Globalization and Culture

John Tomlinson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745656502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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 Culture concludes 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.

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.

Connectivity and Proximity

First the idea of connectivity could be taken to imply increasing global-spatial proximity: what Marx in the Grundrisse (1973a) talked of as the ‘annihilation of space by time’ and what David Harvey (1989) has referred to as ‘time-space compression’. What is involved here is a sense of the shrinking of distances through the dramatic reduction in the time taken, either physically (for instance, via air travel) or representationally (via the transmission of electronically mediated information and images), to cross them. At another level of analysis connectivity shades into the idea of spatial proximity via the idea of the ‘stretching’ of social relations across distance (Giddens 1990, 1994a, b). The discourse of globalization is replete with metaphors of global proximity, of a ‘shrinking world’: from Marshall McLuhan’s famous ‘global village’ to the United Nations’ recent coining of the term ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’ to describe an emerging world-political context. All such metaphors and images derive their sense of increasing intimacy precisely out of the extension and the elaboration of different modalities of connectivity. But proximity/intimacy is not the same thing as connectivity: it is at best an elaboration, at worst a slippage.

Proximity has its own truth as a description of the condition of global modernity and this is generally of either a phenomenological or a metaphorical order. In the first case it describes a common conscious appearance of the world as more intimate, more compressed, more part of everyday reckoning – for example in our experience of rapid transport or our mundane use of media technologies to bring distant images into our most intimate local spaces. In the second, it conveys the increasing immediacy and consequentiality of real distanciated relations metaphorically. Here the connections that affect our lives (for example, the financial networks that tie our bank accounts into the global capitalist market or shared global environmental threats like ‘global warming’ which we confront) are made sense of as though they really bring us into closer contact. Proximity, then, takes us beyond the ‘empirical’ condition of connectivity. It is not that this language is misleading or invalid, but it is nevertheless important to maintain the distinction between this idea and the idea of connectivity.

For the condition of connectivity not only underwrites the notion of proximity, but places its own stamp on the way we understand global ‘closeness’. Being connected means being close in very specific ways: the experience of proximity afforded by these connections coexists with an undeniable, stubbornly enduring physical distance between places and people in the world, which the technological and social transformations of globalization have not conjured away. In a globalized world, people in Spain really do continue to be 5,500 miles away from people in Mexico, separated, just as the Spanish conquistadores were in the sixteenth century, by a huge, inhospitable and perilous tract of ocean. What connectivity means is that we now experience this distance in different ways. We think of such distant places as routinely accessible, either representationally through communications technology or the mass media, or physically, through the expenditure of a relatively small amount of time (and, of course, of money) on a transatlantic flight. So Mexico City is no longer meaningfully 5,500 miles from Madrid: it is eleven hours’ flying time away.

One way indeed of thinking about the particular sense of proximity produced by a ‘technical’ modality of connectivity is to consider the transformation of spatial experience into temporal experience that is characteristic of airline journeys. Planes are truly time capsules. When we board them we enter a self-contained and independent temporal regime which seems designed to remove our experience almost entirely from the business of ultra-high-speed movement through the air. The familiar sequence of take-off routine, distribution of newspapers, complimentary drinks, meals, sale of duty-free goods and in-flight movies all focus us on the internal time-frame of the cabin. So, phenomenologically, our ‘journey’ is one through this familiar sequence of time rather than through space. Going from London to Madrid is one mealtime; from Madrid to Mexico two mealtimes, a movie and a period of sleep. And so forth for the longer hauls. It is only when we occasionally look out of the window, perhaps to trace a coastline, that we might fleetingly grasp a sense of the vast tracts of distance that we are actually passing over. And the sense of the enormity of this space, linking quickly to discomforting thoughts of our vulnerability, probably discourages us from dwelling on this external reality.¹ Much more comforting to focus on the flight data display within the cabin, constantly translating thousands of kilometres into ‘hours to destination’: our true lived reality. It is only very rarely indeed that the territory we fly over intrudes at all into the experience of airline travel. Perhaps the flight crew may draw our attention to some particular physical feature – ‘On our left you can see Cape Cod’ – but examples of any deeper sense of human territory are so rare as to appear eccentric: ‘When an international flight crosses Saudi Arabia, the hostess announces that during the overflight the drinking of alcohol will be forbidden in the aircraft. This signifies the intrusion of territory into space. Land = society = nation = culture = religion: the equation of anthropological place, fleetingly inscribed in space’ (Augé 1995:116). Marc Augé interprets this as the brief intrusion of the thickness of culture into the ‘non-place ‘of the airline’s space, but we can equally see it as emblematic of the curious penetration of an enclosed journey through time by externalities of space (territory) which seem entirely remote from, indeed irrelevant to, this experience.

After a few hours of this enclosed time-journey we arrive, clear customs, walk out of the terminal building and magically ‘there we are’, deposited in the same clothes in which we boarded (the tangible attachments to our not-so-distant home) into a strange environment, a different climate, probably a different language, certainly a different cultural tempo. What sort of ‘proximity’ does such a process involve? How, precisely has the connectivity provided by air travel brought us closer ? It undeniably makes distant places accessible without a great expense of time, energy or (relatively) money. It makes physical relocation a matter of routine – something often to be fitted into a few hours, a day or so at most. But this proximity is also surely a problematic one, born as it is out of the technologically achieved compression of space by time. For the space we traverse in these journeys through the routine sequence of ‘cabin time’ is not just physical distance but the social and cultural distance (Saudi Arabia = Islam = no alcohol) that ‘real’ material space preserves. The connectivity of air travel thus poses for us sharply the question of the overcoming of social-cultural distance.

From the suspended animation of the flight, then, we have to confront the cultural adjustment of arrival. Our experienced journey though time rather than space has not prepared us for the new reality of this place. We have not experienced the sense of the traversing of ‘real’ distance: the gradual changes of scene, the gradations in climate, the series of social interactions, the longueurs, the interruptions and pauses, the symbolical moments of border crossings and the sheer physicality which travel in the ‘real time’ of, say, a railway journey affords. This compression of distance has left us temporarily dislocated and we need to adjust to a reality which is immediate and challenging in its otherness, precisely because it is so accessible. One measure of the accomplishment of globalization, then, is how far the overcoming of physical distance is matched by that of cultural distance.

There are various ways in which we can think about this. The most obvious is to ask how different the place of arrival actually is, in the modern world, from the place of embarkation. This is to enter the discourse of cultural homogenization. The homogenization thesis presents globalization as synchronization to the demands of a standardized consumer culture, making everywhere seem more or less the same. So to assert cultural homogenization as a consequence of globalization is to move from connectivity through proximity to the supposition of global uniformity and ubiquity. As I shall argue in chapter 3, this is a precipitate and in many ways an unjustifiable movement. However, we can see how it has a certain plausibility, particularly when thought through in relation to the example of air travel. For there is no denying the similarity between air terminals worldwide. The exits and entrances to different cultural spaces are, as has often been remarked, curiously uniform and standardized. However, this observation may be of limited significance, since airports are pretty clearly special kinds of places defined by the functional demands of their business, which is precisely to minimize cultural difference in the interests of a functional commonality, smoothing the passage of international travellers. To decide whether the homogenization thesis really obtains you have to venture outside the security of the terminal and get progressively deeper into the dangerous cultural hinterland. This may be something that theorists are unwilling to do. For the encounter with the messiness and particularity of actual cultural practices is of course dangerous for theories – like the homogenization thesis – established at the distance of broad abstraction. Noting different disciplinary tendencies towards progressive levels of theoretical abstraction, Néstor García Canclini wryly observes that ‘The anthropologist arrives in the city on foot, the sociologist by car and via the main highway, the communications specialist by plane’ (1995: 4). The assertion of global homogenization of culture is a little like arriving by plane but never leaving the terminal, spending all one’s time browsing amongst the global brands of the duty-free shops.

So, leaving aside the suppositions of broad cultural homogenization for the present, let us pursue the idea of the relation between connectivity and cultural proximity by thinking about the process of adjustment that occurs outside the airline terminal. The accomplishment of globalization appears here as a function of the ease with which this adjustment can be made. And this reveals some of the intrinsic ‘unevenness’ of globalization. At one end of a continuum of experience we might find the accomplished business-class passenger who displays his (mostly, ‘his’) credentials with the insouciance with which he enacts the social-cultural adjustments of arrival: the swift location of the taxi, the easy transit to the pre-booked international hotel whilst gradually, comfortably, absorbing the changed scene, the assurance of finding all the facilities – faxes, CNN business news, international cuisine – that will allow him to function independently of context. For the orientation of business travel is actually to minimize cultural difference so as to allow the ‘universal’ practices of the international business culture to function smoothly. This is connectivity working functionally to achieve a manufactured form of ‘proximity’ experienced as universality. Distant places are culturally close for business executives because they are carefully negotiated according to the business in hand: international standardization in the hotel and the board room, enhanced, perhaps, by some local colour in the evening’s entertainment.

From the instrumental point of view of capitalism, then, connectivity works towards increasing a functional proximity. It doesn’t make all places the same, but it creates globalized spaces and connecting corridors which ease the flow of capital (including its commodities and its personnel) by matching the time-space compression of connectivity with a degree of cultural ‘compression’. This is certainly an important dimension of globalization. But it does not grasp the whole picture, and risks exaggerating the shading of connectivity into cultural proximity. What the business-class traveller does not typically experience is the fine grain of everyday cultural practices defined by locality rather than globality and maintaining cultural difference in the face of encroaching connectivity. This culture does not reveal itself in five-star international hotels, but in the streets, the houses, the churches, the workplaces, the bars and the shops that lie beyond the business or tourist centres.

Such ‘localities’ are quite simply the places where people live their everyday lives: the day-to-day environments of ‘home’. For some they may exist pressed hard up against the perimeter fence of the airfield and yet they are part of an entirely different cultural ‘world’ from that of the connectivity of air travel. And they are clearly not governed by the same immediate demands of an instrumental connectivity and standardization that organize international business culture. Entering such environments means entering the order of social life which feels the sway of local affairs more than the demands of globality, and which exhibits the particularity – the cultural difference – of ‘locality’. When discussions of globalization raise (as most do) the ‘global–local’ relationship, this is the vast order of everyday life that they invoke.

Few business travellers stray into these environments (until, of course, they are returned to their own comfortable localities). So this level of cultural difference is often invisible when viewed from the perspective of the smooth-functioning globalization of capital. It is more likely to be encountered by less well-organized or resourced travellers: by labour migrants or perhaps by independent tourists on a low budget. In the global space of the terminal such people may appear less accomplished in the rituals of arrival, but their lack of resources means that they quickly penetrate deeper into the culture of locality: the bus rather than the taxi, a basic hotel in a working-class neighbourhood lacking the cultural ‘insulation’ provided by five-star status, the need to shop in cheap local stores. These travellers quickly become more accomplished hermeneuticians, testing out the real extents of cultural proximity outside of the enclaves of a global business culture. The journey into localities then is a journey into the challenging reality of cultural difference, posing the question of how far connectivity establishes ‘proximity’ beyond the technological modality of increasing access.

At this point we have to move beyond the example of air travel. Tracing the phenomenology of this modality of connectivity pushes us towards a ‘high-profile’ understanding of globalization which is seductive but restricted in its application. Jet travel is an intrinsic part of connectivity and, in its increasing commonplace integration into everyday life, demands attention as cultural experience. But obviously it reveals only one aspect of what connectivity implies. First because, despite its increasing ubiquity,² it is still restricted to relatively small numbers of people and, within this group, to an even smaller, more exclusive, cadre of frequent users. Many people in the most developed countries of the world have never been on an aeroplane, and this obviously applies to many millions in less developed countries. Air travel, like the use of the internet, could thus be seen as merely the globalization available to the affluent. And if this were so, it would lose much of its claim to be a general condition of our time. But, more significantly, the sense of global connectivity implied by this sort of high-profile globalizing technology pushes, as...