe que par
les représentations qu’elle dégage”.
He distinguishes five mains components of this imaginaire social: modern life style, daily world events, shared
feelings across borders through the media, the market and the discourse.
Immigration and movements of people, which ought to be the best measure
of any globalisation process, are nowhere discussed.
16 Natacha Polony, journalist at the French weekly newsmagazines Marriane and talking on the issue of internet and politics in the public broadcast Mots Croisés on November 20th, 2006, argued: “[…] Toute la question c’est est-ce que ça crée du collectif ou est-ce que ça laisse des individualités seules ? […] voilà, l’interactivité ça ne crée pas du collectif, ça ne crée pas du politique […] et c’est toute la question à se poser”(35th minute).
17 See the Amsterdam
School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam (UVA),
Faculties of Humanities, http://www.hum.uva.nl/asca/research.cfm,
research program IV: Media and Culture, Project 5: Imagined Futures.
18 Here, one must
take into account the traditional difference made in the field of anthropology
between circular and linear time, between “primitive” and modern societies:
“L’idée que nous pouvons nous
faire du temps des autres et du nôtre est profondément transformée par
l’étude minutieuse des formes les plus courantes, les plus quotidiennes
de la communication. Les conversations, les énoncés inachevés, les prises
de position ambiguës, voire les jeux de mots, nous renvoient à
des comportements sociaux dont l’issue est beaucoup moins certaine que
l’enchaînement mécanique d’un rite ou la récitation automatique d’une
prière”. While this remark calls into question
the traditional approach to so-called primitive societies, it also points
to a methodology of the present. Images et usages du temps, Alban Bensa, in the French ethnology magazine
Terrain, N° 29, September 1997,
http://terrain.revues.org/document3190.htm.
19 The word personnagification was created from the French word personnage, which means character in English,
in the same way personify is
derived from person. I first
used this word to describe the political process of transformation in
the passage from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in works of literature. I later on found
the same word used in the context of cinema:
Mais qui sont-ils, lui ?, an article by Richard Bégin about the movie
Le Couperet (The Ax) by French director
Constantin Costa-Gravas on the Canadian website Hors Champ, July 2006:
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/article.php3?id_article=223.
20 See The golden age of acting, article published
in The New York Times, Sunday, February 15th, 2004.
