Cultural Globalization - Yerim Jang

1. Summary

globalization is a multidimensional process, taking place simultaneously within the spheres of the economy, of politics, of technological developments of environmental change and of culture. globalization is a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity. globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies.

There is no escaping the global dominance of the capitalist system and there is little to be gained by cultural analysts from understating its huge significance. But, having said this, we must resist the temptation to attribute it with causal primacy in the globalization process. First, because we are not dealing with straightforward empirical judgments about what specific practices drive everything else, but also with questions of the constitution of analytical categories: to what extent are economic practices also, intrinsically, cultural ones? The second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture. Common expressions like ‘the impact of globalization on culture’ or ‘the cultural consequences of globalization’ contain a tacit assumption that globalization is a process which somehow has its sources and its terrain of operation outside of culture. One major reason why it seems natural to speak of globalization’s ‘impact’ on culture is that global market processes are easy to understand as having a potential influence on people’s cultural experience.

 This, indeed, is at the core of the interpretation of cultural globalization as ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘Americanization’ or‘Westernization’, or as the spread of a global capitalist-consumerist monoculture (Tomlinson 1991, 1999). In all such readings ‘culture’ seems to be a peculiarly inert category: something that people experience or imbibe but do not themselves produce or shape. Much has been written from the semiotic-hermeneutic perspective of cultural analysis in response to this deep misconception, demonstrating the active, transformative nature of the appropriation of cultural goods (Morley 1992;Thompson 1995; Lull 2000). But despite this critique, the idea of culture as being intrinsically constitutive of globalization– as being a dimension which has consequences for other domains – remains relatively obscure.

 What is culture? Culture is not only ‘a context in which [events] may be meaningfully interpreted’ (Geertz 1973), it is the primordial context in which human agency arises and takes place. Actions which may seem to be fairly instrumental ones, following a logic of practical or economic necessity, are nonetheless always undertaken within that set of self-understandings, plans, hopes or aspirations which we can think of as the constitutive elements of the individual’s cultural ‘lifeworld’.  Even the most basic instrumental actions of satisfying bodily needs are not in this sense outside of culture: in certain circumstances the decision to eat or to starve is a cultural decision. One useful way to think about the consequentiality of culture for globalization, then, is to grasp how culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences.

One common speculation about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only aspeculation, but the reason it seems possible is that we can see the ‘unifying’ effects of connectivity in other spheres – particularly in the economic sphere where the tightly integrated system of the global market provides the model. And, globalization in some of its aspects does have this general unifying character. Whereas it was in the past possible to understand social and economic processes and practices as a set of local, relatively ‘independent’ phenomena, globalization makes the world in many respects, to quote Roland Robertson (1992), a ‘single place’. However, increasing global connectivity by no means necessarily implies that the world is becoming, in the widest sense, either economically or politically ‘unified’. the ‘Third World’ clearly does not partake of the globalized economy or of globalized communications in the same way as the developed world.

An overarching global economic system, it is true to say, is deeply influential in determining the fate of countries in Africa. But this is a far cry from saying that Africa is part of a single, unified world of economic prosperity and social and technological development. So we have to qualify the idea of globalization by saying that it is an uneven process – with areas of concentration and density of flow and other areas of neglect or even perhaps exclusion (Massey 1994). To this extent, globalization, it seems, is not quite global!

 Despite all this, there persists, at least amongst some Western critics, a tendency to imagine globalization pushing us towards an all-encompassing ‘global culture’. The most common way in which this is conceived is in the assumption that I mentioned earlier, that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalist culture to every part of the globe, and the consequent threat of a loss of distinct non-Western cultural traditions. Globally marketed formulaic Hollywood movies, Western popular music genres and television formats appear to many as what the filmmaker Bernado Bertolucci once referred to as‘a kind of totalitarianism of culture’

 Karl Marx’s depiction of a future communist society provides what is perhaps the most vivid imagination of a global culture to be found in either nineteenth- or twentieth-century social thought. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels present a bold vision of a future world in which the divisions of nations have disappeared, along with all other ‘local’ attachments, including those of religious belief. Communist society is a world with a universal language, a world literature and integrated cosmopolitan cultural tastes.

 One clear implication of the discussion in the previous section is that both utopian and dystopian speculations about a single integrated global culture are not only generally ethnocentric in their origins, they are – in part because of this – rather poor predictions of actual cultural development. But there is another, more promising, way of approaching cultural globalization. This is not via the macro analysis of ‘globality’, but precisely in the opposite way, by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities.

 This ‘deterritorializing’ aspect of globalization is felt in very ordinary everyday practices: as we push our trolleys around the aisles of ‘global foods’ in local supermarkets; as we choose between eating in Italian, Mexican, Thai, Indian or Japanese restaurants; as we settle down in our living rooms to watch an American soap opera or the news coverage of a distant political event; as we casually phone friends on other continents, aware of their ‘distance’ only in terms of a time difference; as we routinely log on to Google for information rather than walking down to the local public library. These activities are now so taken-for-granted in the affluent, developed parts of the world, that they seem almost too trivial to consider as signaling deep cultural transformations. Yet they do. It is through such changes that globalization reaches deep into our individual cultural ‘worlds’, the implicit sense we all have of our relevant environment, our understanding of what counts as home and abroad, our horizon of cultural and moral relevance, even our sense of cultural and national identity (Tomlinson 1999: 113f; 2003).

 What we can call the ‘telemediatization’ of culture is a key distinction in twenty first century life. Telemediatized practices – watching television or typing, scrolling, clicking and browsing at the computer screen or talking, texting or sending and receiving pictures on a mobile phone – should be regarded as unique modes of cultural activity and perception. Our use of media and communications technologies thus helps to define what it is to exist as a social being in the modern world. And what all this speed and ‘instant access’ means in the longer term for our emotions, our social relations and our cultural values? In various ways – through increased travel and mobility, the use of new communications technologies and the experience of a globalized media – people effortlessly integrate local and ‘global’ cultural data in their consciousness. The positive potential of deterritorialization, then, is that, in changing our experience of local life, it may promote a new sensibility of cultural openness, human mutuality and global ethical responsibility.

 At the heart of the cultural-political problems posed by contemporary globalization, lies what Amanda Anderson (1998) has described as the ‘divided legacies of modernity’: two sets of strong rational principles pulling in different directions.

 Universal human rights or cultural difference? We don’t really know which flag to stand beside because in most cases there seem good reasons to stand beside both.

2. What was interesting/What did you learn

It was surprising that the increase in global connectivity did not necessarily mean 'unified' economically or politically. the ‘Third World’ does not partake of the globalized economy or of globalized communications in the same way as the developed world. Globalization does not appear equally across the world.

3. Discussion point

Can we say that Westernized global culture is a kind of cultural hegemony?