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Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001
The
Failure of Modernization: Globalization and Culture
by John Roberts
At the
same time as the issue of globalization has become the new meta
narrative within cultural studies it has suffered from chronic undertheorization
and as such a critical enfeeblement. When it is not being talked
up aggressively as an unassailable supraterritorial new world order,
it is given a benign make-over as the 'new digital age'. The cliched
images and phrases are invariably of 'expanded communications' and
global simultaneity, of interactivity and multicultural 'flows'.
The chirpy rhetoric of digital deterritorialization becomes coextensive
with a metaphysical programme of 'democracy-through-new technology'.
The fact that the majority of the world's population do not own
a phone, let alone an old PC is assiduously forgotten. This is not
to score an easy point over the deepening structural inequalities
of the world economy, and the vast discrepancies in access to any
kind of advanced technology, as if the recognition of such inequalities
negates or diminishes the transformations that globalization has
in general put in train. But to recognise that the fundamental
basis of any globalization theory must be that such changes are
wildly sectoral and uneven, and, moreover, subject to possible retreat
or retardation. Thus, the overwhelming weakness of most globalization
theory is that its response to questions of temporal acceleration
and spatial interdependence under the new technological relations
are massively exaggerated. But this exaggeration is not the result
of some failed empirical methodology or an unrestrained enthusiasm
for the 'new', rather it is the determinate outcome of a given politics
and world view.
Leading
globalization theorists such as Manuel Castells, Jan Aart Scholte
and Tony Giddens, argue polemically, that the new conditions of
temporal acceleration and spatial interdependence, have produced
a super-modernity which is actually discontinuous with early forms
of modernity.1 According to Giddens these new conditions 'disembed'
individuals and groups from customary ties and allegiances to given
local contexts and traditions, placing them in a wider, non-geographically
specific sense of place and community, which in turn encourages
the development of non-parochial and indeterminate and ultimately
depoliticized social relations. This is what these theorists mean
by deterriotorialization: the grievous stripping away of traditional,
industrial-based social and communal identities. The fact that the
majority of the world's population still live and work in areas
that are geographically familiar to them across generations and
are engaged in industrial labour, or labour on the land, is also
conveniently forgotten. Thus, despite Western European and North
American myths about accelerating Westward migration, economic migration
as a percentage of world population is relatively small. But, of
course, such theorists would say they are not talking so positivistically
about the demographics of shifting populations. Rather, they are
pointing to the fundamental changes in how home and place are perceived
in the wake of the vast penetration of images of (Anglo-American)
modernity into modernizing non-Western indigenous cultures. The
profusion of commodified imagery from a multitude of cultural sources
within the new "informational economy" (Castells) has
produced forms of cultural disembedding in which the memory and
actuality of local cultural traditions are weakened, even discarded
as antithetical to the fantasies and expectations of being modern
in other, non-local, non-indigeneous ways.
That
these conditions have advanced ruthlessly across the globe, there
is no doubt. But this is a pretty feeble set of conditions on which
to base a paradigmatic theory of globalization. For a theory of
globalization has to do more than note transformations in the communications
industry and the symbolic, if it is to lay claim to evidence of
structural transformation in capitalist social relations. It has
to demonstrate a fundamental break or transformation in how capitalism
organises itself on a universal basis, and therefore how these changes
are radically discontinuous with those forms of organization identified
as having preceded it. Given Castells's, Scholte's and Giddens'
preoccupation with superstructural and symbolic transformations
in contemporary social relations, they are unable to do this, relying
on extrapolation and presupposition. Giddens, in particular, goes
through a whole number of strained arguments in order to make his
globalization theory appear to fit his understanding of late modernity.
He freely admits that the forces of disembedding are continuous
with the liberalization, Westernization, modernization of an an
early modernity, yet argues its contemporary forms represent a qualitative
leap to what he calls a reflexive 'second-phase' of modernity. The
increasing erosion of localised cultural tradition and social norms
extends the conditions of social and cultural self-reflexivity,
and is therefore experientially different to older processes of
cognitive decentring associated with exposure to the first wave
of communications technology. As a consequence of the erosion of
these norms and the rise of more pronounced 'individualistic' risk-seeking
forms of activity, the expanded conditions of secular self-reflexivity
is discernible as a generalisable cross-class and cross-cultural
experience. That various religious fundamentalisms and reactionary
nationalisms since the early 1990s have ripped through large parts
of the East and South, and that racism is rising again in Western
Europe, along with levels of poverty and educational disenfranchisement
(particularly in the US), is construed not so much as counter-evidence
to the theory of expanded self-reflexivity, as an indication of
an individualised, technophilic, Western social democracy lying
'in wait' globally. Giddens claims that the explanatory power of
his theory of globalization rests, therefore, on certain expectations,
in the aftermath of what he sees as the breakdown of older collective
identities and statist forms of social organization and provision.
Similarly Castells and Scholte extrapolate from the expansion of
flexible 'knowledge-based' industries to a largely hopeful concept
of the 'informational age'. What are merely uneven tendencies
come to explain the grinding, conflictual, divided whole. But, even
taking account of the provisional conditions of an emergent theory,
the extrapolation from a single technological or cultural tendency
is itself a suspect basis for any theory with claims to ontological
depth, on the grounds that evidence for such universal transformations
cannot be confined solely to the realm of circulation and the symbolic.
Giddens, Scholte and Castells, develop master-concepts devoid of
any material and causal weight.2
What
globalization theory of this kind produces, essentially, is a view
of culture and political economy in which the effects of technological
change and transformations in subjectivity are dissociated from
questions of capital accumulation and valorisation. The result is
an inversion of the function and role of technology in the processes
of globalization - globalization is supposedly the outcome of technological
change rather than the result of crisis of accumulation - and as
such produces an ahistorical view of the processes of globalization
itself.
From
the end of the nineteenth century to WW1 the world economy experienced
an intense and lengthy period of global expansion, in which Great
Britain, for instance, dominated the textile industry on a world
scale. In the 1870s the mills of Blackburn imported cotton and calico
in order to clothe the whole of China and India. From the late 1920s
until 1945 this process gave way to a system of national autarkic
(self-developing) economies, which in turn was followed by an increasing
reglobalization of the system, which has sped up today. In this
sense the dominant logic of the system is globalization,
insofar globalization is none other than the logic of capital expansion.
In the 1860s and 1870s Marx recognized that the immanent logic of
the system was the development of the world market, because even
at this point in history the valorisation of capital on a domestic
scale in the West was becoming more and more difficult. The overaccumulation
of capital in the major European industrial economies was endemic.3
As Marx argued, the world market is the "precondition and the
result of capitalist production".4 As such globalization is
simply the contemporary name given to the expansion of capital in
search of sources of surplus value, of labour power. That this process
of expansion has become more pronounced over the last twenty years
is an indication that the problems of valorisation and the overaccumulation
of capital continues to be endemic within the leading economies.
Hence the rapid development of the new digital technologies is less
a picture of the increasing modernist integration of the world,
than a familiar pattern of capital expansion and devaluation. Self-expanding
capital continually searches out new investment possibilities. New
inventions create such possibilities. New inventions that do not
involve investment in large amounts of constant capital (factories,
means of production) and that reduce the time of circulation (of
commodities) through improved communications, create even more attractive
possibilities, because they provide the conditions for the rationalization
of older industries and the sweeping away of fixed (dead) capital
and the emergence of new industries. This is what has happened with
the new generation of dotcom companies. A massive amount of capital
has rushed in order to expand the industrial base of the new processes
of digitalization. But once these industries are developed and the
capital reabsorbed, the renewed accumulation of capital is compelled
to find new sources of valorisation on an even larger scale. The
problems of overaccumulation begin again.
These
conditions of capital expansion then have little to do with globalization
understood as a generalised process of global modernization. In
fact, the global expansion of capital and global modernization are
not the same thing. The Western export of capital to (some) of the
peripheries, and the siting of transnational companies in countries
where levels of surplus value extraction are high, is not evidence
that the G8 economies are interested in sustaining conditions of
economic development in the peripheries, but a familiar picture
of technologically advanced countries making a surplus profit at
the cost of technologically less advanced countries. And this, of
course, is pursued on the basis that the available labour power
is not free to move. There is no global labour market, just
as there are no democratic or labour institutions on a global level.
It is not people who are being globalized but capital and its agents.
In this respect, as Boris Kargarlitsky has argued, for all the modernizing
rhetoric of the G8 economies the new neo-liberal hegemony is not
interested in making the world equally modern. 'On the contrary,
the coexistence of societies and communities with different levels
of modernization remains an important structural factor in the system".5
Indeed, under conditions of capital expansion it is more accurate
to talk about the continued failure of modernization on a
global scale. In other words the exaggerated emphasis on temporal
acceleration and spatial interdependence covers the deeper and more
fundamental processes of capital control at the centre. This of
course, is not to say that large parts of the world are not newly
industrializing or that the newly industrialized economies of Asia
and the South continue to grow and expand the working class and
raise living standards. But the world market works on the basis
that the more the economies of the periphery are opened up to industrial
growth and the conditions of democratic modernity the more they
are able to serve the accumulation of capital at the centre. This
process was well under way by the 1920s.
The issue
of cultural globalization, then, presents a number of problems in
relation to questions of culture. What is the extent and reality
of cultural modernization within the peripheries? What is the extent
of transmission and exchange between the centre and periphery? As
Third Worldist explanations of underdevelopment have waned under
the impact of the Newly Industrializing Countries and post-colonial
theory, there has been much discussion of the increasing modernist
integration of the cultures of the periphery into the centre. That
is, the cultures of the periphery are held to be in a stronger position
of exchange with the centre (Anglo-American culture). This argument
is based not simply on the extended ability of periperhal cultures
to imitate the centre, but to transform the forms and practices
of the centre in their own interests and thereby challenge and transform
the cultural self-identity of the centre. In this regard the debate
has tended to focus on the fiction of the 'West' as a self-identical
entity. Because of modernization in the peripheries, because of
globalization, because of the impact of immigration cultures on
the formation of national cultural traditions in the West, the West
can no longer be thought of as the privileged term of cultural modernity.
The binary opposition between a completed Western modernity and
incomplete Eastern or Southern modernity, catching up or replicating
the West, is untenable. In this way the temporality of cultural
modernity is expanded to cover new cultural forms and practices
in the peripheries that demand recognition as coexistent with the
West.6 The current critique of the 'West', then, in cultural studies
embraces two aspects of the spatial and temporal claims of globalization
theory: firstly, that the new forces of globalization generate forms
of modernization across Western and non-Western cultures that share
the same processes of temporality, and secondly, as a result, that
these processes of modernization connect the non-Western local to
the modern, weakening the ethnographic interpretation of indigenous
cultures as essentially authentic. A good example of these conflictual
processes in play is the the recent film by Cesar Paes, Saudede
do Futuro (2000), a documentary of Sao Paulo's streets, communities
and factories and the lives of the Nordestino population - migrants
from the impoverished and drought ridden north. The film adopts
a Benjaminian montage structure, relinquishing a dominant narrative
voice for the voices of those interviewed, the implication being
that the experiential truth of subaltern experience needs no mediation.
If Benjamin supplies the structure, Michel de Certeau supplies the
ideology of oral self-representation. Conventionally then, the film
is inflected by an ethnographic respect for 'native' experience.
Yet what is interesting about the film is that it is not an ethnographic
documentary of the streets. Rather it is a snapshot of the effects
of the vast and pulating forces of industrialisation and modernity
on Sao Paulo - the fifth largest city in the world - and on Brazil
itself. Key to this in the film is the experience of the Nortesdino,
in particular two improvising Nortesdino troubadour street poets.
Their extraordinary call and response improvisations, weaving the
most elaborate stories and asides with wit and humour, produce a
popular modernist street art, in which critical self-reflexivity
and class politics, meets the game-playing of the trickster tradition.
In this way one of the most revealing moments of the film is when
they address they camera and begin to rhyme a poem about the filming
of the documentary. On this basis the forces of modernity have passed
through these two singers and poets to produce a compelling argument
for the wider impact of the new forces of modernization. But for
all this moment's vividness, this example of self-reflexivity 'from
below' remains local and culture-bound. And it is this residual
boundedness of peripheral cultures that the use of the notion of
co-existent temporalities across the West and the non-West is unable
to acknowledge fully.
Thus,
in assessing the new conditions of cultural modernity, in the light
of the continuing force of the centre a number of important distinctions
need to be made. It is true that the old axiomatic distinction between
Western development and non-Western underdevelopment is implausible.
New cultures of modernity that do not replicate or mimic the West
have begun to develop and thrive. Non-Western social subjects are
in the process of establishing new configurations of modernity that
are not assimilable to the West. But there are limits to these changes,
pushing the force of these changes into an over compensatory counter-hegemonic
position. For instance these new cultures of modernity non-assimiliable
to Western models are invariably located in the older industrialized
non-Western economies that have histories of state support of culture:
Japan, India, China and Brazil itself. They are not thriving in
Butan, Mozambique, Greenland, Paraguay, Bahrain etc. Nor are they
thriving in the former major communist economies: Poland, ex-Yugolsavia,
and Russia in particular, which have suffered massive, if uneven,
cultural retardation in the wake of neo-liberal Western intervention.
More importantly though, the forces or mimicry, replication and
the drive to assimilate culturally to the West are as strong as
ever, as Anglo-American popular culture tightens its domination
of the world market. Given the power of this centralizing forces
we should, therefore, be far more cautious about how far non-Western
forms of cultural production are fracturing Anglo-American identities
and how Western and non-Western now exist within a shared modernity.7
Indeed in conditions where globalization is the name for the continuing
necessary failure of modernization on a global scale it would be
foolish to assume that we are all now sharing the same boat. To
counter the benign homogenizing tendencies of global multicultural
theory, then, we need to return to some strong notion of 'non-synchronism'.
Because it is only on the basis of 'non-synchronicity' that the
actual sychronizing tendencies of the world market can be understood
in terms of their real and uneven effects.
1. See
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
Blackwells, Vol 1, 1996; Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical
Introduction, Basingstoke, 2000, and Anthony Giddens, The
Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge University Press 1990 and
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization,
Cambridge University Press, 1994
2. For critique of Giddens on these grounds, see Justin Rosenberg,
The Follies of Globalisation Theory, Verso 2000
3. See Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown
of the Capitalist System: Being also a theory of crises, [1929],
translated and abridged by Jairus Banaji, foreword and introduction
by Tony Kennedy, Pluto Press 1992
4. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol 3, Lawrence
& Wishart, 1972, p253; Buddhadasa Bhikku, Handbook for Mankind,
Dhamasapa, Bangkok, May 1956. p, 44.; Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
email correspondent, August, 2001.
5. Boris Kargarlitsky, The Twilight of Globalization: Property,
State and Capitalism, Pluto Press 2000
6. For a discussion of these issues see, Harry Harootunian, History's
Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday
Life, Columbia University Press, 2000
7. Peter Osborne is more optimistic, see 'Modernism and Translation'
in Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 2000
©2001
John Roberts |
