What is the relation between culture and globalization?

#1

 To begin with, we need to understand some defining features of two basic terms. One is ‘Globalization’ and the other is ‘Culture’. One simple way of defining globalization is to say that it is a complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity. And there is no way to escape the global dominance of the capitalism and there is little to be gained by cultural analysts from understanding its huge significance. But, having said this, we have to resist the temptation to attribute it with casual primacy in the globalization process. There are several reasons for this, but he mentions only two of them. First, because we do not deal with straightforward empirical judgments about what specific practices drive everything else, but also with questions of the constitution of analytical categories: to what extent are economic practices also, intrinsically, cultural ones? Plausible answer to this question range between ‘somewhat’ and entirely. What is not plausible is the assumption that the realm of the economic is that of a machine-like system operating independent of the wishes, desires and aspirations of human agents, and thus entirely outside of the influence of culture. So the first reason to resist the temptation to economic reductionism is that it operates on an unrealistically narrow conception of the economic. And Second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture. Common expressions such as ‘the impact of globalization on culture’ or ‘the cultural consequences of globalization’ contain a tacit assumption that globalization is a process which somehow has its sources and its terrain of operation outside of culture. To clarify this, we have to probe a little more into the peculiarly complicated and often elusive concept of culture. Culture is thus not only ‘a context in which events may be meaningfully interpreted, it is the primordial context in which human agency arises and takes place. Cultural signification and interpretation constantly motivate and orient people, individually and collectively, towards particular choices and actions. One useful way to think about the consequentiality of culture for globalization, then, is to grasp how culturally informed ‘local’ actions can have globalizing consequences. What he has emphasized here is that culture is a dimension in which globalization both has its effects and simultaneously is generated and shaped.

A GLOBAL CULTURE?

 One common speculation about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only a speculation, but the reason it seems possible is that we can see the ‘unifying’ effects of connectivity in other. And globalization in some of its aspects does have this general unifying character. However, increasing global connectivity by no means necessarily implies that the world is becoming, in the widest sense, either economically or politically ‘unified’. Despite its reach, few would dare to claim that the effects of globalization currently extend in any profound way to every single person or place on the planet, and speculation on its spread must surely be tempered by the many countervailing trends towards social, political and cultural division that we see around us. This is a point that is frequently made in the field of development studies. An overarching global economic system, it is true to say, is deeply influential in determining the fate of countries in Africa. But this is a far cry from saying that Africa is part of a single, unified world of economic prosperity and social and technological development. So we have to qualify the idea of globalization by saying that it is an uneven. To this extent, globalization, it seems, is not quite global.

 Despite all this, there persists, at least amongst some Western critics, a tendency to imagine globalization pushing us towards an all-encompassing ‘global culture’. The most common way in which this is conceived is in the assumption that I mentioned earlier, that cultural globalization implies a form of cultural imperialism: the spread of Western capitalist culture to every part of the globe, and the consequent threat of a loss of distinct non-Western cultural traditions. What is feared here is the total domination of world cultures through the unopposed advance of iconic brands such as Disney, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Microsoft, Google, McDonald’s, CNN, Nike and Starbucks.

 What is at stake for cultural analysis is not the (undoubted) capacity of Western corporations to command wide markets for their products around the world, but rather, the deeper cultural implications of this capacity. We have to be careful not to confuse mere cultural goods with the practice of culture itself.  Eating McDonald’s hamburgers, smoking Marlboro cigarettes, drinking Coke and playing computer games may be bad for you in all sorts of ways. But they do not in themselves provide much solid evidence of a capitulation to deeper Western cultural values.

Indeed, one of the inescapable implications of the current wave of anti-Western feeling in large parts of the Muslim world is precisely the demonstration of the resilience of cultural opposition to these values. What the connectivity of globalization is doing is bringing quite disparate cultures into closer contact but certainly involving contending definitions of what the good, the virtuous and the dignified life involves. What globalization is clearly not doing, however, if it is doing this, is effortlessly installing Western culture as global culture.

 A different way of approaching these issues is to view contemporary globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which societies and cultures have imagined the world as a single place, with their own culture at the center of it.

 Marx and Engels write in a way that seems to anticipate some defining features of the current globalization process. Marx combines this vision with a deeply Eurocentric attitude to other cultures. He welcomes the way in which the bourgeois era is sweeping away pre-modern ‘civilizations’, preparing the way for the coming socialist revolution and the communist era which, he insists, ‘can only have a “world-historical” existence’. To achieve this radically cosmopolitan end, Marx is quite happy to see the destruction of non-European cultures. Marx’s universalizing modernism was, in a curious way, as blind to cultural difference as the universalizing Christianity of the medieval mapmaker. Marx’s views remain relevant today which he argues ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’. By contrast with contemporary neo-Marxists, who, in the main, tend towards the pessimistic, Marx appears as cheerfully optimistic about the prospects for globally. Still we can take a lesson from Marx’s example, and it is that the ethnocentric tendency towards universalizing projections of a global culture can coexist with otherwise rational progressive humanistic visions. This certainly remains true today. To take one’s own culture as the ‘obvious’ model for the one, true, enlightened, rational and good is as common as it is understandable. Relativizing this model requires much more difficult acts of hermeneutic distancing and of intellectual and affective imagination. But this is precisely what we need to do if we are to avoid the sort of violent contestation of worldviews that looks so threatening in our present world. Making cosmopolitanism work in a way that does not impose any one particular, culturally inflected model is perhaps the most immediate cultural challenge that globalization faces us with. We can turn to another aspect of globalization.

DETERRITORIALIZATION

 There is another, more promising, way of approaching cultural globalization. This is not via the macro analysis of ‘globality’, but precisely in the opposite way, by understanding the effects of globalization as they are felt within particular localities.

The vast majority of us live local lives, but globalization is rapidly changing our experience of this ‘locality’ and one way of grasping this change is in the idea of ‘deterritorialization’. The idea of deterritorialization implies ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories. Deterritorialization, then, means that the significance of the geographical location of a culture is eroding. No longer is culture so ‘tied’ to the constraints of local circumstances. In fact, the idea of deterritorialization has fairly radical theoretical implications for traditional ways of understanding culture. Culture has long held connotations tying it to the idea of a fixed locality. The idea of ‘a culture’ implicitly connects meaning construction with particularity and location: with ‘territory’. The complex connectivity of globalization threatens to undermine such conceptualizations, not only because the multiform penetration of localities disrupts this binding of meanings to place, but also because it challenges the rather insular thinking through which culture and fixity of location are originally paired.

 If globalization, in its rawest description, is the spread of complex social economic connections across distance, then deterritorialization refers to the reach of this connectivity into the localities in which everyday life is conducted and experienced.

It may well be that, in the long run, this ‘weakening’ of the traditional ties between cultural experience and geographical territory will prove to be the most far-reaching effect of cultural globalization. Deterritorialization is not simply the loss of the experience of a local culture: it is not as though localities, and the particularities, nuances and differences they generate, suddenly and entirely disappear. Localities, on the contrary, thrive in globalization – this is the source of that often noted paradox that globalization tends to produce intensities in ethnic identification – even to the point of the violent contesting of local territory along ethnic lines.

 The difference that deterritorialization makes is that the culture produced by locality is no longer the single most important factor in our lived reality.  Deterritorialization refers to the integration of distant events, processes and relationships into our everyday lives and it is this added dimension of experience that accounts for the attenuation of the hold that local particularities have on modern cultures.

 This ‘deterritorializing’ aspect of globalization is felt in very ordinary everyday practices. It is through such changes that globalization reaches deep into our individual cultural ‘worlds’, the implicit sense we all have of our relevant environment, our understanding of what counts as home and abroad, our horizon of cultural and moral relevance, even our sense of cultural and national identity.

 The phenomenon of deterritorialization arises from a complex set of economic, political and technological factors and in fact, like globalization itself, it is not a phenomenon which can usefully be tied down to one dimension of analysis. But, having said this, there is one factor which is worth singling out for closer scrutiny, since it opens out on to areas of connectivity that are historically unprecedented and which may justifiably be said to define the tenor of our times. This is our increasing routine dependence on electronic media and communications technologies and systems.

 The agenda of global cultural analysis, then, certainly includes understanding the ‘runaway’ speed of modern media technologies and systems. But returning to the general theme of deterritorialization, he wants to suggest that there is at least the germ of optimism in this process for the broader cultural-political challenges that global connectivity poses. Deterritorialization not only disturbs and transforms local experience, it potentially offers people wider cultural horizons. In various ways people effortlessly integrate local and ‘global’ cultural data in their consciousness. Thus, what happens in distant parts of the world, though still perhaps not so vivid as events in our neighbourhood, nonetheless has an increasing significance in our lives. The positive potential of deterritorialization is that it may promote a new sensibility of cultural openness, human mutuality and global ethical responsibility.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

 Cosmopolitan cultural politics deserves to be taken seriously. This does not necessarily mean endorsing grand projects for ‘global governance’; rather it means trying to clarify, and ultimately to reconcile, the attachments and the values of cultural difference with those of an emergent wider global-human ‘community’. This is a dilemma. On the one hand there are the attractions of what we might think of as a ‘benign’ form of universalism, preserving some key ideas of human mutuality and underlying the broad discourse of human rights and the hope of wider horizons of global solidarity. But on the other, the equally attractive principles of respect for the integrity of local context and practices, cultural autonomy, cultural identity and ‘sovereignty’. I do not suppose there is any easy solution to this dilemma, but in the short space available I want to suggest that we may get some way along the road by addressing another rather vexed issue in cultural politics, that is, the question of the formation of ‘cultural identity’.

 Cultural identities are specifically modern entities – ways of categorizing, organizing and regulating the cultural practices, representations and imaginings by which we grasp our existential condition, our personal relations and our attachment to a place or a community.

This essentially modern, ‘regulatory’ category of cultural identity, then, consists in self and communal definitions based around specific, usually politically inflected, differentiations: gender, sexuality, class, religion, race and ethnicity, nationality. Some of these differentiations of course existed before the coming of modernity, some are more or less modern imaginings. But the relevance of modernity here is not so much in the nature and substance of identifications, as in the fact they are formally and publicly recognized, named and regulated.

 As globalization distributes the institutional features of modernity across all cultures, it therefore generates institutionalized forms of cultural belonging.

 One rather interesting interpretation of the impact of globalization to flow from this is that, far from destroying it globalization has been perhaps the most significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity. Those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity tend to imagine identity quite differently. Identity, according to this common view, is more than just a description of the experience of cultural belonging, it is a sort of collective treasure of local communities. More over, whilst long ensuring the culturally sustaining connections between geographical place and human experience, identity, according to this view, is suddenly discovered to be fragile, in need of protection and preservation, a treasure that can be lost. This is the story which implicates globalization in the destruction of local identities.

 However, the crucial mistake of those who regard globalization as a threat to cultural identity is to confuse this Western-modern form of cultural imagination with a universal of human experience. All cultures construct meaning via practices of collective symbolization. But by no means all historical cultures have ‘constructed’ identity in the regulated institutional forms that are now dominant in the modern West.

 Let us now try to connect these thoughts about the institutionalization of identity with the issue of cosmopolitanism. The way we can do this is to understand the cosmopolitan disposition as belonging to a specific identity position.

 Whatever the composition, or the historical/territorial origins of the discourse of human rights it owes most to its modern institutional form. ‘Humanity’ is, in effect, a specific modern identity position which is universal by definition, but which remains compatible with a huge range of cultural variation, by dint of its precise context of invocation. Human rights can be invoked to defend cultural difference in just the same way that they can be used to argue for universal standards of justice, or equality of provision in healthcare, education and so forth.

 To be, without contradiction, ‘human’ in its rich pluralist acceptation of preserving cultural difference, and ‘human’ in juridical-universalizing terms, is a trick brought off precisely by the institutionalized framing of repertoires of identity typical of modernity. The key here is the pluralism of identity positions. In the midst of the proliferation of localisms and sharpened identity discriminations, globalization also generates a flexible category of cosmopolitan belonging.

 But how does this understanding help with the dilemma of whether to endorse universalism or the politics of difference? Well let’s not pretend that it magics away all of the conceptual tensions, or the real political problems around putative regimes of global governance predicated on universal human rights. What we put inside the box labelled ‘human rights’ will be a matter of contention. However, thinking about these issues in terms of identity positions does, perhaps, soften some of the starker intractabilities. Just as it is possible, without contradiction, to hold a repertoire of identities, so it is possible to hold rights which are, as it were, transferable across different contexts. To this extent, the appeal to human universalism is itself dependent on context: it can be invoked in situations where more particular local communal attachments can be reasonably judged to be repressive. But it does not need to be considered as the card which trumps all ‘lesser’ rights and duties. Identities we know are constructs not possessions. Despite the historical tendency for cultures and nations to claim universality as their possession, the appeal to the universal can perhaps be made to work in a cosmopolitan world order as a construct. What is clear, finally, is that, faced with a future world of pressed-together dissimilarities variously arranged, rather than all-of-a-piece nationstates grouped into blocs and super blocs, we urgently need to come up with much more nimble and flexible cultural concepts than we so far possess.

#2, #3

 I learned new two terms in this article. One is 'cultural globalization' that I also learned in the class and the other is 'deterritorialization'. The second one is all brand new to me. As far as I know, it is good perspective to view the globalization critically. Common people tend to regard globalization as something good. And I want to suggest that they get this meaning, so they can know about that local thing has been being extinguished constantly. By doing this, we can protect our things from globalization like global cooperation(McDonald, Starbucks, and so on). Recently, I see so many things in the street that is coming from overseas countries. There is no Korean things anymore except Korean food restaurant. It shows cultural globalization. Even foreign food restaurants has been increased as time goes by. It means that we have been losing our things and, in cultural section, we easily assimilating into the new culture. This is what I do not want to be. I hope that we are not occupied by them.