The Global and the Local :

Modernity and Design IV

Introduction to Design Theories and Culture

Week 10
Nov 10, 2017

1
Tourist vs. Vagabond

1
Zygmunt Bauman

Tourist vs. Vagabond

• The high-up is the mobile elite, whereas the low-

down is the locally-tied, barred from moving and
bound to accept all possible changes on the locality.

• The high-up decides to move to wherever they like,

while the low-down is moved involuntarily.

• “tourist” vs. “vagabond”

a new “apartheid”?

2
Tourists become wanderers and put the bitter-
sweet dreams of homesickness above the
comforts of home…
Vagabonds are on the move because they have
been pushed from behind – having first been
spiritually uprooted from the place that holds
no promise, by a force of seduction or
propulsion too powerful, and often too
mysterious, to resist…

>> Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization, p.92

If they do not move, it is often the site that is

pulled from under their feet, so it feels like
being on the move anyway.
If they take to the roads, then their destination,
more often than not, is of somebody else’s
choice… They might occupy a highly
unprepossessing site which they would gladly
leave behind – but they have nowhere else to
go, since nowhere else they are likely to be
welcomed and allowed to put up a tent.

>> Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization, p.87

3
The shrinking of space abolishes the flow of time.
The inhabitants of the first world [i.e. tourists]
live in a perpetual present… These people
are constantly busy and perpetually “short of
time”…
People marooned in the opposite world [i.e.
vagabonds] are crushed under the burden of
abundant, redundant and useless time they
have nothing to fill with… They can only kill
time, as they are slowly killed by it.

>> Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization, p.88

Limitation:

Is the global always opposed to the local?

4
 2
Glocalization

Roland Robertson

5
 globalization
=
homogenization
=
coercive universalism
?

11

localization
=
heterogenization
=
diverse particularism
?

12

6
 Alexander Kosolapov,
“This is my body” (2001)

7
…the debate about global homogenization versus
heterogenization should be transcended.
It is not a question of either homogenization or
heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both
of these two tendencies have become features of life
across much of the late-twentieth-century world.
In this perspective the problem becomes that of spelling out
the ways in which homogenizing and heterogenizing
tendencies are mutually implicative.

>> Roland Robertson, “Glocalization”, p.27

8
In any case we should be careful not to equate the
communicative and interactional connecting of such
cultures […] with the notion of homogenization of all
cultures.

>> Roland Robertson, “Glocalization”, p.31

9
From my own analytic and interpretative standpoint the
concept of globalization has involved the simultaneity
and the interpenetration of what are conventionally
called the global and the local, or – in more abstract
vein – the universal and the particular.

>> Roland Robertson, “Glocalization”, p.30

time-space compression

10
The global is not in and of itself counterposed to the local.
Rather, what is often referred to as the local is
essentially included within the global.
In this respect globalization, defined in its most general
sense as the compression of the world as a whole,
involves the linking of localities. But it also involves the
“invention” of locality, in the same general sense as
the idea of the invention of tradition, as well as its
“imagination”.

>> Roland Robertson, “Glocalization”, p.31

11
12
13
 3
The Fake

28

14
 fake
=
immoral?

15
 problem
symptom

thinking the fake

。
thinking the global

16
ETA 2824

17
Nicolas G. Hayek

18
19
20
Hikari Mitsushima/滿島光 :
“MONDO GROSSO”

21
suggested reading

Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogenity-

Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, edited by Mike
Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (London: Sage,
1995), pp.25-44.

references
Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogenity-
Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, edited by Mike
Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (London: Sage,
1995), pp.25-44.

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences

(Cambridge: Polity, 1998).

22