Stacy Takacs

Department of English
Indiana University
stakacs@indiana.edu

 

Anthony King, ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

 
Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci is credited with offering the first full-fledged analysis of Fordism as both an economic and a cultural system. His major insight was to recognize that the “rationalization of work” entailed by the reorganization of the productive processes under Fordism necessitated a certain reorganization of social behavior as well. For Gramsci, Fordism was more than a technological paradigm; it was “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man” (302).

 

One cannot help but hear the echo of Gramsci in the recent plethora of Marxist accounts of the contemporary transition to a so-called post-Fordist regime of accumulation.[1] Clearly, contemporary cultural critics have learned from Gramsci which questions about culture and society are worth posing. Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism asks not whether, but how social transformation occurs. In linking the rationalization of work to the regulation of social bodies, he focuses less on the nature of productive relations than on how those relations are reproduced over time and across space. This means introducing into the science of political economy questions about the role of politics, culture, ideology, and identity in the regulation of a given set of capitalist relations. Finally, Gramsci seeks to understand the relationship between the economic base of capitalist society and these airy superstructures without reducing the latter to mere expressions of the former. In this sense, he should be seen as an intellectual forefather of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, which takes this task as its guiding problematic.

 

Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony King, fits squarely within this growing body of material designed to apply Gramsci’s insights to the emerging post-Fordist[2] socio-cultural complex. As the serial form of the title indicates, the text attempts to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. The first part of the title offers a broad outline of the terms of engagement, so broad as to be disorienting, I would argue. The second part seems designed to temper the excesses of the first by establishing identity as the primary vehicle through which to pursue the study of culture, globalization, and the world-system. The implicit question it poses is: how do structural changes in the organization of society impact the ability to locate oneself vis-à-vis others in the world? This is a provocative question. Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate, the text fails to fulfill the promise of its subtitle. Instead of charting a course through the maze of the global via an examination of lived identity, Culture, Globalization and the World-System ends up reinscribing disciplinary boundaries in a defensive attempt to ward off the cognitive disorientation unleashed by the widespread social transformations it describes.

 

The text’s production history provides some insight into why the title of the volume appears so expansive as to be virtually meaningless: the organizers of the original symposium were attempting to provide an introduction to the history of study in these areas. As King explains in his introduction, each term in the title is designed to connote an entire body of theory connected, for the sake of convenience, to a single theorist who becomes the representative of this body of theory within the space of the symposium/text. The term “culture” is intended to reference the works of Cultural Studies guru Stuart Hall and anthropologist Ulf Hannerz; “globalization” refers to the work of Roland Robertson; and “the world-system” refers to Immanuel Wallerstein’s ground-breaking work in international political economy. Hall’s two lectures were presented prior to the symposium while Robertson, Wallerstein, and Hannerz’s lectures served as the focal points for the symposium itself. Respondents included Janet Abu-Lughod, Barbara Abou-El-Haj, Maureen Turim, King, John Tagg, and Janet Wolff, who provided the (admirable) summation of the proceedings. As I will show, the respondents were also made to bear the responsibility of representing their disciplines and/or their theoretical orientations, but in a more enabling way.

 

To my mind, the content of Culture, Globalization and the World-System is less important than its structure as an interdisciplinary conversation about the various economic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate shortly, what it stages is only a pseudo-dialogue that can neither bridge the gap between the social sciences and the humanities, nor think the economic in conjunction with the cultural. Stuart Hall’s two essays are, perhaps, the exceptions to this general rule, and before I embark on a critique of the rest of the text, I want to outline some of his arguments. As the former director of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies–the institutional hub of British Cultural Studies for over two decades–Hall has the most experience a) crossing disciplinary divides and b) analyzing the relationship between culture and the material basis of capitalist society. Thus, he has a certain advantage over the other presenters. Given his background, it is not surprising that he would be the only one of the primary speakers to take up the challenge posed by the symposium’s subtitle. Like the others, he details the structural transformations wrought by new forms of capitalist organization and new modes of production. Unlike the others, however, he refrains from abstraction and so is able to present a much more complex picture of the contradictory and uneven nature of the processes of globalization.

 

Hall’s outline of the macro-level transformations follows the basic structure of the “New Times” position, which, in turn, follows the basic outlines of French Regulation theory.[3] The Regulationists conceive of the capitalist system as inherently crisis-prone and seek to explain how the periodic phases of crisis, like the current crisis of Fordism, are managed or controlled so that the system as a whole does not break down. They emphasize the role of social institutions and informal norms in stabilizing, or “regulating,” capital at such moments of crisis. Thus, for them, a phase of capitalism consists of both a “regime of accumulation” and a clearly defined “mode of social regulation.”⁴ Fordism was characterized by the twin dynamics of mass production and mass consumption. Its key institution of regulation was the Keynesian welfare state, which both mediated between capital and labor to secure the indexing of wages to productivity and stimulated consumer demand by providing money and social services to groups formerly marginalized by the economy. Since the 1970s, declining corporate profits caused by increased international competition, the growing burden of wages indexed to productivity, and a shift in the patterns of consumption (from mass to individualized consumption) have spurred corporations to reorganize their production processes in order to respond more flexibly to changes in labor and consumption markets. The new, flexible paradigm involves the geographic dispersal of production processes and concomitant centralization of command functions, both of which are enabled by new technologies of information, communication, and transportation. It is also characterized by an increase in the production of non-material or “postindustrial” commodities, especially information and entertainment. Of course, Hall does not offer quite this level of detail, but he does define the economic basis of globalization in these terms.

 

He then proceeds to argue that the reorganization of capitalism has undermined the material basis of personal and national identity. As a result, new habits of thought and modes of resistance are required to combat the worst effects of the structural adjustments. To a certain extent, this is a practical argument: global flows of people, money, machines, images, and ideas[5] transgress the boundaries of the nation-state virtually at will, undermining its geographical and ontological security. As corporations set their sights on the global marketplace, the traditional relationship between industrial enterprise and national identity also erodes. Moreover, flexible production has caused drastic cutbacks in industrial employment as corporations downsize and travel abroad seeking a more favorable wage bargain. The loss of manufacturing jobs as well as the increase in service sector and managerial employment have irrevocably altered the class relations of (Western) societies, weakening labor unions and temporarily paralyzing political response to these social changes. These developments lead Hall to conclude that “[the] logic of identity [as we have known it] is, for good or ill, finished” (43). The contemporary conditions for the representation of identity are not conducive to the types of homogeneous collectivities on which political activity had previously been based (44-45). These material adjustments are compounded by the theoretical decenterings of the Cartesian subject from within the fields of linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-colonialism, to name just a few. The connection between the epistemological and material crises of the subject is one of Hall’s key insights, and one that escapes the remainder of the volume’s contributors.

 

Together, Hall’s two essays complement each other nicely. In “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity” (19-40), Hall describes the crisis of Fordism and the decline of the nation-state via the disintegration of a unified sense of national identity. He demonstrates how the concept of “Englishness” was produced and sustained by an earlier moment of globalization, more commonly referred to as imperialism. This identity depended on a certain construction of the “other” against which it could define itself as good and moral. Once firmly grounded in its sense of ethnic homogeneity, this strand of nationalism has given way, under the pressure of contemporary processes of globalization, including the invasion of the colonial center by its formerly peripheralized populations, to a more lethal brand of English nationalism. Because its homogeneity is harder to maintain, this version of nationalism must resort to extreme, sometimes violent measures to produce the ideological closure its seeks. The major insight here is that this virulent brand of ethnic nationalism is not an atavistic or anomalous eruption in an otherwise happily integrated global village. It is a constitutive feature of globalization, and, especially, of transnational corporatism, which fetishizes localities in order to a) commodify them or b) pit them against each other in competition for scarce economic resources (jobs and money).

 

His second essay, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” (41-68), elaborates on these insights by tracing the emergence of “Black” as a political category of identity positioned to challenge the hegemonic formulation of Englishness as whiteness. The title of this essay offers a succinct outline of his major points: Identity, associated with the older forms of social collectivity (class politics, etc.), has given way to Ethnicity, a more contingent and open-ended process of social location based on the strategic coalescence of the interests and needs of different individuals. Hall argues that, in the face of the homogenizing forces of globalization, resistance must involve a process of “imaginary political re-identification, [a] re-territorialization” designed to reclaim place from space and establish a ground from which to enunciate common demands. As he notes, however, because this is a precarious positioning always open to co-optation by the forces of capitalism or by regressive forces within a given grouping, such an identity politics is necessarily a politics without guarantees. In a world too prone to homogenization, however, this style of politics promises to avoid the tendency to imagine that one’s views are universal.

 

The only criticism I have to make of Hall’s contributions is a criticism that many have had of the “New Times” position in general. That is, while it is able to hold the global and the local in tension without subsuming one under the sign of the other, it is not as successful at holding the new and the old in tension. The very name “New Times” implies that what is being described is unlike anything that has come before. As a result, habits of thought and modes of action that were characteristic of the previous phase of capitalism are made to seem irrelevant and even useless in the analysis of the emerging dynamic. This is problematic, for as Marx himself notes, capitalism is always unevenly developed. Emergent and residual forms of capitalist organization coexist with the dominant in any given historical context. Therefore, the call to abandon previous habits of thought and forms of action in the contemporary context seems, at best, premature, and, at worst, foolhardy.[6]

 

I want to turn now to the other essays within Culture, Globalization, and the World-System in order to demonstrate how the structure of dialogue works to reinforce disciplinary divides in ways that are ultimately debilitating for the analysis of culture in general. The text reinforces some of the problems with the organization of the symposium itself. For one thing, the primary essays–by Hall, Robertson, Wallerstein, and Hannerz–are neatly sectioned off from those of the respondents, thereby creating hierarchical distinctions between the participants. Not the least debilitating of these distinctions is the one between the global “stars” (Hall, Wallerstein, Robertson, and Hannerz) and the local “peons” (five of the six respondents were from the New York area, three from the host institution). In the way that generalized discussions of the global tend to subsume the local, this hierarchical organization marginalizes the respondents, according them a certain oppositional status but very limited power. The relative value of each essay/speaker to the symposium is registered quantitatively in the amount of time/space the speaker is allowed to command (respondents rarely merited more than twenty minutes, it would seem). The conspicuous absence of audience participation in the text of the symposium[7] raises most concretely the question of who is authorized to speak about the dynamic of globalization. Finally, the way in which the partitioning of the text is accomplished produces a divisive and often dismissive quality in the essays. Labeling the second section “Interrogating Theories of the Global” prepares both the respondents and the readers to assume an antagonistic role in relation to the primary essays. Many of the respondents take this role too much to heart, neglecting to give credit where it is frequently due. The result is less an inter- or even transdisciplinary conversation about the problems of globalization than a fortification of institutional divides, particularly the one between the humanities and the social sciences.

 

King, in his introduction, and Wolff, in her concluding essay, both draw attention to this disabling dynamic and recognize the complicity of the organizers in its production. That is, by naming the various methodological divides–“Culture, Globalization and the World-System”–the symposium inadvertently reified them. In addition, it formulated a new divide between these concepts (and the methodologies associated with them) and the problem of identity, which, by virtue of its position in the subtitle, was ultimately subordinated to the “main topics.” As King points out, this was a divide the organizers had hoped the speakers would bridge, but only Stuart Hall “addressed both the title and subtitle of the main theme mapping” (14). An interesting and troubling dynamic resulted: while the three primary speakers (Robertson, Wallerstein, Hannerz) focused their energies on reconciling the terms of the main title, the respondents, especially John Tagg and Maureen Turim, emphasized the issue of identity and the constitutive role played by economic, political, and cultural conditions in the formation of identity. Not surprisingly the different emphases produced different levels of discourse, ranging from the highly abstract and totalizing mappings of Robertson and Wallerstein to the concrete counter-examples offered by Abu-Lughod and Abou-El-Haj to demonstrate the heterogeneity and unevenness of the processes of globalization. Wolff reads this divide as a symptomatic expression of an on-going problem within the (supposedly) interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies–namely, the failure of the social sciences to take the humanities seriously. Her point is well-taken, though I would argue, based on my experience studying television within an English department, that any disregard or outright enmity is, in fact, mutual.⁸ Certainly the disregard exists, and it is symptomatic of a general failure to be interdisciplinary enough when it comes to the study of culture, particularly at the supra- and sub-national levels.

 

Read against the grain, however, the structural divide that the text performs illuminates the inadequacies of our current imaginings of interdisciplinary practice. In other words, as an example of a post-disciplinary practice that might complement the shift toward a post-national conception of culture, the volume is an utter failure; as a lesson for future interdisciplinary approaches to the study of global culture and society, it has its moments. For one thing, the participants are highly self-conscious about the symposium’s failings. Thus, I would disagree with Wolff’s assertion that the theoretical differences between the speakers were submerged during the symposium (163-164). On the contrary, the respondents were quick to call Wallerstein and Robertson out for their “econocentrism” (Turim 146). John Tagg goes so far as to accuse them of offering “totalizing” accounts that are, at worst, complicit in the construction of uneven and coercive power relations–as if theory were of the same order of violence as material deprivation or physical punishment–and, at best, guilty of “[putting] us back, once more, in the primitive architecture of the base and superstructure model of the social whole” (156). Meanwhile, Tagg’s own theoretical excesses–he takes Derrida’s prescription that “there is nothing outside of the text” far too literally, denying the existence of any material reality outside of representation–make his discursive positioning obvious. Indeed, at all times, either directly or indirectly, the reader is made aware of the theoretical and methodological biases of the contributors. They become representative figures for their disciplines, charting a course through the larger institutional and epistemological struggles over how best to know and understand the world. Again, I say, this is a virtue. There can be no better introduction to the cross-disciplinary squabbling that characterizes the study of contemporary culture than to have it staged in the open like this.

 

As Hall notes, “you have to be positioned somewhere in order to speak. Even if you are positioned in order to unposition yourself…you have to come into language to get out of it” (51). Too often, as King’s introduction makes clear, the theoretical baggage accompanying concepts like “culture,” “globalization” and “the world-system” goes uninterrogated by the people who deploy it. His sophisticated critique of the nationalist bias under which cultural studies operates is a case in point. The study of culture has always proceeded as if the nation somehow defined the essence of culture. Multinational capitalism’s aggressive demystification of this common sense assumption has, therefore, caught cultural studies unaware. A coherent formulation of what a post-national methodology for the study of culture would look like has yet to emerge from within any discipline. Likewise, no one has yet formulated a post-disciplinary praxis that would be capable of addressing the economic and the cultural as an interpenetrated and indistinguishable complex. Adorno and Horkheimer once proposed that what was novel about contemporary culture was not so much the fact that it commodified the aesthetic, but the degree to which the economic base invaded and took over the superstructure, making it impossible to think the one independently of the other. The very existence of a text like Culture, Globalization and the World-System demonstrates that these epistemological conundrums have yet to approach a satisfactory resolution. But it does point the way, if only through its failings.

 

Notes

 

1. The literature on the topics of post-Fordism, transnationalism, and globalization is extensive to say the least. Readers interested in pursuing the debates are encouraged to turn to the journals Theory, Culture, and Society and Public Culture. Texts that might be of interest include The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey; Global Culture, edited by Mike Featherstone; New Times, edited by Stuart Hall and Jacques Martin, especially Michael Rustin’s contribution “The Politics of Post-Fordism: or, the Trouble with ‘New Times'”; Post-Fordism: A Reader, edited by Ash Amin; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake.

 

2. When I use the term “post-Fordism,” I do not mean to imply that the world has entered an entirely new phase of capitalism. Rather, I use it quite literally to connote the time period after the onset of the crisis of Fordism. That is, the time period after the recession of 1973.

 

3. Most commonly associated with Michael Aglietta and Alain Lipietz.

 

4. To clarify the terminology a bit, “regime of accumulation” designates all of the macroeconomic conditions that enable a particular type of capital accumulation, including the organization of production, labor relations, conditions of exchange, and patterns of consumption and demand during a given historical moment. Those institutional structures, cultural habits, and social norms responsible for reproducing a particular regime of accumulation are known as the “mode of regulation.”

 

5. Arjun Appadurai lists several types of global flows: ethnoscapes (flows of people), technoscapes (flows of technology), financescapes (flows of money), ideoscapes (flows of ideas and political ideologies), and mediascapes (cultural flows, especially of images). He emphasizes that these flows are uneven and multidirectional; therefore, power relations are much more difficult to pin down.

 

6. For an elaboration of these critiques and others, see Rustin.

 

7. The substance of the question and answer session following Stuart Hall’s second lecture is included, but the names and identities of the questioners are effaced.

 

8. Having monopolized the study of culture for years, English departments are generally reluctant to surrender their interpretive privileges to “quantoids” in the social sciences who prefer to study “degraded” forms of culture like TV. Likewise, social scientists consider humanities-style approaches to culture to be shoddy because they do not subscribe to the same rules of evidence.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aglietta, Michael. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. London: New Left Books, 1979.
• Amin, Ash. Post-Fordism: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994.
• Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Global Culture. Ed. Mike Featherstone. London: Sage Publications, 1990. 295-310.
• Featherstone, Mike, ed. Global Culture. London: Sage Publications, 1990.
• Hall, Stuart, and Jacques Martin, eds. New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1989.
• Gramsci, Antonio. “Americanism and Fordism.” Selections From the Prison Notebooks. Eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 279-320.
• Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.
• King, Anthony, ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Lasch, Scott and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage Publications, 1994.
• Lipietz, Alain. Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis of Global Fordism. London: Verso, 1987.
• Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• Rustin, Michael. “The Politics of Post-Fordism: Or, The Trouble With ‘New Times.'” New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. Eds. Stuart Hall and Jacques Martin. London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1989. 303-320.
• Wilson, Rob and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.