Page 168 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

The power of the hybrid
The superculture is based on the premise that the hybrid – human, material, and
discursive features of the cultural ‘in between’ (Bhabha 1996) – is the essence
of contemporary cultural activity. Cultural hybrids are constructed through
routine communication exchange, transforming existing cultural materials and
signs into more elaborate material and discursive themes and representations,
then melding those forms with other forms. Hybrids are not simply the
cultural products of everyday interactions; they are the sources and media through
which such phenomenological interactions take place. Hybrids spring from the
indeterminate discursive ecologies of the cultural spheres, then connect with
and mediate between and among the available cultural fields, reinforcing,
contradicting, expanding, and undermining previous understandings while
they simultaneously create new cultural frameworks and experiences.
The syncretic creativity characteristic of the popular culture industries
(think of pop music forms such as country-western, rock en español, jazz fusion,
or rock-rap, for instance), is now being routinely exercised by everyday cultural
programmers, a trend that is made possible by widespread availability of the
latest communication technologies and the abundance of symbolic forms
stimulated by the globalized cultural economy. Culture has always been formed
through such movements and mergings, but today all this activity takes place
much faster and on a far broader scale. Contemporary cultural hybrids are then
further mediated by the production of deterritorialized cultural styles created
in new physical locations, and by the reintroduction of new cultural syntheses
back into the ‘original’ locations – for example, Taiwanese culture entering the
People’s Republic of China, or Mexican-American culture returning to Mexico.

Supercultural identities
‘Culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to
most people’.
(Huntington 1996: 20)

People all over the world even subconsciously assume cultural identities in
order to understand their worlds, and try valiantly to create an overall sense of
well being in the present and hope for the future. That has never been easy to
do, as the spate of self-help pop psychology books, fundamentalist movements,
and spiritualist crusades worldwide demonstrates. In some ways, today’s cultural
conditions appear to only exacerbate the confusion, isolation, and existential
despair. As David Chaney has argued, the ‘modern mass culture of urban-
industrial societies’ has become in many respects ‘a culture of anonymity’
(Chaney 1994: 96). Psychologist Kenneth Gergen believes that technology
greatly disrupts cultural stability, and fears that the erosion of traditional
cultures and the onslaught of unfamiliar cultural messages will create the

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