Renegotiating Culture and Society in a Global Context

Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci is credited with offering the first full-fledged analysis of Fordism as both an economic and a cultural system. His major insight was to recognize that the “rationalization of work” entailed by the reorganization of the productive processes under Fordism necessitated a certain reorganization of social behavior as well. For Gramsci, Fordism was more than a technological paradigm; it was “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man” (302).

One cannot help but hear the echo of Gramsci in the recent plethora of Marxist accounts of the contemporary transition to a so-called post-Fordist regime of accumulation.[1] Clearly, contemporary cultural critics have learned from Gramsci which questions about culture and society are worth posing. Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism asks not whether, but how social transformation occurs. In linking the rationalization of work to the regulation of social bodies, he focuses less on the nature of productive relations than on how those relations are reproduced over time and across space. This means introducing into the science of political economy questions about the role of politics, culture, ideology, and identity in the regulation of a given set of capitalist relations. Finally, Gramsci seeks to understand the relationship between the economic base of capitalist society and these airy superstructures without reducing the latter to mere expressions of the former. In this sense, he should be seen as an intellectual forefather of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies, which takes this task as its guiding problematic.

Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, edited by Anthony King, fits squarely within this growing body of material designed to apply Gramsci’s insights to the emerging post-Fordist[2] socio-cultural complex. As the serial form of the title indicates, the text attempts to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. The first part of the title offers a broad outline of the terms of engagement, so broad as to be disorienting, I would argue. The second part seems designed to temper the excesses of the first by establishing identity as the primary vehicle through which to pursue the study of culture, globalization, and the world-system. The implicit question it poses is: how do structural changes in the organization of society impact the ability to locate oneself vis-à-vis others in the world? This is a provocative question. Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate, the text fails to fulfill the promise of its subtitle. Instead of charting a course through the maze of the global via an examination of lived identity, Culture, Globalization and the World-System ends up reinscribing disciplinary boundaries in a defensive attempt to ward off the cognitive disorientation unleashed by the widespread social transformations it describes.

The text’s production history provides some insight into why the title of the volume appears so expansive as to be virtually meaningless: the organizers of the original symposium were attempting to provide an introduction to the history of study in these areas. As King explains in his introduction, each term in the title is designed to connote an entire body of theory connected, for the sake of convenience, to a single theorist who becomes the representative of this body of theory within the space of the symposium/text. The term “culture” is intended to reference the works of Cultural Studies guru Stuart Hall and anthropologist Ulf Hannerz; “globalization” refers to the work of Roland Robertson; and “the world-system” refers to Immanuel Wallerstein’s ground-breaking work in international political economy. Hall’s two lectures were presented prior to the symposium while Robertson, Wallerstein, and Hannerz’s lectures served as the focal points for the symposium itself. Respondents included Janet Abu-Lughod, Barbara Abou-El-Haj, Maureen Turim, King, John Tagg, and Janet Wolff, who provided the (admirable) summation of the proceedings. As I will show...