Eduardo Portella
Eduardo Portella
is a Brazilian philosopher, author and literary critic. He was formerly his country’s
Minister of Education and Culture and has served as Deputy Director General of UNESCO. This text has been extracted from his contribution
to a series of “21st-century Talks” held at UNESCO’s Paris Headquarters in
November 1999. |
 To raise the issue
of culture today is to position oneself at the crossroads of two forces, globalization
and the persistence of national identity, that are both contradictory and intertwined.
Culture can no longer be developed without a basic, existential, vital tension between
the universal, the regional, the national and the local.
Although cultures remain anchored in their national contexts, it is increasingly
hard to believe that the traditional concepts of identity, people and nation are
inviolable. Our societies have never experienced such a widespread break with traditions
that have grown up over centuries.
But we must ask ourselves whether modern trends usually presented as possible threats
to these traditions, including that of the nation-state, might not turn out to be
fertile soil for culture, i.e. favourable to the coexistence of diversity. They might
help to avoid the two pitfalls of ordered cohesion and artificial uniformity.
The first arises from the hegemonic identity model being based on a single, total,
dominant, integrating culture. It was seen as something fixed and immutable. It was
brandished as a weapon, and we are only now beginning to measure its impact. The
twentieth century saw the most sophisticated cultures give in to barbarism. It took
us a long time to realize that racism flourishes where cultural identity is regarded
as an absolute. Cultures based on exclusion inevitably lead to the exclusion of all
culture. That is why the concept of cultural identity as we have known it since the
beginning of globalization is out of date.
But culture must not free itself from national identity by surrendering to the might
of globalization and privatization. Emerging post-national identities have not yet
shown their capacity to withstand inequality, injustice, exclusion and violence.
To subordinate culture to criteria developed in the laboratories of the dominant
ideology, which make a cult of the ups and downs of the stock market, the uncertainties
of supply and demand, the snares of functionality and urgency, is to cut off its
vital supply of social oxygen and to replace creative tension with the stress of
the marketplace.
Two big dangers loom ahead. The first is the current tendency to relegate culture
to the status of a superfluous product, whereas cultural perception could well become
for information societies what scientific knowledge has been for industrial societies.
It is too often forgotten that repairing social divisions means having to pay a cultural
cost. Investing in culture is also investing in society. The second danger is that
of “electronic fundamentalism”. Cultural factories and supermarkets spread a culture
that is so technology-oriented that it could be described as dehumanized.
But how can culture be “technologized” to the point where it is just a collection
of cultural clones, and still claim to be culture? A cloned culture is an aborted
culture, because when a culture ceases to be interdependent, it ceases to be a culture.
Interaction is the hallmark of culture. And interaction leads to hybridity, not cloning.
With cloning, the one is an exact copy of the other. With hybridity, the one and
the other give birth to a new entity which is different but also naturally retains
the identity of its origins. Wherever it has occurred, cultural hybridity has sustained
roots and forged new solidarities, which may be an antidote to exclusion.
To paraphrase André Malraux, I would say that the third millennium will be
one of hybridity or it will not be.
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