Page 156 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

usual critical arguments made against communications technology as nothing
more than tools of imperialism don’t shed much light either. Instead of simply
reproducing conditions of domination and repression, the market has created a
rich source of material and symbolic resources which ultimately challenge the
hegemony of state institutions. Where all this is headed, though, is anyone’s guess.

Civilizations
‘A big hug from Chile to all the Mexican people!’
(Chilean broadcast journalist reporting the presidential election
victory in Chile of Ricardo Lagos to the Mexican national radio
system, January 2000)

To a great extent our mediated and unmediated experiences re flect immersion
in the civilizations to which we belong. This fact may seem quite unremark-
able, perhaps even self-evident, but the very idea that differing civilizations
demarcate global cultural organization with serious political consequences has
generated much controversy in academic circles.
Although he was by no means the first to talk about culture in terms of
broad civilizational groupings and alignments, Samuel P. Huntington stirred a
tremendous reaction, certainly not all of it favorable, when his book The Clash
of Civilizations was published in 1996. Part of the critical response to the book
stems from many intellectuals’ unwillingness to accept what they consider its
main premises to be: that civilizations are essential human groupings, and that
human conflict based on these essential differences is inevitable. Huntington
argues, for instance, that:

Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civiliza-
tions is tribal conflict on a global scale . . . Cold peace, cold war, trade
war, quasi war, uneasy peace, troubled relations, intense rivalry, com-
petitive coexistence, arms races: these phrases are . . . descriptions
of relations between entities from different civilizations. Trust and
friendship will be rare.
(Huntington 1996: 207)

A Harvard professor and former American government adviser on national
security issues, Huntington interprets global cultural trends in ways that re flect
his understanding and promotion of American national interests. However, we
are not concerned here with the political implications and pessimistic cultural
predictions Huntington makes. I am interested not in defending or interro-
gating the politics or subtleties of The Clash of Civilizations but in using the
main theme of the book for establishing civilization as a primary cultural
resource for supercultural formation. Even Huntington’s most strident critics
must grant that his dissertation on civilizations is extraordinarily comprehensive.

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