[Discussion] Invasion of the Culture Snatchers?

[Paksoy, Hb]

  Invasion of the Culture Snatchers? 
by Winfried Fluck  
 
PROJECT SYNDICATE
  
The specter of ``Americanization'' haunts the world. Its consequences are
demonized everywhere, sometimes going as far as to draw on the metaphor of a
(need I say American) science-fiction movie entitled Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, within which hostile aliens imperceptibly take control of our
bodies and our minds. But hyperbolic rhetoric about invasions misses the
complexity of the cultural change taking place all around us. 



Neither side in the debate about Americanization offers a convincing
explanation for the phenomenon. Those who argue that Americanization is a
virulent form of ``cultural imperialism'' apparently see it as a product of
growing market domination by American media concerns. However, many giant
cultural corporations - Japanese-owned Sony, Canadian-owned Seagram,
Murdoch's empire or Germany's Bertelsmann - are no longer American, even
though they promote American cultural models. 



Even if the media were American-owned, it is too facile to say that
consumers of culture the world over are mere clay in the hands of skilled
marketing experts. It makes more sense to assume that there are some
elements of social, psychic, and aesthetic gratification that explain the
resonance of American cultural models, and provide for their commercial
usefulness. 



The other side in the debate over Americanization emphasizes the liberating,
anti-authoritarian power of American popular culture. At times, this may be
fitting: in 1950's Germany, for example, American youth culture had a strong
anti-authoritarian component that helped to undermine authoritarianism and
contributed to the process of postwar democratization. 



Only rarely, however, does American-inspired popular culture possess this
dimension explicitly. More often, its attack on authority takes the form of
willful provocations or ever-more uninhibited and graphic depictions of
violence. At other times, the refreshingly anti-authoritarian appeal of such
programs as The Simpsons is commercially exploited to strengthen global
media empires, such as Rupert Murdoch's. In other words,
anti-authoritarianism is not the whole story either. 



We need to look with more nuance at the forward march of American culture
instead of demonizing it as a form of crude imperialism or merely
celebrating its liberating potential. In particular, American popular
culture must be viewed in light of the drawn-out historical process of
cultural modernization. 



In the past, culture was tied to privilege and wealth. Until the 18th
century, books were comparatively expensive; their ownership was limited
largely to the propertied classes. Moreover, a certain educational grounding
(such as knowledge of Latin or Greek) was necessary to make sense of most
cultural objects. 



``Popular culture'' is our word for a form of culture that gradually
abolished these restrictions. Its earliest manifestation, the novel, aided
by new print technologies, created a market that allowed for much wider
access to literature. Knowledge of meter or classical poetics was no longer
necessary. The novel became the literature of the middle class, and the dime
novel, an ``abbreviated novel'' for a dime and slimmed down to
magazine-size, expanded readership to the lower strata of society,
especially to adolescent readers. 



The development of an ``entertainment culture'' around the turn of the 20th
century, including vaudeville theater, amusement parks, a dance craze
triggered by the domestication of black plantation dances, and silent
movies, further reduced the prerequisites for cultural understanding. The
invention of radio and television extended the audience for this new
``mass'' culture even more, and the shift to the priority of pictures and
music created a ``universal'' language, not limited to a particular
community. 



For a number of reasons, America was in the forefront of this cultural
revolution. Due to its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural composition,
especially in the formative years of modern entertainment culture around
1900, American popular culture was faced with the challenge of a market that
anticipated the present global market on a smaller scale. This led to the
development of broadly comprehensible, non-verbal forms of performance,
relying preferably on visual and auditory forms of expression. Before
Americanization of other societies could occur, American culture itself had
to be ``Americanized.'' 



What is the meaning and cultural significance of this process of
``Americanization?'' The constant reduction of the prerequisites for making
sense of culture may confirm the view that consumers of mass culture are
passive. Popular music, in particular, is highly effective in insinuating
itself into the listener almost imperceptibly; no intellectual processing of
its content is required because it makes no claim to inform. Instead, moods
are created by subliminal effect. 



The characteristic form by which music activates the imagination is by short
evocations of out-of-context images, or a diffuse feeling of boundlessness,
both of which need not be integrated into any meaningful context. Listeners
to popular music need not ``earn'' their aesthetic experience through
participation. Contrary to prior visual forms of cultural expression,
including the movies, there is no longer a need for continuity in the flow
of images; contrary to what happens with a novel, no mental translation is
required because the sensual effect of music creates associations that are
shaped not by narrative but by mood. 



The development of popular culture from the novel via the image to the
triumph of popular music and the ``center-less'' heterogeneity of
television, created forms of cultural expression that are singularly useful
for the purposes of imaginary self-extension and self-empowerment. The
result is an increasing separation of expressive elements from moral,
social, even narrative contexts. Here is the triumph of ``mood over
morals.'' Americanization, indeed, is carried by the promise of heightened
imaginary self-realization for individuals who are freed from the bonds of
social norms and cultural traditions. 



Americanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly engineered hidden
cultural takeover but as a process in which individualization is the driving
force. This process is most advanced in the US for a number of reasons. The
promise of a particular form of individualization provides the explanation
why American popular culture finds so much resonance in other societies
where it has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly carried by a young
generation trying to escape tradition). 



Cultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process.
Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of
modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in
contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation.
Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of cultural
standardization, in reality undermines standardization. No single national
culture is the driving force but, instead, globalization is powered by a
restless individualism drawing on a growing store of mass symbols. So: we
are not becoming Americanized. We ``Americanize'' ourselves. 


    
 
Winfriend Fluck is Professor of Kultur at the Free University of Berlin.  
  
 
 
Copyright: Project Syndicate and Institute for Human Sciences, February 2001