Page 145 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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In the realm of uncertainty: the global village
and capitalist postmodernity

Speaking about the present condition of the world, or ‘today’, has become a thoroughly
messy and capricious matter. The collapse of official communism in Eastern Europe and
the subsequent ending of the Cold War, the Gulf War, the gradual decline of American
hegemony, the rise of Japan to world economic might, the spread of the AIDS virus, and
the environmental crisis are only some of the major historical events which signal a
reshuffling of geopolitical relations whose eventual outcomes remain deeply uncertain.
Indeed, as Immanuel Wallerstein has noted, the capitalist world-system is in mutation
now; we have arrived ‘in the true realm of uncertainty’ (1991:15).
I cannot dissociate myself from this condition of uncertainty. Indeed, what I would
like to do here is take this uncertainty on board—not only as to the state of the world
‘today’ but also regarding the current state (and status) of ‘theory’, let alone
‘communication theory’. The very idea of a book on ‘communication theory today’—in
which this essay first appeared (Crowley and Mitchell 1994)—assumes that such an
entity exists or should exist (despite its undoubtable internal plurality and diversity), that
it can be proposed and formulated, and that it matters. But this assumption cannot go
unquestioned. Of course ‘communication’ is, and should be, a crucial site of critical
intellectual reflection if we are to understand contemporary social, political and cultural
relations, although the very notion of ‘communication’ itself, encompassing such a mixed
bag of events and processes, is hardly specific enough to be used as a starting point for
theorizing the complicated entanglements between peoples, powers and cultures in the
world ‘today’.
At any rate, what I will try to explicate here is that if we are to understand
Wallerstein’s true realm of uncertainty, we have to go beyond the concerns of
communication theory, however defined. This is because communication theory, founded
as it is on the logic of reduction, if not elimination, of uncertainty, cannot deal with
uncertainty as a positive force, and a necessary and inevitable condition in contemporary
culture, the condition of capitalist postmodernity.
One of the most popular metaphors used to describe this condition has been
McLuhan’s ‘global village’. However, this very popularity tends to foreclose a closer
engagement with exactly what it means when we say that today’s world is a ‘global
village’. Often the unwarranted (but strangely reassuring) assumption is made that the
creation of the ‘global village’ implies the progressive homogenization—through
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successful communication—of the world as a whole. However, as George Marcus has
noted, the fact ‘that the globe generally and intimately is becoming more integrated […]
paradoxically is not leading to an easily comprehensible totality, but to an increasing
diversity of connections among phenomena once thought disparate and worlds apart’
(1992:321). In other words, the global village, as the site of the culture of capitalist
postmodernity, is a thoroughly paradoxical place, unified yet multiple, totalized yet
deeply unstable, closed and open-ended at the same time. I will propose here a