Globalization and the Great Unsettling

Paul James

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Chapter 5 Globalization and the Great Unsettling

In: Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

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Paul James

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 80–99

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004500365_006

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Focusing on the most recent phase of globalization, the Great Unsettling or postmodern phase, the chapter addresses the question of how one judges if a new phase has been reached? Elaborating on the distinction between modernity and postmodernity, the analysis examines the ecological, political, economic, and cultural characteristics of this current phase at the global level. The argument is that, with antecedents in the previous phase, the great unsettling began in earnest in the post-World War II period. Encompassing and existential change directly attendant upon globalization relativized assumptions that were hitherto globally considered ontologically stable and unquestioned. These include the distinction between the artificial and the natural, the identification of the substantial with the real, the difference between the human and the nonhuman, and the separability of past, present, and future. After introducing general features of these changes select illustrations are offered in the four domains. Ecologically, nuclear weapons and anthropogenic climate change illustrate the unsettling of the distinction between artifice and nature. Politically, the Anonymous movement and the War on Terror illustrate how political legitimacy has been relativized. Economically, financial instruments like hedge funds and derivatives have commodified the future in the present, thus eliding these temporal boundaries. Culturally, artificial intelligence and cybernetics illustrate the unsettling of the human-machine difference. Overall, these changes show the qualitative differences of the latest phase of globalization and how the most fundamental criteria for constructing identities have themselves been relativized.

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

Series: International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Volume: 139

Cover Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004500365

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 19 Nov 2021

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- Social Sciences

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Chapter 5 Globalization and the Great Unsettling

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Globalization/Glocalization: Developments in Theory and Application

Essays in Honour of Roland Robertson

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