I have need to react on two points published here around term “cultural diversity”, one in contribution of Ingrid Commandeur in “Globalization of the Art System” (although I realize it is meant as a provocation) on the "the whole idea of a spontaneous cultural diversity" and the other, there is a poll set at the n.e.w.s. web site asking visitors and contributors to vote for: How should we try to define “cultural diversity”?: 1) each contributor should write a definition, 2) visitors to the site can be given access to the “book on cultural diversity” to add their definition. Before writing any definition in more/less participatory frame, discussion around meaning of the very term needs to be initiated and carried out. This goes in direction that Renée Ridgway and me once shortly discussed over email.

The concept of “cultural diversity” should be approached carefully. It has appeared on stage, hand in hand with terms such are multiculturalism and anti-discrimination, as a legislation - an official discourse of respect for cultural difference and diversity, which ceded the economic ground entirely. It is a concept that has been easy to deliver as policy and it suits actual political trends quite well. The paradox is that policies both establish and support development in this direction but, at the same time, lead to further ghettoisation of diversified cultures. Further, this construct often appears as a direct consequence of the government's social inclusion agenda and where is inclusion mentioned, the next one will relate to the process of “integration” and that becomes very tricky field... Žižek sees multiculturalism as a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism which empties itself of all positive content. According to Manuela Bojadžijev, appeal for “integration” is nothing more then service which represents a mixture of incentives and coercions to deal with the constant recomposition of migration within and to Europe. The diffusion of this new “neoliberal Newspeak” (and not to forget some older vocabularies: ‘flexibility’, ‘minority’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘identity’, etc.) - “from which the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘class’, ‘exploitation’, ‘domination’, and 'inequality’ are conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent”, according to Bourdieu and Wacquant, while they are speaking of a “cultural imperialism”, in order to justify “the deliberate dismantling of the social State and the correlative hypertrophy of the penal State, the crushing of trade unions and the dictatorship of the ‘shareholder-value’ conception of the firm, and their socio-logical effects: the generalization of precarious wage labor and social insecurity, turned into the privileged engine of economic activity.”

“Cultural diversity” has also become one of the major issues concerning arts funding in the public sector. Such concerns have a background in the 1970s, and some think that the current development of policies and initiatives related to “cultural diversity” have their place in an agenda of process of social inclusion. Significant sums of money are asigned and spent in terms of “cultural diversity”. In that sense, it becomes more of an obstacle than supporter of arts and social development.

Can we turn over the perspective and try to define what could possibly “cultural diversity” represent to us? Is it possible to take over and appropriate it? Where emancipatory moment in this comprehension of “cultural diversity” could be seen and what kind of emancipation it could be?