This study aims to identify, within the principle of identity, the cause of the impasse confronting glocal discourse, and to deconstruct and reconstruct it through Gilles Deleuze's ontology of difference. Emerging as an alternative that sought to rest...
This study aims to identify, within the principle of identity, the cause of the impasse confronting glocal discourse, and to deconstruct and reconstruct it through Gilles Deleuze's ontology of difference. Emerging as an alternative that sought to restore the specificity and agency of the local against Western-centric global monism, glocal discourse, in theorizing relations among cultures, presupposes a difference mediated by identity. Consequently, at the very moment it privileges local culture, it confronts two problems. The first is the Problem of Suspicion, in which the glocal is regarded as a contemporary variant of ethnocentrism; the second is the Ambivalent Situation, in which glocal discourse can neither relinquish its core value of local-centeredness nor free itself from that suspicion. Having ultimately failed to resolve this aporia, glocal discourse has lost the vitality it possessed at its inception.
To address this issue, the study adopts a twofold method, critically analyzing the underlying formative principle of existing glocal discourse and proposing an alternative framework. First, by way of G. W. F. Hegel's Science of Logic, it argues that the root cause of the two problems lies on a continuum with the principle of identity, a mode of understanding that perceives difference not as difference in itself, but as something mediated by and subordinated to identity. Presupposing a negative understanding of difference, Hegel adopts the principle that "all determination is negation" (omnis determinatio est negatio), thereby transposing difference into opposition. The two problems of the glocal are formed precisely as necessary side effects of this Hegelian understanding of difference, that is, of the operation of dialectical rationality. As a result, at the moment glocal discourse defines the local, it shifts into an opposition between self-culture and other-culture.
Next, in order to escape the false movement (faux mouvement) that Hegel constructs, the study strategically appropriates the principles of difference in itself (différence en elle-même) and affirmation that Deleuze elaborates in Difference and Repetition, and through them analyzes the principle of identity. When difference is confronted in itself, the very principle that "all determination is negation," which generated the two problems, no longer holds, so that the problems lose their necessity and undergo a shift in status. The two problems remain positive (that is, real) within the domain of identity, and therefore do not disappear. Simply to negate them, then, amounts to a return to Hegel's circle; what must be pursued is not the two problems themselves but the conversion, into a principle of difference, of the cognition that produced them as necessary, namely, the principle of identity.
The significance of this study is threefold. First, by dismantling the principle of identity that produced the stagnation of glocal discourse, it establishes the possibility of conceptualizing the local and culture in themselves, without opposition or negation. Second, this is at once a reconstruction, on the principle of difference, of the very cultural-epistemological framework that has traditionally understood culture only through the mediation of negative difference. Moreover, the principle of identity that the study uncovers is, by its nature, not confined to ethnocentrism but possesses an extensibility that reaches to centrism in general, that is, to any centrism that operates according to whatever is placed at the center. Third, by providing a theoretical breakthrough for the stalled glocal debate, it lays a foundation that opens the possibility of a genuinely local-centered globalization (Localobality).