Page 130 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational media system 121
romantically discovering and validating diversity and difference in an increasingly
homogeneous world, as has been suggested by several authors (cf. van Maanen 1988); it
can more ambitiously—and with a greater sense of unequal power relationships across
the board—work towards an unravelling of the intricate intersections of the diverse and
the homogeneous, the complicated interlockings of autonomy and dependency.
Furthermore, the ethnographic perspective can help to detail and specify the abstracting,
telescopic view invoked by structural analysis of the transnational media system:

The ethnographic task lies ahead of reshaping our dominant macro-
frameworks for the understanding of historical political economy, such as
capitalism, so that they can represent the actual diversity and complexity
of local situations for which they try to account in general terms.
(Marcus and Fischer 1986:88)

In short, one way to examine the ways in which the hegemonic and the popular
interpenetrate one another is to trace the global in the local, and the local in the global.
The next, last section of this chapter gives an illustration of this point.

WHERE THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL MEET:
NATIONALITY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CULTURAL
IDENTITIES

One central issue in which a recognition of the intertwining of global and local
developments has particularly strong theoretical and political consequences is the issue of
cultural identity. In the struggles that are fought out around this issue in many parts of the
world today, the structural changes brought about by the transnationalization of media
flows are often assessed and officially defined in terms of a threat to the autonomy and
integrity of ‘national identity’. However, I would suggest that such a definition of the
problem is a very limited and limiting one because it tends to subordinate other, more
specific and differential sources for the construction of cultural identity (e.g. those based
upon class, locality, gender, generation, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and so on) to
the hegemonic and seemingly natural one of nationality. The defence and preservation of
national identity as a privileged foundation for cultural identity is far from a general, self-
evidently legitimate political option. After all, nations are themselves artificial,
historically constituted politico-cultural units; they are not the natural destiny of pregiven
cultures, rather their existence is based upon the construction of a standardized ‘national
culture’ that is a prerequisite to the functioning of a modern industrial state (Gellner
1983; Hobsbawm 1990). The desire to keep national identity and national culture
wholesome and pristine is not only becoming increasingly unrealistic, but is also, at a
more theoretical level, damagingly oblivious to the contradictions that are condensed in
the very concept of national identity. Defining national identity in static, essentialist
terms—by forging, in a manner of speaking, authoritative checklists of Britishness,
Frenchness, Greekness, Japaneseness, Australianness, and so on—ignores the fact that
what counts as part of a national identity is often a site of intense struggle between a
plurality of cultural groupings and interests inside a nation, and that therefore national