The cultural turn: Language, globalization, and media

In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell (1984), as early as 1976, discerned a new importance to culture as a social question, placing it high in the category of dangers, threats, and disruptive forces. Bell noticed recent changes in culture that implied a departure from the individualism of the rational self that had grounded the culture of modernity since the Enlightenment. Youth were moving away from the modern figure of the individual as autonomous and centered, toward avenues that Bell perceived only dimly but nonetheless did not like. Culture for him had become a general social problem. Others soon followed his lead in decrying the drift from rationality that was widespread and growing, notably Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (Lasch 1979). The question of culture was thereby considerably raised in stature on the agenda of sociology, given the prominence of Bell as a leading social theorist. I believe Bell got it right in his perception of a deep change in culture but perhaps not for the reasons he gave, nor for the negative value he placed on the phenomenon. Surely the great theorists who founded sociology-Max Weber, Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim-all considered culture as central to their domain of inquiry. Yet Bell was on to something new and distinct from the earlier theorists. I cannot trace in detail these changes in the discipline of sociology as they pertain to the question of culture, however important this project may be. Instead I will focus on three large trends that I believe have, in distinct but interrelated ways, altered at least for the time being, and probably well into the future, the way sociologists consider the question of culture. The three trends I shall discuss are the linguistic turn, globalization, and new media. The first trend is theoretical and refers to what is often called “the linguistic turn”

in philosophy. I argue this is best understood, from the standpoint of sociology, as a “cultural turn” since it conceives the individual as constituted by language, implying a new understanding of the cultural figure of the individual in society. (Fredric Jameson 1998 titles a collection of essays with this term but does not define it or discuss it.) The second trend is globalization. Here the persistent and massive crossing of cultures disrupts the sense of the local, the stability of any one culture. Finally, the rise and spread of new media, a third trend, transforms both the process of the cultural constitution of the self in language, as in the first trend, and the character and dynamics of globalization

of the second trend. New media, I shall contend, position the individual in relation to information machines, altering the long-standing relation of humans to objects in the world. In the social sciences, culture is often regarded as the body of meanings embraced by

individuals in a given society. More broadly, the term is often distinguished from “nature” and understood as the sum of practices through which humans build their societies or worlds. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, gives this as one of its definitions of the noun “culture”: “The distinctive ideas, customs, social behavior, products, or way of life of a particular society, people, or period.” In a more restricted sense, culture often refers to refinement of taste or to the fine arts or to farming practices. In the discipline of sociology the term has been deployed in numerous ways and on countless objects of study, in far too many varieties for me to enumerate or analyze in this short paper. For my purposes I shall highlight one point: culture has become a chief problem for sociologists increasingly since the latter part of the twentieth century, continuing with ever more intensity in the current century. In the earlier period, say from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, culture in Western societies was mainly naturalized under the sign of human rationality. The study of society did not focus sharply on culture because it was assumed to be a universal aspect of humanity, grounded in individual reason. After the discovery of reason as the essence of man by the philosophes in the eighteenth century, the question of culture was subordinated to more pressing issues. These were chiefly the formation of democratic nation-states and the development of industrial economies, two phenomena that preoccupied students of society until well into the twentieth century. After World War II the assumed universality of culture came into question, especially

in France, but more widely in the West, and finally in the rest of the world as well. Certainly the collapse of European empires contributed greatly to a new uncertainty about the naturalness of Western culture and its unquestioned supremacy, but the atrocities of the war-Nazi exterminations and the devastation of the American atom bombs dropped on Japan-also were part of the picture. If American science and the “rational” organization of German institutions were so deeply flawed, how could one argue for the universality of Western culture? Indeed, was not Western culture itself open for and in need of a thoroughgoing examination and critique? Many intellectual currents contributed to this critique but the most comprehensive

and convincing of them was no doubt the movement that came to be known, especially in the United States, as poststructuralism, and is sometimes called, especially in sociology, postmodernism (although I prefer the former term). Poststructuralism began in France and quickly spread to the United States and later more widely around the world. Its leading thinkers included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel de Certeau-a list that could be extended. These poststructuralists, whatever their sometimes considerable differences, developed an analysis of culture in which the rational, autonomous individual of the West was understood not as a value to be treasured, defended, and justified, but as a problem, a question to be pursued to define its limitations, restrictions, and confusions. In this way a path might be opened to construct a superior and less constraining vision of possible future cultural formations. Poststructuralists deepened and extended the insight of Ferdinand de Saussure (1959) that language is not simply a tool to be deployed by a fully conscious individual but that, on the contrary, to a considerable extent language constructs the individual. There was thus

conceptualized a form of unconsciousness pervading the individual as he or she engaged in language practices. For the discipline of sociology, poststructuralist arguments concerning the relation of

language to the cultural construction of individuals opened a new project, a new manner of understanding and investigating cultural formations, and a new way of theorizing culture in relation to society. In Britain, this task was quickly taken up by Stuart Hall, a sociologist at the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (Hall 1996); in France by Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu; in the United States by Larry Grossberg and many others. (See Jacobs and Hanrahan 2005 for a comprehensive interrogation of the question of culture for sociologists.) The poststructuralist concept of the cultural construction of the individual enables

sociologists to avoid imposing Western notions of individualism, assuming their universality, and projecting them throughout global cultures. For many groups are disadvantaged by Western precepts-women, ethnic minorities, working classes, children, and of course the non-Western world. Armed with a poststructuralist sense of the construction of individuals through languages and practices, sociologists study the historical formation of Western individuals as well as the formation of cultural groups outside the aegis of Western society. Although it is true that the pioneers of sociology such as Max Weber (1958) experimented with cultural analysis, they often fell into universalizing positions in part because of the absence of language theory in their work. The second trend urging a repositioning of the problem of culture is globalization.

Exchanges between cultures, even long-distance trade, characterize human society as far back as scholars have been able to determine. As transport and communications systems improved, such encounters only increased. In the wake of World War II, along with the ensuing overthrow of Western imperialist states, and finally with the emergence of neoliberal demands for unrestricted global trade in the 1980s, the process of globalization expanded exponentially. As late as the 1990s some economists cautiously pointed to the relative low percentages of global trade compared with intra-national movements of goods (Carnoy et al. 1993). But by the turn of the new century no one convincingly denied the prominence of an economically interconnected world. From the integration of major stock markets to the industrialization of Asian economies, from the instantaneous communication of news events by satellites circling the Earth to the startling unification of oil markets, globalization was recognized as a permanent and rapidly increasing feature of human society. At the economic level, globalization applied not only to commodity markets but to labor markets as well. Workers in one sector of national production now competed with others around the planet. Economic globalization, whatever its benefits, also produced numerous discontents

and resistances (Sassen 1998). Political responses to economic globalization have been and continue to be complex and in many ways unprecedented. From attacks on McDonald’s outlets to the Seattle protests of 1999 against the meeting of the World Trade Organization, to the worldwide opposition movements against the Bush administration’s war in Iraq in February 2003, globalization has not been greeted warmly by all groups. As a suggestion for further research, despite the often nationalist aspirations of some of these movements, one might find in the protests an emerging form of planetary political culture. Although it is tempting to understand contemporary globalization as yet another example of Western imperialism-and certainly George W. Bush’s rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq lent itself to this interpretation-I find it too simple to reduce economic globalization to a new form of Western domination. If one limits

oneself to that perspective, one would have to explain the eagerness of some nations, especially in Asia, to enter the global economy. Al Qaida and China arguably form two opposite poles on a continuum of responses to Western aspects of globalization. The former presents an absolute resistance (although, when it suits their purposes, al Qaida adopt Western originating technologies like the internet and the video camera); the latter constitutes a creative adaptation of Western economic practices, attuned to Chinese ways of doing things. At the cultural level, globalization propelled images, sounds, and texts around the

globe. Before the twentieth century, European colonialism as well as regional movements of groups established contacts and encounters between peoples of different cultures (Pratt 1992). In new spaces created in ports, border towns, and elsewhere, cultures confronted one another in face-to-face encounters, most often with unequal resources and disastrous results. Humans seemingly had great difficulty cognitively and emotionally when confronted by others, by those whose appearance, beliefs, languages, and practices were strange and incomprehensible. With more recent globalizing trends these mixings multiplied enormously, perhaps to the point that the coherence of individual cultures became no longer possible. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, trans-cultural encounters extended beyond face-to-face contacts to include flows of images, texts, and sounds in numerous media forms (Morely and Robins 1995; Castells 1996; Soares 1996). Sociologists would now have to account for culture not only at the level of individual societies but also at that of cultural contacts and exchanges, at the level of transnational national cultural phenomena, international cultural phenomena, and global cultural flows. The third trend of a new sociology of culture-the globalization of media-follows

perhaps from economic globalization. Texts, sounds, and images now flow across the globe with an unprecedented intensity and density. Trillions of bytes of information circulate continuously if unequally to every corner of the planet, with a full one-sixth of the human population using the internet, not to speak of television broadcasts and film audiences. Manuel Castells refers quite appropriately to this phenomenon as “the Internet Galaxy” (Castells 2001). It no longer comes as a surprise that instantaneous reception of news and other forms of information is an everyday occurrence. What may be less understood is that scientific knowledge, like the genome project, also is part of this global flow and indeed, as Eugene Thacker (2005) argues, this flow is essential to the success of genome research. The circulation of genome data, he argues, is an essential condition for their development and use. In his words, “the processes of globalization form a core component of biological knowledge and practice” (Thacker 2005: xvii). From financial markets to peer-to-peer file sharing, from scientific research to social networking, from online gaming to consumer buying, the global aspect of culture is now, and increasingly so, an integral part of human culture. The chief challenge for the sociology of culture that takes the global flows of infor-

mation into account is to theorize and analyze the specificity of different media forms in the process. At the same time, the relation of local cultures to the new media is also of critical importance. Compared with analogue broadcast media like print, television, radio, and film, the internet certainly provides an entirely different relation of the consumer/ user to the producer. The online receiver is also at once a sender, the consumer a producer, the audience is an author. What is more, the user/consumer is attached to an information machine in new ways. The human and the machine are integrated as an assemblage or ensemble so that the old Western individual no longer is configured as

a “subject” over against a relatively inert “object.” Further, the internet is the first medium of cultural exchange that consistently violates political borders. The posts that the nation-state established-paper mail, export control of book, magazines, film, and television-are bypassed to a great extent by the global network of computers. Although new media introduce new cultural configurations, in good part as a con-

sequence of their material structure, they also interact with social phenomena that are not per se new media. Two aspects of the relation of new media to culture that I discuss below, however briefly, are the nation-state and the corporation and adaptations of new media by non-Western cultures. First, the institutions that predate the internet, especially the nation-state and the industrial economy, appropriate the new media and attempt to shape it in their own image. China notoriously censors web sites, for example, attempting to retrofit the internet to state control of cultural dissemination. Corporations attempt to control the reproduction of cultural content, from software to music, film, and television. These actions form one end of a continuum of response by older institutions. A second level of adaptation of new media to older ways of doing things is cultural. Anthropologists have studied how some cultures extend existing practices and attitudes to the internet (Miller and Slater 2000). The innovative features of networked computing are in this case minimized. Older cultural patterns are simply brought to the internet, evaporating the opportunity for new patterns while reinforcing existing values. Another and very distinct way that new media are adapted at the cultural level is one

that makes fewer compromises with pre-digital worlds. Here the users throw themselves into the new domain, attempting to explore the differences it affords from analogue cultures. Massively, multiple online gaming, creating web sites, engaging in peer-to-peer exchanges of content, artist experiments with digital culture, and so forth are not simply substitutions for pre-existing behaviors (such as Skype for the telephone) but innovations in the basic conditions of culture. Of course these individuals and groups remain participants in their local cultures and are by no means born anew in their exploration of new media. Yet, especially the younger generation around the world is less socialized into analogue media forms than older generations and is perhaps more open to experimenting with new media. These three large trends in the relation between global media and culture, as well as

countless variations between them, open the salient political question of their resolution: which model will prevail? Will the internet become a mere extension of older social and cultural forms? Or will its innovative features emerge in relief, becoming the basis of new cultural configurations, in the context of wider aspects of globalization? Perhaps as a consequence in part of global media, “man,” as Foucault says, will disappear. Or perhaps as Freud says at the conclusion of Civilization and Its Discontents, some new, unforeseen, and unforeseeable cultural form will arise in conjunction with global media, completely altering our sense of what is possible. The tasks are truly daunting for the sociology of culture in accounting for the impact of new media while at the same time giving due recognition of the multiple contexts of their dissemination. One issue that, if pursued, might lead to some clarification of the question of a

sociology of culture is that of media and self-constitution, and this is my main concern in this essay. Although the relations between the three trends affecting culture (the linguistic turn, globalization, and new media) might be studied in detail and are already being looked at, to be sure, my interest lies elsewhere. I mean the problematic developed with especial force by Michel Foucault throughout his works: the need to place the Western

figure of the individual in question, in particular in historical question. Unless we understand how the self in the West is constituted by discourses and practices, we inevitably naturalize and universalize that self and consequently approach the context of globalization and multiple cultures with serious handicaps, blindness, and misrecognition of the others, of those with significantly different cultural figures. Of course this problem holds not only for the Western figure of the self but for all cultures. Yet the Western individual is the cultural form that accompanied the spread of Western power across the globe over the past half-millennium and is therefore especially implicated in the issue. If this problematic is accepted as pertinent, then one can focus on the role of media in the complex processes of self-constitution. One can move to this question without any sort of ontological privileging of media, any reliance on media determinism, but simply with the recognition that information machines have been and continue to be positioned in relation to human beings in such a manner that their imbrication is undeniable (McLuhan 1964). Man and machine are now, and surely will continue to be, joined at the hip, so to speak. Their relations are essential to a sociology of culture (Latour 1979). The next step in the argument is to explore the question of media specificity: how

are information machines implicated differently in the question of self-constitution? Do typewriters (Kittler 1986), print machinery (Johns 1998), telegraph (Carey 1989), telephone (Marvin 1988), film (Crary 1992), radio (Brecht 1979-80), television (Dienst 1994), and the internet (Poster 2006) create the same or different cultural forms, i.e. space/time configurations, imaginary registries, body/mind relations? How do these media interact with other everyday practices, with ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual preference? How do they interact in different national and regional cultures? How do they interact in different historic epochs? Without detailed analyses of these issues, the sociology of culture cannot contribute much to an understanding of our global, postmodern condition. Nor can it contribute much to a clarification of the important political matters that confront us. It is time, then, to take information machines-media-seriously into account in a developing and changing sociology of culture.