Page 101 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

idea of the local, specifically what is considered to be local, is produced within and
by globalizing discourses including capitalist marketing strategies that orientate
themselves to differentiated ‘local’ markets. Thus an emphasis on particularity and
78 diversity can be regarded as an increasingly global discourse.
Overall, capitalist modernity involves an element of global cultural
homogenization for it increases the levels and amount of global co-ordination.
However, mechanisms of fragmentation, heterogenization and hybridity are also at
work so that it is not so much a question of either the homogenization or
heterogenization of global culture, but rather of the ways in which both of these
two tendencies work in tandem to produce the landscape of contemporary life.
Links Cultural imperialism, globalization, hybridity, modernity, postcolonial theory

Governmentality The concept of governmentality derives from the work of Foucault for
whom it designates a form of regulation throughout the social order by which a
population becomes subject to bureaucratic regimes and modes of discipline. Foucault
describes governmentality as involving the institutional procedures and calculations
of government that allow for the exercise of power over a target population using
political economy as a form of knowledge in conjunction with apparatuses of security.
Thus, governmentality refers us to the institutions, procedures, analyses and
calculations that form specific governmental apparatuses and forms of knowledge
which are constitutive of self-reflective conduct and ethical competencies.
While governmentality is associated with the state, it is also to be understood in
the broader sense of regulation throughout the social order or, to put it in Foucault’s
preferred manner, the ‘policing’ of societies by which a population becomes subject
to bureaucratic regimes and modes of discipline. Governmentality is a growing
aspect of the micro-capillary character of power, that is, the multiplicity of force
relations that are not centralized but dispersed. This includes modes of regulation
that operate through medicine, education, social reform, demography and
criminology by which a population can be categorized and ordered into
manageable groups. Here the state is held to be a more or less contingent collection
of sometimes conflicting institutions and apparatuses with the ‘bureau’ an
autonomous ‘technology for living’ organized around its own faculties and
possessing its own modes of conduct of life.
The concept of governmentality stresses that processes of social regulation do not
so much stand over and against the individual but are constitutive of self-reflective
modes of conduct, ethical competencies and social movements. According to
Foucault and Bennett, contemporary culture is increasingly understandable in terms
of governmentality since culture is not just a matter of representations and
consciousness but of institutional practices, administrative routines and spatial
arrangements.
Links Culture, discourse, poststructuralism, power, power/knowledge

Gramsci,Antonio (1981–1937) Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist and political
activist whose main contribution to cultural studies has been courtesy of his