Ann Cvetkovich - Articulating The Global And The Local

POLITICS AND CULTURE

Avery Gordon and Michael Ryan, editors

Politics and Culture is a serial publication that publishes material from a diverse number of disciplinary perspectives, from literature to law, from anthropology to political science, from cultural studies to sociology The serial is concerned with the political significance of cultural forms and practices as well as with the cultural character of social institutions and political formations.

Articulating the Global and the Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies,
edited by Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner

Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies,
edited by Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst

Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies,
edited by Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Mark Driscoll

After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s,
edited by Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland

POLITICS AND CULTURE

PART ONE
THEORIZING THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

, Roland Axtmann

, Michael Peter Smith

, David L. Andrews

, Andrew Light and Eric Higgs

PART TWO
CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE LOCATIONS OF CULTURE

, Charles J. Stivale

, Mia Carter

, Zofia Burr

PART THREE
TRANSLOCAL CONNECTIONS

, Amitava Kumar

, Megan Boler

, Lora Romero

As globalization confronts local traditions throughout the world, influencing all levels of social life, arguments concerning tensions and conflicts between global and local forces traverse contemporary theory. Both modern and postmodern theorists argue that the world today is organized by increasing globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture.1 Marxists, advocates of worlds-systems theory, functionalists, Weberians, and many other contemporary theorists are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment. Even some advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism as a new cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; Gottdiener 1995). In significant modern and postmodern social theories, globalization is thus taken as a salient feature of our times.

Yet an equally wide range of theorists have argued that the proliferation of difference and the shift to more local discourses and practices define the contemporary scene and that theory and politics should shift from the level of globalization and its often totalizing and reductive macrotheories to focus on the local, the specific, the particular, the heterogeneous, and the microlevel of everyday experience. Indeed, a wide range of theories associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism focuses on difference, otherness, marginality, the personal, the particular, and the concrete over more general theory and politics that aim at more global or universal conditions.2

Dichotomies, such as those between the global and the local, express contradictions and tensions between crucial constitutive forces of the present moment; consequently, it is a mistake to overlook focus on one side in favor of exclusive concern with the other (rejecting the local and particularity, for instance, in favor of exclusive concern with the global, or rejecting the global and all macrostructures for exclusive concern with the local). Our challenge is to think through the relationship between the global and the local by observing how global forces influence and even structure ever more local situations and ever more strikingly. One should also see how local forces and situations mediate the global, inflecting global forces to diverse ends and conditions and producing unique configurations for thought and action in the contemporary world.

Indeed, in many diverse fields and disciplines, theorists are beginning to consider how global, systemic, and macrostructures and forces interact with local, particular, and micro-conditions and -structures. Such dialectical optics attempt to theorize the intersection of the global and the local, how they interact and mediate each other, and the new constellations being produced by their current interactions. In this way, one overcomes the partiality and one-sidedness of undialectical theories that fail to perceive the ways that the global and the local interact so as to produce new social and cultural constellations.

Analogous to the question of conceptualizing the interactions of the global and the local on the level of theory, debates have emerged over the proper locus and focus of politics today. Some theorists argue that global and national problems require macrostructural solutions; others argue that the proper sphere of the political is the local and the personal, not the global or national. Postmodern theories of power, for instance, have stressed how power inhabits local, specific, and micro realms, ignored by modern theories that located powers in centers such as the economy, the state, or patriarchy. Postmodern politics urges local and specific actions to intervene in discursive sites of power ranging from the bedroom to the classroom, from prisons to mental institutions.3