What do Australian Historians and Intellectuals Have to Say About Globalisation?
Global Cultural Networks and the Hysteria of the Homogenous.
By Craig Bellamy
PhD Candidate RMIT University.
What is globalisation? At the start of the 21st Century, this is (apart from a splattering of gherkin, mayo, and sugary bun) the question on everybody's lips. Is it American cultural homogenisation and corporate greed, is it the Internet and the rise of the much hyped information society? Is Globalisation something culturally sinister and causes the Greeks at the corner milkbar to close shop and move into farming genetically modified chicken nuggets? Globalisation is a term that is as large as the world in which we live and is often interpreted through a monomaniac discourse that absorbs and explains everything from declining sea turtle numbers, third world poverty, cheap mail order books, and the boss deciding to cut your wages because the bagels aren't selling.
I would like to propose that despite the vacuum in which much globalisation discourse circulates that there is, in terms of globalising forces, something unique about our present time in history, but far from the US-centric-cultural-homogeneity thesis purported by thinkers such as Maud Barlow or Benjamin Barber, the opposite is probably true. The nation-state already taught us how to conform and gone are the days when Australians would 'wake in fright' to a ruthless egalitarian conformity composed of uncomplicated practical people sunning ourselves in the complacent state-sanctioned myth of a society of battlers. Gone are the days when beer beasts freely roamed the streets screaming doctrinal mantras out of the doors of crappy tariff protected cars at anyone who did not kowtow to our egg-and-tomato hamburger lifestyle. (We are now complicated; we drink wine and cappuccino and put avocado on our burgers).
Australia, like all Western societies, intersects with the rest of the world in a myriad of ways and on a myriad of levels. America to a muscle-car enthusiast is cheap petrol, glossy magazines, and a similar wealthy nostalgia for Concords with road-worthy certificates. America to an intellectual is a society of high-paid jobs and undergraduates with the cognitive ability of Labradors. America to a businessman is a land of opportunity where social ability is directly linked to hard work, and an entrepreneurial and uncritical positive spirit. Australia has always had a complex relationship with the US, we share a history of over two hundred years, and we are perhaps no more 'American' now than in any time in the past. How do we measure this anyway beyond the highly selective pop-cultural remediations forced on us by our corporate-battler-elite?
To understand this period of globalisation, we must move beyond the hysteria of the homogenous. We have already been there, we already created a mind-numbing 'vegemite utopia' of red bricks and red meat? Do we fear that American corporate homogeneity is something worse than the Kafkaesque hell we created for ourselves? Do we really want to return to that wholesome naivety stooped in racism, paternalistic tariffs, and narrow moralistic censorship? We must embrace the battler-dictum of the 'real world'; the real world of abstract ephemeral cultural flows and networks, of one-to-one real-time global relationships, of cultural nodes in global cities (that have for over a century been too large for the individual to understand anyway). The world is globalising, we are creating a global real-time economy of global networked cultures or what Manual Castells terms a 'network society'.
To understand a network society, one must look at the intersection between the historically determined trajectories of the local and where these intersect with the ephemeral cultural flows of information and cultural icons. The local (suburb, city and state) is globalising, but not in the somewhat simplistic and monolithic neo-colonial hypothesis of Maud Barlow or Benjamin Barber. Identities and cultures that include ones that are not necessarily nation-based nor geographically specific are flourishing under the present globalising trends. Gay identities, creative identities, ethnic identities and different identities are augmenting geographical specific cultures by participating in a much larger cultural exchange.
For instance, what is occurring in the artistic community of Melbourne's inner city is that the 'resistant identity' of the local cultural elites (that is resistant from the 'massification and 'standardisation' of the suburbs), is becoming highly networked to other cultural centres in the world (such as Amsterdam, Manhattan or Edinburgh). The networking of this culture, augmented by new information technologies, is not particularly original and is somewhat predicable, but never before has it been so pervasive, so immediate and so accessible. The icons of creativity utilised by artists can flow quickly and enter more readily the local cultural context. The artist can identify with the icons flowing within the particular cultural node and use this to facilitate the acceptance within a particular artistic group identity. The impact of technologies such as email and its discussing groups cannot be underestimated. These networks facilitate the flow of ideas within a networked culture creating international networked styles that may enhance the local.
The great danger with this period of globalisation is not homogeneity, but closed global networks. These networks may be closed through technological means, such as access to bandwidth, or other technological mediated forms of cultural and social exclusivity. Already we are seeing this occur in our film festivals and galleries where an international appropriation of unrepresentative culture is creating a pastiche-homogeneity. This is when curators bypass more immediate and direct forms of local culture in favour of a narrowly defined 'international'. This is the selection of aspects of globalisation to suit a purpose and this purpose may or may not fuse with national or local cultural elements.
We have nothing to fear about globalisation and if anything, exposing our culture to larger contexts will highlight what we have to contribute that is truly unique. After all, it was Australia that invented the suburbs, created the great barns of consumption on their arteries and corporatised our great cultural experiment, 'egalitarianism'. Globalisation is a complex international cultural exchange, and with any form of cultural and economic power, it depends on who is at the wheel as to how it will be implemented and interpreted. I doubt that if the communists had have invented fast food, that it would be anything different to that of the American ilk. It is not homogeneity that we have to fear, it is the yuppie moving next door to a one hundred year old pub, then ringing up the local council to complain about the noise.
Bibliography
Barber, Benjamin R Jihad vs. McWorld, Ballantine Books, New York, 1995.
Castells, Manual The Rise of Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, 1999.