Page 137 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 128
It is often said that emerging from the ever more comprehensive expansion of the
capitalist culture industries is a ‘global culture’. How should we conceptualize and
analyse this monstrous beast? No doubt, the liberal discourse in which CNN’s Ted Turner
appropriated McLuhan’s global village idea falls short here, incapable and unprepared as
it is to see beyond the optimistic, happy pluralist rhetoric of ‘free flow of information’
and ‘democratic participation’. This rhetoric was already criticized and discarded in the
1970s and 1980s by critical theorists who, mostly speaking in the name of Third World
perspectives and interests, forcefully emphasized the deep imbalance of those flows and
the ‘cultural imperialism’ that is implicated in that process (for a critical overview, see
Tomlinson 1991). But the cultural imperialism thesis, on its part, provides an equally
flawed account of ‘global culture’, evoking an unrelenting and all-absorbing, linear
process of cultural homogenization seen as the result of unambiguous domination of
subordinated peoples and cultures by a clearly demarcated powerful culture, usually
designated as American or European, or, more generally, as ‘Western’ culture. It is not
only the residual elements of hypodermic needle theories of ‘media effects’ that make
such a view problematic. A more fundamental problem is its implicit assumption of
‘culture’ as an organic, self-contained entity with fixed boundaries, whose traditional
wholesomeness is presumed to be crushed by the superimposition of another, equally
self-contained, ‘dominant culture’. As a result, talk about cultural imperialism often tends
to collude with a defence of conservative positions of cultural puritanism and
protectionism. To put it differently, this perspective too easily equates the ‘global’ as the
site of cultural erosion and destruction, and the ‘local’ as the site of pristine cultural
‘authenticity’. It is such a dichotomized, binary counterposing of the ‘global’ and the
‘local’ that I wish to challenge here. As I have already suggested in chapter 8, the global
and the local should not be conceived as two distinct, separate and opposing realities, but
as complexly articulated, mutually constitutive. Global forces only display their
effectivity in particular localities; local realities today can no longer be thought outside of
the global sphere of influence, for better or for worse.
The transnational dissemination of mass-mediated culture is, given the hegemonic
strength of global capitalism in today’s world economy, an irreversible process that
cannot be structurally transcended, at least not in the foreseeable future. But this does not
mean that it is not actively and differentially responded to and negotiated with in concrete
local contexts and conditions. These local responses and negotiations, culturally diverse
and geographically dispersed, need to be taken into account if we are to understand the
complex and contradictory dynamics of today’s ‘global culture’. In this respect, as Mike
Featherstone (1990) has remarked, it is preferable to speak about globalization, to think
in terms of complex processes of global integration rather than in terms of static and
given polarities of ‘global’ and ‘local’. Globalization—defined by Roland Robertson as
‘the concrete structuration of the world as a whole’ (1990:20), the series of developments
by which the world becomes a ‘single place’—should not be thought of in simple, linear
terms. It is not a sweeping, all-absorbing process; and, above all, it is an always
unfinished, and necessarily unfinishable, process precisely because this single global
place we live in is also a deeply fractured one.
The construction of a ‘global culture’, then, should not be conceived as a process of
straightforward homogenization, in which all cultural difference and diversity is
gradually eradicated and assimilated. Rather, globalization involves a checkered process