From a geometrical and logical point of view, the ecology of Universalism, as the horizon where the universal and the particular, the global and the local interact, is a complex interweaving of continuity and contingency, or to use Charles Sanders Peirce's terminology, Synechism and Taichism. We can generally investigate the space of the Universal through particular instances or local contexts, but the relation between the local site and the global is not one-to-one. The Universal cannot be
exhausted by particular instances. In the same vein, the global integration of local sites is not simply addition or a stabilizing synthesis, one that has been concluded or can be concluded. It has something more, a structure that has something in excess of adding back-to-back local sites. This structural excess is what I call the transformative factor. An intuitive example would be a
a non-trivial fiber bundle, such as a Mobius band. If local sections of a Mobius band were simply added together, we had a cylinder. But a Mobius strip or a Klein bottle have a global twist, something that cannot be constructed by simple mapping of one local section to its neighborhood. So a trivial fiber bundle, such as a cylinder, is globally different from a Mobius band, but they are locally identical.
To turn this into an art example, the contemporary notion of site specificity is more like a trivial fiber bundle, rather than a non-trivial fiber bundle endowed with a global twist. Precisely because of two reasons. On the one hand, this paradigm sees the site, the local site, as an anchored, rooted, or a stable element contextualized by its local neighborhood. And on the other hand, it sees globality as a whole, or a totalized space that is given in advance.
And therefore, it is a point of contrastation or opposition, the diametrical opposition with the local site under investigation. Now if we were to attach an observer to this local site so as to extend our art example into a cosmological example, the observer of the conventional form of site-specificity is anchored in the local site. a rooted subject. For such an observer, then the totality of the global or the
universe is already given as a whole. But we can also imagine a different observer, an observer that is not anchored, it is a rootless. For the second observer the model of the world is not established as a stable whole a world that is in its totality is confronted by the anchored object sorry subject the model of world for such an observer is always scattering the observer itself requires a mobile frame of reference in which neither the totality of the local
site nor the global construct subject and the universe are established in advance. This I would say is precisely the difference between the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system as a rectification but not detachment of the Ptolemaic framework on the one hand and the Newtonian-Einsteinian framework of looking at the universe and the other. Once we carry out the investigation of the local and the global, the particular and the the universal through the synthetic or integrative environment that the
interweaving of continuity and contingency create, we can arrive at a very, very interesting results. Looking at the space of the universal through particular instances or local contexts is in this sense no longer a purely analytical procedure. It is like looking into an expansive space through a lens that does not produce zooming in and zooming out effects. By simply scaling up or down the same image, but instead it produces synthetic and wholly different images
across different scales of magnification. It then becomes almost impossible to intuitively guess what kind of conceptual and topological transformations the local context, a window into the universal, undergoes as it expands its scope and converges upon the universal or the global construct. By approaching the space of the universal through local contexts in an environment where continuity and contingency are interwoven, that is where different layers of mediation between universality and particularity the global and the local exist, we can arrive at intriguing conclusions.
For example, we can tackle the question of constructively integrating local contexts in order to broaden or expand their scope without merely adding them to one another in a pluralistic and flat fashion. The transition from the local to the global requires something more than the jocastoposition or addition of local contexts. It requires a form of interneeding, multiplication between localities, while it acknowledges their particular specifications, parameters and orientations,
it takes localities beyond their immediate and restricted ambits. This is what, earlier on, I called the transformative factor, under which multiplicities of the local are integrated, but also transformed into an integrated global construct, whose structure is not simply the sum of such multiplicities of local sites. It is in this sense that the passage from the local to the global is not simply a form of transit through which the local element preserves its constancy.
It is instead a mode of production of new orientations, structures, dimensions and new intuitions of locality and globality. Disintegration and integration. Now I would like to start the question of approaching the space of the universal by discussing the problem of localization. Reductively speaking, in order to approach a space whose full scope is not given, we need to start somewhere. Which is to say, we need to find and identify a site to which we can approach this space without ever over-stretching the resources of the site
or being restricted to the immediate resources of its local horizon. To see the universe in an ungiven manner, we should also have a non-given definition of the local as our initial point of navigation of the said universe. In fact, the question of localization undergirds the kind of ontological and epistemological justification you make about yourself, the subject and the world.
Precisely because it is the localization that permits a malleable approach, and it is the malleable or revisable approach in the sense of navigation of different pathways that forms knowledge and makes sense of ontology, the universe or the world of which you are a part. Localization is always an act of organization or configuration. It operates under the schema of what Gilles Chatelet calls doing violence to a landscape, to an immediate landscape, your local site.
A perturbation, the injection of disequilibrium, a designated alienation, a systematic distancing that brings about the possibility of qualitative organization of information from a homogeneous information where nothing is given in advance. The local can then be understood as an encapsulated depth or more intuitively speaking a complex structure endowed with a very simple appearance, a surface that is but a depth unbound by a a ramified path structure. The subject or the observer of this local site is not a tourist
of the surface, but a laborer or a traveler whose task is to unpack, step by step, the depths, the navigational pathways, already implicit to the surface. The classical antinomy between surface and depth, the superficial and the abyssal, the regional and the universal, the terrestrial and the cosmological, the local and the global, finally comes to a resolution, but only by virtue of rediscovering the local as an integral
tension, a space of alternative addresses whose navigation requires the perpetual reorientation, reorganization, and reconstitution of what we call the local. And to come back to the site-as-specificity example, where the site is situated firmly and is contrasted to a pre-established model of globality, etc. Now to break from this provincial paradigm of locality or site-as-specificity, we must
Think of the local as nothing but a concatenation of different alternative addresses or ramified paths which can infinitely grow as they are navigated. Precisely, you can always see a local site from infinitely growing alternative addresses. This navigation as a task of unpacking depths or ramified addresses requires a new constitution of the local subject, one that is ruthless and for which neither the local or the global
are finalized totalities. The organization of the local, the identification of its internal exigencies and demands, is by definition an operation that can only take place in the passage from the local to the global, with the understanding that the global is neither the aggregate of particular instances, nor is it endowed with the same orientation. It is as a result, it is as a result, a ramified path structure, a product of depths which ought to be navigated.
this very navigation of such depths is what I call localization a non-trivial localization of a site or locality or local condition and it's precisely the result of this depth-wise view of the local site that we can now see the local site as a topos with endless ramifying addresses at various local levels and depths appearing as different and isomorphic
and as different and even incommensurable, sorry, even incommensurable images of this local site portraits at different levels of depths, depth-wise portraits of one single local site. Zooming in and out of the local site does not yield similar or isomorphic images. It produces, contra the classical portrait of the local site as adopted by the conventional paradigm of site specificity, different non-homothetic or self-similar images of the site.
Essentially depth-wise view of the local site or localization of a local site by ramifying paths yield different portraits of the same local site. Thus the localization of a local site does not preserve the canonical or unique address of the site or its essential features or parameters. It assigns site new addresses and parameters
at different levels. Such addresses can be revised or integrated. But one thing is certain. The unpacking or disenvelopment of such addresses for a given localities is precisely the labor of the universal, the construction of a globality that is not given in advance as an opposition to the local, but is in fact the very constructive meaning of the local as a site that can be addressed differently and entails the unfolding of such addresses. And such unfolding is
precisely the labor of navigation and integration of other addresses pertaining to different sites, different localities. It is in this sense that the task of localization is not about exposing or situating a local site in its immediate neighborhood, but to reconstruct and broaden what actually a given locality is, beyond its presented and manifest portrait. To this extent, we can say that seeing the local from its surface and from its depth
results in two entirely asymmetrical views or images. It is the similarity of images of the local site that calls for a stereopsis or a stereoscopic image or stereoscopic coherence between different addresses or depths of a local site, between the synthetic and analytic views. Without this stereoscopic view or coherence, one risks either a restrictive localism, a microlocalism, or a universalism that is completely detached from concrete particularity.
both of which are pathologies of visions or to adopt Wilfred Sellar's terminology seeing or conceiving the world as. They are both pathologies of seeing. the world, not as a given totality, what I would call a pathology of seeing,
to go depth-wise, to localize a site by way of its ramifying atlases, is to see the local world in which we live as a building block for constructing new worlds. That is to say, to recognize this world anew. To recognize the world of which we are part requires to recognize this world,
a recognition that coincides with reconstruction of this world according to the possibility of new actual worlds that can be made from this world as their building block.