‫האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים‬

‫הפקולטה למדעי החברה‬

‫המחלקה לסוציולוגיה ואנתרופולוגיה‬

‫תרגיל מספר ‪5‬‬

‫תרגיל לקורס‪ :‬סוציולוגיה של הגלובליזציה‬

‫מרצה‪ :‬ד"ר גילי דרורי‬

‫מוגש לידי‪ :‬רוית מזרחי‬

‫שם‪ :‬מטיאס ג'אלפים מראשקין‬

‫מספר ת‪.‬ז‪337741003 :.‬‬
‫תאריך הגשה‪03/06/2015 :‬‬
 What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi
of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture.
Therefore, culture is war.
Jean-Luc Godard

Gili Drori proposes looking to the UN's routinely dedication-making as a

focal point of culture production in the global plane: there is an emerging global
culture, says the author, and it's fabric is knitted by ritualistic and bureaucratic
actions, realized in the core of international institutions. Considering the weight
of UN in the political global sphere, the dedication habit is clearly an important
epicenter to this new set of values and norms emerging in our era.
However, one must always raise suspicion on those who claim
themselves as representatives of people. Does a political class, entrenched in
New York, really represent global consensus? They can for sure speak in behalf
of all peoples? There is such amount of moral common ground between
humanity, so we can call for a global culture? The history of human sciences
shows us that, if there is any universal characteristic to the human kind, it is a
utterly flexible mind structure and, obviously, not something in the realm of
Moral and Law. But if so, in name of what these international organizations
speak? Negri and Hardt cast light:

The Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades,
as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet
barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an
irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges.
Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a
global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of
sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global
exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world. (2000)

For them, we live in the era in which the dominance of the national state
model is declining, not because globalization turned it useless, but rather
because this model reached such a coverage of the globe and ranges of power
that it merged into a new form of sovereignty - just like unicellular organisms
merged into multicellular forms of life later on history. And this is what
international organizations represent in their core: the new web-like,
decentralized, global-ranged regime of power. And this regime flows through
and grows from the global capital.
Looking through this prism, the dedication works of UN are not pieces of
a global culture, but of the Imperial culture, i.e., the one of the classes that run
the Empire. More than that, dedication works function as a machine of
hegemonic discourse - it gives legitimacy to the new power: the issues treated
in the dedications aren't urgent to the world, but to new sovereignty's health.
And from this blooms the gap between the discourse making in UN and its
practical works: its main issues remains the limits of borders, war and peace,
but its bureaucratic tributes talk about progresses and rights. Theoretically
speaking, the dedications are battles of the symbolic realm: they are the
reaffirmation of the ontological cornerstones of our capitalistic society - the
isolated individual and the sanctification of future.
One of the best examples of the double agency (intervention and
symbolic legitimating) of supranational authorities (as the UN) is the right to
humanitarian intervention (UN's Chart, Chapter VII: Action with Respect to
Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression). Negri
and Hardt clarify once again: "What stands behind this intervention is not just a
permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of
emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of
justice"(2000). This values are not universals, of course, for there is no such
thing. But, certainly, they are sacralized and vested as a natural moral by the
ritualistic processes of cultural institutionalization.
In the end, the outcome of these dedications and other similar discourse
making actions, is not the contour of a global culture, but the legitimacy of a
new global order - a new form of power that represents a paradigm shift. In this
times, we should remember what was said by the roman historian Tacitus: "they
make slaughter and they call it peace".

Bibliography:

NEGRI, A. and Michael Hardt - Empire. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.

NEGRI, A. and Michael Hardt.- Multitude. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.