Glocality

Some time ago Chris posed a question to the rest of us at the League that has been tumbling around in my head for some time and to which I think have the rough outlines of an answer, or at least the tickle of a start. Chris said,

Exit Question for my fellow members of the League.  I would be interested in hearing yours thoughts about how we can get back to sense of the value of things: community, trade, materiality, thought, our time and what it should be spent on, family, and the like.

Of course there are a lot of different ways that one could answer Chris’ question depending on how one takes the question. There are potentially many reasons why we are experiencing a distance from a sense of the value of things, but among the things that Crhis lists off there is a thread that presents itself to my eyes: globalization.

Now rest assured that I’m not about to go off on some broadly construed anti-globalization rant, it was some years ago that I developed an appreciation for the effects of globalization on our planet: economic, cultural, technological, and otherwise. That appreciation persists to this day. But one runs the risk of  harbouring a one-sided analysis if one remains unwilling to contemplate some of the negative effects of the world’s increasingly globalized context.

One such effect is an increasingly widening perspective that takes our frame of reference so far out of relation from our lives as lived that we do indeed start to lose our grip on, as Chris puts it, the value of things. In many regards, our inherent value of things comes from the orbit they inhabit within the constellation of our lives and how we interact with them. But as our lives become more and more exposed to the mind-numbing pace and unstructured parameters of a global context, the gravitational force of those orbits cease to exert the force to which we’ve become accustomed and our unspoken value of things begins to come into question.

Even our interactions with one another are increasingly mediated by a variety of interfaces that take away the human-to-human contact that is vital to a grounded sense of value — this blog, love it thought I do, is a good example of just one of those devices. Which is not to say that networking devices that expand the parameters of our interactions are bad, per se, but it is to cultivate an awareness of the impact they have on various aspects of our lives and to factor those impacts in when we determine the ways in which we choose to live and how we determine value. In some cases, those impacts may be considered so as to re-orient ourselves to the devices that open us to a more expansive and globalized context to see if we might be able to co-opt their original intention in such a way as to reverse or coerce the potential unintended negativity. To redeem our beloved League, the communal emphasis of this site is precisely such an attempt in the realm of blogging.

The response to Chris’ question, then, I think lies in the uncharted territory of post-postmodernism with a re-emergence of the local that doesn’t require, nor even sees as possible, a denial of the global. The neologism that I’ve dreamt up to describe this emergence is glocality, an effective hybriding of local rootedness and uniqueness within the breathtaking and boundless possibilities of the global. To pull directly from a series of emails between some friends on this subject a few weeks ago where the notion of glocality started to take some shape for me,

I would offer that perhaps the move back to the local is one that represents an embrace of the local by the global. We can’t “go back” per se, but the movement forward is wherein we recognize that there is no global that is apart from the local. The movement is the recognition of the global context by the local and an acknowledgment of the local’s place within the global. In this regard we have globalized context teeming with locality and particularity that itself is interconnected and under-girds the global. They are, in some kind of non-non-dual ultimate sense, perspectival contexts of the same animal. One is both global and local, but neither to the exclusion of the other.

…

I wonder if we can see the global as less of a separate entity and more of a perspective, a frame of reference via which the interrelational nature of the particular is revealed. To be global, then, is to recognize and value the local/particular and see how it all overlaps into one picture?

Unity without violence to particularity.

The driving force behind this notion of glocality for me is to rejig the way that we think about globalization and the natural tensions that arise from that method of thinking between our support for an increasingly globalizing world and the resulting impacts on our locality within that world., to, as I say above, fin unity without doing violence to particularity.

All too often wen tend to cast globalization as this discrete thing that is engulfing and overwhelming our world, a meshwork of interconnectedness whose homogenizing effects can’t but stamp out the particular local instances of our lives as lived. That way of thinking about globalization does indeed, as I spoke about earlier, tend to have a homogenizing effect and the loss of distinct cultures, unique customs, and traditional voices informs much of the crux of the argumentation against globalization, be it from the left or the right sides of the ideological spectrum. My intuition is that the loss of our sense of the value of things is intimately concomitant with those other losses. And yet we also intutit that there is no going back, that a turn away from globalizing contexts is a fool’s errand driven by the blissful contentment of ignorance that is no longer really available to us. Similarly to one of Freddie’s suggestions in a seminal post at L’Hote on premodernism,

It’s that you are asking the mind to knowingly change itself back to a state of unknowing. Since you must be conscious of something that you are asking yourself to do, that’s impossible.

The world has gone global in its contexts and now unleashed those contexts aren’t just unwilling to slip quietly back into their Pandora’s Box, but rather that they aren’t even capable of doing so. So what then are we to do?

To wit, my coining of this awkward term. In rejigging the way that we think about globalization and globalized contexts, I think it behooves us to do so with an eye to bridging some of these unfortunately gaps and assuaging some of our very real concerns.

Do global and local contexts need necessarily to be at odds? I don’t think so, and the whole idea behind glocality is that they are in fact, not. Globalization or globalizing contexts are not some discrete ontological beast that we must kill, but rather an emerging perspective about the world and our place in it. Global contexts are an orientation to the world wherein we recognize that our immediate surroundings, our local environment, is part of a much larger picture, tied together with a whole series of other local environments. That larger picture doesn’t negate the validity and importance of our local environments and the values the spring from those environments (and ways of thinking and evaluating the world), rather it simply places them in a larger conceptual container and by doing brings them into relationship with one another in a new and exciting way.

In this way we can stop looking to articulate a homogeneous meta-analysis of our world that will be a global way of thinking about the world and focus our efforts on cultivating a greater dexterity in our conceptual manuevering within the terrain of this vast sea of relatedness. Which is not to say that this orientating notion of globalization does not have any impact on the values to which we ascribe based on our locality, it does. But that impact is not an interaction of something called the “global” with something called the “local”, it is rather the interaction of different values spheres of local origin with each other. So our own localized values are affected through their interactions with other increasingly relational value statements that arise in other localized instances of life.

Viewing things through this looking glass I think manages to calm the concern around the tension between local and global ways of viewing the world without compromising our localality nor denying a global context of awareness and brings us to a place where, as Chris asks, we can start to get back to the value of things. But, of course, in reality we are not getting back to anything, but moving forward into a habitation of value that is both local and appropriately dynamic and mutable.

All of which is quite vague and theoretical, admittedly. I do’t pretend to have some kind of crystaline vision of how all of this lands. It is rather an attempt to articulate to the best of my ability an intution about a possible way of reconciling some of the deep existential dilemnas that we face and, more than anything, an invitation for a shared fleshing out of what the world from this perspective looks like to the collective naked eye.

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Tags | globalization, interrelatednes, locality, value