W6. Cultural Globalization

Cultural Globalization(John Tomlinson)

Summary:

The relationship between globalization and culture
globalization is a multidimensional process, taking place simultaneously within the spheres of the economy, of politics, of technological developments –particularly media and communications technologies – of environmental change and of culture. Globalization refers to the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize material, social, economic and cultural life in the modern world.
Culture,something to which social events can be causally attributed’ and this is surely right to the extent that we should think of cultural processes primarily as oriented towards the construction of socially shared meanings.
‘what is culture for?’, the most satisfying answer is that it is to generate meaning in life. The notion of ‘causality’ sits awkwardly with this conceptualization. Culture is certainly so in that the practices and processes of meaning construction inform, inspire and direct individual and collective actions which are themselves consequential. Culture is thus not only ‘a context in which [events] may be meaningfully interpreted cultural globalization involves the increasing 'reflexivity’ of modern life: the systemic integration of myriad small individual actions into the workings of the social institutions which appear autonomously to govern our lives. (Giddens)

Culture is a dimension in which globalization both has its effects and simultaneously is generated and shaped.

A global culture?
globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only a speculation, but the reason it seems possible is that we can see the ‘unifying’ effects of connectivity in other spheres. 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’ that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalist –particularly American – culture to every part of the globe, and the consequent threat of a loss of distinct non-Western cultural traditions. What is feared here is the total domination of world cultures through the unopposed advance of iconic brands. So, it converged to “a kind of totalitarianism of culture”. 

What the connectivity of globalization is doing is bringing quite disparate cultures into closer contact – by no means inevitably as a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) – but certainly involving contending defi nitions of what the good, the virtuous and the dignifi ed life involves. What globalization is clearly not doing, however, if it is doing this, is effortlessly installing Western culture as global culture.
A different way of approaching these issues is to view contemporary globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which societies and cultures have imagined the world as a single place, with their own culture at the centre of it.
But the point is that this tendency towards unwarranted universalizing – what we might call particular cultures masquerading as universal ones – is not restricted to specific categories worldviews or to ‘pre-modern’ cultures.

Deterritorialization
This analysis is by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities not by the macro analysis of ‘globality’. The vast majority of us live local lives, but globalization is rapidly changing our experience of this ‘locality’ and one way of grasping this change is in the idea of ‘deterritorialization’. Deterritorialization, then, means that the significance of the geographical location of a culture – not only the physical, environmental and climatic location, but all the self-definitions, ethnic boundaries and delimiting practices that have accrued around this – is eroding. ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’ (Garcia Canclini 1995: 229). Culture is a spatially bounded entity, somehow paralleling the bounded, integrated entity of the ‘society’ (Mann 1986). But the complex connectivity of globalization threatens to undermine such conceptualizations, not only because the multiform penetration of localities disrupts this binding of meanings to place, but also because it challenges the rather insular thinking through which culture and fixity of location are originally paired.
Deterritorialization is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture: it is not as though localities, and the particularities, nuances and differences they generate, suddenly and entirely disappear. Deterritorialization refers to the integration of distant events, processes and relationships into our everyday lives and it is this added dimension of experience that accounts for the attenuation of the hold that local particularities have on modern cultures. This ‘deterritorializing’ aspect of globalization is felt in very ordinary everyday practices. 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.
The phenomenon of deterritorialization arises from a complex set. It is not a phenomenon which can usefully be tied down to one dimension of analysis. But, there is one factor which is worth singling out for closer scrutiny, since it opens out on to areas of connectivity that are historically unprecedented and which may justifiably be said to define the tenor of our times due to our increasing routine dependence on electronic media and communications technologies and systems.

Telemediatization is grasped as a peculiar form of mobility that does not involve actual physical movement. As a distinctive mode of deterritorialization, the internet and television is described as a form of ‘virtual travel’ and popular expressions often employ metaphors of mobility. We should remember that none of these activities and experiences have any counterpart beyond the last few decades of world history. Deterritorialization not only disturbs and transforms local experience, it potentially offers people wider cultural horizons. The positive potential of deterritorialization, then, is that, in changing ourmexperience of local life, it may promote a new sensibility of cultural openness, human mutuality and global ethical responsibility.

Cosmopolitanism and cultural identity
Cosmopolitan cultural politics means trying to clarify, and ultimately to reconcile, the attachments and the values of cultural difference with those of an emergent wider global-human ‘community’. This is a dilemma. One is the attractions of what we might discourse of human rights and the hope of wider horizons of global solidarity. But on the other, the equally attractive principles of respect for the integrity of local context and practices, cultural autonomy, cultural identity and ‘sovereignty’.

Divided legacies of modernity are the heart of the cultural-poitical problems posed by contemporary globalization : two sets of strong rational principles pulling in different directions.
john suggest that we mayvget some way along the road by addressing another rather vexed issue in cultural politics, that is, the question of the formation of ‘cultural identity’. Cultural identities are specifically modern entities – ways of categorizing, organizing and regulating the cultural practices, representations and imaginings by which we grasp our existential condition, our personal relations and our attachment to a place or a community.
Regulatory category of cultural identity which is essentially modern consists in self and communal definitions based around specific, usually politically inflected, differentiations: gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, nationality.