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A Two Sided Coin?
Globalization from the Cultural Perspective
by Abril Trigo
www.globalresearch.ca 14 October 2003
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/TRI310A.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------A lot has been said about the benefits and evils of globalization, and a lot more will be said, no
doubt about it, but I am convinced about this: globalization is a two sided coin, yes, but a heavily
loaded one. Perhaps my skepticism has to do with my professional and intellectual background,
and I fit in this sense with the general perception that we humanists are, for the most part, critical
of globalization. Anyway, I won’t get here into the litany of the negative effects that economic
globalization has on local cultures and native peoples. Instead, I’ll like to reflect, however
briefly, on the intimate, structural role that the cultural plays at the core of current global
processes.
What does globalization really mean?
Despite the current familiarity of the term and the opulent bibliography on the topic, which
grows exponentially day after day, there is a great deal of confusion about the meanings of
globalization. Such confusion is understandable indeed, given the contested status of a term that
finds itself at the center of complex political struggles and ideological mystifications that pit
globaliphilics or hyperglobalizers against globaliphobics and skeptics, not to mention the myriad
of transformationalists or third way globalists, for control of a global imaginary that, according
to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, serves as an ideology for these cynical postmodern times
in which we live. Why are there so many synonyms for globalization today? Is "transnational"
equivalent to "international" or "multinational"? Is it adequate to speak of "global citizens,"
"global democracy," "global sexual policies," the same way we speak of "global capitalism"? Is
globalization a synonym for "postmodernity," or "New World Order," or "the information age,"
or "late capitalism," or a multiplicity of scapes, or the ultimate "Empire"?
Used and abused in any imaginable circumstance and lacking any precise definition, the term has
become a cliché that, as any other cliché, means everything and nothing, an empty and
ubiquitous buzzword that fills the pages of newspapers, economic journals and fashion
magazines, but also academic papers, and conferences. It is a password that lets you in the "cool"
circles of wine-and-cheese connoisseurs when dropped at the right moment. A cliché, a
buzzword, a password, it has become, in that sense, truly a zeitgeist, a word that captures, for
some people, the spirit of the times, and, for others, the dreams –or the nightmares- of these
times.
There is no question, therefore, that the term globalization is an ideologeme, an empty signifier
at the center of overt or covert ferocious ideological, epistemological and political struggles that
could be filled with multiple, conflicting meanings, depending on who is speaking, to whom, and
in what circumstances. This is so because whoever is able to establish a consensual, accepted
meaning of the term, will be able to shape a definite interpretation, a certain understanding of the
economic, social, political and cultural processes involved. That is, to produce an interpretive
framework, a cognitive mapping of the world in which we live, either a glossy, rosy picture of
plenty and universal joy, or a somber one of mounting misery and inequality, or a critical
analysis capable of unveiling its less obvious mechanics.
The question is: could the notion of globalization go beyond its ideological underpinnings?
Could it be a truly hermeneutic category, a tool for knowledge? What does globalization name?
Is it a synonym for globalism? And what about globality? Is globalization truly global? We are
all touched by globalization –in the clothes we wear, in the images we receive, in the information
we handle- but, whose lives are really global? And what does it mean to be global? What does it
require? The CEO of McDonalds who decides the amount of beef in the burgers sold in
Guatemala, or the youth of Indian descent who work and serve at the local franchise, or the
ladino youth who pay highly for the prestige of consuming a Big-Mac? The corporate employee
who lives aboard of an airplane, or the migrant worker who, sometimes, doesn’t even learn the
language of the host country? The consumer who buys a shirt in Columbus, or the woman who
sew it in a maquiladora plant in El Salvador? The TV star whose image inundates millions of
screens around the world, or the millions of viewers who adopt, consciously or not, the TV star’s
manners and looks?
There are many ways of experiencing globalization
Globalization is obviously lived and perceived differently according to the location of the
individual. By location I mean, of course, the geographical location, but also the social status and
the professional activity, the language or languages spoken, the ethnicity, the gender, and the age
of the subject. Globalization cannot be experienced the same way in New York City, in the
cornfields of Ohio, in Dakar or in the Bolivian highlands; it cannot be experienced the same way
by a Quechua artist living in Paris and by a Quechua peasant living in the Andes; it cannot be
experienced the same way by a bilingual Latino student at Ohio State University and her
grandmother making tortillas in some village in Guanajuato. All this is very obvious. My point is
that even though globalization pervades everything and touches everybody’s life, directly or
indirectly, the experience will be absolutely different depending on where the individual is
socially, ethnically and nationally positioned to enjoy its fruits or is condemned to make it
possible. It is clear that for many, particularly those, like us, who live in the central economies,
the famous triad of the US, Western Europe and Japan, globalization brings enriching
experiences, but for many others, in fact the vast majorities of people in the periphery of
capitalism, it is just, in many cases, the possibility of getting a job for 50 cents an hour, so barely
beating the threshold of absolute poverty stated by the World Bank at $1.08 a day, in complete
disregard of the actual costs of basic needs like food, which sometimes amount to four fifths of
people’s income in the poor countries [Monbiot 2003].
Globalization: a new regime of capitalist accumulation
However, despite so many different ways of experiencing globalization, there must be a way to
capture the economic, social and cultural processes occurring at a global level. What is new
about globalization?
Globalization is one more instance in the constant, tortuous and increasingly accelerated
expansion of capitalism that inaugurated Western modernity. Therefore, it is mistaken to affirm
that begins in the Greco-Roman antiquity, or in the expansion of the great world religions, or
with the Arab trading routes or the Chinese commercial fleet. It is also a mistake to reduce it to
the opening of new markets and the expansion of world trade, as if it were a new form of
mercantilism.
Globalization is a new regime of capitalist accumulation and its correlative new mode or sociopolitical regulation, or, according to Castells, a new mode of development which differs from
previous industrialization in that the source of productivity lies primarily in the new information
technologies and in the accumulation and reproduction of knowledge. It is also a new mode of
production, characterized by profound transformations on the productivity of labor –from
industrial manufactures to what is call "immaterial labor"- and in the productivity of
consumption –consumerism, of course, and consumer society. It is also the last –and some would
say the ultimate- time-space compression in the vertiginous and protracted history of modernity
and capitalism, driven by the accumulative, expansive and creative-destructive logic of capital,
ideologically reinforced by the belief in the inevitability and blessing of material progress. This
logic explains the periodic time-space compressions brought about by the successive
technological revolutions with which capitalism has tried to solve its periodic and endemic
periods of recession. The corollary of reducing the time needed to move in space in order to
accelerate and increment the rate of return has been the inevitable and ever-increasing shrinking
of space, making distances shorter and the world smaller. The historical reduction of the ratio
between time and space amounts, as David Harvey indicates, to a brutal colonization of space
and objectification of time under the abstract logic of money and the commodity. Beginning with
the extraordinary technological discoveries and territorial adventures of the 14th and 15th
centuries, time has been money [266-7].
The ultimate time-space compression
The history of modernity –the modern history- has been thus regulated by cyclical and
convulsive periods of retraction and expansion of capitalism, and by spasmodic technological
revolutions which developed new regimes of accumulation, new modes of regulation and new
eco-cultural formations. That’s why the history of modernity is the history of capital, the history
of the colonization of territories and peoples, nature and societies, always in search of new
markets and new raw materials, manpower and consumers, in pursuit of furthering accumulation
of economic and cultural capital. Mercantilism, which began subsuming the sphere of trade and
exchange, stimulated the colonial adventures from the 15th to the 18th centuries; industrialism,
which took off at the middle of the 18th century with the first industrial revolution and reached
maturity with the Fordist regime of accumulation at the beginning of the 20th, subsumed the
sphere of production and labor, sponsoring the expansion of the imperial age. The crisis of
Fordism and the Keynesian mode of regulation during the 1970s, when there were no more
territories untouched by capitalism to incorporate, and the Bretton Woods accords of 1944,
which backed the dollar with a fixed amount of gol were no longer tenable, put into question the
neocolonial system under US hegemony and called for its substitution by a more flexible regime
of production and accumulation and the neoliberal mode of regulation –actually, of deregulationin place nowadays. Uphold by the marriage of convenience of the more abstract forms of finance
capital and information technologies, this flexible regime of accumulation deepened and
extended the global expansion of capital, subsuming all populations, all regions, and all forms of
labor time and leisure time in the remotest corners of the world.
And here we are approaching our topic. Globalization involves such an extensive and intensive
expansion of capital that it actually exceeds the strictly economic and strictly political
dimensions to include the cultural as well, which now acquires a leading role… economically.
We are amid another space-time compression, of course, and entangled in an omnipresent,
omnivorous totalization that keeps subsuming the more insignificant, the more intimate aspects
of everyday life under the logic of the commodity form and the forms of capital with the capacity
to operate as a single unit in real time on a planetary scale, as Castells put it [1996, 92], that is,
finance and speculative capital, the more abstract and essentially unproductive forms of capital.
The development of new information and telecommunication technologies, the flexibilization of
labor markets, and the segmentation of consumption, made possible the consolidation of a global
economy under the undisputable dominance of the finance sector, undoubtedly the more mobile
and flexible form of capital, and of the culture industry, specialized in the production of
symbolic goods, that is, of culture in its strictest form. This is the most formidable machinery of
production humankind has ever seen, an economy of plenty and waste which –paradoxical as it
may seem- feeds itself in the more extreme forms of poverty and the more obscene forms of
destitution and marginalization. Nearly 1.3 billion people, or over a quarter of the world
population, live on less than a dollar a day, and close to 1 billion are malnourished, with an
expectation of survival of 40 years of age. But also one person in eight in the richest countries is
affected by poverty, long-term unemployment or some sort of deprivation [UNDP 1999, 22]. The
latest figures released just last week by the Census Bureau indicate that 2.7 million more people
went into poverty in the past year. Never, in the history of humankind, there has been such an
accumulation of wealth, but never has wealth been so unjustly distributed.
The globalization of poverty
And this is so because this globalization involves a new international and global division of labor
and consumption that implies, necessarily and structurally, the global reproduction of poverty,
which, as Michel Chossudovsky says, is not a mere side-effect or an eventually reparable social
cost of yet another modernization, but another input on the supply side, since capital demands a
constant supply of cheap labor. In a nutshell, the reproduction of poverty guarantees the
availability of the cheap labor needed for capital to maintain its rate of expansion.
Unquestionably, this is related to the flexible regime of accumulation that characterizes this
global economy, whose main requisites are: the availability of instantaneous, reliable and
confidential information, and the free flow of capital and commodities (although not necessarily
of people). The question is, what is and where is the ultimate source of value in the global
economy? Or said differently, where is wealth produced in the present world? This question can
be answered satisfactorily only if we take into account that, first, being the economy of global
scope, it has to be thought as a whole, as a flexible system in which multiple interconnected parts
are combined for the production, circulation and consumption of material and symbolic goods;
and second, that this regime of accumulation operates on two platforms. On the one hand, by
extracting the productivity of labor, in particular the surplus value of cheap labor, from women,
children and people of color in the periphery, where most manufactures and material goods are
presently produced, but also by controlling the net flows of capital from peripheral economies to
central economies, either in the form of interests paid for external debt, royalties and dividends,
or capital flight [Hoogvelt 88-9]. On the other hand, by extracting the productivity of desires,
which is done by inducing nonstop consumption and the culture of consumerism, particularly in
the central economies and among the affluent sectors in the peripheral economies. In other
words, by means of a flexible regime of capital accumulation that combines the exploitation of
material labor (the production of material goods, for the most part done in the peripheries), with
the exploitation of immaterial labor (service and intellectual labor, for the most part done in the
centers), and the exploitation of consumption (the consumer culture prevalent in the central
societies but that also includes the affluent strata in peripheral societies). How did this happen?
First of all, in the 1970s the fall of the rate of profit of the industrial sector in the central
economies triggered the relocation of many manufacturing plants to the periphery, where salaries
were cheaper, and the eventual expansion of the industries related to services, information,
telecommunications and symbolic goods, spurred by a larger demand and the incentive of a
higher rate of profit. This resulted in the advent of a "new economy" moved by finance capital
and speculative investment, where value is located on the control of information, the
privatization of knowledge, and the cashing of royalties. A "casino" economy in which the
largest profits are made from fictitious capital, which derives money away from productive
investments, and where "securities", a purely virtual form of future money, is put to make money
[Hoogvelt 86-7]. Remember the burst of the bubble? Remember South East Asia, Russia,
Mexico, Argentina? Remember Enron, Anderson and company? These are no exceptions to the
rule, isolated incidents, or the good gone rotten; financial crises have become the logical
consequence of the free flow of capital flows. They show the system at work, a system, though,
whose existence is viable through the exploitation of cheap labor and the transfer of capital that
chokes many peripheral countries’ possibility of development. Under the vigilance and the
interference in national decisions of the institutions of global economic governance, the IMF, the
World Bank, and the WTO, the snowball of the external debt, the technological gap, and
dependency from transnational banks, have become mechanisms of actual political intervention
that impose to developing nations the privatization of national assets, the dismantling of social
security systems (in complete disregard of local traditions and the fact that in weaker economies
public provisioning of services by state institutions is more important than private income), and
the deregulation of capital and labor, at the expense of the already diminished national
sovereignties. Not to mention the subsidies and other protectionist policies to specific sectors,
like agriculture for instance, with which Europe and the US undermine the sustainability of local
production in many countries. A double standard that led to the collapse of the WTO meeting in
Cancun.
However, this appropriation of the productivity of labor, particularly of cheap labor, is
complemented by the appropriation of the productivity of desires, through the continuous
expansion of consumer markets and the implosion of consumerism: the sustained creation,
segmentation and absorption of new consumer markets and new consumers to the market
through the intensive colonization of culture and everyday life. The novelty of this new regime
of accumulation has to do with the central, critical role that the production, distribution and
consumption of symbolic goods, and of culture in general have, thus reflecting a decisive
convergence of the economy, politics and culture.
What is the role of culture in globalization?
There are basically two culturalist approaches regarding the role culture plays in global
processes. The first one consists of defining globalization as a process in which ideas and
behaviors, technology and information are exchanged and disseminated between different
cultures worldwide freely. From this perspective, which de-emphasizes the economic side of
globalization, or disconnects culture from economics, politics and power, globalization is
understood as another case of cultural diffusion or hybridization this time at a global scale of,
more often than not, positive consequences, such as promoting racial tolerance, cultural
understanding, and social awareness toward difference [van der Staay, UNESCO 1998, 253]. In
this sense, cultural globalization, understood as globalization of cultures, is equivalent to some
sort of universal humanism.
The other approach consists of stating that cultural globalization, characterized by massive
acculturation, worldwide homogenization, and ethnic annihilation, is an inevitable, though
deplorable, side effect of the otherwise good economic globalization and its spin-offs, political
modernization and global integration. This approach feeds two opposite positions, that of the
globalists who believe that economic progress and modern institutions are worth the price of
disposing of traditional and local cultures, and that of those who see in local cultures and cultural
diversity the alternative for a globalization with a human face. The Human Development Report
of the United Nations published in 1990 opens with these words: "The real wealth of a nation is
its people. And the purpose of development for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.
This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial
wealth" [UNDP 1999, 1]. And then it says, "The challenge of globalization in the new century is
not to stop the expansion of global markets. The challenge is to find the rules and institutions for
stronger governance […] to preserve the advantages of global markets and competition, but also
to provide enough space for human, community and environmental resources to ensure that
globalization works for people –not just for profits" [UNDP 1999, 2].
What are the main cultural effects of global processes?
1. The ideological effect
There are several cultural effects that I cannot consider here, such as the tremendous impact on
the environment; or the obscene privatization and monopolization of knowledge through the
enforcement of the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement
which is nothing else than the legal silent theft of centuries of humanity’s knowledge by
transnational corporations backed, politically and military, by the governments of the rich
countries; or the many forms of underground globalization which apply neoliberal policies to the
letter, from drug trafficking to money laundering, from human trafficking to slave migrants, from
black markets to informal employment, which in Latin America provides 85 of every 100 jobs
[UNDP 1999, 37].
The most obvious cultural effect is probably the pervasiveness of a neoliberal ideology which
spreads the belief that globalization and the capitalist market economy are natural facts of life
driven by some meta-historical force beyond human agency, thus masking the political decisionmaking –and the military interventions- that keep the economy going. Its main assumptions are
that [see Robbins, 1999, 100-1]:
*
Sustained economic growth is the path to human progress.
*
Free markets, unrestrained and unregulated, are efficient and natural creators and
distributors of wealth and resources.
*
Meanwhile governments should reduce themselves to assure the free flow of capital,
privatization of state assets improves efficiency.
*
Economic globalization, achieved by removing barriers to the free flow of money and
commodities anywhere in the world, increases efficiency and creates jobs, lowers consumer
prices and increases consumer choice, boosts economic growth and gives people more
opportunities, including the opportunity to travel and migrate freely, and finally promotes
political democracy, ethnic tolerance and cultural diversity.
What I found more striking in this set of beliefs is the implicit assumption that what is good for
corporations is good for society; that what is good for certain countries is good for the whole
world; that what is good for producers is good for consumers; that what is good for capitalism is
good for humanity, since human well being is measured by the increase of consumer spending. It
is arguable whether competitive markets may be the best guarantee of efficiency, but it is
undeniable that they are not of equity. "When the market goes too far in dominating social and
political outcomes, the opportunities and rewards of globalization spread unequally and
inequitably –concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations and
corporations, marginalizing others" [UNDP 1999, 2]. US multinationals account for more than a
quarter of the US GDP and the sales of multinationals exceed the GDP of many countries
[UNDP 1999, 31-2]. This ideology works thanks to the articulation of what Peter Sloterdijk calls
"cynical reason", which gives otherwise informed and intelligent people the alibi to believe in
what they know is not true, despite the fact that is not true, and because it is not true, thus freeing
them to get drunk in the hedonistic enjoyment of consumption. What is lost from the picture is
that for capitalism culture is just a means for economic progress. However, as the World
Commission on Culture and Development has stated, "culture is not a means to material
progress: it is the end aim of ‘development’ seen as the flourishing of human existence in all its
forms and as a whole" [in Borofsky, UNESCO 1998, 72]. What is lost from the picture is the
difference between "being better" and "being better off", between the pursuit of things and the
pursuit of happiness.
2. The centripetal/centrifugal effect of spinning
Despite World Bank reports sustaining that absolute poverty has fell from 29% to 23% of the
world population between 1990 and 1999, and many economists who affirm global inequality is
falling, there are many other economists and social scientists who sustain exactly the opposite
[see Fischer 2003; Wade 2001; Monbiot 2003]. Regarding statistics, in the end it all depends on
the gathering of information and the manipulation of data. Despite widespread hullabaloo about
the respect for difference, the benefits of ethnic diversity, and the "I’m feeling good" of
multiculturalism, inequality and poverty –which comprises many more dimensions than lack of
income, including deprivation of education and health services, social exclusion, lack of
employment, all forms of discrimination, environmental degradation, personal insecurity,
violation of human rights, lack of cultural expression, and the inability to make social and
cultural choices [UNESCO 1998, 17]-, are more severe today at any level of analysis: between
countries and within countries, between rural and urban areas, between ethnic groups and
between men and women. The gap between the elites of the world population globally integrated
and the remaining majorities of locally excluded, continues to widen. The income ratio between
the fifth of the world’s population living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest has
gone up from 30 to 1 in 1960, to 60 to 1 in 1990 to 74 to 1 in 1997. The fifth of the world
population living in the richest countries consume 84% of the world’s paper, 70% of the world’s
energy, 75% of its metals, 85% of its wood, and 60% of its food. They also enjoy 82% of the
world trade and 68% of foreign direct investments. The world’s 200 richest people more than
doubled their net worth between 1994 and 1998 to more than $1 trillion, an income equivalent to
that of 41% of the world population. The assets of just three super-billionaires exceed the
combined income of all the least developed nations and their 600 million people [UNDP, 1999,
3].
As the Argentinean Martin Hopenhayn has said, while the few experience globalization as a
provisional condition, which presupposes a diversified and sophisticated consumption, better
access to information and technology, and the joyful abandonment to the seductions of an
unpredictable and vertiginous life, the many live globalization as a precarious condition,
characterized by labor insecurity, social violence, and poverty without hope. One of the most
blatant effects of globalization is the disintegration of social cohesiveness, fragmenting
communities, nations and regions, and the horrendous increase of violence, not only in poor
countries, but in rich countries as well, from urban violence to social unrest, from political
violence to military interventions, from terrorism as politics to the politics of terror. The many
forms of urban violence, which is the result of inadequate incomes, overcrowded housing, job
insecurity, racial and gendered discrimination, and lack of social services, is answered with more
guns, more repression, more vigilance, more prisons, more private security, more spatial
segregation and more empty cities, in a spiraling of the politics of fear which have taken over the
life in the cities [Jelin, UNESCO 1998, 120]. In 1995 the illegal drug trade was estimated at 8%
of world trade; money laundering is estimated to be between 2-5% of global GDP; the traffic of
women and girls for sexual exploitation, which amounts to half a million a year in Western
Europe alone, amounts to a $7 billion business [UNDP 1999, 5]. There is an alarming
internalization, naturalization and conformism to the daily coexistence with violence, which so
becomes a perverse mechanism of ideological control and political manipulation, at the local, the
national and the international levels.
But perhaps the most sophisticated and perverse form of violence is the asynchrony suffered by
the many locally excluded between expectations and achievements, between the ideological,
symbolic and affective allurement into a way of life from which they are economically and
socially forbidden. The attraction of goods continuously on display and the ostentatious display
of luxury beyond reach generate frustration, anger, and hate [Jelin, UNESCO 1998, 119-120].
Peripheral populations are condemned to a systematic unevenness between the slow or even
regressive pace of socio-economic integration (that is, in their capacity of consumption and
living standard) and their accelerated ideological integration to the global market of desires and
symbolic consumption [Hopenhayn 44-5]. This "disintegrative integration," as Hopenhayn calls
it, aggravates the material and symbolic stratification between those who enjoy the banquet as
full members of a transnational cosmopolitan elite, and those who, dazzled by transnational pop
culture, are condemned to peep through the window. The economic and cultural promises of
economic distribution, political democracy, ethnic and sexual tolerance, and cultural respect are
not, and cannot be under the current global system, for everybody.
The best visual metaphor I have found for this sort of globalization is that of a spinning vortex,
whose always-increasing intensity and velocity produces a dual and combined centripetal and
centrifugal effect, keeping the people at the center in a sort of ecstatic, obsessive, paranoiac
delusion, while pushing the people at the periphery into an erratic, hysteric, schizoid illusion.
Therefore, globalization produces both, integration and marginalization, unification and
segmentation, connection and isolation, homogenization and differentiation, concentration and
dispersion, massification and individuation, entropy and stasis, acculturation and
transculturation.
3. The cosmopolitan commodification of culture
A truly ecumenical culture is obviously the ultimate horizon of any humanist utopia, and perhaps
this explains why we tend to perceive cultural phenomena as detached from economics and
geopolitical powers, thus mystifying two different, though complementary, forms of cultural
globalization: the global pop consumer culture produced by transnational corporations for
worldwide mass-consumption, and a high tech, sophisticated, deterritorialized cosmopolitanism
intended for a transnational corporate and academic elite, according to Brazilian Renato Ortiz.
Despite the indisputable increase of worldwide interconnectedness, the narrowing of cultural
differences, and the globalization of local cultures, the fact is that only a tiny fraction of cultural
goods produced outside the US culture industry, deemed by transnational media corporations to
fit into "global" standards, become global. This is the case of the carefully selected musicians,
whose art, promoted as "world music," is produced and marketed for the consumption of the
"cosmopolitan" segments of the European, US, and Japanese markets [Throsby, UNESCO 1998,
203]. The truth of the matter is that the only truly global culture is the US pop culture spread
through the overwhelming power of media networks and the spousal of the cosmopolitan
lifestyles and esthetic tastes of mega-stars, globalized by the omnivorous power of transnational
corporations and the asymmetrical interdependence of global cultural flows. The single largest
export industry for the US is entertainment. Hollywood films grossed more than $30 billion
worldwide in 1997 (Titanic alone more than $1.8 billion); more than 80% of the world music
markets is controlled by the so-called "Big Six", Sony, Polygram, Warner, BMG, Thorn-EMI,
and MCA [Jelin, 1998, 110; García Canclini, UNESCO 1998, 169; Throsby, UNESCO 1998,
195-6].
The notorious worldwide imbalance between cultural production and cultural consumption
barely reflects, actually, the monopoly of knowledge, information and culture held by central
countries (In 1993, just 10 countries accounted for 84% of global research and development
expenditures and controlled 95% of patents [UNDP 1999, 3]. While Latin America accounts for
less than 1% of the world cultural exports, 70% of Latin American television programming is
imported, with 62% being from the US [García Canclini, UNESCO 1998, 165-6]). Nevertheless,
the truly ideological character of this cultural globalization, driven primarily by the pursuit of
profit, lies in the unidirectional and, for this reason, ultimately non-communicational and
disinformational mass media [Baudrillard 1997, 33-4].
This is related to a paradox, which springs from identifying globalization with access to high
tech information and gadgetry, and implies that cultural globalization is only possible in the
centers while peripheral peoples keep dwelling into their local cultures. Obviously, economic
globalization is based upon high tech, and the access to information technology gives evidence,
in part, of the degree of cultural globalization. But this partial truth mystifies the fact that with
the exception of the cosmopolitan few, the majority of the population of the US –unquestionably
the driving force behind economic globalization- clings to a staunchly cultural insularism (easily
translated in xenophobia and jingoism according to the circumstances), and that what is "global"
for the rest of the world, for ordinary Americans is simply "American." In this sense, cultural
globalization is tantamount to the global acculturation, particularly of the youth in the rest of the
world, to US pop culture, with all the implications in the shake up of social habits and consumer
desires, family structures and patterns of living [Mohan Rao, UNESCO 1998, 39], a process that
many consider an overt Americanization. Cultural globalization (again, not to be confused with
the globalization of cultures) is not solely dependent upon the accessibility to high tech, but more
importantly, on the relational value that global pop culture and the integration of the world
populace to the global imaginary acquire in specific milieus. To watch the Emmy Awards or the
latest video by Britney Spears in Columbus doesn’t have the same cultural value as it would to
watch them in Prague, or Nairobi, or Buenos Aires.
What is the cultural reception of an exotic but now blond Shakira’s mumbled English in the US
or in Latin America? TV programs, pop music and Hollywood films produced for the US market
make up the lion’s share of cultural consumption around the world, but how many foreign films
are annually screened in a city of more than one million, capital of an important state, like
Columbus? Hence, while non-US publics get globalized via the commodification of global pop
culture, most Americans remain locked in an insular and nationalistic bubble that has even
shrunk after 9/11, when the violence of globalization finally stroke back. Hollywood saturates
every market: 70% of the European film market, 83% of the Latin American, 50% of the
Japanese, while foreign films are less than 3% of the US film distribution market [UNDP 1999,
33]. While in the rest of the world peoples are challenged to change customs, tastes and desires,
in the US these challenges amount to the cosmopolitan adventure to the "ethnic" restaurant
around the corner and the elites’ acquired taste for expensive wines and flavored coffees.
Although they become part of the landscape (not truly an ethnoscape, as Arjun Appadurai would
wish), the millions of migrants who flood the rich North from the poor South are not part of the
club; what is exotic ethnic cuisine for the few is plain homemade cooking for the many. These
migrants, many times undocumented, indentured workers kept under some form of slavery, are
the invisible hands washing the dishes, breaking cement, and picking tomatoes for us to enjoy.
The experience of vertigo produced in the peripheries by the centrifugal dynamics of
globalization corresponds at the center to some sort of centripetal stasis. Cultural
cosmopolitanism is good, but it is not good for everybody, and the "profound dehumanization
and systemic banalization of civilization" that it contributes to legitimize, is not at all the kind of
humanism I envision.
4. The commodity effect
As we have seen, the process of expansion that led to globalization was facilitated by a dual and
combined conversion in the regime of capital accumulation, from the exploitation of alienated
work to the exploitation of alienating consumption, and from the industrial production of
material goods to the cultural production of symbolic goods; a conversion that puts culture at the
center of a system in which economy, politics, society and culture seem to be integrated into a
single totality that blurs the difference between the material and the symbolic, the base and the
superstructure, the real and the ideological, insofar as ideology is embedded now in the
commodity-sign form, which permeates and regulates the system. Culture, in the form of
information, know-how, software, patents, and so for, becomes one of the main sources of
capital and a decisive mean of production, but more importantly, because the economy is
increasingly moved by consumption, and particularly by the consumption of symbolic goods and
cultural services, culture becomes the engine of the "new economy" as well as its main indicator.
However, consumption has not just become the economic mover, but it also has a primordial
political and cultural function. Because we do not consume objects, we consume something else,
even more important, in an economy of plenty where objects abound. We consume messages,
symbols, meanings, which tell us how much we are worth and who we are. Consumption –and
particularly cultural consumption- works through the production and reproduction, creation,
incitation and manipulation of desires, constantly pushing the threshold of pleasure, stirring as a
result additional consumption and reinforcing consumerism as a "natural" way of life. It defines
a system in which commodities are produced primarily as signs and signs are produced as
commodities; a system in which everything that can be exchanged (objects, services, bodies, sex,
information, pleasures) has a symbolic value and consequently can always be translated to the
ultimate sign, money.
But consumption is also a field of political struggle, not only for the direct access and the social
distribution of goods, but because consumption –and particularly the symbolic value provided by
both material and cultural goods- creates the illusion of having a democratic effect, when it
actually is highly stratifying and discriminatory. Moreover, with the erosion of the nation-state
and its institutions, and the crisis of legitimacy of politics and politicians, consumption
subsumes, under the commodity form, the role, the rights and the responsibilities of citizens. In
effect, nowadays, citizens are more and more supplanted by consumers, the same way identities
are configured more and more in consumption: Tell me what you consume and I will tell you
who you are. At last the cultural becomes political and vice-versa.
And this is so, in the end, because consumption is the place where desires –the desires that drive
the political and the libidinal economy- are produced and supposedly satisfied, and I said
supposedly because satisfaction is pushed always further, and the subject, as consumer, becomes
the sublimated pursuer of an impossible object of desire. Providing a satisfaction that is never
enough, consumerism conforms subjects that can never be fulfilled. This explains the profound
instability of social identities and political as well as ethical values in a society where everything
is for sale, where everything is relative, translatable, interchangeable, where everything is a
simulacrum of a simulacrum, and where we cannot resign ourselves to play the role that we have
been assigned in this reality show where everything that is solid seems to melt into the air.
Let me finish with some words by Mahatma Gandhi: "I do not want my house to be walled in on
all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my
house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any." [UNDP 1999, 4].
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