Page 139 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 130
are inextricably intertwined, in turn leading to the modernized reinvigoration of a culture
that continues to be labelled and widely experienced as ‘Cantonese’. In other words, what
counts as ‘local’ and therefore ‘authentic’ is not a fixed content, but subject to change and
modification as a result of the domestification of imported cultural goods. As Joseph
Tobin observes in the context of Japanese consumer culture, ‘[w]hat was marked as
foreign and exotic yesterday can become foreign but familiar today and traditionally
Japanese tomorrow’ (1992:26). Tobin mentions the example of sukiyaki, now considered
a ‘traditional’ Japanese food but actually a dish borrowed from the Europeans. The same
is happening in Japan with the hamburger, where McDonald’s Biggu Makku is becoming
increasingly Japanized and where hybrids such as a ‘riceburger’ have been invented.
A similar, well-known story has been told about the telenovela, a genre which had its
origins in the American daytime soap opera but soon evolved into a distinctively Latin
American genre. Telenovelas became so popular in that part of the world that they
gradually displaced American imports from the TV schedules and become an intrinsic
part of local popular culture (Vink 1988; Mattelart and Mattelart 1990). A similar erosion
of the hegemony of American imports has taken place wherever there is competition
from local productions, which almost everywhere tend to be more popular than American
programmes (McNeely and Soysal 1989).
Of course, all too euphoric evaluations of such developments as evidence of ‘global
pluralism’ and ‘local autonomy’ should be countered and confronted with the remark that
they still remain framed within the concerns of capitalist culture, now at the national level
rather than the transnational one. Nevertheless, what such examples do indicate is that the
apparent increasing global integration does not simply result in the elimination of cultural
diversity, but, rather, provides the context for the production of new cultural forms which
are marked by local specificity. If, in other words, the global is the site of the
homogeneous (or the common) and the local the site of the diverse and the distinctive,
then the latter can—in today’s integrated world-system—only constitute and reconstitute
itself in and through concrete reworkings and appropriations of the former. Diversity,
then, is to be seen not in terms of local autonomy but in terms of local reworkings and
appropriations. The diverse is not made up of fixed, originary differences, but is an ever-
fluctuating, ever-evolving proliferation of ‘expressions of possibilities active in any
situation, some accommodating, others resistant to dominant cultural trends or
interpretations’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986:116). Two things follow from this. First, we
have to recognize the hybrid, syncretic and creolized, always-already ‘contaminated’
nature of diversity in today’s global cultural order, a fluid diversity emanating from
constant cultural traffic and interaction rather than from the persistence of original, rooted
and traditional ‘identities’. Second, we can agree with Ulf Hannerz (1992) that
contemporary global culture, what he calls ‘the global ecumene’, is bounded not through
a replication of uniformity, but through an organization or orchestration of diversity; a
diversity that never adds up to a perfectly coherent, unitary whole.
At a more fundamental level, this discussion leads me to explore the relationship of
the globalization of culture and the predicament of modernity. After all, modernity has
been presented as one of the most sweeping globalizing forces in history—if anything, as
dominant ideology would have it, the whole world ought to ‘modernize’ itself, become
‘modern’. But what does this mean in cultural terms? One of the most eloquent
descriptions of the modern experience comes from Marshall Berman: