The Emergence of Global Contemporaneity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3891955 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Terry Cochran (Université de Montréal, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 119-140 |
| Publication date | 1996-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/dsp.1996.0003 |
| OpenAlex | W2011798695 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
Diaspora 5:1 1996 The Emergence of Global Contemporaneity Terry Cochran Université de Montréal Introduction In a recent issue of Le nouvel observateur, a sort of upscale weekly whose influence in France resembles that of Time or Newsweek in the United States, the cover story and main theme concerned the global force of French culture. More than half of the magazine was devoted to evaluating the national culture’s vitality and viability outside the national borders. The magazine reviewed all the domains of cultural production, from cinema to architecture, including literature, philosophy, painting, and even rap music. In trying to represent the contemporary dynamism of French knowledge and ideas in the age of what it called “computer intellectuals,” one article (entitled “Quand la pensée française voyage sur Internet ”) opted for a statistical analysis of data reported in the American Citation Index, which lists authors and texts cited in academic journals. The French found reasons to be very proud: in 1994, Foucault was cited 1,085 times, followed by Bourdieu (624 times), Derrida (293 times), Baudrillard (232 times), Levi-Strauss (186 times), Lyotard (183 times), Ricoeur (177 times), Barthes (154 times), Lacan (118 times), Sartre (90 times), Braudel (86 times), and so on. Furthermore, Foucault was quoted significantly more than any other writer: Habermas, for example, was cited only 918 times and John Rawls, 664 times.1 As the author was quick to point out, French culture and knowledge are obviously holding their own in the global marketplace; they seemingly have no trouble transcending the confines of national debates and contributing to transnational debates of a more universal character. Nonetheless, the author did glimpse some shadows in this otherwise bright picture of the planetary status of French intellectual production. To put it simply, these French works, authors, and ideas are read, cited, and known almost exclusively in English. The article’s author comments that this “nuance” needs to be considered in determining the significance of the global circulation of French culture. This is ironic, to be sure, particularly with regard to the obsessive defensiveness of French cultural policy concerning the xxxxxxxxxx 119 Diaspora 5:1 1996 intrusiveness of English; but I wanted to begin with this story because I think it succinctly articulates a series of interrelationships and issues implicated in any contemporary discussion of the organization of knowledge, whether thought of according to disciplines, university departments, or area or thematic studies. While French knowledge, if one could really conceive of such national knowledge today, shows its face to the world in English guise, the underlying translation process results from a strangely asymmetrical opposition. Contrary to customary French interpretations , there is neither an opposition of two or more nations locked in ideological or cultural conflict, nor some sort of linguistic battle between two powers vying for world domination. In fact, rather than simply the result of some national imperative, the massive diffusion of English expresses a new global condition that is at the same time a loss of cultural specificity or identity. In this sense, English is simply a linguistic vehicle of a globalization that problematizes claims for territorial, cultural, and epistemological distinction between the national and transnational spheres, at the same time that it disrupts prevailing understandings of the universal and the particular, the global and the local. Contemporary concerns about the organization of knowledge (including the disciplines and their discourses), the social function of universities, the role of intellectuals, and so forth, have emerged in the wake of destabilizing technological, cultural, and economic change in the last half of the twentieth century. This volatile configuration of change, often referred to as “globalization,” has placed into question a number of the ideas we have concerning the world—ideas ranging from the nation, collectivity, and cultural production, as in the France example, to how to describe fields of knowledge and integrate those knowledges into a larger historical understanding. It is not easy, however, to characterize the nature of this challenge to the ideas of modernity, for the configuration of modernity has, from the very beginning, been bound up with the idea of globalization. As early as 1848, Marx and Engels saw global awareness as fundamental for modern historical
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| Citations per year | 0.04 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1999 - 1999 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |