Page 266 - Contribution To Phenomenology

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL REVENGE 259

And image technologies have become multipliers in another sense as
well. They are the everyday equivalents of cubism, surrealism, and the
Picasso style of multiple perspectives within a single scan or frame. Here
the multi-screen or the television control rooms are good examples.
Instead of one single screen, multiple screens are situated side by side.
It is a "compound vision" but not di-optic as in the multiple eyes of
insects which have many lenses upon the same referent—here there is a
multiplicity of referents. This, too, is a kind of bricolage which the
technical editor—in the case of the TV control room—or the viewer,
"composes," sorts out, selects in a usually fast and changing movement,
what will be foregrounded and "revealed," and what will be left out or
"concealed."
All of these technologies are familiar, part of a now ordinary lifeworld.
With and through them we are now ready to note how contemporary
cross-culture is technologically mediated as "pluriculture."
First, cultures (plural) are daily present. The international portion of
the television news displays Middle Eastern, Asian, Irish, varieties of both
Eastern and Western European culture-bits virtually every night. Old
fashioned magazines and books, too, often combine these culture
fragments—as particularly the National Geographic in Anglophone
countries.
Nor is the multicultural presence restricted to imagery—it is material-
ized in other practices, (a) Cuisines are good examples—every interna-
tional city has a range of restaurants other than local or national and
these have multiplied in the last few decades, (b) Fashions, which belong
to cultural semiotic systems, take their lead, not only from traditional
centers such as New York or Paris or Rome, but from Tokyo, Hong
Kong, with fashion borrowings from virutally every culture—African
dashikis, Nehru jackets, modified Samurai warrior padding, para-military,
American cowboy—all are part of the plurifashion presence, (c) Even
religions take on this culture fragment appearance. In "Christian" Europe
one finds small groups of convertees to Hari Krishna, Islam, Buddhism,
even tribal or witchcraft revivals.
I have already noted in the multiple presence of cultures that they
often appear as culture fragments. These are also mixed in dizzying forms
of bricoleur eclectic. Nouvelle cuisine is French with an Oriental touch;
Japanese "Samurai" fashion is high modern plus traditional; Bahai is
Hindu with Christian forms absorbed into it. There is a kind of center
of gravity which is that of culture bricolage within pluriculture.