Globalization & Cultural Theory

Foreword

Imagination dead, imagine!
(Samuel Beckett, 1965)

Taking utopia and dystopia to be the defining sensibilities of global times, in the proposed volume we seek to explore the structures of the global imagination from a perspective informed by comparative poetics and global theory. As expressions of the social imaginary, utopia and dystopia have galvanized the spirit of each age, firing the imagination of writers, historians, philosophers, political thinkers. Since Aristotle’s Republic through Thomas More’s Utopia to the post-apocalyptic trends of the global times, utopian/dystopian thinking has constantly testified to the propensity of the human mind to conjure up ideal or dark visions of the future. Beyond this disposition of the mind toward envisioning societies of the future, utopia/dystopia foregrounds itself as a ‘structure in waiting’, a’space of the possibles’ reflective of the ethos of a certain community at a given time, illustrative of its guiding beliefs, ideals and, above all, of its fears, i.e. what Ana-Karina Schneider, in her systemic approach to 9/11 as a generic and periodical marker, terms a “structure of feeling.” Profuse and prolific, capable of great versatility, utopia is as protean and heterogeneous as the variegated mediums in which it has manifested itself so far: fiction, film, TV series, comics, computer games, and creative writing blogs. Suffice it to look at utopian/dystopian cinematic representations alone to note that, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to The Wachowschi’s Brothers’ Matrix (1999), running through the visual imagination is a strain of millennialism, the morphological traits of which are identifiable in the various religious utopias, the ecology utopias, political utopias, economic utopias, feminist utopias, indeed the science and technology utopias engendered by the literary imaginary from early modernity to hypermodernity. Observing this at work with a keen eye for confluence and convergence, Corin Braga and Sämuel Ludwig provide contemporary insights into original sites of utopia, as the imagined and intentional lieux de mémorire foregrounded by canonical literary texts.  In “Utopia: between Eutopia and Outopia,” Corin Braga revisits Thomas More’s Utopia, deconstructing its dual modal structure, standing “between the possible and the impossible,” between eutopia and outopia with a view to appraising its twofold, metadiscursive levels of representation. Rethinking William James’s theory of truth, Sämuel Ludwig sheds new light on the utopology-dystopology equation streaming through America determinism, in so doing, tracing anew the cultural filiation underpinning the American realist tradition.
But whereas the patterns of continuity are ostensibly more likely, congenial and evident, the elements of incongruity and/or change particularizing the utopian/dystopian thinking and sensibility in global times are perhaps less distinct hence at least equally worth investigating. And it is the turns and twists of this ‘brave new world ageism’ that the present volume, among other, sets out to explore, the ‘new directions from old’ , its new departures under the transformative power of the global condition.  Typically, globalization is construed as the cultural logic of processes of standardisation, to many, synonymous with ’Americanisation’. In the present volume, we take issue with this thesis, in the attempt to make the case for a cognitive rather than culture-specific model of global theory, one that views knowledge structures as significantly more consequential and reflective of global anxieties than the cultural patterns to which

they give rise. Working in the medium of literature, culture history, film and television, we aim at identifying a set of dominants constitutive of the global ‘order of imagination’, wherein ‘order’ is understood in the Durandian  acceptation of the term, i.e. as ’regime of the image’. For while it is beyond the scope of our enquiry here to embark upon in-depth analyses of the topoï and tropoï of the utopian/dystopian imaginary, we do hope to shed light on some of the dominant motifs resurfacing in global cultural production. ‘Liaising’ between the post-apocalyptic horizon pre-/9/11 and the posthumanist dimensions of post/9/11 fiction, Ana-Maria Schwab delves into the Manhattan dystopia of the by now E.L. Doctorow classic The Waterworks (1994), engaging a close reading of Doctorow’s dystopian future structured as a recurrent past.
One of the central tenets of the present  investigation is that dystopian projections, in general and apocalyptic trends, in particular, form an integral part of global sensibility, with catastrophe looming large on the horizon of expectation of globality and dystopia as a dominant cognitive paradigm. Drawing inevitably on the utopian repertoire, the anti-utopia, particularly in its global guise, of posthumanist allegory and digital catastrophe, postapocalysm, as I argue, becomes a natural dis/order of the world. “Post-Apocalypse Now: Globalism, Posthumanism, and the ‘Imagination of Disaster’” if anything attempts to uncover what I envisage as a shift in the dystopian imaginarium, from an epistemological to an ontological regime. In her examination of the Asian cyborg as the universal, posthuman subject, Amelia Precup takes stock of this particular metamorphosis into a ‘cyborg-topian future’ as projected in Karen Tei Yamashita’s performance prose “Anime Wong” (2014).
The dystopian ontologies of globalism, culminating in the doctrines and aesthetics of posthumanism, could not be accounted for in absence of a return to Enlightenment, symbolic thinking and radical critique; or else, the passage from humanism and its protocapitalist ethics to posthumanist poetics and corporate capitalism goes through postmodern allegory the province of David Howard’s original and unsettling collage, “Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the 21st Century.”
In a seminal work devoted to the archeologies of utopian fiction, Northrop Frye  placed utopia at the centre of the fictional experience, recalling to mind the ultimately inherently utopian structure of all literary works, all configuring to a certain extent a’ no-place’ to be inhabited and populated by the receiving subject.  In what follows, we sought to build on the Durandian metaphor toward an enhanced and, as we hope, topical exploration of the limits and limitations of the global imagination.
     

Adriana Neagu
Cluj, 25 October 2016

“Throughout human history, perhaps even pre-human, there has been a tension between the need for order and the forces that cause change. That tension is greater now than ever, because, in our increasingly globalized world, the rate of change is also increasing. This book finally explains how we can cope: we have stories. We live our narratives.” Brian Spooner, University of Pennsylvania, is editor of Globalization: The Crucial Phase and Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order

"The idea that Axial Ages occurred, and that they provide warnings/opportunities for us today, seems both new and useful. But the value of this book is additional to this stance, in that it looks at cultural change - civilizations - from a complexity viewpoint. These changes are certainly complicated, but the pressures are interwoven and therefore need to be understood as complex. The book does a good job of explaining our present cultural difficulties - our prospective emergencies social, ecological and physical - in a wholly new way. Perhaps we'll get new answers..." Jack Cohen, evolutionary biologist, is co-author of The Collapse of Chaos, with Ian Steward.

"This is a challenging and creative tour de force on comparative, global, world history and cross-cultural, complex societal dynamics. Without doubt one of the most stimulating works in the tradition of big history and macro analysis.” Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, George Mason University, is author of Power Laws in the Social Sciences: Discovering Non-equilibrium Dynamics in the Social Universe.

“In this book, Dmitri Bondarenko (Russia) and Ken Baskin (USA) compare Modernity with the period historians know as the Axial Age (800-200 BCE) as times of transformation, responding to rapidly increasing social complexity. In doing so, they try to apply the experience of the earlier period, and the time of cultural achievement that followed it, to our time of ideological tension among civilizations. The great achievement of this relatively small book is the lucid way in which the co-authors present a picture of complex worldwide developments, based upon their mastery of recent and older literature, and their efforts to point to a way out of the hopelessly divided socio-political situation of today.” Henri J.M. Claessen, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University, is author of Structural Change; Evolution and Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology.

“With a lens of great magnification, the authors search through the intricacies of history, selecting its most important threads to weave together. What emerges is a rich tapestry in which the underlying trajectory of history, not clearly visible to the untutored eye, is brought boldly to the surface. And far from being couched in academic jargon—as one might have supposed—the book is a rare combination of brilliant analysis and beautifully crafted prose. Moreover, it ends on a hopeful note with the authors prescribing what they think societies must do if they are to confront and surmount the challenges that lie ahead.” Robert L. Carneiro, Curator Emeritus of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, is author of Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History.

"I find this a very insightful book, that will help readers to place current cultural developments within the framework of our common past, while contemplating what the future may bring." Fred Spier, University of Amsterdam, is President, International Big History Association, and author of Big History and the Future of Humanity.

If the humanities is the study of what it means to be human, to partake of communal feeling, experience emotion and empathic concern, it must be that around and about the beginning of the twenty first century, the discipline, as we know it, faded away, moving with these accelerated times, having to shift its object of enquiry to realms closer to apocalypticism, animism, environmental and extinction studies. And it's not because 'on and about' the year 2000 'human character changed'; nor because ours are unprecedented times in terms of crisis, anxiety and loss, although in many ways they are; this moment in time, is unique, not so much in terms of the drama that it sees unfolding, but in the futureless horizon of humankind and the pathetic part humans get to play in the 'grand scheme' of planetary things. In its transformative potential, the pandemic pushed further the question of what comes after the human. For in posthumanism, human character, history, i...

If the humanities is the study of what it means to be human, to partake of communal feeling, experience emotion and empathic concern, it must be that around and about the beginning of the twenty first century, the discipline, as we know it, faded away, moving with these accelerated times, having to shift its object of enquiry to realms closer to apocalypticism, animism, environmental and extinction studies. And it's not because 'on and about' the year 2000 'human character changed'; nor because ours are unprecedented times in terms of crisis, anxiety and loss, although in many ways they are; this moment in time, is unique, not so much in terms of the drama that it sees unfolding, but in the futureless horizon of humankind and the pathetic part humans get to play in the 'grand scheme' of planetary things. In its transformative potential, the pandemic pushed further the question of what comes after the human. For in posthumanism, human character, history, indeed culture become inconsequential, made redundant by the pressures of a resized, rescaled equation: human-animal world, hence their ceasing to form the focal point of debate. Arguably, the

This paper seeks, first, to examine the impact of media technologies on the expansion of U.S. sports in South Korea: second, to investigate globalizing and localizing strategies of the U.S. sports in the 90s. By paying attention to the localizing strategies, this paper shows that not only technological capabilities but also contextual elements within South Korea (e.g., economics, politics and ideologies) influence local production, distribution, and consumption of U.S. sports. In the late 90s, the U.S. sports were consumed in a nationalistic discourse in South Korea not only because Korean players began to perform in the U.S. but also because South Korea suffered the economic crisis simultaneously. Korean players in the U.S. were treated as national heroes. The analysis of the case of South Korea suggests that the globalization of cultural commodities needs to be understood beyond the dichotomy between cultural homogenization and heterogenization. Rather, this paper argues that Korean government and national sentiment still play important role in increasing popularity of U.S. sports in South Korea.