Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art, and Social Practices

Introduction

Introduction The Making of Worlds j a. aneesh, lane hall, and patrice petro Contemporary accounts of an emerging “Global Village” or “One World” system —whether in relation to economics, culture, communication, or language —may seem naïve descriptions of global integration. But discourses on globalization are perhaps not all rhetoric. To take but one example: worlds studied by anthropologists are no longer protected by geography and distance; in fact, they continue to disappear. Obstinate languages, values, norms, and practices have been either exterminated or brought out of seclusion, full of wonder and spectacle via research, representation, and multiple mediated views. Two decades ago, linguists rushed to a Turkish farming village in order to record the Ubykh language, once spoken in the northwestern Caucasus, from its last known speaker, a frail farmer whose death in 1992 also marked the death of the Ubykh language. Indeed, 90 percent of the world’s languages are expected to disappear in the next one hundred years.1 It is not surprising, then, that the unprecedented integration of the world through money, media, and communication is often experienced as disturbingly threatening and altogether “real.” After all, satellites never set on the empire. And yet, the nature of integration, captured by the term “globalization,” is often poorly understood, resulting in misplaced battles over homogeneity versus heterogeneity, as if the functional expansion of markets and media could turn the world into irremediable cultural sameness.2 Responses to an imaginary threat of homogeneity quickly lead to demonstrations of cultural distinction, such as in claims that the English spoken by Americans, Britons, Indians, and Australians (and all others) varies in each instance. One rushes to show how new diversities and cultural hybrids emerge through such integration, thus situating global integration in a positive light. Subtle differences between McDonalds in Minneapolis and Manila are explored to disprove the thesis of McDonaldization.3 Yet such attempts to capture diversities, including the thesis of hybridity, cannot free themselves from their philosophical dependence on the notion of an original identity without which diversity or hybridity would not make sense. Thus, difference could be thought of only as difference “between” self-identical objects. Instead of looking for microscopic differences in cultural content—the diversity of various McDonalds or the Englishes spoken on different continents—this volume proposes a different measure of difference whereby the world is nothing but multiple emergences, indeed multiple worlds, under different systems of observation, always mediated by representations, artistic interventions, and social practices. Beyond Social Construction For the contributors to this collection, the thesis of worldmaking replaces the notion of reality with the making of reality in an effort to emphasize that there is no self-identical world out there to be discovered. Instead, as the authors show, the world gets made in the very process of observation, of drawing distinctions . While culture is always already mediated by language, the increasing sophistication, multiplication, and dissemination of information nonetheless changes the experience of all culture. To confront the challenges posed by this reality, it is important to distinguish the thesis of worldmaking from two obvious, long established systems of social thought: constructionism and realism. Borrowing from both, we may indeed call our approach constructive realism. This is not a glibly convenient middle path, since it is developed from major theoretical developments of the last century implicitly focused on the notion of difference.4 Let us explain first why worldmaking is not simple constructionism. Constructionism in its various versions tends to evoke, perhaps mistakenly, a sense of anti-realism, idealism, or relativism, appearing to suggest that things are not real but constructed or socially made. One of the most influential works in this tradition of thought—Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality5 —offers a highly sophisticated account of constructionism , explaining how everyday interactions form the basis of commonsense understanding, which over time settles into conventions, significations, and institutions, later perceived as an ordered, prearranged introduction 2 reality that impinges on us. However, there are two problems with such celebrated accounts of social construction. First, they tend to privilege human agency by tracing all domains of social reality—scientific, technological, or legal—to original human interactions: the “social order is . . . an ongoing human production,” as Berger and Luckmann explain.6 At the same time, they posit a reality that is deeper than the socially constructed one, which is temporally, ontologically, and logically dependent on...