by Édouard Glissant
A beautiful dialogue between Glissand and the curator Hans Ulrish Obrist.
I still believe that the future lies not with the great powers, but with the little islands, lands, and cities.
Globality versus Globalization
- Globality does not homogenize culture. It produces a difference from which new things can emerge. (22)
- Globalization standardizes and dilutes. It reduces communities to a single model, attacking them from the top down, diminishing them.
Archipelagos
- ”a world of many worlds” as quoted by the Chiapas
- they desire a creole — a mixed Mexico
- Creolization is the means by which several distinct cultures or their elements, come into contact in a particular place in the world (contact languages enable this)
- Distinction between multiethnic (where many cultures exist but are distinct) and creole (where many cultures mix and form new ones)
Digital gardening and networked thought as tending to free isles? The reader is a free agent. This freedom produces chance, it produces the unexpected.
On utopias
Utopia is what is missing to us in the world — and thus it is never complete
- If we imagine utopia as a finished work, then we’re continuing the old debates, we’re continuing the old science, and we’re continuing the old demands.
- Why we need to continue to write new shared fiction
- Utopias cannot have norms. When we have norms, we banish to hell anything that does not fall within the rule of that utopia.
- To reach utopia, we must accept that our world changes radically and perpetually, and that it changes with us and in us. We should reject stasis and and immutable.
Utopia is a feeling: an ability to sense that all is entangled