Globalization and Worlding: Interconnected Alternatives

Abstract

At the outset, a distinction is drawn between globalization, that takes the shape of a consensus imposed from above, and worlding, that takes the shape of a dissensus developed from below. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, globalization “polices” a political space, suppresses conflicts among its constituents, appropriates and translates everything into its own identity parameters. By pointing out the “political” gap between what is claimed and what is within the given space, worlding, in contrast. insists on disagreement. However, these two reconfigurations and recalibrations of human being-in-common are never diametrically opposed, but are interrelated and intertwined. Worlding can start as a liberating “politics” but, as soon as it institutes its platform of commonality, may slip into an imposed “police”. Since political disagreement necessarily aims to legitimize its unrecognized identities, a surreptitious perversion of dissensual politics into a consensual police is its inescapable ultimate consequence. Disagreement invents names and utterances, setting up new collectivities that solidify their identities by “policing” their spaces. Accordingly, one can conclude that worlding starts as an emancipating project that gradually turns into discriminating globalization. The continuous slide of one into the other impeded and disconcerted the political space of European modernity from its very beginnings, accompanying it like an uncanny shadow. This space repeatedly proliferated both its internal (intra-European) and external (extra-European) “zones of indistinction”, whose residents forged transborder alliances with the aim of its recalibration and reconfiguration.