global local

Arif Dirlik begins his essay with a short description of the film Local Hero. It is a film about a small town which the corporate evil giants want to take over, but in their negotiation process, the corporate evil giants fall in love with the town and in the end, they scrap their project and build labs that benefit the town. In ways, this film is a fairy tale where the small town is the beauty and the corporate giant is the beast. It is a story about humanizing the beast that is the corporation. Dirlik is amused by the fact that even in past decades, the global and the local were seen as two ends of the spectrum at battle with each other. Local was the site of resistance to capital; it shows "a nostaligia that becomees an active ingredient in the formulation of a contemporary discourse on the local which has rescued 'fabulation' itself from the opprobrium of a more 'realistic' time to render it into a principal for the reconstruction of the local" (Dirlik).
The 1990s, according to Dirlik, were dominated by movements and projects to reconstruct and save the local from domination. Examples he gives are the tree hugging women of Chipko, the Mexican workers of maquiladora industries and western Kansas counties. Much of this work follows activist tactics.

Dirkil points out the two faces of the "local"- the site or promise and the site of predicament and discusses these points further:

Rethinking the Local
The local has never really disappeared; it has just been marginalized. It appears to be dying because civilizations in history have homogenized as they progressed, making it appear that the global (as opposed to the local) homogenized the local and ended it. Modernity makes it appear that the local is out and the global is in by focusing attention on progress, urbanism, capitalism and scientific rationality.Modernity became the evil while local became the traditional good.

Critics feel that modernism has forced its narratives upon people and turned them modern. By repudiating modernization, the public has brought attention to those social and cultural forms that did not have a place in modernism; this rejection of modernism has revived their presence in society and given them a choice to join modernism or not- opposite of what modernism did when it forced them into accepting mdoernism. Colonized states like Hong Kong are examples of this point. Their choice and decision to modernize was never questioned, it was assumed that they would naturally join the modern tendencies drawn out by their colonizers. The rejection of modernism also brought local narratives into the spotlight. These local narratives had resisted or complied with modernism and contributed to the formation of modernity. I think that examples of this would be groups and nations that refused to accept modernity. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia still reject certain aspects of modernity. Dirlik mentions that the spirit of nationalism in certain areas was heterogenized into nationalism for the global as part of modernity; stripping them of their sense of nationalism for modernity.

Dirlick predicts that repudiation of modernity is a temporary transition phase during which silence voices can be heard and forgotten narratives are remembered. However, this phase will end as capitalism comes back and reshapes our narratives and history. The issues raised right now will soon be forgotten as capitalist establishments reconfigure our developing world. The only way that these issues may be heard is if previously powerless groups who are now in power consciously redefine the world with consideration of past issues. In an ideal world, this would mean that Bill Gates and George Bush would come together to start a foundation that creates jobs for recent graduates, helps those in the work force utilize their potential and provide good workers with large bonuses. They would travel to India and Malaysia and see that the level of education there is as good as the level of education in North America, and an Indian neurosurgeon can work wonders if provided (with no cost to himself) with North American laboratories and equipment. Ours, however, is not an idealistic world and the global is indeed a monster that eats up anything local that comes in its path, even if the local belongs to somebody else.

Postmodernism, Dirlik notes, is concerned about the local. The postmodern consciousness encourages a contemporary localism. However, this local has traces of oppression and power misuse from it's earlier days, it remains closely tied to capitalism- as Dirlik discusses further on.

Global Localism
Global capitalism, also known as late capitalism, a flexible production or accumulation, is "a further deterritorialization, abstraction, and concentration of capital" (Dirlik). It is "an unprecedented penetration of local society globally by the economy and culture of capital" (Dirlik).

A new international division of labour, or as Dirlik puts it, "the transnationalization of production where the process of production is globalized" is central to the new global capitalism. Production changes location, speeds increase, and capital becomes more important than labor.

Capitalism is "decentralized" nationally- no one nation can attest to being the center of global capitalism.

The transnational corporation links this network of nations. This corporation is the economic node that feeds the network.

Unpredented global unity and fragmentation took place because of transnationalization of production. Global in the disappearing of a center to capitalism, fragmentation of the production process into subnational localities.

For the first time in history, the "capitalist mode of production appears as an authentically global abstraction"- no longer attached to Europe. Economic fragmentation led to multiculturism. However, Dirlik disagrees and says that capitalism is based on European ideologies and no matter how much it detaches itself from Europe, it will remain of the same ideologies. Thus, even if Europe and North America lose their domination over the capitalist world, their ideologies will still rule the world.

Transnationalization questions the divisions of First, Second and Third Worlds. This has all led to global localism. "Think globally, act locally" comes out of this concept.