Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern (original) (raw)
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World, Un-World, Alter-World: Critical Form in Global Space
It will be my claim here that attention to the critical potential of form requires a simultaneous critique of the logic of globality at work, perhaps, in any movement to the globe as scale. The globe and globality, of course, name a form of "bad" abstraction in several recent influential critiques of distant reading and the more sociological approaches to a literary world-system: the globe as an uninhabited "gridwork of electronic capital," averse to the alterity of the planet (Spivak (72); or globality as the referent for a proliferation of "geographically emptied names," the cartographic correlate to an agglomerative World Literature (Apter 40). The reductions of the world and world literature to the purer abstractions and emptied geography of global space remain important in what follows. But, this paper proposes a slightly different question and approach. Its point of departure is what the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz has termed the "establishment of franchises," a modified form of cultural-industrial logic that literary theory tends to reproduce in its extension to a global scale. In this sense, I will suggest, global scale and critical form can define a productive tension or contradiction for the study of global modernisms, between this modified form of cultural-industrial logic and an immanent criticism oriented by the internal organization of literary forms. The argument that follows first very briefly introduces Schwarz's recent intervention into debates about the global turn in literary studies before focusing on a particular abstraction of geographical space-"the desert"-in two related texts from the early 60s by another Brazilian, Clarice Lispector: the first, a hybrid chronicle on the modernist city of Brasília; the second, the hermetic novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964). From here, I juxtapose Lispector's specific negative imaginary of literary world-forming-the allegorical production of ruins that opens onto the space of the desert-with the literary-philosophical tendency to separate the world and worldformation from the material traces of history, production, and the "un-world." The larger
ProtoSociology is an interdisciplinary journal which crosses the borders of philosophy, social sciences, and their corresponding disciplines for more than two decades. Each issue concentrates on a specific topic taken from the current discussion to which scientists from different fields contribute the results of their research. ProtoSociology is further a project that examines the nature of mind, language and social systems. In this context theoretical work has been done by investigating such theoretical concepts like interpretation and (social) action, globalization, the global world-system, social evolution, and the sociology of membership. Our purpose is to initiate and enforce basic research on relevant topics from different perspectives and traditions.
Globalization as Transmodern Totality
Capter 1, Rodriguez Magda, Rosa M, Transmodernidad, Barcelona, Anthropos,2004
To think the world is to create it through philosophical categories. And here the Hegelian dialectic was possibly the most ambitious method of rational totalization. To confront ourselves with the "global" brings us back to this very epic of meaning that we may have certainly been somewhat oblivious to in these recent times of wastefulness and dissemination.
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IN RECENT SCHOLARSHIP in the humanities and social sciences, there has been a move to comprehend processes of globalization as they impact on culture and society. Indeed, according to some, "a major paradigm shift [is] taking place in the way that the scholarly production of knowledge is being rethought at the close of the second mi l lenn ium" (King ix ) . One of the major indices of this shift is the prevalence of the term "global" itself within an array of scholarly discourses, particularly — and most important for our purposes — in the currently fashionable invocation of the notion of "global culture." The phrase is repeatedly employed in a host of recent popular publications, journa l special issues, and essay collections. 1 Institutionally, this shift has been reflected in the rise of international studies centres and degree programs, as well as in the self-stylings of several of the major nationand disciplinecentred scholarly organizations in the...
GJ #2015, 1, Beyond the discourse of globalization, by R. Robertson
This paper deals with the ways in which discourse concerning planet earth is being transcended. Specifically, attention is drawn to the increasingly overlapping relationship between the work of philosophers and anthropologists, one the one hand, and astrophysicists on the other. Woven into the discussion are the issues of the neglect of global consciousness and culture in comparison with the more usual concern with global connectivity. In this respect it is argued that globalization, as it is normally understood, can be regarded as self-destroying when it is considered under the rubric of glocalization. The paper concludes with discussion of the possibility of some form of global governance in the light of the present chaotic state of global affairs. It is argued that some relatively clear-cut image of the world as a whole is a precondition of any systematic attempt to resolve this problem. The attempt to provide such an image rests upon the author's previous discussions of the global field.
The Ontology of Globalization: The Loss of Worlds in the Face of Rising a Uniform Globe
2021
Up until Kant’s critical philosophy, it was not easy to speak of the “world” itself as distinct from “nature”. After Kant, the world began to be considered from a historical perspective. Therefore, the world came to be considered as historical rather than natural, which is why it is possible to speak of different worlds in the history of thought. However, globalization more and more drives these different worlds into a uniform historical globe. In this paper, I consider the question of globalization as a passage “from multiple historical worlds to a uniform historical globe”. By analyzing the passages from “nature” to the “world” and from the “world” to the “globe,” I focus on how the idea of “dwelling in the world” and of “saving the earth” has increasingly transformed into the idea of “dominating the world” and of “owning the earth”.
Journal of Global History
The interdisciplinary analysis of historical and contemporary global issues with increasingly productive flows of theories, concepts, methods, and practices is a principal goal in global studies. However, within the humanities and the social sciences, the idea of the 'global' is often restrained by disciplinary boundaries, with scant dialogue and transference between them. The present special issue addresses this fundamental gap by historicizing the notion of the 'global' in an interdisciplinary dialogue, with approaches from history, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, art history, and media and communication studies. 1 Our objective is to gain greater insights on the global approach from several disciplines and to let their borrowings and contributions emerge. The issue responds to a double demand: on the one hand, it undertakes the task of historicizing global perspectives for several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, providing a thorough intervention in the state of the art; on the other hand, it juxtaposes six disciplines to encourage fruitful cross-pollination and to address problems and challenges within a global dimension. The issue has four specific goals: first, to illuminate shared or divergent genealogies and chronologies, showing which theories, methodologies, and approaches to the global have been more productive and can further new paths of cross-disciplinary inquiry; second, to unearth unforeseen relations between disciplines, helping to better acknowledge their borrowings and connections; third, to show contextual and institutional disciplinary changes at a transnational scale, as well as the ideological agreements and discrepancies that often accompany these; and, fourth, to provide a pool of concepts and practices that will enrich the range of possibilities for the advancement of global perspectives in each discipline. Historicizing the global approach As an epistemological premise, rather than as a complementary view, we understand 'global' as a research approach that examines cultural, social, political, or artistic phenomena on a larger † This special issue began to take shape in the seminar 'Global perspectives in the humanities and social sciences', which the Global Literary Studies Research Group (GlobaLS) organized in Barcelona in 2017. We thank the Department of Arts and Humanities at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and the MapModern project (Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad), for their financial support. We also wish to thank the keynote speakers (Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Jernej Habjan, Katja Naumann, and Peter Wagner) and seminar participants for their lively and productive discussions, which helped us reflect on the history of the global through different disciplinary perspectives.