Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes

1 - Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity and the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies

Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity 25 I remember that, just before I presented this paper under its original title of “On the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies” at the conference in London, a friend of mine said, “Okay, you are presenting a paper on the uselessness of media and cultural studies.” While this was his misreading of the title, I realized it sounded more provocative and perhaps more accurately suggested what I was trying to convey — something about an emergent uneasy sense of doing critical media and cultural studies — and which I am feeling. I have no intention of generalizing my own sense of frustration. However, I have come to realize the necessity of reviewing what I have done so far and of rethinking the tactic of critical intervention. Over the last ten years or so, what has motivated my academic enthusiasm has been critical engagement with the politics of everyday life through the analysis of media and popular culture. In particular, I have been interested in how to get over the exclusive demarcation of national and cultural boundaries and how to make them more inclusive and dialogic. I have examined these issues especially in the Japanese context and with an attention to media culture connections in East Asia, mostly by looking at people’s meaning construction processes in a wider sociohistorical context. I have been convinced that I was making sense of the complexity of the ways in which power operates in everyday life through media culture, and this critical study is an effective tool to negotiate and contest existing power relations. However, over the last several years, the optimistic conviction I held in the 1990s has become less certain. Apparently, this is related both to the 1 Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity and the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies Kōichi Iwabuchi 26 Kōichi Iwabuchi increasing concern with border control and national security, especially after 9/11 and, more crucial to the study of transnational media culture flows, to the escalating penetration of market-fundamentalist corporatism under the sign of neoliberalism. As is often pointed out, these urgent issues are not primarily “cultural,” and so recently we are witnessing more studies focusing on political economy issues. This is not to say that the study of people’s meaning construction processes is no longer important or unconnected to political economy; on the contrary. However, we should more seriously attend to the operation of political and economic structural restraints on the process of meaning construction and transborder dialogue. This is imperative if we do not want to lose sight of “the way in which it [culture] matters — and hence, its effects — have changed in ways that we have not yet begun to contextualize or theorize.”1 In this short essay, I look first at how the logic of corporatism has deeply penetrated transnational media culture flows and how states are also joining the game of corporate branding of the nation in ways in which the publicness of media culture and the possibility of transborder dialogue are severely hampered by the logic of market profit and national interests. I focus on three issues: decentering and recentering of transnational media cultural power, the increasingly systematized connections of national dominant cultures, and the development of state policies to brand national cultures. Since these developments are closely related to the prevalent discourses on the pragmatic uses of culture in neoliberal terms, they inevitably compel us to reconsider the meaning of usefulness and practicality in regard to our own critical research, so that we can pursue effective ways, not just theoretically, of intervention in the realpolitik. The Reconfiguration of Decentered Power Networks Let me focus on one of my major areas of research — media culture flows and connections in East Asia. Studies on intra-Asian media flows and connections have become active since the mid-1990s, and I am one among many who have been fascinated with this emerging phenomenon. Cultural traffic within East and Southeast Asia has indeed been blossoming as globalization advances. Since the mid-1990s in particular, close partnerships have been formed in the media industries as companies pursue marketing strategies and joint production ventures spanning several different markets. Popular culture from places like Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea is finding unprecedented acceptance all over the region, leading to the formation Reconsidering East Asian Connectivity 27 of new links among people in Asia, especially youth. This trend has...