Page 131 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 122
identity is, just like the popular identities in Latin America and elsewhere, fundamentally
a dynamic, conflictual, unstable and impure phenomenon.
However, contrary to the subterranean tactics by which informal popular identities are
created, the categories of national identity and national culture are invested with formal,
discursive legitimacy and are at present still dominantly used as a central foundation for
official cultural and media policies. It is this constellation that has been thrown into
question by the electronic intrusions of the transnational media system, which does not
care about national boundaries, only about boundaries of territory of transmission and of
markets. It is not just a question of ‘cultural imperialism’, that older term that suggests
the unambiguous domination of one dependent culture by a clearly demarcated other
(Tomlinson 1991). The homogenizing tendencies brought about by the transnational era
may be better characterized by the term ‘cultural synchronization’ (Hamelink 1983), and
it poses quite a different problem as to the politics of national identity. The Mexican
theorist García Canclini has formulated the problem as follows:
To struggle to make onseself independent of a colonial power in a head-on
combat with a geographically defined power is very different from
struggling for one’s own identity inside a transnational system which is
diffuse, complexly interrelated and interpenetrated.
(quoted in Martín-Barbero 1988:452)

In other words, in the increasingly integrated world-system there is no such thing possible
as an independent cultural identity: every identity must define and position itself in
relation to the cultural frames affirmed by the world-system. Ignoring this, which is the
case when national identity is treated as a sacrosanct given, not only can lead to
undesirable unintended consequences, but is itself an act of symbolic power, both by
defining an abstracted, unified identity for diverse social and cultural groups within a
nation, and by fixing, in a rigid fashion, relationships between distinct national ‘imagined
communities’ (Anderson 1983).
Two more Third World examples can illuminate how a politics of national identity, or
one that is propelled in its name, always implies a rearrangement of relations of cultural
power, both locally and globally. The examples also point to the kind of concrete
situations that ethnographies of reception could take up while holding together both local
specificity and global pressures.
In its attempt to foster Malaysian national identity, the Malaysian government ruled in
1989 that television commercials were no longer allowed to feature ‘pan-Asian’ models
(and still less Caucasian models or ads ‘suggesting Western superiority’). Instead, actors
should represent Malaysia’s main ethnic groups: Malays, Chinese and Indians. Ironically,
however, the government had in the early 1980’s taken precisely the opposite tack,
directing advertising agencies to stop using racially identifiable models, reasoning that
using mixed-race actors would be more adequate to promote a unitary Malaysian identity
(Goldstein 1989). What we see here is not only that national identity is a matter of
selective construction, including some and excluding other elements from it (defining
itself as much in terms of what it is not as in what it is), but also the very uncertainty and
instability of what that identity is and should be. The inconsistency exemplified in this