Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesContemporary debates have developed Taylor’s insights by claiming that differenceneeds to be considered as the constant intersection of many features wherenone of them can claim importance over another (Agamben, 1993: 29-38). Thisapproach advocates the intrinsic hybridity of identities. This condition of “inbetweenness”1 presupposes a deeper acceptance of human existence as a porous,constant flux of definitions and redefinitions where nobody belongs completely toany one identity. This way, differences proliferate, opening the way to constantcultural contamination.This ideal of infinite cultural translation, however, poses serious policy implicationsas it radically challenges traditional top-down interventions, which have sofar been bent on efficiently keeping difference within, for example, the narrowconstraints of multiculturalism. Moreover, if it is true that culture has always beenan arena of negotiation, and that globalisation has, to a certain extent, always beenpresent in the constant and reciprocal exchange between continents, cultures andsocial groups, the challenge posed by the new spatial logic of the informationalrevolution could seriously impinge on any attempts by any single state to legislatefor any single cultural identity.As Manuel Castells argues (1994: 20):“The informational revolution allows for the simultaneous process of centralisationof messages and decentralisation of their reception, creating a new communicationsworld made up at the same time of the global village and of theincommunicability of those communities that are switched off from the globalnetwork.”This highlights two main features in contemporary urban living that policy makerscannot afford to ignore: that of spatial segregation and the commodification ofspace.Citizenship, says the geographer Alisdair Rogers (n.d.: 6-7), is inconceivablewithout some reference to its spatiality, and, if one thinks, for instance, about themass of homeless people expelled from the business and tourist districts in twentieth-centurywestern cities, it becomes evident that the denial of citizenship isoften experienced also through physical, social and economic exclusion from suchspaces.Conversely, state multiculturalism has at times fostered an approach akin to acommodification of public space, a space where consumers and not citizens areallowed. Here the city offers itself as a stage of an empty spectacle to be viewedby a mass audience (Harvey, 1989). The result of this is the creation in some citiesof a sort of “multicultural theme park” where differences are sanitised through theconsumption of “exotic” cultural products. In global cities, on the other hand, ascompetition for scarce public resources between different stakeholders makescommunity politics a politics of conflict over the allocation of resources,marginalised social groups are increasingly claiming their right to ensure that their__________1. Bhabha, 1997.124