Dimensions of Conflict in Globalization and Cultural Practice: A Critical Perspective

Dimensions of Conflict in Globalization and Cultural Practice: A Critical Perspective

In the collusion of languages between postmodernism and neo-liberal globalization theory, conflict is almost always elided under the spectral energies of ‘flow’. Identities, goods, and practices are imagined to be in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, flux, and mutation, as they cross borders, circumventing the strictures of trade regulations and the protocols of nation-states. If there are obstacles encountered in this seemingly unregulated global flow, they are invariably absorbed along the way, with dichotomies and oppositions giving way to hybrid mixtures and intercultural conversations. Even when ‘disjuncture’ (Appadurai, 1990, 1996) is marked as a central component of such globalization discourse, it is never allowed to disrupt the momentum of cross-border exchange. If anything, it catalyzes the exchange without allowing it to break down under the pressure of irreconcilable differences.

Against this increasingly hollow Utopian scenario, what makes the insertion of ‘conflict’ in globalization discourse so productive is precisely its interruptive capacity to break the easy equations between the flow of global capital and its impact on new modes of cultural production and reception. Conflict brings us back to earth, within the immediacies and I contradictions of specific locations. It reminds us that globalization impacts on different locations in significantly different ways. Even when its commodities and services appear to be distributed at mass levels, this dissemination registers through a spectrum of inequalities and imbalances, if not exclusions of large sections of the world's population. Far from being anachronistic, therefore, conflict has the potential to be the soundest arbiter of differences, if not the most potent means of questioning the dominant hegemonies of our times. Without conflict, there can be no action: this truism, drawn from and tested through the practice of theater and cultural activism, continues to be oddly tenacious, not just at a performative level, but in the social and political developments of the public Romain as well. In the world of theater, it is well known that when conflict appears to disappear altogether, by entering the subtexts of silence or stasis, there are more unprecedented and enigmatic dimensions of conflict than what gets articulated in the agonistic confrontation of differences. These BA-conflictual dimensions of conflict that seem divested of all violence and tension are best described as ‘latent’, to adopt the felicitous category adopted by the editors of this series. I would argue that the latent dimensions of conflict can be more intractable than those manifest dimensions of conflict where the differences are emphatically marked. Likewise, the invisible traces of conflict can be more corrosive than what meets the eye. More critically, the attempt to deny conflict, or to settle it once and for all, as in many sincere and failed experiments in conflict-resolution, can be more problematic than the embrace of conflict as an integral part of human endeavor and change.

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