Page 141 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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some fundamental aspects of social formation and meaning production in life dominated
by the forces of global capitalism. To be sure, the reduction of the postmodern to an
artistic attitude, an-ism, a superstructural phenomenon, might be particularly biased to the
situation in the developed West, where the epithets of modernity and modernism can
arguably be attached to a ‘real’ and protracted historical period (say, 1789–1968) and
where the postmodern is often experienced as either a demystification or a betrayal of
‘the project of modernity’ and its modernist ideals (Habermas 1983). In the context of
this discussion, however, I find it more useful to approach postmodernity not just as that
which comes after the modern in a chronological sense, but more profoundly as those
modes of social experience and practice which respond, synchronically as well as
diachronically, to the cultural contradictions brought about by, and inherent in, modernity
itself.
In this sense, it is worth asserting that the peripheries of the world, those at the
receiving end of the forces of globalization, where capitalist modernization has been an
imposed state of affairs rather than an internal development as was the case in Europe,
have always been more truly postmodern than Europe itself, because in those contexts the
eclectic juxtaposition and amalgamation of ‘global’ and ‘local’ cultural influences have
always been a social necessity and therefore an integrated mode of survival rather than a
question of aesthetics. Becoming modern, in these cases, has always been ridden with
power and violence; it could never have been a matter of simply embracing the new, as
Berman would have it—but then, he described a peculiarly romanticized way of
becoming modern—but has been one of being forced to ‘let all that is solid melt into air’
by Western powers, and of becoming experienced in the creation of improvised and
makeshift forms of new solidities in order to negotiate the consequences of an imposed
entry into the ‘modern world-system’. As a result, being ‘modern’ here has always-
already been a fractured experience, always a matter of negotiating with an Other which
presents itself as both the site of power and object of desire. As Hannerz, a Swedish
anthropologist, has astutely remarked:

[T]he First World has been present in the consciousness of many Third
World people a great deal longer than the Third World has been on the
minds of most First World People. The notion of the sudden engagement
between the cultures of center and periphery may thus in large part be an
imaginative by-product of the late awakening to global realities of many
of us inhabitants of the center.
(Hannerz 1991:110)

This is not to ignore the unequal power relations that continue to characterize the
relentlessly globalizing tendencies of modern capitalism, which have only become more
overwhelming in scale and scope in the late twentieth century. It is, however, to point to
the unpredictable, often incongruous and highly creative (though not necessarily desired
or desirable) cultural consequences of these power relations as they intervene in shaping
particular local contexts, particularly those positioned at the relatively powerless
receiving end of transnational cultural and media flows. It is here, in these peripheries,
where the intricate intertwinings of global media and local meaning—not their binary
counterposing—are most likely to be a taken-for-granted aspect of everyday experience,