CCT 510
Introduction to Topics and Approaches for this Module
  • Internationalism/Internationalization vs. Globalism/Globalization
    • Earlier set of terms presuppose recognized, established group of nations among which some entity or agent can be "inter."
    • "Globalization" presupposes transnationalism: prevailing metaphor is the centerless, nodal-concentrating network for relations of power, assets, capital, cultures.
  • Disciplines, methodologies for Approaching the Question of Globalization and the Post-9/11 World
    • Clash of methodologies: the world as socially, discursively, symbolically, ideologically constructed vs. empirical and quantifiable knowledge of the world outside social construction.
      • Social constructivism vs. empiricism and quantifiable methodologies.
      • Theory is like software: you get what you boot with.
    • Combining methods for a complexity model.
    • Deconstruct all binaries!
      • Neither West or East is a unified totality capable of being constructed as already-given opposites, or assumed as self-evident or internally consistent wholes.
      • Using West and East (and their variations) as binaries require mutual entailment and definition by an opposite, by a predetermined "otherness".
      • Identity politics gets entangled in binaries and false projections of a totalized, unified, or monolithic "other" or "enemy."
  • Working with globalization paradigms, discourses, arguments, presuppositions.
    • Theories of globalization from multiple disciplines, conflicting ideological agendas.
      • Often a proxy term for other agendas (like the earlier terms, "multiculturalism," "liberalization").
    • The term "globalization" itself is contested and plural, not singular (Michael Mann).
      • Globalization, like societies and social power, is not a unified or totalizing whole.
      • Is it a descriptive or prescriptive term?
    • "Clash of Civilizations" as a counter-force in globalization. Huntington's well-known paradigm:
      • "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." (Huntington, 1993)
      • A limited model. East and West and other civilizations are complex societies, and there's no guarantee that nations will rally around a core state as the bearer of a civilization (e.g., the US).
      • The "Other" is always already inside: the West is in the East, the East is in the West. No nation is a unified, isolated, totality. In fact, globalization teaches us the opposite.
      • What if we look at the world total as a network of interdependencies with complex social structures, rather than as polarities and illusory unities in opposition to each other?
    • But nations and economic players must enact globalization from within existing institutional structures: it is not an independent or autonomous force.
    • Beware the reification of abstract terms: "globalization" is not a thing or power in itself, but is only seen through the social and economic agents that agree to act in certain ways.
  • Globalization Theories: Some Dominant Views and Issues
    • Globalization as a model of the mobility of capital--finacial, intellectual, human--in a globally networked, transnational world.
    • Globalization as a description of international flows of capital, information, technological infrastructure, concentrations of production, infrastructure, and labor in "global information cities" or "megacities."
      • Global cities and networks: globalization is a product of networked cities, resulting in contrasts in wealth and resources between states with and without global cities.
    • Globalization as a theory of power distribution in political-economy models.
    • Globalization as a redefinition of the old divisions of the world--developed and developing countries, industrialized and industrializing nations, and core and periphery.
      • Divisions between northern and southern hemispheres becoming more dominant and problematic than old divisions between developed and developing nations or East and West.
  • Some main agreed-upon indicators of globalization:
    • the spread of manufacturing from the economically advanced countries to the Third World, shifting markets but globalizing production and consumption.
    • movement of basic industry and manufacturing to developing world and move to information economy in developed world.
    • the development of world products and extension of transnational corporations.
    • the diffusion of interconnected, international financial markets.
    • large-scale transfers of populations to metropolitan regions.
    • the emergence of a global preference for democracy and liberal trade markets.
    • the consumption of identical cultural goods around the world (pop culture, entertainment).
    • the movement toward worldwide access to communications and information technology across territorial and national boundaries.
    • globalization as materialized in the flow of communications, finance, and data across national boundaries among global networked cities as the nodes in a global network.
    • international growth of telecom and the Internet with simultaneous centralizing/concentrating and decentralizing/disaggregating forces.
  • Contentious issues and debates:
    • Globalization seen as the worldwide diffusion of dominant cultures through the global marketplace (Western and American cultures globalized through ownership of infrastructure and production), reading "globalization" as another case of  hegemony, cultural imperialism, or Americanization.
    • Globalization as the imposition of Western and American transnational market economics, characterized as global capitalism or empire, throughout the world.
    • The general homogenization or "internationalization" of culture, favoring Western developed nations and their languages and values, accompanied by an awareness of a resulting dilution or disappearance of local and minority cultures.
  • The Clash in Identities: nationalisms, and imagined communities
    • Nation-state identities and pan-national imagined communities ("Nation of Islam"), "American," "European."
    • Anderson's "imagined community" theory: power in imagined identities and communities. Today, trans-national identities seem to exert the most power.
  • Consequences of Wriston's Law ("Capital goes where it is wanted and stays where it is well-treated.")
    • Concentration of all forms of capital assets--financial, intellectual, social--in global cities.
    • Concentration and network effects: attraction of capital through network nodes.
    • Consequences of being left out of capital concentration centers (example, most of the Arab and Islamic world).
  • Global Informational Cities: A Network of Globalization Sites
    • Globalization as a network of magacities with concentrations of technology, information, capital, and labor in a constant state of flows to and from a central node.
      • "The global city is not a place, but a process. A process by which centers of production and consumption of advanced services, and their ancillary local societies, are connected in a global network, while simultaneously downplaying the linkages with their hinterlands, on the basis of information flows." (Castells, 1996, 386)
      • Consequences of being off the global grid, outside the network, no nodal access.
      • Edges, periphery of global system, distribution of power. The periphery resists the network.
    • Mapping and inventory of World Cities. Map of megacities.
  • Globalization, technology, and communications
    • The global architecture of the Internet and telecommunications.
    • The distribution of Internet nodes, domain names, concentration of architecture can be used as a proxy for globalization through networks of global cities.
    • Consequences of being "off the grid" in interconnectivity and access.
  • International Culture Issues: Simultaneous Globalizations in International Art World
    • Internationalization of the art market in global cities.
    • Artists need to move to cities in the "market network" to be successful.
    • Artists and the artworld struggle with ways to position art in an image-saturated culture, competing with popular culture, television, advertising, entertainment.
      • Some artists have even rejected the "(fine)art" differentiation and embraced cross-media hybrids and ongoing boundary crossings of art and pop culture.
    • Internationalization of artworld professionals: museum curators, art historians, gallery directors, art biennial and international art exposition professionals.
    • The International Art Biennials
      • Art Biennial as a space for artistic legitimization and market validation.
      • The role of Biennial curators: the reign of the curator-auteurs.
      • Effect of the Biennials: an international language of the arts?
      • The impact of the Biennial on local culture and host cities, economic spill-over effects of the artworld.
    • Case study of an artist with high awareness of complexity in globalization: Julie Mehretu
      • Art works as layers of maps referencing multiple cities and places, the experience of global cities and fractured space and place.
      • Art works as hybrids of techniques and media.
      • Semiotics of materials and mark-making today: a "traditional" medium used to represent what "painting" and "drawing" have not been used to represent (multiple urban places, spaces, from perspective of multiple identities).
Martin Irvine, 2004