Global Culture, Media

The notion of a global culture, along with globalization, globality, and globalism, is among the various ideas associated with the term global that began to be used at the end of the 1980s and have become keywords or master concepts since. Global culture was the object of a certain amount of scholarly attention in the 1990s but has been evoked less frequently since then, although the notion retains substantial purchase in the popular imagination and in the institutionalized discourses of international cultural politics and diplomacy. As a result, it is subject to many different interpretations. Many of these lead either to utopian visions of a world better prepared culturally than ever before for the eventual advent of a Kantian perpetual peace or to dystopian visions of a homogenized planet, in which human diversity is being rapidly eliminated.

The term global culture consists of two words, both of which need to be deconstructed. What is the global? Does the term refer simply to phenomena encountered everywhere in the world? Or to phenomena that dominate the planet because of contemporary globalization? Or is the global a higher level of human organization and process, a new whole at the planetary level that is more than the sum of its parts, and is endowed with an entelechy of its own? Different readings of the global go hand in hand with the bewildering diversity of meanings acquired by the term culture itself.

Many of these contemporary understandings have become prominent “scripts” in rhetoric, policy, and practice all over the world. As Raymond Williams observed three decades ago, there is a genealogy of favored meanings of the term culture in recent human history. The leading usage today is of culture as a particular way of life, whether of a people, a nation-state, an ethnic or other identity group, a historical period, or sometimes of the human species itself. This is closely followed by a narrower idea of culture as the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity, in other words, culture as the arts (this understanding of the arts also includes the inherited traces of past human creativity, now called “cultural heritage”; hence, this meaning is often expressed as “arts and heritage”). Much less current nowadays is the oldest historical understanding of culture as a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development (as in talk of a “cultured” person), although this understanding often underpins the second and third readings. Yet even today the three usages are often combined or conflated, sometimes within the space of the same written paragraph or oral utterance.

One of the problems of the dominant ways of life usage is its overextensivity. Surely ways of life include science, technology, the economy, and politics, so what exactly is the cultural? Anthony Smith has suggested, for example, that a global culture might consist of a shared language of communication and appraisal or of an interdependent system of communication based on information technology—a broad reading indeed. Another problem is that the ways of life so postulated are often considered bounded wholes, as things that can have agency and cause other things to happen. What started out as an analytical concept becomes both reified and essentialized. Present-day mixings and flows of culture no longer authorize this fixity; hence, rather than perceive culture as a thing, say many analysts, it should be read as a property that individuals and groups deploy to describe or mark difference. In cultural studies, the cultural field is considered a site of contestation, in which subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings by dominant ones. A way out of both these impasses is to take the semiotic route, folding all three understandings mentioned into an idea of culture as the social construction, articulation, and reception of meaning. Such a construct that is cognitive as well as symbolic makes it possible to encompass, as David Held and colleagues have done, social relations and symbolism, artistic creation, the commodified output of the cultural industries, as well as the spontaneous or enacted, organized or unorganized cultural expressions of everyday life.

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