Notes on (aesthetic) judgment in the times of globalisation

beyond desire to understand the Other

introduction to an essay published in International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Šuvaković, Mako (eds.), pp. 70-82

We all live in an increasingly homogenised world. Due to proliferation and acceleration of all modes of communication, literally everything, from ideas to products, from people to viruses, almost instantaneously becomes global. This essay tables a single, but critical issue related to such, radical globailsation – the importance of cross-communication capable to celebrate diversity and treasure the cultural Other; or, to put it the other way round – it attempts to point at dangers associated with an evident lack of such sensibility and, consequently, of cultural diversity itself.

As early as 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord has foreseen the dangers. He pointed out that “the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign” (Debord, 1967). In 1988, not long before ending his own life, in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle the key Situationist has warned how “the spectacle has spread itself to the point where it […] permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory […] that the globalisation of the false was also the falsification of the globe” (Debord, 1988, my italics). Since then, “a false ideological universality, which masks and legitimises a concrete politics of Western imperialism, military interventions and neo-colonialism” (Žižek, 2005), the irresponsible sovereignty of which has evolved into a fully-fledged reality. The perceived inevitability (ibid.) of the new, neoliberal version of the flat World needs to be confronted. The aim of this essay is to advance an awareness about an ultimate (im)possibility of translation and universal equivalence (Nancy, 2015), the damaging effects of reductionism (Morozov, 2013) in cross-cultural research and practice, and the need to protect the complex, messy world of precious differences (Low, 2004).

The discussion that follows presents three fragments of an ongoing research into cultures which are profoundly different to that of my own, and provides a brief Post Scriptum. First we establish the “Who” of those investigations, thus pointing at the importance of subjectivity in cross-cultural explorations in general. Then, we problematise the notions of untranslatability and non-equivalence, the combined “What” (urbanity and aesthetics, as two illustrative themes) and the “Where” of our discussion (Japan and China). The third segment presents elements of “How”, the ways of working with(in and for the Other, as established during my immersions into the cultures of the East. The P.S. explains the necessary sensibility in approaching, thinking, living and, in particular, in efforts to judge the radical Other.

The essay is polemological, in hope to, in de Certeau’s tradition, help “force theory to recognise its own limits” (de Certeau, 1984).

(sketches or Vermeer, Dali and Gumpp paintings, by Davisi Boontharm)