Globalization and Culture: Vol. 3. Global-Local Consumption

GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE Prilims <i> The concept of ‘globalization’ has in an extraordinarily short time become the dominant motif of the contemporary social sciences. Central Currents in Globalization is an integrated collection of four multi-volume sets that represent the systematic mapping of globalization studies. The series sets out the contours of a field that now crosses the boundaries of all the older disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The result is a gold-standard collection of over 320 of the most important writings on globalization, structured around four interrelated themes: Violence; Economy; Culture; and Politics. The series editor, Paul James (RMIT, Australia), is joined by sixteen internationally-renowned co-editors from around the globe who bring their subject expertise to each volume, including Jonathan Friedman, Tom Nairn, R.R. Sharma, Manfred Steger, Ronen Palan and Imre Szeman. Together the four sets provide an unparalleled resource on globalization, providing both broad coverage of the subject, historical depth and contemporary relevance. Paul James is Director of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT in Australia, an editor of Arena Journal, and on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of awards including the Japan–Australia Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the Australasian Political Studies Association for the best book in the field of political studies. He is author/editor of many books including Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (Sage Publications, 1996). His latest books are Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism (Pluto, 2005), and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (Sage Publications, 2006). His interests are threefold: first, globalism, nationalism and localism, including the changing nature of the nation-state and the effects of an emergent level of global integration; second, social theory with a concentration on theories of culture, community and social formation; and third, contemporary politics and society with an emphasis on debates over technology and social change. Imre Szeman is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies and a founding member of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.). His main areas of research are globalization, visual cultural studies, contemporary popular culture and social and cultural theory. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters on a range of topics. He is author and editor of a number of books including Zones of Instability (2003), Popular Culture (2004) and Canadian Cultural Studies (2009). Prilims <ii> CENTRAL CURRENTS IN GLOBALIZATION GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE VOLUME III Global-Local Consumption Edited by Paul James and Imre Szeman Los Angeles | London | New Delhi Singapore | Washington DC Prilims <iii> Introduction and editorial arrangement © Paul James and Imre Szeman 2010 First published 2010 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge all the copyright owners of the material reprinted herein. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4129-1953-1 (set of four volumes) Library of Congress Control Number: 2008938650 Typeset by AV Computers, Delhi Printed on paper from sustainable resources Printed by MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall Prilims <iv> Contents Acknowledgements vii Volume III: Global-Local Consumption Introduction: Global-Local Consumption Imre Szeman and Paul James ix XII. Historical Developments 43. Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature Johann W. Von Goethe 44. Conjectures on World Literature Franco Moretti 45. A Sweet Lullaby for World Music Steven Feld 3 9 21 XIII. Global and Local Cultures 46. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy Arjun Appadurai 47. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture Ulf Hannerz 48. Globalization and International Tourism in Developing Countries: Marginality as a Commercial Commodity Victor Azarya 49. The Globalization of Football: A Study in the Glocalization of the ‘Serious Life’ Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson 50. Sport and the Repudiation of the Global David Rowe 45 64 75 91 111 XIV. Global Literatures, World Music and Commercial Culture 51. Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture Mia Consalvo 52. World Music does not Exist Timothy Brennan 53. Transports of the Imagination: Some Relations between Globalization and Literature Simon During Prilims <v> 127 144 158 vi Contents 54. Fake Logos, Fake Theory, Fake Globalization Hsiao-hung Chang (Translated by Yung-chao Liao) XV. Debating McDonaldization and Global Homogenization 171 55. The Globalization of Nothing George Ritzer 56. McDonaldization: Linearity and Liquidity in Consumer Cultures Bryan S. Turner 57. The Tyranny of the Brands Naomi Klein 58. Local Consumption Cultures in a Globalizing World Peter Jackson 59. Globalization’s Cultural Consequences Robert Holton 191 199 213 220 240 XVI. Critical Projections 60. Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma 61. Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society Michael Storper 62. Culture and Globalization, or, The Humanities in Ruins Imre Szeman 63. Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff Prilims <vi> 253 271 297 314 Acknowledgements These volumes are framed by the work of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne. They were produced in collaboration with the Globalization Studies Network, an international collection of centres and institutes around the world, and with the profound intellectual support of individuals in the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT – in particular, Damian Grenfell, Anne McNevin, Martin Mulligan, Yaso Nadarajah, Tom Nairn, Heikki Patomäki, Peter Phipps, Andy Scerri, Victoria Stead, Manfred Steger, Anna Trembath, and Chris Ziguras. The editors are particularly grateful for the wise counsel of David Mainwaring and organizational efficiency of Judi Berger at Sage Publications. Prilims <vii> Prilims <viii> Global-Local Consumption Imre Szeman and Paul James T he global reach of production and exchange was the first major bundle of themes to emerge in the study of the processes of contemporary globalization. Intensifications of globalization first began to be traced theoretically with respect to shifts in capitalist production and empirically, in relation to global trade. As we discussed in an earlier volume in the ‘Central Currents in Globalization’ series, different writers talked about a series of transformation: from Fordism to post-Fordism, from national to transnational relations, from regions to a system of global cities, and from fixed and aggregated capital to spatially-dispersed ‘disorganized’ capitalism.1 Most of those conceptual claims were expressed in overly dichotomous ways, and they tended to miss out on the uneven layering of different levels of production and exchange; yet at the same time, they articulated a significant shift in the nature of the global economy. The question of consumption, which was to emerge later in academic studies, has significantly complicated this understanding of globalization. Consumption and all of its ramifications in the context of intensifying globalization is the focus of this volume. The more recent interest in the dynamics of global-local consumption has, in certain fields of enquiry, displaced production from the centre of the story of globalization. In actuality, of course, the nexus of different modes of practice from production and exchange, communication, enquiry and organization continues to be fundamental to contemporary globalization, as it was to earlier forms of globalization – albeit in different configurations. This point does not go without saying. The emphasis on consumerism, including the ideology that consumption is essentially good – for example, consumption is freedom – is one of the dominant ideologies of our time. And this has, in some circles from neoliberal economics to cultural studies, has either masked or romanticized relations of production, not least because the place of production is out of sight and over there. That qualification made, global-local consumption has rightly been singled out as one fundamental point of connection between these different modes of practice. Commodity consumption has bourgeoned, supported by new practices of electronically-mediated distribution of goods and services. New means of exchange from containerization and air-transport systems to web-based wholesaling and retailing outlets such as eBay and Amazon.com have revolutionized consumption patterns. Mass information-technology platforms constructed on the new electronic means of communication have become central to meaning-production in the world. Mass tourism – the consumption of experiences and differences as a form of embodied globalization – supported by new means of organizing and communicating travel deals, has become one of the largest segments of the global economy. Prilims <ix> x Introduction And, a debt-financed explosion of consumer consumption in Western economies, especially the United States, has taken off, directly connected to the rise of justin-time global production regimes linking the Chinese industrial zones, the Asian ‘tigers’ and Western markets. In short, commodified consumption of goods, meanings and services, either from across the globe or organized globally, has become a way of life for much of the world’s population, extending far beyond the affluent or elite. Extended relations of consumption have a long history of importance in linking people across the globe, with the earliest forms of globalizing trade going back to such transversals as the fourteenth-century Silk Route. However, now they cross class and cultural boundaries in a way that is unprecedented. The global expansion of consumption, part and parcel of contemporary economic ‘development’, has raised concerns about the unsustainable pace at which global resources are being used up – petrochemicals in particular. Alongside advertisements to consume more, newspapers and magazines sound the alarm regularly about the impact of accelerated consumption on the environment, the nature of our connections to community, and the ideals of citizenship that underpin democratic polities.2 At the same time, underlined by the developments of the contemporary Global Financial Crisis (September 2008–present), desires projected through consumption have become essential to what is perceived as ‘the health’ of our economies.3 As we have seen, a downturn in the consumer-confidence index, an index based entirely on consumer expectations of future expenditures, can shake stock markets and cause currencies to tumble. In the almost complete absence of other sustained macro-political and social narratives – concern about global climate change notwithstanding – the pursuit of the ‘good life’ through practices of what is known as ‘consumerism’ has become one of the dominant global social forces, cutting across differences of religion, class, gender, ethnicity and nationality. It is the other side of the dominant ideology of market globalism and is central to what Manfred Steger calls the ‘global imaginary’.4 The problems and possibilities associated with the emergence of a global consumerist ethos is one with which scholars have only just begun to come to grips. For much of the past century, beginning with Thorstein Veblen’s investigation of conspicuous consumption in 1899,5 anxieties about commodity culture were treated as national or Western rather than global concerns. They have been explored in articles and books on a dizzying array of themes and topics, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives.6 Attempts to make analytic sense of the impact and significance of consumerism on modern cultures have been complicated from the outset by normative considerations – either of a moralizing character or by concerns about consumerism as a form of social control – as well as by the role played by consumerism in the rise of ‘mass’ societies. When these long-standing anxieties about consumption and consumerism are set against the space of the entire globe, coming to clear conclusions about its impact on global and local social relations is made even more difficult. The idea of consumerism as a form of social control, for example, blends easily into existing discourses of economic and cultural imperialism; what is described as ‘Americanism’ is often the threat of a consumer culture associated with US society.7 Expressed more structurally, the addition of new global communication technologies and the increasing role of techno-scientific enquiry (labelled R&D) in the production of goods, have intersected with and altered practices of production and exchange, further multiplying the difficulties of accounting for consumption and consumerism in the world today. Intro-Vol-3 <x> Introduction xi The study of global-local consumption can take many forms. This volume brings together a number of influential and important scholarly articles that examine consumption and consumerism in relation to globalization in two different, if significantly related, ways. The processes associated with globalization have created hitherto unimaginable opportunities for cultural forms and practices to travel far beyond the indigenous sites and spaces in which they were first conceived and produced. While there have always been cultural movements and flows from one space to another, the intensity and extensity of contemporary intersections of the global and the local have forced scholars to look closely at the myriad ways in which culture is consumed – used up, made sense of, embraced, and explored. Examining this first sense of cultural ‘consumption’ takes up the difficult questions of cultural diversity and authenticity that have shaped much of the discussion around culture in/and globalization. For example, by looking at implications of the transformation of older cultural forms and the creation of new forms of globallocal culture such as global literatures and world music, we can see the meaning and effects of social change on people’s identity and subjectivity. This first sense of consumption is often haunted by the second, more common usage of the term used in the opening paragraphs above: consumption as a central (and defining) practice of consumer societies. Though explorations of culture in reference to global-local circulations highlight the emergence of new and changed cultural forms, more often the flow of the global to the local (and vice-versa) has been viewed as a process of cultural loss or destruction. This loss is, in part, the consequence of the spread through culture of the values of capitalist modernity, which in turn has been figured culturally as a society defined by consumption. How and why do cultural flows of globalization produce cultural forms that reinforce consumption? How do processes of globalization generalize an understanding of culture that is itself intimately related to consumption (culture as the ‘purchase’ of meaning-making experiences after a day of labour)? These are issues that are taken up by almost all of the articles collected here. The chapters in this volume represent essential groundwork in making intelligible the systems and processes of global-local consumption. Explorations of the two central themes of global-local consumption – that is, how culture is consumed as it travels the world and what it means for consumption to have been globalized – are surveyed across different sections in the volume that range from historical perspectives to critical analyses. Historical Developments Though there are developments and circumstances that make the contemporary moment one that is globalizing in a unique and specific way, there have been many earlier moments in which human communities have had to conceptualize their relationship to ‘others’ as a result of overcoming separations of distance and geography. Such early encounters with ‘otherness’ form some of the conceptual raw materials out of which recent discourses of globalization have been built. One can go back as far as the ancient empires of the Mediterranean and Near East – Babylon, Persia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of these polities had to culturally Intro-Vol-3 <xi> xii Introduction negotiate the distinction between insiders and outsiders, whether due to military conquest, trade, or cultural exchange. In different ways this was also the case for Africa (Asante, Bantu and so on) and Asia (Mongols, Mughals and so on). Less distant from our own period is the epoch launched by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama’s journeys to the New World. It symbolically inaugurated Europe’s modern attempts to manage, control and define racial and ethnic difference, even as it brought back to the Old World new consumer goods that once established in Europe were further globalized: tobacco, potatoes, sugar, chili-peppers, corn, and rubber. These consumer goods were brought together by a mercantile division of the world organized in part around indentured labour and slavery. Grappling with the effects and consequences of globalization today requires understanding the lasting impact of colonial discourses that once insisted on the innate superiority of European ‘civilization’, of post- and anti-colonial discourses that challenge Eurocentric concepts and histories, and of ‘cultural imperialism’, imperialism carried out by other means than sheer force or organizational imperatives – all of which have shaped our sense of what globalization is, and how we conceptualize it.8 It is only by attending to the complex historical legacy of globalization that it is possible to see, for instance, the lingering traces of the West’s ‘civilizing mission’ in the supposedly rational and scientific discourse advanced after World War II on Third World development and modernization, not to mention in the very concept of the ‘Third World’ itself. Such developmentalism has taken new form in the ‘neoliberal stress on consumption as the prime source of value’,9 and, as such, the notion of ‘a healthy consumer economy’ has become a goal towards which all societies must strive. Nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism (rather than imperialism) framed another discourse on global culture and cultural consumption. Johann W. Von Goethe’s (1749–1832) discussion in the late 1820s on Weltliteratur or ‘world literature’ (reproduced in this volume)10 has become an important point of reference in many discussions of ‘world’ or ‘global culture’. His brief comments on world literature draw attention to the substantial literary and cultural interchanges already taking place in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These include translations of significant works, including Goethe’s own writings, into major European languages, and the existence of journals across the continent devoted to reviewing foreign works of literature. For Goethe, these literary exchanges do not bring about a homogenization of culture – a consistent worry whenever ‘culture’ and the ‘global’ are placed in relation to one another. On the contrary, for him, Weltliteratur promises to create greater opportunities for mutual understanding and tolerance, with both spiritual and material benefits for all. Goethe points, too, to the importance of cultural borrowing and interchange to the vitality of cultural life – a point stressed by many theorists of globalization and culture today. The differences, however, are stark. The world literature that Goethe envisions remained tied to a system of nations, each of which expressed its specific national characteristics through its literature. He also expresses anxiety about the emergence of a mass culture – the culture of the ‘crowd’ – which must be contained by the activity of ‘serious’ and ‘intellectual’ individuals around the world. In the concept of Weltliteratur are framed many of the problems and challenges in conceptualizing global culture: the role of national culture and its relationship to a universal, ‘world’ Intro-Vol-3 <xii> Introduction xiii culture; the status of elite versus mass cultures; and even the relationship of culture to economic and social institutions and structures. While Goethe understood Weltliteratur in relation to the nation-state system, Franco Moretti argues that today ‘the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system’.11 Such a system creates a conceptual challenge for literary criticism. The dominant mode of examining literature across the world has been through ‘close reading’: a detailed, structural exploration of texts focused on tropes, themes and other literary characteristics. The limit of such an approach is that it has necessarily only dealt with a very small body of ‘serious’ literature – the wellestablished and well-defended canon of important literary works. The idea that there might be a world literature has, for the most part, led to the expansion of national literary canons to include supposedly ‘serious’ texts from other parts of the world: in the case of British literature, for instance, we have seen the inclusion of English language texts from post-colonial Africa, India and the Caribbean. For Moretti, taking the study of world literature seriously requires an entirely new approach to literary study. Instead of close reading, he proposes a model of ‘distant reading’ focused on the global circulation of genres, devices or tropes. By taking ‘world literature’ as the name of a problem as opposed to a set of objects, Moretti is able to uncover the logic governing the unequal cultural relations structuring the world literary system at the present moment. Like world literature, ‘world music’ has been read as a signal of a new cultural situation, in which music from around the world is now able to circulate to once inaccessible places. If a great deal of the discussion of culture in relation to globalization has emphasized threats to cultural difference, the presence of world music has often been taken as an example of the success of heterogeneity over homogeneity in the global system. Steven Feld’s ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’, like Moretti’s work, explores the intersection of scholarly methodology with the circulation of cultural power in globalization. Feld’s account of the links between the emergence of ‘world music’ as a category within musicology and its transformation into a consumer market niche has at its centre a detailed analysis of the flow of music from the centre to the periphery. What Feld discovers in the multiple appropriations of a recording of a Baegu lullaby in the creation of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s world-music record Visible World, is the unequal ‘power and privilege to contact and know, to take away and use’. The success of world music, he suggests, is connected to the way in which it has been ‘imagined as some kind of sign that democracy prevails, that every voice can be heard, every style can be purchased, everything will be available to everyone’.12 As he shows, the reality of world music today is far from the Western consumer’s visions of it. In tracing the unequal relations of cultural power at work in globalization, writers such as Moretti and Feld show how the most common framings of globallocal consumption – difference or sameness, heterogeneity or homogeneity – might miss older and more fundamental relations of otherness and power. Their writings also highlight how far we are from the hopeful vision of open cultural exchange and understanding at the heart of Goethe’s vision of world literature. These chapters – and indeed, every other included in this volume – depend on the foundational distinction between ‘local’ and ‘global’, touched upon earlier. Intro-Vol-3 <xiii> xiv Introduction Global and Local Cultures In all of the articles in this volume, the distinction between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ acts as an organizing framework (whether explicitly or implicitly) within which the unique characteristics of consumption at the moment of globalization is explored. In the initial discussions of globalization, invocations of the local were often used to name spaces that were either shielded from, or resistant, to aspects of globalization thought to be damaging or destructive. In common usage, the local continues to retain a normatively positive valence in contrast to the autonomous and unstoppable forces of the global. At times the global seems to emerge and exist in some non-space like Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand of the market. At the other end of the usage spectrum, for example in much of the postmodern literature on globalization, the common-usage defence of the local has been diminished as romantic and naïve. In the articles collected here, and indeed in most scholarly discussions of globalization over the last couple of years, the globallocal distinction is now understood as a heuristic and analytic device for comprehending contemporary phenomena across social and experiential scales. The distinction is not one of binary opposition, but one with significant interplay and dynamism. The difficult issue now is how to conceptualize that interplay. If we can begin in the most general terms, the relationship between the local and global has been fundamentally changing across world history, but the local and the global remain bound up with each other: Proposition 1. While particular local practices can occur without reference to, or direct influence by, global forces and processes, the varying degrees of ‘separation’ between the local and the global are being substantially (and unevenly) reduced in the contemporary world. There are few if any localities now that are not connected in some way to and in some minimal way affected by global processes and forces. More importantly, however abstract or apparently automatized the mediating conditions, there is no ‘global’ outside of the various localities and persons that necessarily comprise it. Jean and John Comaroff’s chapter in the present volume expresses this point well: globalization is ‘a vast ensemble of dialectical processes, processes that cannot occur without the grounded, socially embedded human beings... [nor] without the concrete, culturally occupied locales – villages, towns, regions, countries, subcontinents – in which they come to rest, however fleetingly’.13 While we hold to that position strongly it can be put more broadly, and with an analytical rider: Proposition 2. Understanding globalization should neither involve positing a dichotomy between the local and the global – or between the embodied and disembodied, or the concrete and the abstract for that matter – nor collapsing those terms into each other. Rather, understanding globalization requires recognition of the changing imbrications of different layers of social meaning and practice. In other words, the layers of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ variously intersect, contradict, enrich and impoverish each other, but they remain analytically separable for the purposes of understanding the complexity of the world. In tracing global-local consumption, the meaning of ‘the local’ changes from study to study. In some cases, the local refers to small-scale, sub-national com- Intro-Vol-3 <xiv> Introduction xv munities; in others, to the scale of the city; in still others, to national communities or to regional configurations. The lack of an agreed-upon definition of the local in the theorization of globalization does not, however, need to create significant problems of understanding. This is in large part because it is the scalar relationship named by the analytical global-local distinction that is the real focus, not a rigid dichotomy. In the spaces of contemporary tribal-traditional communities, where processes of social reproduction and acculturation still tend to take place on geographically-limited scale, there are ongoing moments of global interchange: notions of ‘indigeneity’ and ‘tribe’, for example, have themselves become globalized. In spaces characterized by the dominance of the modern, day-to-day social life has expanded to encompass the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state, 14 but even here there is the significant issue that nation-state is a global phenomenon. Intensifying globalization thus reconstitutes rather than simply supplants longestablished patterns by which subjects and citizens are fashioned, including place, locality, and tribal and national identity. Processes as varied as mass migration, the establishment of diasporic communities and increased access to images and ideas originating in geographically distant and culturally-unrelated spaces have changed through processes of globalization. The global world is one in which ‘both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference, as critical life choices are made, can be difficult’.15 As Bruce Robbins points out, today ‘we are connected to all sorts of places, causally if not always consciously, including many that we have never travelled to, that we have perhaps only seen on television – including the place where the television itself was manufactured’.16 Analyses of global-local consumption attempt to map the ways in which local areas or spaces within which individuals and communities have participated in meaning-making practices are now more directly, consciously and unavoidably connected to other spaces, and to chart the effects and experiences of this intensified connectivity as the basic character of human social life is redefined around the globe. The second part of the present volume focuses on this relationship between global and local cultures, which has been one of the most frequently-analysed aspects of globalization. This focus is a consequence both of the conceptual challenges that globalization raises for studying culture and the experience of living in a world where the speed of cultural, economic and political interactions has rapidly reshaped everyday points of reference and traditional cultural norms, expectations and practices. With respect to the first, academics and non-academics alike have long imagined the ‘appropriate’ space of cultural processes – the scale at which cultural practices are thought to take place and within which they are thus to be examined – to be the ‘local’. This is whether this local is in turn imagined at the different scales of the community, the city, the region or the nation. This remains an important political consideration. Yet, at the heart of the concept of globalization stands the recognition that contemporary cultural, social and political processes have to be understood in reference to forces and flows that exceed the scale of these common spatial categories. Any consideration of the local that does not take the global into account is unlikely to understand what is happening at either scale. This conceptual challenge mirrors the ways in which globalization is frequently narrated in the media and experienced in everyday life. It has become common Intro-Vol-3 <xv> xvi Introduction to describe the loss of jobs by steelworkers in the eastern United States or coalminers in Germany’s Ruhrgebeit, or the dominance of Asian screens and streets by Hollywood films and Seattle fast food chains, as examples of the way in which the global has impacted on and changed the local. Scale matters: lines of force and causality extend around the world, with even the most ‘local’ events and experiences being shaped by developments at the global scale. Does the global reshape the local? Can the local resist the intrusions of the global? The most simple and appropriate answers to these questions are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. However, these common questions, in the very fact of their prevalence, point to the tendency to view the relationship between these scales as one in which the global dominates the local, and almost always to its detriment. Perhaps as a consequence, the local has been rather uncritically imbued with all the virtues that the (supposedly) anonymous logics of the global are imagined as lacking – virtues such as heterogeneity, diversity, direct relationships, genuine meaning-making activities and authenticity. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and film, the local (the village, the home-town, Heimat, etc.) tended to be depicted by one line of literary and artistic intellectuals as a place of stifling tradition which protagonists sought to escape by immersing themselves in the cosmopolitan environs of cities. With the intensification of globalization over the last couple of decades, it has become this same local that is imagined by some as the scale of interaction that will ‘save us’ from the homogenizing depredations of all things global. What connects the best writings on globalization is their attention to the substantial complexities of the interaction between global and local – complexities which go beyond the simple equation of the global with power and destructiveness, and the local with powerlessness and life. These complexities are such that they require careful attention to the narratives and discourses that constitute the imagined and lived spaces of the local and the global to begin with, which change and shift over time, as well as to the precise circumstances of specific intersections of the global and the local. These complexities also require new conceptual models of cultural traffic that capture more effectively the ways in which scalar interactions are shaped today. In his massively-influential essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Arjun Appadurai argues that the ‘new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’.17 The central problem of globalization, announced at the very beginning of the earliest version of Appadurai’s article, is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. It is a tension often framed spatially as an opposition between global and local. His model of five interacting ‘scapes’ – situated, perspectival constructs organized around ethnicity, media, technology, finance capital and ideology – is intended to offer a more accurate and complex view of a world in which global flows occur non-isomorphically and disjunctively, with a myriad of effects and outcomes that a strict division between global/local cannot map. Appadurai’s model works effectively to summarize a dominant set of contemporary processes, but it does not work analytically across different historical phases of globalization. Hence, our use of the more analytically abstract ‘modes of practice’ schema, examining modes of production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry as they pertain to the changing nature of cultural meaning and local- Intro-Vol-3 <xvi> Introduction xvii global consumption across different periods. The strength of Appadurai’s approach, nevertheless, is in evoking the present and recognizing the interplay of the local and the global without collapsing them into each other as some other writers are want to do. In an equally influential article, Ulf Hannerz explores the relationship between cosmopolitans and locals in the space of a world culture ‘marked by the organization of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity’. 18 Cosmpolitanism is a concept with deep historical roots; it has generated a great deal of new discussion in conjunction with globalization. The mobility of ideas, images, information and bodies today raises the possibility that individuals can encounter and develop relationships to other places, cultures and people. Hannerz ponders the ways in which one can encounter the diversity of global ‘local’ cultures well beyond one’s own local meaning-making. He distinguishes the attitude of the cosmopolitan from that engendered by other varieties of mobility – tourism, exiles and expatriates – and considers, too, the modalities of cosmopolitanism itself. He writes that a ‘genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other’. The opposition between global-local appears here as one between cosmopolitans with a wide perspective and locals with a more narrow one. This verges on positing a normative dichotomy. However, Hannerz is careful to point out not only that ‘there can be no cosmopolitans without locals’, but also that it is ‘no longer so easy to conform to the ideal type of a local’. Victor Azarya, Richard Giulianotto and Roland Robertson, and David Rowe provide us with specific examples of cultural consumption, highlighting the complex interplay between local and global. Azarya examines one of the major ways in which many people experience both globalization and the encounter of global with local: the unprecedented expansion of mass tourism.19 Tourism is now the world’s largest industry and the one that is growing the fastest. For many Global South countries, it represents an important source of economic growth and expansion. Tourists are increasingly drawn to visit ‘authentic,’ ‘marginal’ spaces where they hope to encounter a locale utterly distinct from their own home. What this means for groups such as the Maasi of East Africa is the need to package and sell their marginality and difference, balancing the need to attract foreigners with a ‘reinforced primitivism’ that may not even represent current cultural practices, while including enough familiar elements to make it a palatable destination. The consumption of experiences of difference through tourism may have some economic benefits for communities such as the Maasi; it comes at the potential cost, however, of numerous changes to local culture to make it consumable by outsiders. David Rowe argues that, contrary to what might have been expected, international sport does not contribute to a process of ‘comprehensive globalization’ – by which he understands a process through which global forces dissipate local differences until the latter are all but lost. Widely-watched televised mega-sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics, which are sponsored by global consumer brands (Adidas, Nike, McDonalds, Budweiser, etc.), might suggest that sport is ‘globalization’s most attentive handmaiden’. Rowe notes, however, that in these cases, the local cannot be so easily written out of the picture. In the case of sports, the nation remains an essential touchstone and symbolic register: even if everyone is watching the World Cup, they are usually cheering for their own Intro-Vol-3 <xvii> xviii Introduction national team. ‘Sport’s dependency on the nation’, Rowe argues, ‘always reinserts the restrictive framework of modernity into the fluid workings of postmodernity. In doing so – in a highly emotional manner – sport operates as a perpetual reminder of the social limits to the reconfiguration of endlessly mutable identities and identifications’.20 Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson take up the same issue – sports – but draw slightly different conclusions from the same premises. Focusing on football (soccer), Giulianotti and Robertson describe the complex interaction between the local and the global across the different fields (culture, economics, mass media, labour, etc.) that characterize globalization – processes which the study of sport in general and football in particular serve to highlight. ‘Glocalization’, a highlyinfluential term brought to the globalization literature by Robertson, is used to explain these processes: ‘Glocalization helps to explain how the symbiosis of the local and the global differs according to the particular cultural circumstances’.21 Here the term ‘symbiosis’ is complicated (see Propositions 1 and 2 above); and ‘glocalization’ as a concept suffers from potential misunderstanding. Such a conceptual presentation of the connections between local and global can offer a model of how to productively use differences in scale to reveal the new kinds of cultural and social relationships that are shaping the world today – relationships that are too simply and anxiously imagined as exhibiting heterogeneity or homogenization. However, in the hands of less critical writers it has the effect of collapsing the local and global into each other. For example, in Thomas Friedman’s rendition, glocalization is used in much the way that Japanese corporate advertisers first used the term – it is the process of reworking the global into the local so that local people can readily assimilate global representations, practices and commodities. In his description, glocalization in effect leads to a ‘flat earth’ where the global is everywhere, and the layers of difference make little difference.22 In Friedman’s sense, we are all choosing the global, albeit tinged with local colour. From Global Literatures and World Music to Commercial Culture When one discusses globalization and culture, what is often being referred to is the increasingly wide-spread distribution of cultural content, genres and forms around the world – from world music and world literature to video games and consumer products with fake global logos. The chapters in the third part of this volume assess both the impact of globalization on cultural content and genres, and the ways in which existing discourses of globalization have failed to accurately capture the complexity of the processes at work in reshaping culture on a global scale. As we have witnessed in the preceding sections of the volume, discussions and analyses of the globalization of cultural forms such as literature, fashion and music, are often accompanied by qualifications as to what is actually ‘new’ in current forms of cross-border exchange. Literary expressions, for instance, have a long history of travelling across borders. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) was popular across Europe soon after its publication in Spain; Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) led to young men across the continent adopting fashion styles from the book and (reputedly) attempting copycat suicides. Intro-Vol-3 <xviii> Introduction xix However, it is not just ideas, representations, ideologies, and styles that are globalized: in other words, it is not just content that is globalized. The globalization of content is the obvious part of the process. It is easy to see when an element of content comes from elsewhere across the globe (cultural consumption in the first sense of the concept as discussed above). By comparison, except when there are obvious border-crossing clashes, it is strangely much harder to see when literary, artistic, and musical forms are globalized. Usually they emerge slowly, subtly and hegemonically. The literary form of the novel, for example – an extended prose fictional narrative, printed and bound, to be read privately – can now be found everywhere in the world, with its greatest moment of globalization coming in the nineteenth century. This was linked to a slow world-historical change in the dominant mode of communication as script gave way to print, and print-capitalism generalized the reach of the novel as a consumerable commodity. The same can be said for novel genres: romance, comedy, detective-fiction, magical realism, and so on. As content, magical realism, for example, was used as a means of resistance to globalization and imperialism; by contrast, as form the genre was itself part of a globalizing counter-response to realism in Latin America and Southeast Asia linked back to a magical realist visual art movement in Weimar German.23 More generally again, it was part of the globalized spread of a literary form called ‘the novel’. Music went through the same process, though later and more unevenly. At the level of musical form, different notation systems were slowly globalized across the world with the five-line staff system rising to partial dominance in the nineteenth century. In 1939, and then confirmed by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955, an international conference recommended a global standardization of pitch with the note A to be tuned to 440 Hz. This had parallels to the earlier process of globalizing time through agreement on the prime meridian, but it remains more contentious because of issues as basic as local histories of use and questions about what temperature at which the standard should be measured. The establishment of globalized genres of music – classical, rock-and-roll, jazz, samba, and so on – developed in the twentieth century, and music was distributed on changing media of recording that waxed and waned in their dominance. At the leading edge, commercially-produced tapes, records and compact discs as albums, gave way to self-burned CD compilations, and, most recently, to web-based music management programmes such as iTunes. Linked back to content, we are now long past the point where the simple fact of cultural influence or borrowing raises eyebrows. We are used to living in a world where ‘hip hop is mixed up with samba’, as the Los Angeles’ group the Black Eyed Peas sing in ‘Mas Que Nada’, their update of the song by Brazilian pianist Sergio Mendes. More than that, fashion in the forms of distribution has entered the global scene. Will-i-am, leader of the Black-Eyed Peas, has said that the group’s latest studio release on iTunes, The END (2009), is more a continuing ‘diary’ of music rather than an album of music. ‘There is no album any more.’ This is hyperbole for effect of course, just as it was for writers such as John Barth and Walter Benjamin in saying that ‘the novel is dead’, or Roland Barthes in analytically describing the ‘death of the author’. The difference now is that those phrases are globally accessible at the touch of button through internet search engines such as google.com. Intro-Vol-3 <xix> xx Introduction Despite continuities, there are thus profound differences between our contemporary global moment and earlier ones, especially with respect to the speed at which ideas and forms circulate the globe, and the ways in which such speed effects the consumption of culture. In this context, Mia Consalvo’s chapter on videogame production in Japan takes aim at two (related) concepts that continue to shape how global-local consumption is imagined: cultural imperialism and Americanization.24 The idea of ‘Americanization’ has long stood in for the concept of ‘globalization’ itself, especially in discussions of culture. In turn, what is at issue in the idea that the world is becoming more culturally ‘American’ is that globalization is largely a form of ‘cultural imperialism’ through which the United States exerts a relentless form of soft power. ‘Americanization’ is in itself a complicated notion that tends to blur together a number of distinct forms of social, political and cultural influence ascribed to the United States, including forms of social rationalization and standardization that are part of more general processes related to modernity (these issues are addressed in chapters in the fourth part of the volume). Consalvo’s examination of the Japanese video-game industry shows that neither Americanization nor cultural imperialism describes the success of the Japanese industry in the USA, or indeed, of the increasing significance of a panAsian style or culture. From the production process to the different global spaces in which video games are consumed, what is at work in the video-game industry is a dynamic flow between global and local – in which the global cannot be easily equated (as it all too often is) with forces and effects originating in the United States. Arjun Appadurai reminds us that ‘if a global cultural system is emerging, it is filled with ironies and resistances, sometimes camouflaged as passivity and a bottomless appetite in the Asian world for things Western’.25 Chapters by Timothy Brennan, Simon During and Hsiao-hung Chang, explore these ironies and resistances, with an eye on the often confusing and contradictory politics of culture in globalization. Timothy Brennan takes the category of ‘world music’ as exemplary of a general characteristic of contemporary culture – at least in the West. He writes that ‘world music characterizes a longing in metropolitan centers of Europe and North America for what is not Europe or North America: a general, usually positive, interest in the cultural life of other parts of the world found in all of the major media – in film, television, literature in translation, as well as in music’.26 Brennan notes that this accelerated interest in difference comes at the same time as people imagine that real cultural difference is disappearing through the same forces that make it possible to listen to music from other parts of the world in the first place. What is most commonly understood as world music – everything from Sufi music to wedding music from the Balkans – is anything but world-based. The music that makes up world music is ‘local or regional music that either does not travel well, or has no ambition to travel’. For Brennan, ‘world music can only be understood through protracted sorties into the frameworks of dissemination and meaning of the individual forms that make it up’.27 For the purposes of leisure listening on a mass-scale, for which the category of ‘world music’ is created, however, the demands of consumption opens up our field of consumption only by narrowing down the meaning of what is being consumed. Simon During and Hsiao-hung Chang offer innovative and idiosyncratic approaches to the issues they take up. To Moretti and Goethe’s chapters, During adds another perspective on literature and globalization. Taking note of the Intro-Vol-3 <xx> Introduction xxi widespread sense of the decline of literature at the present time, whether measured by the number of university students studying literature or book sales, he suggests that ‘literature is undergoing a radical mutation of barely less force than the transformation that accompanied the radical reorganization of the field of letters in the middle of the eighteenth century’.28 What is of particular concern to During is the dissipation of a specific form of subjectivity – modern literary subjectivity’ – which he links to political and social hope. The imaginative mobility once enabled by serious literature has become ‘vernacularized’ in the era of globalization by the movement of people, information and culture. Though the consequences of the marginalization of literature are multiple, it is the loss of literature as a vehicle for imaginative movement between privilege and subalternity, between those for whom globalization means mobility and those for whom it means enclosure, that has the deepest political effects. Chang’s investigation of the circulation of the ‘fake’ explores the characteristics of a new form of global-local cultural consumption, in which the demand for conspicuous consumption (Veblen) on a global scale mobilizes the production of goods that simultaneously make use of and subvert the circuits of global capital. The market for fake luxury items, produced at varying levels of cost and quality (with the best approaching the condition of the original item), exemplifies the unusual forms of contemporary cultural consumption on a global scale. Logo-mania or what Naomi Klein has called the ‘tyranny of the brands’29 drives the purchase of items across the consumer spectrum from those created as high-status cultural items (Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Tiffany, Hermès and the like) to basic consumer items such as hamburgers and coffee. Fake logos operate at the border at which items that symbolize elite belonging can nevertheless be transformed into mass-market commodities in which its symbolic function continues to operate. Despite their manifest undermining of the ‘intellectual property’ of the elite brands (a strange concept in itself), fake logos have been another layer of the enhancement of branding. In order to evoke this symbolic intersection of global-local interchanges with the curious life of the fake in consumption today, Chang coins the term ‘glogocentrism’ which crashes ‘logocentrism’ into ‘globalization’. However, like the term ‘glocalization’, it remains an evocation looking for an adequate theoretical framework that covers the full range of different modes of practice and integration. Consumption in Theory In Naomi Klein’s terms, contemporary consumerism has seen a manifest shift from an emphasis on the production of commodities to the production of the branded meanings associated with those products. ‘Out of this heady time we learned that Nike was about “Sport”, not shoes; Microsoft about “Communications”, not software; Starbucks about “Community”, not coffee.’30 This shift in the framing of consumption is one of the many issues that have caused major problems for theoretical analysis. George Ritzer, in developing upon his major work on McDonaldization (the rationalization of society, exemplified by the organizational form of the McDonalds chain of hamburger outlets)31 has, for example, interrogated the use of Max Weber’s concept of the ‘iron cage’ of rationality and Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘carceral archipelago’. These concepts provide possible approaches Intro-Vol-3 <xxi> xxii Introduction to analysing the enframing of global-local consumption, but Ritzer rightly finds both of them wanting. In emphasizing processes of regulation and organization both of those concepts miss out, for example, on the active agency involved in the subjectification process. Ritzer, himself a Weberian theorist, ends up calling upon a literary metaphor to do his work, describing the McDonalds outlets as ‘Islands of the Living Dead’, places full of light and energy, but ghettoized and deadened simulations of life.32 Bryan Turner, working similarly out of a Weberian paradigm that has in the past put its emphasis on the rationalization of the life-world, turns to a different metaphor – that of ‘liquid differentiation’ – to revivify and qualify older Weberian analyses. Here he draws upon Zygmunt Bauman’s book Liquid Modernity33 which argues for a transformation from modern linearity to (post-modern) fluidity. Turner suggests rather that a dialect of regulation and fluidity pertains: ‘The rational processes of McDonaldization produce individualization as a response to the inflexibility and rigidities of standardized systems through disembedding processes, and in turn, the processes of individualization require compensating processes of standardization through audits and regulations.’34 That is, linearity and fluidity are in tension with each other, but nevertheless with old-style corporations such as McDonalds succumbing to a global trend towards fluidity and differentiating local markets. Whether or not Bauman’s metaphor of ‘fluidity’ is helpful here past its initial evocation is a moot point, but what is clearly the case, as both Ritzer and Turner suggest, is that for any approaches describing the transformations of the present, it does not help to describe the changes in terms of a singular epochal descriptor such as the shift from linearity to fluidity (or even from modernity to post-modernity, to use a categorical claim). What we see rather is processes and formations intersecting and overlaying each other. The difficulty here is to delineate processes of dominance, emergence, tension and contradiction. Finding the right metaphors to evoke the change is difficult enough, but critically understanding what it means for nature of social life has led to many problematic takes upon the present conjuncture. As Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma write: The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it’.35 If we turn from the neo-Weberian to the post-Marxist lineage, the question of culture remains an equally problematic site of theory. Scott Lash and Celia Lury’s recent book Global Culture Industry provides a good example of both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary analysis of global-local consumption. Their theoretical approach builds upon and reworks the critical theory of consumption developed by the Frankfurt School, and in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Lash and Lury argue that contemporary consumption culture has moved from a culture industry of commodities (á la Horkheimer and Adorno) to a global culture industry of indeterminate branded objects. They express the complexity of change in a series of flat dichotomies: ‘The commodity is dead; the brand is alive’; the Intro-Vol-3 <xxii> Introduction xxiii commodity is produced, while the brand is a source of production; commodities are all alike whereas the brand is an ‘abstract singularity’.36 Without wanting to detract from the important empirical work in the book, its overall thesis turns on just the dichotomous epochal evocation that we have just been criticizing in the unreconstructed Weberian lineage. This time however the reconstruction of some basic theoretical precepts in classical Marxism makes the analysis even less convincing. Drawing upon the orthodox superstructure/base metaphor (and forgetting the ambiguous and subtle writings of Marx on commodity fetishism37 ), Lash and Lury suggest that once culture was part of the superstructure, but now it has come to take over the structural base of social life and to dominate the economy. In effect, they are arguing for a shift from the primacy of the mode of production to the primacy of the mode of communication understood as ‘cultural’. By contrast, without fixing on any one of the manifold of domains of modern social life (culture, politics, economy, ecology) or on any one of the manifold of modes of practice (from production to communication, organization to exchange) and treating it as the determinative of the process of social interchange, Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma emphasize the different social forms, the layers of their abstraction, and the way that they are lived: Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them, including – critically – the abstract nature of the forms that underwrite and propel the process of circulation itself. The circulation of such forms – whether the novels and newspapers of the imagined community or the equity-based derivatives and currency swaps of the modern market – always presupposes the existence of their respective interpretive communities, with their own forms of interpretation and evaluation.38 Consumption across the Domains of Economics, Politics and Culture New ways of consuming culture and the expansion of practices of consumerism have played key roles in the destabilization of the once steady points of economic, political and cultural reference. ‘Culture’ has long played an essential social function, both as a force legitimating tradition and current configurations of social power (as in Matthew Arnold’s famous turn to culture – ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’39 – a response to the ‘anarchy’ attending the rise in power of the British working classes and the materialism of the bourgeoisie) and as a relatively autonomous site through which criticism of the existing society could be mounted. Globalization has wrecked havoc with both the legitimating and critical functions of culture. Culture imagined as a space of transcendent possibilities has been overlaid by a level of culture instrumentalized, objectified and commodified into an economic and political resource. The expansion of the service economy and the elaboration of forms of abstracted production – in Hardt and Negri’s terms ‘labor that produces immaterial products, such as information, knowledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects’40 – has made culture an essential element of contemporary economic development. It is not just that the cultural sector plays an important part in consumer culture (it is the largest export sector of the United States economy),41 but also that the Intro-Vol-3 <xxiii> xxiv Introduction dynamics of culture, especially as expressed in terms of ‘creativity’, has become part and parcel of economic planning. Globally, nations, regions and countries have adopted programmes and policies that highlight the quality of their educational and cultural infrastructure, their overall ‘quality of life’, and thus their potential to generate the kinds of creative impulses that supposedly lead to ideas for new products and services. Britain developed a global cultural brand with slogans such as ‘Cool Britannia’ in Britain, as did Germany with ‘Land of Ideas’, New Zealand with ‘Hot Nation’ and Scotland calling upon us to ‘Create in Scotland’. Developing economies have also been encouraged to mobilize culture as an economic resource. Past president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn, for example, suggests that ‘physical and expressive culture is an undervalued resource in developing countries. It can earn income, through tourism, crafts, and other cultural enterprises’.42 Increasingly co-terminous with a consumerism of global dimensions, the function that culture played in social reproduction and the creation of subjects has changed significantly, with consequences that have yet to be fully grasped. The central role played by consumerism in contemporary social life has led some scholars to suggest that it is in practices of consumption that we should now locate political, economic and cultural values and rationalities. One common strategy has been to re-locate the critical functions of culture with respect to society – what for the historical avant-garde emerged from art’s separation from bourgeois life (Bürger43 ) – to consumerism itself. Lauren Langman, for instance, articulates a not uncommon position within studies of contemporary culture: ‘In our global age, when consumerism is hegemonic, consumer culture provides spaces for transgression’.44 Political and normative objections to consumerism have to be measured against the empirical fact of consumption as a wide-spread, globalized, and defining practice of everyday life. The Argentinian anthropologist Néstor García Canclini has perhaps gone the farthest in re-thinking the slide from citizens to consumers as something more than a sign of political or cultural loss that has to be combated at all costs. He writes: The relation between citizens and consumers has been altered throughout the world due to economic, technological, and cultural changes that have impeded the constitution of identities through national symbols. Now they are shaped by the programming of, say, Hollywood, Televisa, and MTV. For many men and women, especially youth, the questions specific to citizenship, such as how we inform ourselves and who represents our interests, are answered more often than not through private consumption of commodities and media offerings than through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation in discredited political organizations. This process could be understood as loss or depoliticization from the perspective of the ideals of liberal or enlightened democracy. But we may also posit, as do James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, that the political notion of citizenship is expanded by including rights to housing, health, education, and the access to other goods through consumption. It is in this sense that I propose reconceptualizing consumption, not as a mere setting for useless expenditures and irrational impulses, but as a site that is good for thinking, where a good part of economic, sociopolitical, and psychological rationality is organized in all societies.45 Against this view that consumption is a site that is ‘good for thinking,’ there remains significant opposition to the inevitability and incontestability of contemporary modes of consumption. The social rationality of consumption that Intro-Vol-3 <xxiv> Introduction xxv García Canclini points to has significant deleterious effects. There is, first of all, the impact of current modes of consumption and the global expansion of consumerism on the natural environment. There is now little question that current levels of consumption have negatively impacted the environment, with rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide creating a greenhouse effect impacting on every aspect of natural environmental systems. Second, contrary to what is often assumed, consumption generates significant individual and social dissatisfaction. As a practice that defines much of social rationality, its outcomes – moments of individual pleasure mixed with increasing individuation and abstraction of social relationships, the drive for ever greater personal accumulation at the expense of the environment within which we must live – render it an irrational and problemfilled practice. In ‘Towards a New Politics of Consumption’, the sociologist Juliet Schor proposes a different way of addressing contemporary consumption. She focuses on an important, if under-theorized aspect of consumption. Schor believes that there is enormous discontent with consumerism; what is lacking is a way to conceptualize this discontent. Social well-being in a consumer society is linked to income levels and the ability to consume. What is lacking is a market for ‘alternatives to status or positional goods’.46 There is a market for things, but not for public goods or more free time. In turn, since it is difficult to express one’s desires for these kinds of goods in a society where achievement is measured by monetary wealth, consumer society ‘under-produces’ goods that people find important: a clean environment (since environmental costs are not included in the price of goods), leisure (as it is harder to choose more free time over higher incomes in virtually every employment sector), and all manner of public goods (since mass transit is so poor, we are forced to use private cars, which in turn leads to a further decline in mass transit since it is under-utilized and in need of subsidy in virtually every urban space on the globe). A new politics of consumption would create a language and a political framework in which it is possible to create an economy of ‘less work and less stuff’.47 Schor believes that there is a strong demand for such an economy, even if it is difficult to see it because we can only participate in those forms of consumption presently on offer. She makes seven suggestions. First is the revival of discussions of the minimal social needs for every individual in society to be fully able to participate in it; second is a focus on quality of life rather than ‘quantity of stuff ’, which in turn is related to the need for more ecologically sustainable forms of consumption. Addressing minimal social needs has to be accompanied by more democratic consumption practices, that is, a way of delegitimating the status of high-end products and changing the rules of the game of distinction. Fifth and sixth, a ‘vast consumer policy agenda’ has to put pressure on the development of government policy, including the creation of policy to control the cultural environment (ad-free zones, diversity in retailing, etc.) Finally, a point that is absolutely crucial to any politics of consumption: ‘everything we consume has been produced. So a new politics of consumption must take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards’.48 The identification of the terms of a ‘new politics’ of consumption is far easier than the process of implementing such suggestions – especially when such arguments are framed against consumption and inequalities on a global scale.49 Intro-Vol-3 <xxv> xxvi Introduction The suggestions that Schor makes resonate differently in local situations around the globe. In the Global South, ‘quality of life’ and ecological sustainability are of course important. But needs in terms of ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ have to be defined carefully when the problem with ‘quantity of stuff’ in the slums of the world is not having enough of it, and the problem of ‘quality of life’ in the consumer markets of the world is subjecting oneself as a consumer of commodified identity in the first place. Conclusion Consumption is one of the central themes that needs to be addressed in attempting to understand the central currents of globalization today. We all consume, and for an increasing number of people in the world that consumption comes from elsewhere rather than through local relations or through self-production. Practices and subjectivities of consumption now stand at the intersection of different dominant modes of practice: capitalism (production-exchange), mediatism (communications), techno-scientism (enquiry) and rationalizing regulation (organization). It is not just the content of our consumption that has been increasingly globalized, but also the social forms: from the genres and media through which we read – newspapers, romance-fiction, blogs, advertisements, website pages – to the basic ontological forms that we largely take for granted – interconnected spaces and modern temporalities. Yes, we now consume time and space. ‘Time is money’ and lived spaces are sold to us as dream homes, faraway tourist destinations, and contracted packages of derived risk (aka toxic debts). In all of this, issues of consumption bring home to us, perhaps more than any other aspect of globalization, questions of how we want to live. What does it mean to talk of quality of life? How are we to negotiate relations of local and global interconnection? Notes 1. Paul James and Barry Gills, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 1, Global Markets and Capitalism, Sage Publications, London, 2007. This was followed up in relation to the changing dominant mode of exchange in Paul James and Heikki Patomäki, eds, Globalization and Economy: Vol. 2, Global Finance and the New Global Economy, Sage Publications, London, 2007. 2. Paul Lewis, ‘Buy, Buy, Buy: Consumers Fuel £1 Trillion Spending Boom’, Guardian 12 May 2006. 3. Jonathan Row, ‘Our Phoney Economy’, Harpers Magazine, June 2008, pp. 17–20. 4. In a related volume in this series: Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, eds, Globalization and Culture, Vol. 4: Ideologies of Globalism, Sage Publications, London, 2009, and his The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008. 5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New American Library, New York (1899), 1953. 6. David Ley and Kristopher Olds, ‘Landscape as Spectacle: World’s Fairs and the Culture of Heroic Consumption’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 6, 1998, pp. 191–212. Intro-Vol-3 <xxvi> Introduction xxvii 7. Mel Van Elteren, ‘Conceptualizing the Impact of US Popular Culture Globally’, Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, 1996, pp. 47–89. 8. This theme is covered in an earlier volume in the Central Currents in Globalization series: Paul James and Phillip Darby, eds, Globalization and Violence: Volume 2. Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations, Sage Publications, London, 2007. 9. Jean Comaroff and and John L. Comaroff, ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 291–343, cited from p. 298, reproduced in the present volume. 10. See also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature’, in Hans-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rhein, eds., Comparative Literature: The Early Years: An Anthology of Articles, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1973, pp. 5–11, 227–8. 11. Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, New Series no. 1, 2000, pp. 54–68, cited from p. 54. (The article is republished in the present volume.) 12. Steven Feld, ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 145–71, cited from pp. 166 and 167. (The article is republished in the present volume.) 13. Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Millennial Capitalism’ cited from p. 305 (reproduced in the present volume). 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London (1983), 2nd edn 1991. 15. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp. 43–44. See his ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 7, no. 2–3, 1990, pp. 295–310 (reproduced in the present volume). Mel van Elteren makes a slightly different point that does not hold across all settings: ‘The more social life becomes mediated by the global marketing of styles, places and images, by international travel, and by global media networks and communication systems, the more identities become detached from specific times, places, histories and traditions’ (‘Conceptualizing the Impact of US Popular Culture Globally’, p. 56.) Yet intensifying processes of globalization, including global consumption, have seen the re-assertion of identity politics such as nationalism or ethnic identifications tied to specific locales. 16. Bruce Robbins, ‘Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’ in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, p. 3. 17. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, p. 296. 18. Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 7, no. 2–3, 1990, p. 237 (reproduced in this volume). 19. Victor Azarya, ‘Globalization and International Tourism in Developing Countries: Marginality as a Commercial Commodity’, Current Sociology, vol. 52, no. 6, 2004, pp. 949–67 (reproduced in this volume). 20. David Rowe, ‘Sport and the Repudiation of the Global’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, vol. 38, no. 3, 2003, p. 286 (reproduced in this volume). 21. Richard Giulianotto and Roland Robertson, ‘The Globalization of Football: A study in the Glocalization of the “Serious Life”’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 55, no. 4, 2004, p. 549 (reproduced in this volume). 22. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005. Friedman is often wrongly attributed with coining the term ‘glocalization’. 23. Suradech Chotiudompant, ‘Thai Magical Realism and Globalization’, in Terence Chong, Globalization and its Counter-Forces in Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2008. 24. Mia Consalvo, ‘Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture’, New Media and Society, vol. 8, no. 1, 2006, pp. 117–37 (reproduced in this volume). Intro-Vol-3 <xxvii> xxviii Introduction 25. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 29. 26. Timothy Brennan, ‘World Music Does Not Exist’, Discourse, vol. 23, no. 1, 2001, pp. 45–6 (reproduced in this volume). 27. Brennan, ‘World Music Does Not Exist’, p. 58. 28. Simon During, ‘Transports of the Imagination: Some Relations between Globalization and Literature’, Arena Journal, New Series, no. 20, 2002, p. 126 (reproduced in this volume). 29. Naomi Klein, ‘The Tyranny of the Brands’, New Statesman, 24 January 2000, pp. 25–28 (reproduced in this volume). See also her No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Picador, New York, 2001. Ironically, No Logo was published in the UK, Australia and other Commonwealth countries by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins owned by the global capitalist Rupert Murdoch; the term No Logo became a cult brand in itself. 30. Klein, ‘The Tyranny of the Brands’, p. 25. 31. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, 5th Edn, 2007. 32. George Ritzer, ‘Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 47, no. 2, 2003, pp. 119–36. 33. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge, 2000. 34. Bryan S. Turner, ‘McDonaldization: Linearity and Liquidity in Consumer Cultures’, American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 47, no. 2, 2003, p. 143 (reproduced in this volume). 35. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, p. 191 (reproduced in this volume). 36. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007. 37. Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow (1887), 1977, ch. 1, section 4. The first paragraph reads: ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.’ 38. Lee and LiPuma, ‘Cultures of Circulation’. As a qualification it should be said that as anthropologists they do theoretically emphasize the mode of exchange (viz. circulation) to the relative exclusion of other practices. 39. Matthew Arnold from the preface to Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1869), 1993. 40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, New York, 2004, p. 65. 41. According to UNESCO, ‘In 1996, cultural products (films, music, television programs, books, journals and computer software) became the largest US export, surpassing, for the first time, all other traditional industries, including automobiles, agriculture, or aerospace and defence’. UNESCO, Study on International Flows of Cultural Goods between 1980–1998, UNESCO, 2000, available on-line at: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ industries/trade/. Last accessed 23 August 2006. 42. Wolfensohn cited in George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003, p. 13. See also the World Bank, Cultural Properties in Policy and Practice, World Bank, Washington, 2002, (lnweb90.worldbank.org/; last accessed 6 May 2009), which summarizes World Bank policies with respect to cultural property. Intro-Vol-3 <xxviii> Introduction xxix 43. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. 44. Lauren Langman, ‘Culture, Identity and Hegemony: The Body in a Global Age’, Current Sociology, vol. 51, nos. 3–4, 2003, p. 226. 45. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001, p. 5. 46. Juliet Schor, ‘Towards a New Politics of Consumption’, in Juliet B. Schor and Douglas Holt, eds, The Consumer Society Reader, The New Press, New York, 2000, p. 427. 47. Schor, ‘Towards a New Politics of Consumption’, p. 459. 48. Schor, ‘Towards a New Politics of Consumption’, p. 461. 49. Michael Storper, ‘Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality and the Consumer Society’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, 2000, pp. 375–409 (reproduced in this volume). Intro-Vol-3 <xxix>