Theory & Event

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), much like the UN itself, is an institution patently committed to the Enlightenment project and the Kantian analytic. It emerged, interestingly enough, post hoc after WWII in the European ruins of Enlightenment thinking. Although lacking any overarching global legal authority because no such institutions exist¹, UNESCO is one of the primary international bodies concerned with major and minor cultures, as well as human knowledge in the present. Fostering a global project of cultural preservation through its World Heritage Sites, UNESCO upholds culture as a strategy for struggling with rapacious economic, political, and social forces that destroy human environments as well as humans themselves.² Near the end of the last millennium, UNESCO published the 1998 World Culture Report: Culture, Creativity, Markets, and the 2000 World Culture Report: Cultural Diversity, Conflict, and Pluralism as a service to uphold concepts of universal humanity.³ The World Culture Reports include academics, activists, policy analysts, global actors (literally like Gong Li), and well-known critics and cultural theorists in the Euro-Americas context (Homi Bhabha, Arturo Escobar, Wendy Harcourt, Arjun Appadurai, George Yudice, Nestor Canclini, Anthony Giddens, and Nancy Fraser).⁴ Both World Culture Reports include a plurality of perspectives bridging humanistic theorists, social scientists, “hard” scientists, economists, and ecologists because of the common care for the persistence of various “living interactive cultures” as proclaimed in the 1998 trinity of “Culture, Creativity, and Markets.”

The World Culture Reports were produced during a moment of representational crisis in the wake of the disintegration of the Cold War’s bipolar order of power. Assaults on epistemic coherence were seen on several fronts: globalization as discourse had been rediscovered and was all the rage; coherent local and global civil societies were in crisis due to labor and immigration flows, and liberalist anti-statism abounded; populations were cynical about representational democracy; and bioethical concerns intensified with the cloning of Dolly the sheep. UNESCO recuperates the transcendental of “culture” as an object of knowledge for humans at a moment when concepts of life, particularly human life, are being challenged through biotechnology and genetic engineering. The WCRs argue for rethinking the category of life through a stable conduct of existence like culture to classify all forms of life as human. Culture seems to operate as the primary glue for human organization, the fundamental mode for measuring what humans are - how they “be.” As a result, UNESCO exhibits an epistemological “will to anthropologize” forces, techniques, strategies, and functions that often frustrate representation and the limits of knowledge. Anthropomorphism allows UNESCO to enframe life within culture with local or particular variations understood as cultural difference, while maintaining the universal concept of culture to differentiate human life from other forms of non-human life. (Animals appear for UNESCO as integrated elements of the ecological environment, like objects as Aristotle once said, rather than autonomous unto themselves.) For UNESCO, humans need culture not only to shore up “the human” for this challenge to epistemological concepts of life, but also to offer material alternatives (universal humanity) to the utilitarian concerns of the market and information, which seem to replace the universal human as the central representation of the world system.

The WCRs play a minor role within this project of reclaiming universal humanity via “anthropologization.” Cultural differences (specific cultures), recognized as subsets of a larger species identity (universal human), can be reconciled through dialectic synthesis of local cultures within universal humanity to create what I call the “global human system.” The category of the “global” (or universal human) mixes biological and economic discourses, namely evolutionary and economic developmental horizons and a pragmatic concern for utility, or adding value, that creates what I argue below as “utilitarian humanism.” “Utilitarian humanism” generates a naturalized form of value for the human identified through culture: Humans become human when they are recognized within a particularistic manifestation of culture. Led by Jeremy Bentham and his disciple, John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism began as a secular moral philosophy in Britain committed to understanding why certain things happen at the organizational unit of society, and to itemize those practices...