Page 268 - Contribution To Phenomenology

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL REVENGE 261

American remains "theory-centered"? Or, provocatively, is the move to
decrease the difference and value between literary work and critic's work
in most post-strucutralist theory, a "retreat strategy"? If the artistic
imaginative production now is located beyond Euro-American precincts
such that we must retaliate in our own form of cultural counter-revenge?
I could multiply examples here of the new forms of cross culturality
which have become powerful within a global pluricultural framework. But
the leading and final question regarding cultural revenge needs to be
addressed: how does pluriculture express this revenge?
The answer has many dimensions only some of which I shall point up:
Reactions to technoculture have often been defensive, entailing an implicit
recognition of the acidity of technoscience to traditional cultures. This is
most apparent in the world revivals of the "fundamentalisms." Crude
attempts to censor magazines and television, particularly in Islamic
countries and often directed at "protecting" women, are likely to fail over
time.
Sometimes technoscience has been enthusiastically adapted and re-
molded mto distinctive non-European cultural form. This is most apparent
with Japan and Korea, the two Asian countries now become techno-
scientific. Last year, while in Spain, I watched the televised races of mid-
size sports sedans in England be led by nine out of ten Japanese
produced cars, all outfitted with four wheel drive and often four wheel
steering technologies which outdid the Europeans. What is interesting
about this phenomenon is that these now superior technologies were not
the result of Western production and innovation strategies, but of a
consensual, infintesimal but continuous improvement strategy which only
gradually achieved its result. The technology is developed upon a different
cultural base.
Neither of these forms of cultural revenge, however, are as powerful
as the more subtle decentering and displacement effect of the pluri-
cultural. The very presence of a bricolage of culture fragments, from
which one may and does choose, gradually decenters any privileged single
choice. It makes us aware of a certain "arbitrariness" of our past choices,
or of our simply having taken for granted a given tradition.
Like multiple cuisines, or musical styles, we have a larger palate, a
more discerning ear available for us. Moreover, it is not the paucity of
one-dimensionality which poses the problem, but the richness of the
cafeteria or the music halls.