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September 7, 2003
Winning culture wars
The mass production of cultural works has intensified contending inequalities, which are institutionalized by the United States’ advancement of the struggle over intellectual property rights in the global market, observes Marwan Hassan
WITH postmodernism there has been a shift away from action towards questions of interpretation. Political resistance to the capitalist status quo is ridiculed as passe, superficial, and out of touch with reality. The power of the capitalist state and market are accepted as the grand projects of a completed history. The citizen (aka wise consumer, shrewd investor) is advised to relinquish his or her intellect to the pleasures of the stock market. To continue to oppose capitalism is interpreted as delusional.
In the world view promoted daily in the capitalist media, mass unemployment is nothing more than a reflection of a correction in the stock market. Alienation of work does not exist. The discussion of labour is a function or efficiency. Leftist terminology is commodified. Terms such as “radical”, “reform”, “revolution”, and “reactionary” have lost their former content and shifted down a semantic axis to enter the jargon of liberalism and conservatism.
Under this arrangement, intimacy holds little appeal. Expressions of intimacy are a sign of vulnerability. Consumerism has no tolerance for intimacy. Intimacy in the consumer economy is insinuated to be a form of hypocrisy. But intimacy’s danger to capitalism is that it struggles to overcome alienation, it leads to compassion and poses a threat to indifference, which the credit-card crowd thrives on.
Advertisements lead the trend towards stylized alienation: be cool. Be aloof from social turmoil. A curled lip and a scornful gaze exhibited with just enough style may be taken for enigmatic indifference or ironic cynicism. It is better to travel on the surface of society, disengaged, negotiating emotions with the credit card, consuming the world in style rather than to be devoured by alienation or succumb to compassion. This self-exhibitionism is the commodification of the face and gesture, abstracted from the posturing in designer ads. Postmodernism has its variations among the leading industrial nations. The USA, Japan, and France are the leading exporters of cultural values. But this is not just a cultural condition. It is economics. The culture industry in the world economy is one of the largest export industries at the more abstract level of taste and cultural values, these nations contend. Schematically, France for Europe and Japan for Asia are representatives of “high culture” in the capitalist world system, while the US, straddling the Americas and the Anglo-trans Atlantic culture, claims to represent “global culture”, “international pop culture”, or “mass culture”. Canada (and Quebec) is caught in the vice grips of these struggles as much by reasons of geography and language as by economics and politics.
France with its post-1960 generation of intellectuals... has intellectual clout. The cultural movements of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism serve to project the prowess of French culture. Although the French culture industry does not have the economic power to out-produce the US, the cultural elite of France project themselves as the articulators, arbitrators, and shapers of cultural values in their more abstract developments.
This “intellectuality” of the French culture industry does result in the US intellectuals being consumers of French culture, especially literature and visual art. But a reverse process sets in, the French and Europeans become mass consumers of American material culture in the form of films, music, and popular culture symbolized by Euro Disney and McDonald’s. This European consumerism of American commodities leaves the US culture industry with the conviction of its greater appeal and dominance over the European culture industry.
Japan is another case altogether, because of its economic power and its prestige in the zones of high art; yet it has the industrial capacity for the mass production of consumer goods to compete with the US. Japanese intellectuals, from Kurasawa to Kawabata, from Kobo Abe to Kenzaburo Oe, have considerable influence. Their art production, from traditional painting and pottery to food and literature, has appeal characterized by elan and intellectuality.
In the zone of postmodern mass culture, with the electronic toys such as Gameboy or Pokemon, Japanese influence is sustained and passed over to children in an immediate and spontaneous way. Like cars and cameras, image production has an influence on self-imaging which is crucial to capitalist consumption in the industrialized nations. Japanese culture production traverses all strata of society such that it is beyond dismissal, especially because Japan is crucial to the capitalist world system as it has developed since 1945.
The US response to the Japanese has been economic and legalistic by the government and ideological by the mass media. The US government attacks the Japanese economic system on as many fronts with a range of tactics, filing trade complaints within the World Trade Organization, attacking the financial, stock market and banking systems, pummelling the yen, and driving down stockpiles of food staples (e.g. rice). The US media presents Japanese culture as parochial, insular and inward looking, and the Japanese language is deemed to be difficult to learn.
Admittedly, this sketch of the tripolarization of global culture is simplistic; nevertheless it serves to highlight the contradictions of capital and culture. The emotional currency of the post-1945 world system is alienation. Alienation in labour establishes the preconditions for production and consumption.
By contradiction, alienation has become the prerequisite for the mass production of art. And as deep as opposition to alienation runs through society and culture today, only those societies and cultures which have been able to commodify alienation into art forms have been able to shape and share in the industrial mass production of art. They are the cultures, which are perceived as playing a role in the global culture industry — Western Europe, Japan, and the US.
With the entry of China, India, and Brazil the cultural equation becomes increasingly more complex. The residue of the old British Empire, nations such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are client states of the US capitalist system.
For most countries outside of this configuration, the conjunction between the alienation of labour and the alienation in the culture industry is brutal: these cultures however valued, esteemed, and historically important, are made irrelevant or turned into a source material. A black-market economy based on scarcity dominates these nations.
In this “empire of chaos”, to appropriate Samir Amin’s term, they have first world factories producing goods for European, Japanese, and North American markets. Their traditional culture production is reduced to manufacturing of cheap religious items, folk objects, and goods for the tourist trade. The peasantry and working classes of these nations scrape by, consuming the surplus productions of the European, American, and Japanese industries which are dumped onto their commercial domestic markets destroying the viability of their local economies.
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As a work of art achieves its being, its truth content grows more subject to argument, less stable and coherent. In the next moment of capitalism, art work’s truth content may be swept away by new conditions, new relations, new works. If there is truth content in a specific work of art, it remains unstable — shifting, breaking down, and attempting to reconstitute itself from moment to moment to survive.
Before there was god or the spirit, there was the truth content of a work of art, but the banality is that god did away with god even before Nietzsche could. This metaphysical jargon of art ranking is a game yet a necessity of commerce, it binds the culture industry to the commodity like the horsehair that binds the plaster to the wall.
The ranking of art is related more to the production and distribution of goods of the culture industry and to cultural chauvinism in and of the industrialized societies. This tendency more expresses the emergence of transnational artists who are more functions of transnational capital than anything to do with their artistic ability and the works of art themselves.
In mass production, the role of the art work as an object does not reside in the work itself, in the production process, or commercial transaction but is crystallized in the commodification of alienation. The alienation in the commodity is not apparent because of contradictions in the circulation of goods and the hucksterism of advertising, which obscure the role of labour in the art and endow the purchased thing with an aura of newness.
The feature of being “new” displaces the alienation and dissembles as a form of transcendence. Confused sentiments are aroused, as many cultures struggle to survive in the swamp of postmodern globalism to salvage their historical authenticity, durability, and continuity. Each group struggles to develop a culture industry to compete in the global economy. Societies are driven to commodify what is most “authentic” and “genuine” in their culture. That is, to generalize and quantify their own culture.
On a global scale, a rebellion seems to have erupted against European and North American cultural commodities, while at the same instant the automation of production, market saturation, and compulsive consumerism advances. Without capital and access to markets, no culture can escape marginalization in the world capitalist system. A general struggle persists over the cultural commodity where the definition of culture intensifies.
The more important struggle over capital is displaced to cultural or religious fronts where protracted conflicts ensue. They represent not much more than feeble forms of the economic struggles like Egyptian shadow plays. The unequal relations of production, whether in technology or economics, between Arab and African countries with European or North American capital make a frontal economic opposition almost impossible.
Sometimes an anxiety over loss of authenticity results in a reactionary response with a retreat into religious nostalgia, such as Islamic, Hindu or African traditionalism or North American Indian shamanism, to corrode the nation or culture from within.
These developments highlight the political economic anomaly: in the global economy of cultural production how can there be equalities of relations between Saadat Hasan Manto, Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Gamal Al-Ghitani with Nick Bantock, Stephen King or Robert James Waller? Although the quantitative is a compression of the qualitative, quantity is an inverted expression of quality, in the culture industry the quantitative rules the qualitative.
Under capitalism, with the mass production of cultural works there are not equalities but contending inequalities. The struggle over intellectual property rights in the global market advanced by the United States serves to institutionalize these cultural inequalities. It cannot be any wonder that many Arabs, Africans, and indigenous peoples in the face of mass production by US transnationals are split between craving for the cultural commodities of the US and the desire — even desperation — to retain their own culture at any cost even when it appears economically irrational or reactionary.
With the collaboration of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, the US does not attempt to persuade but coercively compels African and Arab countries to open up their markets to North American cultural commodities. For academics and intellectuals to speak of rock and roll, Disney, or Dallas as popular culture on a global scale is then free trade in cultural slogans. Economic pummelling of a small nation’s economy does not contribute to that nation’s culture.
Excerpted with permission from
Velocities of Zero: Conquest, Colonization and the Destruction of Culture
By Marwan Hassan
TSAR Publications, PO Box 6996, Station A, Toronto Ontario M5W 1X7, Canada
Website:
www.tsarbooks.com
ISBN 1-894770-02-1
200pp. $24.95
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