On the notion of “world” in the contemporary cultural discourses: relations between universal and diversity

Abstract

Considering the notion of world as a socio-historical category, this article analyses how it is perceived in the contemporary time, from the perspective of the relation between the ideas of universal and diversity. If until the second half of the twentieth century the images men had about the world were based on the idea of universal, today it is the idea of diversity which predominates on this definition. We take as our corpus of research the arts and the music, and conclude that if the idea of diversity assumes such predominance, a global market imposes on it its universal rules.