Sedda - Forms of the World

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FORMS OF THE WORLD Roots, Histories, and Horizons of the Glocal1 Franciscu Sedda (University of Rome Tor Vergata)

0. Introduction According to The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1991: 134) the term glocal and the process noun glocalization are formed by telescoping global and local to make a blend. Also according to the Dictionary that idea has been modeled on the Japanese dochakuka (deriving from dochaku living on ones own land), originally the agricultural principle of adapting ones farming techniques to local conditions, but also adopted in Japanese for global localization, a global outlook adapted to local conditions. More specifically, the terms glocal and glocalization became aspects of business jargon during the 1980s (...). By now it has become, again in the words of The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, one of the main marketing buzzwords of the beginning of the nineties (Robertson 1998: 28).

The emergence and the assimilation of a new word in a specialized lexicon and in common speech is always a meaningful event. Its entrance in the academic discourse so as in the collective imagery helps us sense a certain spirit of the times in which we live. For example, we could think about the appearance of glocal in international bestsellers, such as Thomas L. Friedmans essay The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005), or as the protagonist in Jason Reitmans recent film Up in the Air (2009) starring George Clooney. Moreover, the new word may provide us with a glimpse into the future that we may inhabit. At the same time, we can regard the arising of a new sign on the surface of the sea of social life as the top of an iceberg, one that invites us to glimpse below, in more depth, in an attempt to explore and gain insight into the political and cultural systems and processes that it underlies, and that, in some way, push it and keep it afloat. The appearance of a new concept can induce a fruitful doubt, a curiosity. It can become the premise for new questions to pose to ourselves and for the histories that led us to our present. Shedding new light on what now surrounds us and on what preceded the emergence of a new concept can drive us toward a new focus of our sight, one that simultaneously implies a reinterpretation of the world and of the categories through which we make the world meaningful. Thus, the emergence of a new sign is a cause and an effect of the act of reopening the meaning of our becoming. Therefore, if it is true that each generation creates its predecessorsto paraphrase Borges, the arising of glocal offers us a chance to rethink some of the rootsbe they physical, anthropological, or phenomenologicalof our world, that is, of those structural devices that shaped our existence in the past and still shape it today. A rediscovery of these roots will direct us toward novel ways, new storiesnatural, dominant, imagined, telling us about the systems and processes that led us to the current configuration of the globe. This reflection will help us focus on 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Martino Dibeltulo and to Harjeet Grewal for translating this article from Italian into English, and for providing their valuable comments to earlier drafts of the essay.

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some of the possible horizonsecological, plural, sharedof our glocal world. Along this reelaboration we will thus seek to individuate those devices and concepts that allow us to gain a deeper insight into the idea of glocality itself. I. The Coherence of the World, the Plurality of the Human I.1. Physical Roots The possibility of a physical coherence of the world and of the generalization of a certain biological history on a universal basis would give the globe its first unity, well before the great discoveries, before the industrial revolution, before the interpenetration of the economies (Braudel 1979, p. 22).

How is it that we came to be what we are? And, most of all, what is it that we really are? In other words, what is the quality that is most peculiar to our contemporary world? As we will see below, the statement of Fernand Braudel from which we are beginningthat is part of a complex reasoning that the French historian develops in Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism (1979)is not unrelated to our questions. On the contrary, it will help us undo the complex tangle that these questions form, until they reveal their glocal essence. As a matter of fact, Braudel underscores the physical coherence of the world and refers to a biological history on a universal scale exactly by asking in what ways we reached late nineteenth century society. Braudels point of departure is connected to the problem of the figures of world population. This structuring and structural factor of the planets life, obviously not only of human life, places us at the outset before an enigma: that of its sudden increase, during the eighteenth century, after long periods of continuous and yet tendentially stable fluxes and refluxes. The world population, which until then was under the half billion people of whom the majority were peasants (between 80 and 90%), explodes reconfiguring the globe and its assets: in particular, it builds the material bases for a type of lifeso interconnected and interdependentthat, if we condescend with this sedentary view of the configuration of humanity, had been until then practically impossible. What, then, propelled this leap? Braudels response places us before two well-known factors that are taken into consideration in current discourses on globalization: economy and space. What the historian remarks is that in the eighteenth century, to a general economical restoration corresponds a multiplication of the spaces offered to men: All the countries of the world then colonized themselves, occupying their territories that were empty or semi-empty of inhabitants (p. 20). In any event, this response that interlaces economy, spaces and movement does not leave Braudel satisfied. First of all, because the empty space that is available to man has always been there and it still is today (forests, steppes, arctic regions, deserts), even in an age in which the world appears as finite. Second and foremost, this interlacement fails to explain the very globality of such change. As Braudel notes: The true question remains the following: why is it that, in the same moment, the geographic conjuncture enters into play, although the supply of space has been permanent in any case? The problem is posed by synchronism. International economy, effective yet still very fragile, cannot be deemed responsible, by itself alone, of such a general and powerful movement. It is itself a cause, as much as it is a consequence (ivi).

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The solution to the enigma that Braudel advances is interesting in two respects. On the one hand it invites us to reflect on what we could call the synchronizing factor that begins to operate to bring about the worlds becoming-global. On the other, because the factor that is thus individuated shows us that this apparent becoming-global is indebted to a more fundamental being-glocal. According to Braudel, in fact, what functions as an instrument of correlation between actors, times and spaces, is, in this case, the climate, that is, to be more precise, its rhythm, the series of climatic variations that following one another relate to daily life and consequently transform it. Although it is not the case here to venture into the complex causal boxings of Braudels reconstructions, it should be noted that between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century the climate of the globe meets a general coolinga small ice age (p. 22)and that the effects of the eighteenth-century life reflux, along with economical mechanisms such as the enormous price fluctuation to which this climatic change gives rise, generate a biological leap. With the eighteenth century, in China so as in Europe, an ancient biological regime and an ensemble of constrictions, obstacles, structures, relations and numerical games that had been until then the rule, breaks, so that from then on the rule of the equilibrium between the number of deaths and the number of births is invalidated, and life would win over death, ever since overtaking her adversary (p. 45). It implies, in fact, a double glance that grasps elements on two different scales: the regular and equilibrated cycle of life and death in the short term, and the overall effect of the victory of the compensations in the long term (p. 62) once that the fluctuations of material life enter into a particular relation with the climatic fluctuations (p. 22). What interests us here is that, while on the one hand this temporary and yet decisive climatic unification of the globe makes us foresee the first globalizing factor of the world in its physical coherence, on the other hand, it invites us at once to go beyond. Braudel himself is immediately aware of this: If this climatic explanation contains, as I think, some truth to it, we should in any case prevent from oversimplifying it. Each climate is a rather complex system and its impact on the life of plants, animals and men can only be fulfilled by means of winding ways that depend upon the places, the cultures and the seasons (p. 22).

It is then clear that we are locked inside a glocal device within which the climate, only just evoked as a singular and synchronizing factor, reveals itself in its plurality and multiplicity. In other words, upon mentioning climate, its plural climates immediately appears: globality appears as the overall effectone that may be principally located by way of a speculative and generalizing viewof a series of infinitely minute phenomena that are at the very same time independent and interdependent. The glacial age, the Gulf Stream, the Monsoon, the natural disasters in China between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, can probably be traced back to a single logic, as part of a complex systemic network. And yet, like the sun, the clouds and the rains, they continue to distribute themselves locally, to the extent that they almost seem to take shape as mutually separated processes.

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I.2. Natural Histories When we depart from this root to look at our world, what appears is a long history that several scholars have recently defined as the natural history of globalization. From the point of view of human beings, it is a history made of migrations, of colonizations, of drifts, and of hybridizations (Pievani 2002, pp. 25, 29), that is governed in a subterranean fashion, yet, by a strange, non-human, protagonist that is precisely the climate: We will see that climatic alterations will be a constant in the natural history of our biological family. The span of geological time occupied by hominid evolution will always be characterized by a climatic and environmental turbulence, a crucial (and often underestimated) factor for the structure of our evolutionary path (p. 58). In other words, well before the modern planetarization of European makea recent, contingent, and principally socio-economic eventthere would be a million-years long history made of subsequent planetarizations. A history based on the complex coevolution between populations, natural habitats, and climatic variations. Telmo Pievani, one of the foremost Italian philosophers of science has set forth, through a retelling of the studies of Niled Eldredge, Stephen J. Gould, and Ian Tattersall, to classify this history into three major phases: the first spanning from 1 million to 150.000 years ago; the second from 150.000 to 30.000 years ago; the fourth extending from 30.000 years ago to the present (p. 208). In simpler terms, these phases correspond to the three waves of diffusion of three kinds of Homo from Africa throughout the world: first, the spread of the Homo ergaster and of the Homo erectus, then a first wave of the Homo sapiens, and lastly a second wave of Homo sapiens (pp. 205-207). 2 What is most striking to our common sense, something decisive from a point of view of a glocal history of the world and of the human, is that to these three planetarizations underlies, on a deeper level, the pluralistic character of human evolution since its origins (p.205). In other words, in reliance upon the current results of paleoanthropological studies, a plurality of hominid species has simultaneously populated the world (at least twenty in total, and at certain times at least five simultaneously). The contemporary solitude of the Homo sapiens would then be the temporary outcome of a declining diversity (Gould, in Pievani 2002, p. 246). This outcome is also a rather recent one (considering the 6 million years of homination). As Pievani notes: If an unaware extraterrestrial fell on planet Earth 30.000 years ago, there, spread across the old world, she would have found three contemporaneous forms of hominids: the Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, the Homo erectus in Asia, and the Homo sapiens who cohabited with both in the course of its relentless expansion toward the most recondite corners of the inhabitable world. [] What today we call humanity has always been represented, in the past, by a multiplicity of cohabiting species (p. 206).

In other words, our history would be saturated, since its origins, with different forms of the human that planetarize and at the same time relativize the world, giving it shape through a myriad formations. While on the one hand the global diffusion of the Homo Sapiens confirms the common origin 2 See the various related hypotheses that are not always easy to disentangle (Pievani 2002, pp. 160-187).

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and the deep communality of human beings (that so deprives all racist discourses of any meaning), on the other hand it does not exclude human diversity: The diaspora of the peoples on earth reveals in fact a genetic and anthropological unity even within the noticeable diversity of human cultures and morphologiesand so is for languages (p. 203), that, as Pievani reminds us, are in the smallest part of biological origin (the few genes that regulate the color of the skin and some anatomical traits adapted to climate) and in the greater part fruit of different and contingent histories (p. 211). From here, once again, although within a single species, the necessity according to Pievanito recur to the (evidently glocal) metaphor of the unitas multiplex represents itself. Once more, the history of globalization reveals itself as the history of a constant and plural glocalization. I.3. Ecological Horizons What are thepractical and theoreticalhorizons of this first mainly local root? It is impossible to summarize all of them. But a first point that we find interesting to notice is that this becoming of the world sees manand its cultural universe at largeas the conditioned, and not as the conditioning: that is, it sees man as the object that undergoes the effects of global processes, and not as the agent who causes them, rules them, or is by all means at its center. This reflection invites us, especially considering the view of a very long period, to avoid tracing all explanations back to a single anthropocentric dimension. Furthermore, it leads us back, on the contrary, to the complex play between wholes of possibility and constraints that interlace, overlap, link up and articulate in history: from genetic to climatic variations, up to environmental niches and further to the latitudinal-longitudinal structuring of the continentsall able to favor the domestication and the consequent development of the different immune systems among the populations of the globe (Diamond 1997)we then find ourselves among a complexity of interacting and structuring factors. This complexity conditions the stability and the mutations of the forms of our existence, of our worlds, creating, in the long run, interdependencies that are not easily sensed between cultural and extra-cultural factors to which, in general, the studies on globalization primarily point to. Secondly, as we have seen above, such apparently global processes are, since their beginning, glocal processes. Talking once more about climate and its impact on the lives of all beings, one could attempt to summarize the argument by saying that a change in the global economy of climate is, locally, the fortune of some and the misfortune of others. What emerges, then, is the problem of the continuous correlation between different series: the correlation between genetic, climatic, environmental, demographic variations in relation to social, cultural, economic and technological variations. In this sense globalization is given as the apparent and temporary synchronization between the various series that simultaneously underlay a constant plurality of rhythms that are, in turn, necessarily mutually asynchronous.3 Thirdly, one should not forget that the more one approaches the present time the more the socio3 There has not been, in substance, a synchronized evolution of the main characteristic of the species of hominids (anatomy, technology, social organization, diet, habitat), but an evolution with heterogeneous rhythms, an evolution on a time lag (Pievani 2002, p. 141).

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cultural aspectsdue, also, to the deepening of scientific knowledge and of technological skills begin to retroact on the ecological aspects that were initially regarded to be conditioning. What appeared to be conditioned now becomes conditioning: men, acting upon the world in an increasingly intensive and extensive way become, at least potentially, the cause of the very changes in the physical coherence of the world and in the biological history of humans. Finally, the awareness of possible collapses on an increasingly global scale, linked with the knowledge not only of past collapses but also of past experiences of positive response and of local management of ecological problems (Diamond 2005, pp. 14-17), leads toward more accentuated forms of reflexivity. A reflexivity that is simultaneously inextricably local and global. The transformation of the climatic (or more in general ecological) question in a sort of common discourse of contemporary societya kind of global common senseemphasizes the local perception of the world-as-a-whole (Robertson 1992, Robertson e White 2004). At the same time the planetary environmental risk, the daily perception of the fragility of our worldincreasingly emphasized, for that matter, by its centrality in the mediatic and political discourseseem to be creating the conditions for a cosmopolitan awareness, that is, the almost automatic perception of a common destiny (Beck 1997, p. 58) or the instinctive belonging to a single Earth-Motherland (Morin 1993). To conclude, the concrete processes of desertification, or the simple destruction of the environment caused by savage exploitation of the territory and of natural resources, by putting into motion the relative chains of illnesses, famines, wars, migrations, and by relating to the demographic growth of the world population, such actions once again shuffle the cards of planetarization. While the political response to environmental issues remains entrusted to difficult forms of global coordination (synchronization) of local, unanimous and plural interests, the daily, concrete commitment on a small scale seems left to face global processes and forces that are hard to manage. For the daily perception of the world-as-a-whole, then, there is clear evidence for the multifarious glocal conflicts and disorders. II. Imagining oneselves human in a different way II.1. Human Roots When peoples give themselves names, made exception for denominations of a geographical character, they differentiate, as far as we can judge, in two categories: the ethnic appellative either consists in a laudatory epithet the Brave, the Strong, the Excellent, the Eminent, or, in most cases, they simply call themselves the Men. Beginning with the Germanic Ala-manni and, regardless of their origin and of their language, following the parade of peoples up to the Kamatka or to the southernmost end of South America, one encounters dozens of peoples that designate themselves as the men; all of these set themselves up as a community that has the same language and the same origin, and implicitly pose against the neighboring peoples (Benveniste 1969, p. 284).

Our biological history led us to ascertain the unitas multiplex of the Homo sapiens. On the threshold of our contemporary world, once we are put before the first verbal documentary evidence of our ancestors, we find once again confirmation of this unity within the multiplicity. The traces of the self-denominations of peoples ooze with glocality and immediately give insight into the 6

imaginative and at the same time differential character of cultural identities.4 In other words, while historical data testifies the pervasiveness of the self-description of various peoples as simple and pure men, to a degree that it leads us toward the hypothesis of a global innate consciousness of the humankind, on the other it appears to indicate that this tension toward the universal inextricably matches with an apparently opposed tension, a tension toward the particular. Thus, history at its beginnings seems to hand over to us a scenery made of as many humanities as were the collectivities that comprised it. Or better, a scenery made of many local collectivities that self-defined as human, that is, representing globality, at the very time when they distinguished themselves from and opposed against other collectivities that, in turn, probably in another language, self-defined as men. Imagining oneself human by defining oneself different; defining oneself human by imagining oneself different. Let us pause for a moment to note that the scenery of self-denominations outlined by Benveniste is actually further stratified. To the side of the simple definition the Men one also finds again another series of definitions: the Brave, the Strong, the Excellent, the Eminent. In our view, such apparent dyscrasia links up in a very clear way with a distinction highlighted by Jurij M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskij, two of the foremost scholars of the semiotics of culture, leading us to identify two forms or effects of glocality. Lotman and Uspenskij (1973) remind us that from a typological point of view the self-definition of a culture in terms of globality of meaning generally takes place either in opposition against a non culture or in antithesis to an anticulture. The history of cultures teems with collectivities that, albeit recognizing the existence of otherness, viewed it as the space of a non-culture. They thus molded their own world on the opposition orderly vs. non orderly, organized vs. non organized, cosmos vs. chaos, or considering otherness to be an anticulture, as the place of a different order, of an opposed sign, a negative sign: henceforth the structuring of the relation departing from the pair correct vs. erroneous, or, even more radically, from true vs. false. The two types of self-denominations that we have considered above are essentially traceable to these two typological forms. The denomination in terms of Brave, Strong, Excellent, Eminent, presupposes the existence of an otherness deprived of value, weak, wrong in some way, and marked by a trait of negativity or inferiority. The denomination in terms of Men, on the contrary, presupposes the existence of a collectivity whose culturality appears inexistent or so unrecognizable that these other men are often marked with the trait of animality or barbaricity. The practical consequence of such distinction is, according to the Russian authors, that the cultures that conceive themselves as order struggling against chaos regard themselves as the potential carriers of organization in the space that, for them, is dominated by disorder. On the contrary, cultures that conceive themselves struggling against a different culture of a negative sign would have the opposite tendency: rather than aiming at spreading their own principles, they rather tend to shut themselves away to defend and preserve themselves. Henceforth the two culturalpolitical logics: the one expansionist, and in some way inadvertently hybridist, the other protectionist, with apparently purist effects. If we further elaborate such prototypical stances we can then say that they suggest two basic ways for articulating glocality. 4 On this semiotico-structuralist point see the consonances with the elaborations of Anderson (1983, 1998), Appadurai (1996), Hall (2006), Clifford (1988, 1997, 2002, 2003).

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Cultures that perceive and describe themselves as representative of the human in its entirety, and that may consequently have a tendency to expand, can be considered as global localities: even though they are partial (and perhaps they even sense it), they feel their locality to be potentially valid on a global scale, exactly because what surrounds them appears to them lacking organization, coherence, values. On the contrary, cultures that base themselves on the antithesis between their own positive values and the others negative values, and as such are able to develop forms of protectionism, would behave as local globalities: that is, as spheres of meaning that, exactly because they perceive and describe themselves as complete, tend to shut themselves away in a space that is best impermeable to alterity. Such attitudes clearly indicate extreme polarities and the complexification of the contemporary world should, in theory, render extremely difficult their re-actualization in such forms that, looking back into the past, appear to us as more clear-cut. In any event, on the one hand it is not difficult to bring to the mind numerous contemporary discourses based on the exportation, at times violent, of ones own principles and values on the part of collectivities that attribute themselves a civilizing mission, or, on the other hand, to think that the construction and the maintenance of walls and barriers, real or imaginary, in defense of ones own territory and of ones own culture on the part of collectivities that perceive their supposed coherence (if not their very existence) under the threats of alterity. Notwithstanding appearances, resort to narratives based upon the struggle between the civilized and the barbarous or between good and evil, the missionary work of values or the defense of an owned space that is imagined as uncontaminated, still seems present, pervasive, and very often politically effective. II.2. Dominant Histories Regardless of how such typologies may be applicable to the complexity of the contemporary world, it is evident that defining the human leads us into an unsettled and at the same time viscous territory. We say unsettled because the human appears to be the root and at the same time the horizon of our discourses and of our actions; we say viscous because the necessity that collectivities have to recognize themselves as humansor as declinations of the humanmatches with a tendency to transform ones own peculiar humanity in humanity tout court. We could say that the recent history of humanity has very often been motivated and put into motion by such misunderstanding of ones own peculiar humanity with humanity as such. And this misunderstanding made it so that the world changed into the product of subsequent or competing histories of dominations. Lotman, in his important work The Semiosphere (1985), has adapted the concept of dominant, as developed by the Russian formalists and by Roman Jakobson within the field of analysis of artistic texts, exactly to the dynamic of cultural systems. By readapting, in turn, Lotmans elaboration, we could say that the dominant is a local structure that seeks, in the first place, to subject all others to its organization (to its rules, to its system of values); secondly, that it appropriates the right to speak and act in name of globality (or of some idea of globality); thirdly, in this journey of domination, the local structure produces its own self-description that legitimizes as globally valid only her own 8

specific (and initially local) structuring of the world, while it seeks to relegate other local forms of organization of sociocultural reality to non-existence or to insignificance. The history of the past five hundred years, as many have already implicitly or explicitly maintained, could be read as a series of attempts of subsequent or competing dominations: the Ibero-Catholic mondialization, the Dutch commercial rule, the British globalization based on sea control and on industrialization, the United States hegemony of financial capitalism, and up to the post-1989 tale of the end of the history (the birth of the Empire, to say it in the terms of the counter narratives that while contesting this new and further globalization actually risk to emphasize its omnipervasiveness, see Negri, Hardt 2002). Even if we were to pause at this radical simplification of recent world history, it would be in any case impossible to deny the overlapping of (governmental, national, ethnic, continental, civilizational, confessional) subjectivities and of (economic, religious, political, linguistic, territorial) logics that are not isomorphic, that are not completely and perfectly correlated: subjectivities and languages that are continually created and redefined at the very moment of their coming into relation. Moreover, it would be equally consequential to recall that for each domination not only were there alternative ones in evident competition, but also that before the advancement of each hypothesis of domination there were, as well, forms of open resistance, of ambiguous compromise, of refined and yet impossible impermeability, of partial and perhaps involuntary foreignness to the dominant logics due to the imperfect finitude of the world. The transformation of the dominated alterity into a mere local position within the discourses and the practices of the dominant, or an authentic construction of the barbaric (Lotman 1985)that is, the ability to deprive at once a collectivity of the possibility to self-define and to reproduce itself culturally, up to the point of making of it a destructured whole of individuals apparently ready to adhere to an identity and to a universe of values that are imposedare games whose stake has always proved complex and inexhaustible. But above all unpredictableand even sardonicin its outcomes. So as the dominant never recognized themselves when they looked at their image in the eyes of the dominated, even in those of the most docile, likewise the dominated, even the most belligerent, at the time when they attempted to achieve liberation, were never able to return to what they were before. The relation had changed both, making the tangle of the world once and again more intricate. II.3. Plural Horizons The very long history of dominationsone into which we cannot enter hereappears interesting to us for it helps to gain insight into a further glocal device: one in which a globality and a locality are not given as ontological entities but as relative and relational meaningful effects departing from strategies and tactics of incorporation that are played through specific force and power relations. In other words, we are dealing with systems and processes (more or less) englobing or (more or less) englobed, where, by all means, the meaningful effect is always given through the generated and adopted positions within the relation and from the point of view from which we look at the relation itself (that is, from the position from which we relate with the relation). Let us provide a single example by reporting an apparently shocking statement of Jean-Marie 9

Tjibaou, a former priest who later became the leader of the Kanak independence movement. According to Tjibaou the Bible did not belong to white men but was reinvented by the Kanak people: with this statement, the New Caledonian politician drew attention on the selective and transformative appropriation of an object that originally did not belong to the Kanak (Clifford 2001 and 2003, p. 86; Bensa 1998) and that later became, in a distant Pacific island, different from itself and simultaneously part of an ancient and at the same time very new culture. One should note the paradox: here Christianity both plays the role of a parameter-discourse, of a language of global translation that is dominating in its own way, and exists concretely, at the same time, only as a part of the life world, of the imagined world of a situated (and apparently dominated) collectivity that, making it its own, localizes it, not only in the sense that it introduces the object into a territorial locality (New Caledonia), but especially in the sense that makes it a local piece within a cultural system that is wider in itself, global (what we could call contemporary Kanak culture). It is as if we first defined the plane of those who adhere to Christianity and then said, with no fear of contradiction, that: They have the same religion, but it is not the same anywhere: it does not have the same value and the same form everywhere. To complicate this already complex question we should also take into account the fact that the religious discourse that arrived in New Caledonia is that of Protestantism, a specific form of Christianity. Furthermore, when Tjibaou declares a semiotic sovereigntyif we can so call itof the Kanak, he does that within a severe conflict with the French state that incorporates his island, his land, into the European political space within a long colonial history. How many globalities and how many localities come into play in this cross-section of the world? What, then, is global and what is local in this net of plural relations? Probably, in order to try to provide an answer, the questions to ask are others: Who englobes who? How? Within what type of relations of force and meaning? From what point of view and from what position? When we widen our view and interlace the theme of the plurality of non isomorphic logics (or disjunctive logics, as Appadurai (1996) would put it) with the glocal device of englobement, what we obtain is a sort of a crossed-eye sight (Sedda 2006) that is capable of analytically keeping in simultaneous presence several planes that are apparently contradictory: that is, various levels of homogenization and heterogenization that are commonly regarded to be mutually exclusive. We think, in this respect, about the observations of Sahlins (2000) on the coexistence of a generally capitalistic logic (a language) and of its local overthrows (or else simply of its own adaptations and misunderstandings). We also think about the endless reasonings on westernization (Tomlinson 1999) in terms of a unified and unifying dynamic that, in all respects, clashes with the impression, when descending to a lower level, if not of its disappearance, to say the least, of its turning into dust within other logics, other sights, other narratives that are more composite and heterogeneous, or globally coherent but from another point of view, from another position. Ultimately, the games are always more complex that what we would like (and it comes to us natural) to think. Not only the global can be (and in fact often is) only a locality, a sub-structure, dominating (only temporally and only from some point of view), but the same local, if we observe it well, reveals itself to be construed through global languages and recipes (Robertson and Whine 2004) or through neighboring relations, that are simultaneously translocal and differential (Appadurai 1996). Once again, the definition of locality and globality is worked through complex semiotic devices. It produces itself through effects of meaning and power that are 10

contingent and unstable, if not completely aleatory or imponderable. For such reasons the horizon of our glocal world that is made of distant proximities seems to be exposed to continual processes of fragmegration (Rosneau 2003), that is, to a continual play of fragmentations and aggregations on several levels and by means of plural logics. This concept, developed in the field of study of international relations, seems to match with the idea that our cultural identities are the cause and the effect of repeated linkings and delinkings, of repeated spatial and historical (re)articulations that make subjectivities and identifications what is at stake in identity politics (Clifford 2002, 2003). In other wordsmore consonantly with Greimasian lexicon , we are those who produce the figures of identity and alterity, ones own and the others, that populate the world; we are those who, time after time, for tactical or strategic needs, thematize the local and the global as dimensions that are given and natural, and place ourselves in relation to them; we are those who define the values that guide our own existences; we are those who tell the stories of those authorities that should legitimize our loyalties, our attachments, our belongings, that for which is worth to live or even to die. III. My Body, the World III.1. Corporeal Roots [] Rather than saying that I am in time and in space, or that I am in no place, why not say better that I am everywhere, always, being in this moment and in this place? (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 132).

Merleau-Pontys question leads us to inquire into a further root of the glocal, a phenomenological root inscribed into our very corporeality and in its relation with the world. It is worth to try to follow for a moment the reasoning of the French philosopher, who arrives to pose this question in his attempt to weave again the split between fact and essence, between things and ideas. Now, according to Merleau-Ponty, the divarication between fact and essence is only given under a particular condition: that is to say a condition that presupposes or that relies upon a thought that looks at being from another place, and in front, one might say (p. 132). Given this postulate the subject presents itself as a kosmotheoros, a person who is able to preside the cosmos with a sovereign sight but who grasps things in a fixed and total order, that is manifold and yet flat. This means that in this play things gain an absolute givenness, for absolute is the determination of their placement in space-time: which, in turn, signifies that the same meanings that relate to this world of things become frozen and proceed to form a system of meanings with neither locality nor temporality (ivi). This possibility of abstraction, of generalization, this possibility that the subject has to enthrone into a sort of zero point of Being in order to exercise a sort of bird-eye view, matches, however, with the perception that these same imaginative and globalizing operations tomorrow, in a short time are destined to fall toward that from which they detached, to reveal their rootedness in a situation, in a space-timea certain point of apparition on earth and in my life (ivi). The question from which we departed comes into play at this juncture. If the subject can constantly produce globalizing generalizations without giving up rooting herself in a space-time and 11

without giving up translatingin the double meaning of transporting and at the same tame transformingthis background within the semiotic formations that she produces, why should we not think that, in the end, she may not be everywhere, always, being in this moment and in this place? In other words, are we not able to space with our imagination, moving among different places and cultures, going back to the past, anticipating the future, building the present, inventing worlds? Moreover, are we not able to inscribe these worlds into manifold semiotic formations that, by realizing imagination, make it accessible, shareable? Are then not our located, fragile, and perishable bodies to build a globality of meaning, to a sort of worldmaking5? If this inextricability between global and local is possible, if the subject can produce the world that contains it, it is exactly because the worldthe visible in the words of Merleau-Ponty detects the subject, dominates it filling it and occupying it because, I who see it, I dont see it from the bottom of nothing, but from the heart of the visible itself: I, the seer, am also the visible (ivi, p. 133). We thus see that at the apex of its localization the subject discovers her greater universalizing power: in her co-inherence with the world, at the time when the world roots itself in the body, the subject discovers the power of opening her own thought to the universal, that is to say to a thought that is dense of unthought, that is capable of a general distortion of things and of discovering their deep nerve whilewe saytranslating them semiotically. Then, what keeps together the two poles, facts and essences, is this profound glocality of the body-world relationship and of the statements that structure it. The imagination of the world branches out from our body, and yet there is no other life chance for the single body other than exiting from itself toward a generality that is not within, in the In Self. On the contrary, it is exactly a crossing point with and on the world: [] we do not live and know on the road amidst opaque facts and clear ideas, but at the point of encounter and of crossing in which families of facts inscribe their generality, their relation, grouping around the dimensions and the place of our own existence (ivi, p. 135). Our situated statementsproducers of global statements by way of carrying a globality of meaning and by way of being able to journey through the world to be appropriated by other bodies are the crossing place between world and body. Owing to an eidetic variation, a manipulation of forms that is simultaneously production of semiotic formations, the body is the very producer of the systems of meaning that produce it, and by means of which it locates itself within some generality. 6 That which Merleau-Ponty calls interworld is, in our reading, the space that semiotic formations open, regardless if they are actions or words, journeys or discourses, institutions or narratives. Semiotic formations allow the subjects to articulate forms that are shared by subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality, so as to define the figures and the themes, the authorities and the values that time after time give structure to our worlds. III.2. Imagined Stories If viewed originating from this root, our story may appear as the history of the multifarious ways 5 On worldmaking, see also Goodman 1978. 6 See what has been written on Subject, Discourse (system of representations), Identity by Geninasca (1997).

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by means of which we have imagined ourselves and our world: how we have recounted ourselves and how we have acted consequently. However it is impossible to trace here a history of glocal imagination and of its continuous rearticulation. What we can do here is try to sketch one of the many possible journeys. Let us start again from some interesting historico-cultural data that Lotman and Uspenskij have pointed out. According to the two authors in ancient and in medieval literary texts so as in fourteenth-century novels one encounters with unusual rarity the theme of incomprehension (1973, now in Lotman 2006, p. 79). Communication becomes a problem only with the texts of Romanticism. Now, the legitimate coexistence of different points of view on the world, the constant conflict between different discursive universes, between competing systems of truth, causes incomprehension to become established as the rulefrom which follows the happening of tragic communicative and cultural collisions (ivi). The consequence is that while before Romanticism, for example in the epic plot, communication was regarded as an ideal act, instantaneously realizable and without loss (ivi) now the problem of translation imposes itself domineeringly. We find a clear example of the way in which translation begins to define the field of culture in early twentieth century in James Joyces Finnegans Wake. As Umberto Eco (2003) wrote, Finnegans Wake is a plurilingual text, already translated in some way: or, we could say, that it shows within itself the question and the very centrality of translation. But Finnegans Wakes own plurilingualism, one that tries to give shape to the global complexity of the world within a single text, is such by way of its originating from a certain fold of the world. As noted by Eco, Finnegans Wake is plurilingual but from the point of view of the English language. It is a plurilingual text as an Anglophone may have thought it (ivi, p. 304). And we should add, an Irish Anglophone. It is not a case that when Joyce had to translate both the text and himself, he had to rethink such plurilingualism, such world-in-translation, beginning from another fold of the world: It thus seems to me that the choice of Joyce-translator-of-himself has been to think about the destination text (French or Italian) as a plurilingual text such as it could be thought by a Francophone or an Italophone (ivi, pp. 304-305). The example of Finnegans Wake helps us focus upon the entrance into a world that is so global to be twice glocal. A babelic world (Fabbri 2000) made of a myriad languages that mix together and translate constantly; a world in which this mixture, this self-translation, brings different results depending on the space in which it realizes itself and on the position beginning from which this world-in-translation is grasped (and in turn translated again). In other words, the mechanism of translation becomes exponential. Consequently, the boxings, the crossings, and the interdefinitions between globality and locality become infinitely complex. The tragic glocal paradox of early twentieth century, to which translation tries to answer, can be summarized like the following: the world shrinks, incomprehension increases (Sedda 2004). Precisely at the time when the world ends and becomes fully interdependentas noted by Valery (1945) between 1931 and 1938: There begins the age of the finite world (ivi, p. 23), nothing will be done again that does not involve the entire world (ivi., p. 37), there begins the period of the most tragic, great, world, wars. The very redefinition of the Great War into World War I seems to indicate this reflexive and imaginative leap toward a unity of the world that fully reveals 13

itself in the tragic, collective, inability to live together on the planet. The world, forcedly and ambiguously interconnected by means of mass communication as well as by European colonialism, founds itself caught in an explosive tension between naked bodies and impossible imaginaries. As Walter Benjamin said about the traumatic historic turning point that the world war brought about: nothing had remained unchanged besides the clouds, and below them, in a magnetic field of deadly currents and explosions, the minute and fragile body of man (1936, in Benjamin 1966, p. 248). And this return on the naked and fragile, minute and hyperlocalized bodies conformed to the setback of human imagery at the end of World War II. The end of humanity proposed with the Holocaust, inscribed within the very same unimaginability and unrepresentability of such an inhumane event. The end of man and of futurethe end of the future of the species, that is, the realization of the possibility of imaginining oneselves physically extinguishingset forth with the Atomic Bomb. Such is the bloody caesura between located bodies and global imagination that in the history of the global imagery will seem to begin healing only toward the late 1960s. Two emblematic examples: the Beatles who in 1967, right in the middle of the Summer of Love, sing All You Need is Love in the first satellite program in world-vision in all history, which was significantly called Our World; humanity that in 1969 remains breathless when a tiny human body places live his own foot on the Moon, a collective imagination that becomes true, with the possibility of looking at oneself from another place and of actually imagining oneself as one (just as one year laterno wonderJohn Lennon will sing in his Imagine). Furthermore, at the time when all this was happening, the twentieth century was offering us from within the westa label that is as generic and slippery as that of orientas well as from its colonial space, a new explosion of voices and bodies and englobed peoples, apparently mute and in any event once again ready to gain speech, willing to tell their own story and to imagine themselves differently. As a matter of fact, while the world became apparently globalized (and globalization itself became, for many, a mythology, a great narrative), the westas the privileged actor of this history of unificationhad to come to terms with the fact that her others had always told their own story and wanted to keep doing so. This story was different, or more precisely, differently located within the common plot of stories and spaces of which our world is made. Those others, those minute bodies apparently divided, broken, deprived of their own possibility to imagine the world and its transformations, had already foreseen a place for alterity inside their own cultural system. They were ready to reinvent themselves. They were once again ready to reinvent what had been imposed onto them7; but they also generated new contradictions, bringing about new conflicts and new dominations, ambiguous or incomplete liberations, and, after all, partial ones. Let us provide a single, brief example. It is an example that, despite its limits, is at the same time well known and paradigmatic of the relationship between the bodily-phenomenological dimension and the potential invention of worlds. Moreover, it is an example from a socio-political field that helps us ponder the ways in which the possibility of imagination and agency, whether individual or communal, artistic or scientific, political or technical, can intervene on the historical structures of domination (see II.2, II.3), in a similar way as it does on the natural structuring over a very long 7 Cfr. Sahlins 1993, 2000.

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period (see. I.2, I.3). The example is Mohandas K. Gandhi. Involved in great collective movements made of numerous governmental, religious, cultural and linguistic aggregations (and disintegrations); tester of unpredictable truths and translations, of unthought actions and ideas; a small, fragile, and contradictory man who believed that each body can and should provide world examples: We must be the change we wish to see in the world. 8 Particular historical events aside, Gandhis actions and words (echoed by Barack Obama in his We are the ones weve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek, Chicago, 02/05/2008) aid us to underscore the practical and explicit assumption of the body in quality of both the semiotic-discursive matrix and support. It is a device within everybodys reach for the experimentation, the exemplifying, and the opening of worlds. It is a potency that becomes more striking and evident when it turns into a means of empowerment in the struggles of self-affirmation of the oppressed, of the emarginated, of the weak, of those who are excluded and persecuted for their diversity. And yet, as the examples we took into consideration remind us, nothing and nobody left this relation of forces intact and unchangedindependence and interdependence, clash and collaboration, homologation and differentiation, translation and incomprehensionthat today continues in each corner of the earth, each time more or less tense and asymmetrical, productive and destructive. And yet the many others of the west left for a long time at the margins stirred, by way of very different strategies and objectives, an apparently globalized world. Making it, once and again, glocal. III.3. Shared Horizons What, then, is the world that we have inherited and that is now before us, if not a shared world? The idea of sharingof con-dividing (dividing together9), the being between us, the inexhaustible tension of being together while dividing ourselves, or of dividing something while being together seems to us one of the key concepts aiding us to view our glocal horizons, our being singularplural. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote: The world, each time, keeps arising from an exclusive, local-instantaneous fold. Its unity, its uniqueness and totality, consist in the combination of this networked multiplicity, which has no resultants (Nancy 1996, p. 15).

Here, what is offered to us is the possibility to think and inhabit a world of worlds. On the one hand the world is taken as known and as the goal of our action, as the beginning and as the end of our being in it, but on the other hand it keeps opening itself: the world opens itself to itself through plural singularities, the worlds, that constitute it. It is a proliferation from the inside, similar to an explosion of lava that falls back again to return perpetually onto what created her, that in turn flows 8 See Gandhi 1996. For a philosophico-political reflection on exemplarity see Ferrara 2008. 9 In a previous draft of this essay, written in Italian, we played on the meaning of the verb condividere, in English to share, composed by the Latin prefix con- (together) and by the verb dividere (to divide). In our translation of this paragraph we used the verb to share but we supplemented it with the compound con-dividing. We thus invite the reader to reflect on the meaning of the Italian word, graphically untranslatable in English.

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back to the origin, to the earthto what it already is and what it continually becomesmodifying it with no interruption. The interesting thing that perhaps is not immediately perceivable is that the idea of sharing (Nancy 1990) connects and relates to that of border (Lotman 1985, 1993), understood as the place of contact and communication between semiospheres, the place that simultaneously unites and divides, the place of the encounter with the other, understood as the mechanism activating reflexivity, self-definition and self-awareness. Is it not, then, the encounter with the other that changes us and simultaneously makes us who we are, making us anew and simultaneously making us believe we have recovered our memory, our past, and our conscience? But if the border is the locus of the translating relation par excellence, 10 if it is true that there is a (semiotic) border anywhere there is an attempt or a need for translation, then borders, in our glocal world, are omnipervasive. Furthermore, as much as it may sound paradoxical, it is their excess that makes difficult, if not impossible, any definitive asphyxia and total impermeabilities, though it forces us into a wearing, imperfect, and at times even traumatic, work of mutual cultural translation. We must constantly face the others alterity and the very alterity that we ourselves are. For this, we are repeatedly called to translate alterity but also to translate the tradition11, to constantly redefine what we believe is ours. In conclusion, at the time in which the space of the world ended, what was being realized was not its flat homogeneity but the plurality of its internal, overlapping, interconnected spaces; what was emerging was the network of its cross-stratified histories, of its manifold borders, of the various languages and points of view, of the many logics and narratives that structure it and constitute it while they fringe it and complexify it at the same time. Our glocal horizon seems to place us in this space of interplay between the heterogeneity of the real and the (social, historical, cultural, or in a wider sense, semiotic) formations that, by articulating borders, conflicts, contradictions, do create possibilitiesalbeit imperfect and contingent onesof sharing and identification. So as do new borders, new conflicts, new contradictions, new translations. ANDERSON, B. (1983), Imagined Communities, London, Verso (trad. it. Comunit immaginate, Roma, Manifestolibri, 1996). ANDERSON B. (1998), The Spectre of Comparisons, London, Verso. APPADURAI A. (1996), Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press (trad. it. Modernit in polvere. Roma, Meltemi, 2001). BECK U. (1997), Was ist Globalisierung? Irrtumer des Globalismus-Antworten auf Globalisierung , Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag (trad. it. Che cos' la globalizzazione?, Roma, Carocci, 1999). BENJAMIN W. (1966), Angelus Novus. Ausgewahlte Schriften 2, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp (trad. it. Angelus Novus, Torino, Einaudi, 1995). BENSA A. (1998), Nouvelle-Caldonie. Vers lmancipation, Paris, Gallimard. BENVENISTE E. (1969), Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropeennes. 1. Economie, parent, societ , Paris, Les editions de Minuit (trad. it. Il vocabolario delle istituzioni indoeuropee. 1. Economia, parentela, societ, Torino, Einaudi, 1988). BERNAB J., CHAMOISEAU P., CONFIANT R., (1989), loge de la crolit, Paris, Gallimard (trad. it. 10 It would be interesting to develop the connection between the idea of relation, as a primary one, as generating the parts that enter into relation (see Hjelmslev 1961), and the idea of border (on this we should recall Lotmans idea that dialogue precedes and generates language, Lotman 1985). On the poetics of the relation see Bernab, Chamoiseau, Confiant, 1989, Glissant 1996, Chamoiseau 2005. 11 See Sedda 2003.

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