PHILOSOPHIE - Association internationale des professeurs de ...

AIPPh Documentation Leusden 2009
substantial role in taking us away from the confrontation of sharply divisive identities.”
(Sen 2007, 148)
The world has changed a lot since 1751. Foreign cultures are no longer far away, they
live here with us, ‘distinct societies’ have become anachronistic, and distances have
shrunk.
In fact one can describe our present age of globalization as one of compression: “The
global field as a whole is a sociocultural system which has resulted from the compression
of civilizational cultures, national societies, intra- and cross-national movements and
organizations, sub-societies and ethnic groups, individuals and so on. As the general
process of globalization proceeds there is a concomitant constraint upon such entities to
‘identify’ themselves in relation to the gobal-human circumstance and environment
(Robertson 1992, ch 4) – even before expeditions in space led us to feel ourselves as
“inhabitants of this one earth”.
“Across the universe” we find global popular culture: Its icons can be found throughout
the world. “Mel Gibson and Madonna are as well known in Brazil as in Belgium; Guns ‘n’
Roses or Jurassic Parc draw huge audiences in Tokyo and in Toronto... Global culture
transcends or erodes national cultures... Popular culture and its market has been
universalized – the same video clips, films or television programmes are consumed in
London, New York and Paris, and very often they are marketed by the same group of
transnational corporations. This leads to the view that politics are irrelevant.” But
according to Street this does not automatically mean to accept a concomitant process of
cultural unification and standardization, as one could presume. (Street in Scott 1997,
75)
Can there be plural identity? According to Wolfgang Welsch, a German postmodernist,
we have to think personal identity as a bundle of different roles which are part of our
identities. What is necessary is a ‘competence of transition’, corresponding to his model
of “transversal reason”, in which we have to imagine different types of discourse with
overlapping common areas, which allow these transitions (Welsch 1995). According to
Nietzsche we have to be “manifold”, have to go through many perspectives and
experience many views, before we are able to see the whole from an uplifted
perspective. According to Amartya Sen we have lots of identities: “The same person can
be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African
ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a vegetarian, a woman, a long-distance runner, a
historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and
lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician,
16