Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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J. MacGregor Wise. Cultural Globalization: a User's Guide. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, 175 pp, US$24.95 (paperback).
<1> There's no question that Wise's Cultural Globalization is a useful addition to cultural studies pedagogy. In a field dominated by a hand-full of textbooks - Storey's Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, During's Cultural Studies, Hebdige's Subcultures - it's nice to have an alternative for your staid, "introduction to cultural studies" syllabus. And this one is resolutely global, with examples drawn from all over the world, especially East and Southeast Asia, testament to Wise's childhood perambulations.
<2> Drawing on 10 years in the classroom, Wise lards his introduction with a wide secondary literature on global productions and appropriations of culture, illustrating the central theme of cultural studies approaches to globalization - that they must, as Anna Tsing reminds us, evoke the local. Or, in a more Deleuzian spirit, Wise (25) writes:
If we look at cultural globalization from the perspective of home-making, it is about how people make sense of the world and themselves in the light of a variety of competing world views and assumptions. We hear about the struggles between local cultures and global cultures (usually meaning Western, if not American, cultures). What this book aims at is that point in everyday life when both sides of this struggle come together, where the individual draws on elements from either or both in making sense of their everyday lives.
From the burgeoning, contradictory "youth cultures" in Nepal, South Korea, Greenland, to variegated mediascapes stitched together with television, movies, music - J-pop, K-pop, etc. - Wise repeatedly illustrates heterogeneous productions and practices of popular and mass culture across global scapes.
<3> I was particularly pleased to see the emphasis Wise places on Korea as not only an ambivalent and even contradictory consumer of Western culture (e.g., the self-conscious punk irony of Crying Nut), but as a source of global culture in its own right (through what Chinese critics initially dubbed the "Korean wave"). This, together with the examples he adduces from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and elsewhere, Cultural Globalization proves an important corrective to the usual, US- and UK-centered texts. Diverging from something like Iain Chambers's resolutely Western-centric Popular Culture: the Urban Experience, Wise provides countless examples of the ways that people continue to confound U.S.-driven cultural homogenization.
<4> Or does he? In spite of his repeated insistence that his book concerns "everyday life," we see rather little of the day-to-day habitus of people wrestling with the (growing) inequalities and (fleeting) promises of globalization. What we see, instead, is everyday life contracted to the one-dimensionality of the commodity - "second productions" of media through consumption or through alternative, non-US production. Of course, Wise is hardly oblivious to this tendency. As he cautions (43-44),
Global capitalism no longer promotes homogeneity, it is not trying to mass produce one widget for the entire world. This old strategy can be opposed, by those so inclined, by arguing in favor of cultural difference (we're different and so your widget won't work here, go home). What global capitalism does today is that it actually promotes difference (the new, the exotic), and it thrives on difference. But it promotes only a certain type of difference, and ignores other differences. It promotes the types of differences that can be easily packaged and sold, the types of differences that are not threatening to global capitalism. By promoting a limited range of differences, it limits the range of actions available to people.
Certainly, this is a rejoinder to naïve celebrations of "world music" as signaling the death-knell of western imperialism. But, at the same time, Wise (unintentionally?) gestures to the limits of cultural studies itself. If we agree that global capitalism generates new value from flattened, etiolated "cultural difference," then what of cultural studies and its jouissance of cultural alterity? Shouldn't we reflexively include cultural studies in these suspect, global flows? If global capitalism exhorts us to "Be as different you want, but only in certain well-defined ways that won't rock the boat" (45), doesn't cultural studies do the same?
<5> Indeed, the examples in Cultural Globalization invoke the familiar, cultural studies triad of " border crossing, identity formation and strategic essentialism" (117) so many times, that I cannot help but conclude that cultural studies is also a form of cultural globalization with a suspect, homogenous vision of meaning and practice. This is how cultural studies scholars apprehend (consume) the global world - as local territorializations of commodity and meaning (television, film, music, fashion) where, in a familiar coda, we resist (but also accommodate) global capitalism., borders are crossed but also strengthened, power is contested but also legitimated. It really doesn't matter whether we're talking about bhangara is Birmingham or K-pop in Mongolia - cultural studies will inevitably consume these global commodities and produce remarkably similar interpretations. Of course, this is not to imply that cultural studies scholars lack originality (or, rather, that they are any more deficient there than scholars in other disciplines), merely to remind us that cultural studies is very much embedded in the global capitalism is describes (and this, too, is hardly an original observation).
<6> At the close of Cultural Globalization, Wise (152) reminds us that,
If the only result of pondering these issues is an individual navel-gazing, then we're missing an important element of cosmopolitanism. If we conclude that globalization only matters when it affects me, then we've fallen prey to the neoliberal ideology that places all social, economic, cultural, and political agency on the shoulders of the individual.
Yes - but a little, critical navel-gazing might be helpful. It would help us to understand the contours of cultural studies as a particular form of cultural consumption, one oftentimes breath-takingly out-paced by the exigencies of a fashion industry it (distantly) tracks. For example, many of Wise's sources are drawn from the 1990's, freezing the endless frisson of novelty in an amber of cultural theory and simultaneously ensuring that the global music, film and television upon which we report will never (given a research/publication cycle of several years) be au courant with the consumption patterns of the students we teach. Los Tigres? Hey - the 1980s called and they want their norteño back.
<7> More seriously, a little reflexivity might allow us to apprehend the kinds of limitations the neoliberal structures in which we are embedded limit what we can say and write. The familiar refrain of individual territorialization, after all, suggests the extent to which cultural studies trails in neoliberalism's wake, picking up the pieces of imperialism and violence (cultural, economic, carceral) and embossing them with the (trademarked?) imprimatur of cultural studies. Cultural studies is a kind of secondary consumption of the global commodity, subjecting it to a critical gaze, but also rendering the it more palatable to the academy - re-packaging the commodity for the Ph.D. set, and simultaneously producing another sort of commodity (a textbook, a conference, a curriculum).
<8> There's something dreadfully realistic about all of this - making do with what we've got (after Michel de Certeau) - but one cannot help but feel amidst all of this plucky bricolage that cultural studies needs another Ernst Bloch, and maybe even throw in a John Zerzan as well. As Fredric Jameson (1991: 281) has complained, "The surrender to various forms of market ideology - on the Left, I mean, not to mention everyone else - has been imperceptible but alarmingly universal." That is, it's all very clear that to cultural studies today that capitalism has penetrated heretofore non-commodified spheres of life, that it has compounded its ideological function, but there's little sense that there's anything else out there but a kind of (re)commodificaton and that this is really all we can hope to look forward to.
<9> But this is not an indictment of Wise's book - just the opposite, really. Courtesy of his clarity, his marvelous ability to survey a moment of global cultural studies from the 1990s to the early 21st century, we can, in a properly dialectical fashion, grasp the limits of a cultural studies that takes it cues from management and marketing . . . And, maybe, plan the revolution?
Reference
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Samuel
Gerald Collins
Towson
University
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