Against Hybridity

Social Impasses in a Globalizing World

Haim Hazan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745690704, 9780745690698
• eBook ISBN: 9780745690735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the major characteristics of our contemporary culture is a positive, almost banal, view of the transgression and disruption of cultural boundaries. Strangers, migrants and nomads are celebrated in our postmodern world of hybrids and cyborgs. But we pay a price for this celebration of hybridity: the non-hybrid figures in our societies are ignored, rejected, silenced or exterminated. This book tells the story of these non-hybrid figures Ð the anti-heroes of our pop culture.

The main example of non-hybrids in an otherwise hybridized world is that of deep old age. Hazan shows how we fervently distance ourselves from old age by grading and sequencing it into stages such as 'the third age', 'the fourth age' and so on. Aging bodies are manipulated through anti-aging techniques until it is no longer possible to do it anymore, at which point they become un-transformable and non-marketable objects and hence commercially and socially invisible or masked. Other examples are used to elucidate the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid: pain, the Holocaust, autism, fundamentalism and corporeal death. On the face of it, these examples may seem to have nothing in common, but they all exemplify the same cultural logic of the non-hybrid and provoke similar reactions of criticism, terror, abhorrence and moral indignation.

This highly original and iconoclastic book offers a fresh critique of contemporary Western culture by focusing on that which is perceived as its other Ð the non-hybrid in our midst, often rejected, ignored or silenced and deemed to be in need of globally manageable correction.

1
Terms of Hybridity: (Non-)Hybridization and (Anti-)Globalization

For many observers of postmodern globalization, this condition is best characterized by the flattening of national and geographical borders. According to this logic, if the vertical hierarchies of nation-states were the hallmark of modernity, horizontal flow and neoliberal privatization would be the signs of the postmodern. Critics of this process of globalization regard it as creeping homogenization, sometimes also referred to in the context of popular culture as McDonaldization, Disneyfication, or – what better than another hybrid – McDisneyization (Ritzer and Liska 1997). This process is critically seen as an American-led (and often owned or franchised) production of generic international content and style that transcends national borders. Built on the transmutable and flexible elements of post-Fordist, late capitalistic popular culture, global postmodern society seems to be replacing vertical national cultures with their different languages and religions – give or take a few persistent islands of fundamentalist resistance. Otherwise, cultural difference and uniqueness are being displayed, commodified, and marketed in the form of touristic sites, theme parks, “national geographic” magazines, and “discovery” channels.

This process has also been called de-differentiation – the flattening of high/low cultural differences so that mass-produced, popular culture feeds on and replaces both high and low (Lash 1990). Categories like “folklore” and “high art” that have been created in order to maintain social hierarchies are quickly confounded in the marketing and consumption of tradition and indigenous identities (Canclini 1995). Literature is thus no longer regarded as the sacred bearer of high culture. Even Hebrew, once the language of the intellectual and orthodox study of religion, which at the turn of the twentieth century was transformed into and reborn as a vessel for nation-building by ideologically driven Zionists, has now become an ordinary language, and its literature a normal literature, no longer the exclusive province of high-minded ideals and nationalistic fervor. Indeed, the work of sociolinguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2003, 2006, 2009) examines how Israeli Hebrew was “reinvented” over the course of the twentieth century by responding to the social demands of the newly emerging state, as well as to escalating globalization, with a vigorously developing lexicon, enriched by multiple foreign-language contacts. This view of language highlights the key role of hybridization by regarding “language” as an ensemble of idiolects, sociolects, dialects and so on – rather than an entity per se.

Similar to the sociolinguistic study of neologism and language contact, hybridization has also become the model for the socio-anthropological study of tourism, for example in the context of the staging of “the exotic” in familiar modes of reproduction. Carnivalesque experiences of tourism are defined by academic scholars as “sites of ordered disorder” which encourage a “controlled de-control of the emotions” (Featherstone 1991). The touristic hybridization of the exotic and the familiar, the authentic and the commodified, is encapsulated in performances that are toned down by a self-regulating of the body and the passions, and despite the allure of the illicit, the other or the extraordinary, they are uncluttered and clean, and contain no exciting “antisocial” elements (Gottdiener 1997). These kinds of postmodern stagings may be seen to proffer a dystopian future for global culture where every potential space becomes intensively stage-managed and regulated as part of the commodification of everything (Edensor 2001). Nevertheless, alongside this homogenizing process which works its way through hybridization, there is an unceasing proliferation of practices which open up the world, invade the everyday, and expand the repertoire of performative options and the range of stages. This is why non-hybrids are apprehensively perceived as dead ends of social impasse that stand in the way of globalization.

Thus, contrary to the modern attribution of disgust, abjection, abomination, taboo, and otherness to impure or hybrid symbolic configurations, the post-postcolonial untouchable and incorrigible that the book discusses lie in apparently irreducible, irreconcilable, immutable, and unadulterated non-hybrid/pure forms of life. Such atomized constructs hold in store the prospect of their own destruction as cultural units beyond transmutation, transcendence, and transaction. This book describes the West's reluctant encounters with culturally manufactured extra-cultural spaces populated by savage-like entities deemed beyond moral domestication. Contemporary social anthropology is no exception to that anxious reluctance to admit “savages” into its epistemological fold; hence its self-assigned and socially harnessed commitment to the cultural task of manufacturing “tamable others” whose digression from unmanageable savagery ensures a discursive standing within the discipline. This is accomplished by detecting, exposing, representing, construing, and defending the rightful autonomy of others to be different, alongside their privilege to be ushered into the company of the civilized. This two-pronged javelin eliminates the possibility of unadulterated savagery with no prospect of disciplined incorporation. As economic processes of globalization are espoused to cosmopolitan ethics in promoting identity politics of relativistic multiculturalism, no leeway is left for the emergence of uncultivated fiends descending from some inexplicable beyond. In this manner, the task of anthropology – as well as of cultural studies in general – has become one of rendering the wild “savage” a tamable “barbarian.” When savages cannot be tamed, they are socially quarantined and avoided, as in the case of “old age,” “autism,” “pain,” “fundamentalism,” and so on. I will discuss in the following section how this is also part of the biopolitical governmentality of hybridization, in which the task of medicalization is similarly performed to tame the deviant. Conditions that are part of us but also impede what is perceived as normal assimilation are hence medicalized – hyperactivity treated by Ritalin, depression by Prozac, and impotence by Viagra (Conrad 1975, 2007).

In a globally regulated world, fraught with mass media and impregnated with a declared transnational desire for ubiquitous human communication, there are still quite a few uncivilized spaces; islands that evade “the civilizing process” (Elias 1994 [1939]), resist assimilation, escape diagnosis, defy pluralism, and negate the plausibility of change. Global, postmodern society considers these islands' failure to assimilate to be subversive, deviant, ominous, and intolerable. As information technologies, labor migration, tourism, international commerce, and consumerism develop to embrace and pervade the experience of contemporary living (Bauman 2000; Beck 2002), the need for cultural devices to create a common language of assimilation – also referred to as “pidginization” and “creolization” – is constantly on the rise (Hannerz 1996).

The processes of globalization were generated by the claim for universalization and standardization as the general logic of converting the indigenous into the global, followed by a demand for hybridization. Our modern-day economic discourse is one of the dominant examples of this all-engulfing process. Neoclassical economic theory assumed that all people, across nations, cultures, and backgrounds make economic judgments in essentially the same rational way. In the past three decades, psychological and behavioral economic research has demonstrated the contrary – namely that people depart quite frequently and systematically from the neoclassical economic model (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). This behavioral critique of rational economic choice has led, in the terms used here, to a demand for hybridization; most researchers (including those advocating an accurate behavioral model) still assume that all people will be susceptible to the same cognitive bias or heuristic causing deviation from rational economic decision-making (Etzioni 2011). As a result, the potential that cultural differences systematically influence economic decision-making has generally been overlooked, or – in times of economic trouble, as in the recent cases of Greece and Spain – deemed in need of governance and correction.

The postmodern passion for an omnipresent vehicle for transferring and transforming cultural and economic capital is challenged by the emergence of such sites of aborted translatability. They are viewed as unsettling epistemological voids, exposing the notion of globalism to the threat of being rendered arbitrary, superficial, shallow, nihilistic, indeterminate, patently anomic and uncivilized itself.

The fear of impasses of symbolic exchange induces the globalized world to devise various cultural means of leveling cultural differences while facilitating common denominators. This may be the common motivation behind the thrust to rationalize souls through allegedly universal therapeutic language that transgress the boundaries of the person, the family, and the workplace (Illouz 2008); to homogenize bodies via scientifically legitimized practices of medicalization (Conrad 2007); and to replace individuality with fashioned logos and virtualized consciousness through cinematic and electronically interactive media. Our postmodern, global society is all about assimilation and networking; if you cannot or do not want to assimilate, if you are out of the network, you are increasingly considered socially dead.

This zeal for networking underpins even the more sophisticated forms of cultural analysis, such as the new theory advanced by science and technology studies, entitled ANT (actor-network theory). The underlying premise of ANT is that in a globalizing world the topography becomes flat as a result of processes of mass communication. The lingua franca of this flat topography, where differences can meet, hinges on cultural metaphorization for the symbolic linking of different cultural entities and meanings: “To do so we have to invent a series of clamps to hold the landscape firmly flat and to force, so to speak, any candidate with a more ‘global’ role to sit beside the ‘local’ site it claims to explain, rather than watch it jump on top of it or behind it” (Latour 2005: 174).

By submitting to the flattening effect of globalization, ANT may be blind to the biopolitical governmentality such flattening requires and entails. If global premises of uninhibited conversions are to be safeguarded, the disturbing presence of cultural voids calls for “clamping” – measures of remedial and corrective treatment. In the absence of a recognized language to gloss over the opacity of such spaces, the populations inhabiting them often remain uncivilized, marked by attributes of incurable savagery. In either case, bereft of globally approved appropriate means of signification, the civilized is incapable of transforming the savage into its own ilk. Specters of ultimate, indestructible others, uncontained but nevertheless engendered by the global scene, haunt and undermine its very foundations (Agamben 1998; Appadurai 2006). This book sets out to explore these zones of cultural sturdiness.

A genealogy of hybridity

Even though my interest is primarily in non-hybridity, the context of hybridity – whose proliferation provides a crucial backdrop for our discussion – should also be deconstructed and its genealogy of power/knowledge explained. Hybridity has been discussed by anthropologists and sociologists of culture as an all-engulfing process both compatible with globalization and a necessary means for the spread of globalization, offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities (Hannerz 1992, 1996). Hybridity, then, is the cultural logic of globalization. In the words of Kraidy:

Hybridity is one of the emblematic notions of our era. It captures the spirit of the times with its obligatory celebration of cultural difference and fusion, and it resonates with the globalization mantra of unfettered economic exchanges and the supposedly inevitable transformation of all cultures. At a more prosaic level, since its initial use in Latin to describe the offspring of “a tame sow and a wild boar” […] hybridity has proven a useful concept to describe multipurpose electronic gadgets, designer agricultural seeds, environment-friendly cars with dual combustion and electrical engines, companies that blend American and Japanese management practices, multiracial people, dual citizens, and postcolonial cultures. (Kraidy 2005: 1)

In contrast to either the “modernization” or homogenization of culture worldwide, or the rigid cultural resistance from outside influences, this view of hybridity stresses “glocalization,” namely, the dynamic intermix of the global and the local (Nederveen 2004). While neo-Marxist “world system” theories, as well as functionalist accounts of global modernization, developed in the context of Third World countries (usually Africa and Latin America), are more loudly proclaiming the status of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Zones and Discourses of Cultural Sturdiness
• 1: Terms of Hybridity: (Non-)Hybridization and (Anti-)Globalization
• 2: Becoming a Non-Hybrid: The Very Old as Deadly Others
• 3: Impasses of Hybridity: From Liquidity to Quiddity
• Conclusion: Bringing the Extra-Cultural Back In
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement