Global Media and Culture

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. . . . And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.

—Karl Marx¹

Global Discourse in Question

Increasing global relations catalyze the question of culture: are the basic conditions of culture changed, diminished, or supplemented as a result of intensified exchanges across national, ethnic, and territorial borders? What are the major discursive regimes that have emerged in connection with the phenomenon of global culture? What models of analysis are best suited to examine these exchanges—translation, transcoding, mixing, hybridity, homogenization? Do they appear to pose the most productive questions in the present context? Do these concepts articulate the challenges and opportunities posed for culture by the rapid intensification of global exchanges? One might inquire as well, at another level, about the epistemological conditions for framing the problems of global culture. What discursive positions enable asking the question in the first place? What are the conditions of writing/ speech/word processing that open a critical stance on the question of global culture? Is the subject, the “I think” of the Western philosophical tradition, an appropriate position of discourse in order to initialize questions about global culture? Does the fact that a large proportion of global exchanges occur only with the mediation of information machines incite a need to redefine the notion of the other?

Have We Become Cosmopolitan?

Very often the figure that governs discourse about global culture is the cosmopolitan.² Since Immanuel Kant wrote “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” in 1784, the problem of global culture has been framed by the terms “universal” and “cosmopolitan.”³ Especially in recent years, major publications have addressed the issue of the emergence of a sense of the planetary, by invoking the term “cosmopolitan.”⁴ This recent interest in the term very often returns to Kant and his formulation of the issue. For the eighteenth-century philosopher, cosmopolitan is a determination of reason alone, requiring no practical effort of travel, or acquaintance with, or study of the societies of the world. By use of the term cosmopolitan, it is as though the human species might question its fate only from a vantage point that is not local, not rooted in a somewhere, not tied to any specific space or place but somehow itself global, planetary, cosmopolitan. And this from Kant, who is notorious for residing almost without absence in the eighteenth-century backwater of Königsberg in eastern Prussia. Kant deploys the term Weltbürgerlicher ansicht (viewpoint of a citizen of the world) in a special manner. The cosmopolitan point of view for him is achieved through reason alone as it confronts the question of world peace. He writes, “The greatest problem for the human race . . . is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.”⁵ However well intentioned, the problem of a global political institution is determined not by leaders of governments but by the philosopher himself. Because “universal civic society” is deemed so important, Kant finds it necessary to turn to and rely upon “a cosmopolitan point of view.”

Well before neoliberal pundits proclaimed the earth as a free-trade zone and instituted treaties to render this assertion a practical economic force, Enlightenment thinkers like Kant problematized the universal. Kant and the others easily moved from positing man as rational creature to the question of humanity as a universal species. Poststructuralists and postcolonial theorists since the 1970s have pointed out difficulties with the assumption of the universal in Enlightenment thought.⁶ The proclamation of the universality of mankind obviously failed to include nonwhites, women, children, non-Christians, and so forth, detracting seriously from the aspiration...