Page 133 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 124
transnational media system seem to be more impossible and ineffectual than ever, social
groups inside and between nations seem to have found informal ways to construct their
own collective identities within the boundaries of the system that limits and binds us all.
I have not highlighted the cases above out of cross-cultural romanticism, but because
things happening in distant places and among other peoples—often reified as an
amorphous ‘Third World’—may offer us lessons that are relevant in Europe as well. For
example, recently European national identities have been thoroughly put under pressure
by the growing importance of an integrated European media policy, as for example in the
EU’s directive for a Television without Frontiers. Culturally, this policy, which is an
attempt to regulate the otherwise uncontrolled expansion of the transnational media
system across Europe, is legitimated by pointing to the need to defend and promote some
notional, supra-national ‘European identity’, in which the range of separate national
identities in Europe will presumably be represented. However, this sweeping pan-
Europeanism, which is increasingly becoming a hegemonic force at the level of official
Euro-politics, contains many contradictions. For one thing, it is clear that there is no
agreement about what such a European identity should look like. Thus, the smaller
nations (such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Greece) are suspicious about the
dominance of the larger nations (France, Germany, Italy), while there is also a clash of
visions and interests between nations who define themselves as part of a ‘Nordic’
European culture and those that represent the ‘Latin’ culture. Of course, this is not to say
that the separate national identities themselves should be seen as harmonious givens to
which we could resort as a safe haven (after all, the nations themselves are repositories of
conflicting cultural identifications), rather, it is to suggest that the politics of European
identity is a matter of cultural power and resistance, not simply a question of cherishing
some ‘heritage’, as much official policy discourse would have it.
Troubling in this respect is the way in which such a ‘heritage’ is artificially forged by
the formulation of what is included in and excluded from the configuration of
‘Europeanness’. This implies symbolic strategies that are sustained by constructing the
image of a unified European culture that needs to be protected from the supposed threat
of external, alien cultural influences. In his book Orientalism Edward Said (1978) has
already shown how the idea of ‘Europe’ has benefited from the colonial period onwards
from its claimed superiority to the culture of the ‘Orient’. This ‘heritage’ of latent and
manifest racism still has troubling effects on ethnic relations in most European countries.
More recently, Europeanists have shown obsessive concern about the supposed threat
of cultural ‘Americanization’ as a consequence of the transnationalization of the media
system. However, this is to blatantly ignore the fact that American cultural symbols have
become an integral part of the way in which millions of Europeans construct their cultural
identities. Thus, official policies based upon a totalizing antagonism of ‘Europe’ against
‘America’ are necessarily out of touch with everyday life in contemporary Europe. If
American popular culture seems so attractive to so many in the world, how do people
incorporate it in their activities, fantasies, values, and so on? What multifarious and
contradictory meanings are attached to images of the ‘American way of life’ in what
specific circumstances? Surely, those meanings cannot be the same in different parts and
among different groups and peoples living in Europe or, for that matter, in Latin America
or Southeast Asia, but we know almost nothing about such differences. Against this
background, pan-Europeanist discourse should not simply be seen as a counter-