Globalization and Culture E-Book

John Tomlinson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Globalization is now widely discussed but the debates often remain locked within particular disciplinary discourses. This book brings together for the first time a social theory and cultural studies approach to the understanding of globalization.

The book starts with an analysis of the relationship between the globalization process and contemporary culture change and goes on to relate this to debates about social and cultural modernity. At the heart of the book is a far-reaching analysis of the complex, ambiguous "lived experience" of global modernity. Tomlinson argues that we can now see a general pattern of the dissolution between cultural experience and territorial location. The "uneven" nature of this experience is discussed in relation to first and third world societies, along with arguments about the hybridization of cultures, and special role of communications and media technologies in this process of "deterritorialization". Globalization and Cultureconcludes with a discussion of the cultural politics of cosmopolitanism.

Accessibly written, this book will be of interest to second year undergraduates and above in sociology, media studies, cultural and communication studies, and anyone interested in globalization.

Leseprobe

For my Mother

GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE

John Tomlinson

polity

Copyright © John Tomlinson 1999

The right of John Tomlinson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1999 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Reprinted in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978–0–7456–1337–6ISBN 978–0–7456–1338–3 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10½ on 12½ pt Palatino by Ace Filmsetting, Frome, Somerset Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1   Globalization and Culture

Globalization as Complex Connectivity

Culture as a Dimension of Globalization

Why Culture Matters for Globalization

Why Globalization Matters for Culture

2   Global Modernity

Global Modernity as Historical Period.

Globalization as a ‘Consequence of Modernity’

Suspicion of Global Modernity

Conclusion

3   Global Culture: Dreams, Nightmares and Scepticism

Dreams: Historical Imaginings of a Global Culture

Nightmares: Global Culture as Cultural Imperialism

Global Culture : The Sceptical Viewpoint

4   Deterritorialization: The Cultural Condition of Globalization

The Concept of Deterritorialization

The Mundane Experience of Deterritorialization

Objections to Deterritorialization

Deterritorialization at the ‘Margins’

Hybridization

5   Mediated Communication and Cultural Experience

Mediation and Connectivity

Mediated Proximity 1: Intimacy Redefined

Mediated Proximity 2: Televisual Involvement and the Closing of Moral Distance

6   The Possibility of Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism: Idea, Ideology, Ideal

Cosmopolitans Without a Cosmopolis

Conclusion: Extending Solidarity’s Short Hands

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has benefited greatly from discussion with many people – some friendly to the ideas it contains, others (friendlily) sceptical. Some of the arguments were first tried out as invited papers at various workshops and seminars and I am grateful to the following people for their kind invitations, hospitality and helpful comments: Jaap Verheul and Hans Bertens at the University of Utrecht, Ritva Levo-Henriksson and Kaarle Nordenstreng of the Finnish Association for Mass Communications Research, the late Vincent Tucker at the University of Cork, Frans Schurman and Detlev Haude at the Third World Centre of the University of Nijmegen, Clive Barnett and Murray Low of the Department of Geography, Reading University, Barbara O’Connor at Dublin City University, and Mohamed Salih and Jan Nederveen Pieterse at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. I am also indebted to the following people for the way in which they have, in various ways, influenced and enriched my thinking about globalization and culture: Martin Albrow, Ash Amin, Anthony Giddens, Luke Goode, Stuart Hall, Cees Hamelink, James Lull, Tony McGrew, Graham Murdock, Renato Ortiz, Jan Aart Scholte, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, Peter Taylor, Ken Thompson, Gillian Youngs. The Faculty of Humanities at the Nottingham Trent University has been an extraordinarily stimulating and supportive intellectual environment to work in during the last few years, and I have benefited enormously from many discussions with friends and colleagues in CRICC and the Theory, Culture and Society Centre, in particular: Roger Bromley, Deborah Chambers, Hugo de Burgh, Chris Farrands, Mike Featherstone, Richard Johnson, Eleonore Kofman, Ali Mohammadi, Parvati Raghuram, Chris Rojek, Tracey Skelton and Patrick Williams. Terry McSwiney gave her usual superb secretarial support. Rebecca Harkin at Polity Press provided invaluable comments on early drafts. Finally, Anny Jones is always the most vital source of intellectual stimulation and incisive critique – Oh (other) fair warrior!

Peter Grimes:I am native, rooted hereBy familiar fields,Marsh and sand,Ordinary streets,Prevailing wind ...And by the kindnessOf a casual glance.Captain Balstrode:You’d slip these mooringsIf you had the mind.

Benjamin Britten/Montagu Slater: Peter Grimes

1

Globalization and Culture

Globalization lies at the heart of modern culture; cultural practices lie at the heart of globalization. This is the reciprocal relationship I shall try to establish in this chapter and explore in the chapters which follow. This is not a reckless claim: it is not to say that globalization is the single determinant of modern cultural experience, nor that culture alone is the conceptual key that unlocks globalization’s inner dynamic. It is not, therefore, to claim that the politics and economics of globalization yield to a cultural account which takes conceptual precedence. But it is to maintain that the huge transformative processes of our time that globalization describes cannot be properly understood until they are grasped through the conceptual vocabulary of culture; likewise that these transformations change the very fabric of cultural experience and, indeed, affect our sense of what culture actually is in the modern world. Both globalization and culture are concepts of the highest order of generality and notoriously contested in their meanings. This book certainly does not aim at an exhaustive analysis of either: more modestly it tries to grasp the main elements of globalization in what might be called a cultural register. In this first chapter I offer an orientating understanding of the concept of globalization within this register, and then try to show why culture and globalization matter intrinsically to each other.

Globalization as Complex Connectivity

To construct this argument I begin with a simple and relatively uncontentious basic understanding of globalization as an empirical condition of the modern world: what I shall call complex connectivity. By this I mean that globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life. The notion of connectivity is found in one form or another in most contemporary accounts of globalization. McGrew, to give a typical example, speaks of globalization as ‘simply the intensification of global inter-connectedness’ and stresses the multiplicity of linkages it implies: ‘Nowadays, goods, capital, people, knowledge, images, crime, pollutants, drugs, fashions and beliefs all readily flow across territorial boundaries. Transnational networks, social movements and relationships are extensive in virtually all areas from the academic to the sexual’ (1992:65, 67). An important point to draw out here is that the linkages suggested exist in a number of different modalities, varying from the social-institutional relationships that are proliferating between individuals and collectivities worldwide, to the idea of the increasing ‘flow’ of goods, information, people and practices across national borders, to the more ‘concrete’ modalities of connection provided by technological developments such as the international system of rapid air transport and the more literal ‘wiredness’ of electronic communications systems.

McGrew writes from the perspective of international politics, but similar formulations – ‘interconnections’, ‘networks’, ‘flows’ – can be found in sociological (Lash and Urry 1994; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998), cultural studies (Hall 1992) or anthropological accounts (Friedman 1995). What this attests to is at least a basic degree of consensus on the empirical reality that globalization refers us to. It is these multivalent connections that now bind our practices, our experiences and our political, economic and environmental fates together across the modern world. And so the broad task of globalization theory is both to understand the sources of this condition of complex connectivity and to interpret its implications across the various spheres of social existence.

One of the most striking features of the idea of globalization is just how readily and plentifully all manner of implications seem to flow from it. It is an extraordinarily fecund concept in its capacity to generate speculations, hypotheses and powerful social images and metaphors which reach far beyond the bare social facts. In one sense of course this can be counted to its credit, since the simple fact of increasing connectivity is limited in its interest and, without interpretation and elaboration, could remain an almost banal observation. Connectivity is thus a condition which immediately needs elaboration and interpretation. However there is also a danger of confusion arising from the tendency towards conceptual slippage that seems to attend the idea. Because of this, we need to exercise a degree of circumspection in the way we elaborate the core idea of connectivity. To illustrate both the need for elaboration and its pitfalls, I want to look at two ways in which the simple idea of connectivity shades into other themes.