chairman_hall wrote:big_dave wrote:Except that it doesn't. Global interaction serves only to increase diversity in the face of the corporate singularity. Up until the twentieth century greater interaction meant greater diversity for immediate and obvious reasons, there is nothing to say that this has somehow been reversed since aside from our own guilt.
That almost everyone feels this way speaks more about how isolated the Anglophone world is becoming, rather than how homogenous we imagine our lives to make the world. We may be making them poorer and more miserable, but we couldn't rob them of their identities with a million episodes of 24 and a thousand Britney albums.
I think that this is a hard thing to quantify and assess with any deal of phenomenological truth.
I can see how local traditions may become more resistant to the globalised culture but that may only occur due to the psychology of an individual. The hard and possibly trite fact is that you can moreorless go into any city in the world and buy a Coke or a Big Mac. This is the tangible thing we can see in any city in the world and it speaks volumes to me. You would be hard pushed to find a Afghanistan brand in every city in the world.
It's interesting you mention the idea of finding an 'Afghanistan brand in every city in the world'. In a way, we do by reading about the war in Afghanistan in our newspapers and on the television (albeit in a kind of reductive way, through the prism of conflict). In essence, globalisation gives us a new awareness of distant subjectivities. This is probably a historically unique moment.
I was watching a Godard movie yesterday, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and there's a scene in which the main character, who is kind of kind of subject to the regime of totalising capitalism, asks herself why she finds herself in Paris of the 60's thinking of an Asian man...a Vietnamese man. Godard is highlighting the possibilities that globalisation offers. As well as being a system and process of homogenization that benefits capital, there is also an element of cultural and local reflux. Localized struggles can utilise the interconnectivity offered by globalisation to create it's own networks of solidarity, etc. So a new plurality emerges against the homogenizing project of capital.
Even our awareness of exploitation is a consequence of this new opportunity.