Page 267 - Contribution To Phenomenology

260 DON IHDE

Pluriculture also seems to favor ''surfaces:' One picks and chooses
culture fragments, but one does not take with them their context or
history. We become adept with chopsticks; we change our clothes with
the occasion; we become rehgious "aesthetes" at most
These are some of the characteristics of a technology mediated
pluriculture, famiUar to all of us, particularly in cosmopolitan and
international centers and in the "First World/'

V. Cultural Revenge

Where in all of this lies revenge? Our answer is closer to hand than
thought. What we have been taking to be popular culture is only the
surface manifestation of one element of pluriculture. Popular culture is
a kind of bricolage, an easy picking of the cross cultural. Jeans: originally
the fashion of the American gold-miner, invented by a Jewish tailor
(Levi-Strauss), exemplifies the working class. Beatles: bricolage music,
invented in Liverpool, England, but drawing from older jazz, blues, and
swing (African American) as well as folk harmonics. And, what of "pop
leftist pontics"? The "Events of May" in '68 had "Maoist cells" (Chinese
Marxist), later the "Che" inspired groups (Latin Marxists), or Biko
(African) anti-apartheid groups. Popular culture reflects a kind of
bricolage pluriculture. It is neither "American," nor "European," not
"Asian," but, in a sense, all of these. It is "postmodern" in the sense that
it is a "both/and" rather than "either/or" and constantly forming and
reforming in a non-foundational mix of culture fragments.
I shall not pretend that popular culture appeals to many intellectuals.
But often literature does. And if this is an ascent in a cultural scale,
something emerges here, too, which points to pluriculture. Nobel prizes
in physics have retained their virtually strict Euro-American cast—all such
prizes in the last decade plus have gone to Western Europeans and
Americans. But the same is not true of Uterature prizes, with nearly half
going to non-Euro-Americans! Egyptians, Israelis, Africans, Latin
Americans now inhabit that field.
One could—as several have done—make the case that literary produc-
tion is now clearly multicultural and that the best is often non-Euro-
American. But new "theories" of criticism such as deconstruction, post-
structuraUst, French feminism, etc., which are today popular do seem to
be largely Euro-American. Does this mean that fictive and imaginative
production has shifted its center of gravity outwards? and that the Euro-