Global Culture

"Global Culture(s)- Salvation, Menace, or Myth?" by Immanuel Wallerstein ([email protected]) © Immanuel Wallerstein 2001 [You are free to download this paper or send it electronically to others. If you wish to translate it into another language, or to publish it in a printed medium or on another web site, you must obtain formal authorization from the author.] [Paper delivered at conference on "New Cultural Formations in an Era of Transnational Globalization," Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Oct. 6-7, 2001.]

As we all know, culture is one of the most ambiguous, most debated words/concepts in the social science lexicon. There is little agreement on what it means or implies. If we add the adjective global before culture, we magnify the confusion immensely. Society of course is a word/concept that is just as ambiguous, but at least it is more anodyne. The concept of culture arouses passion. People - ordinary people, extraordinary people, and politicians - often discuss the concept of culture with ferocity. Some famously reach for their revolvers and others man the barricades. Think of the Sokal hoax. (1) I shall not try to construct, deconstruct, or reconstruct the concept. I should say I shall not try to do this again, since over the past twenty years I have written many an essay on this theme, perhaps too many.(2) There may not be such a thing as global culture, or so we sophisticated analysts of the world cultural scene may say. But there are many, many people around who believe that this hobgoblin truly exists. For some it is a demigod; for others the devil incarnate. But for all these people it seems to be a reality. Let us start with those who embrace the concept. Every religion that claims to expound universal truth lays down codes of moral behavior which constitute a global culture, in the very simple sense that these religions assert that such behavior is not merely desirable, but also possible, for all human beings. Religions thus proclaim norms which they insist apply everywhere and at all moments in time. Surely such a proclamation is an assertion of the existence of a global culture. To be sure, these norms are violated, indeed more often than not. But the fact that norms are violated has never invalidated the existence of a culture. On the contrary, the fact that people bother to observe that cultural norms are being violated has usually been invoked as strong empirical evidence for the living meaning of a culture. Then there are all the secular religious concepts, many of which we associate with the Enlightenment: liberty, individuality, equality, human rights, solidarity. These too are proclaimed as norms which know no boundaries. They too are not said to be not merely desirable but universally possible. Furthermore, many people are regularly ready to impose these norms - religious or secular - on persons who are unaware of their existence, who refuse to acknowledge

their validity, or who simply refuse to observe the prescribed behavior. When the religious authorities do this, we call this an inquisition in the case of the members of a religious community or proselytization with the aim of conversion for non-members. Once upon a time, religious institutions proclaimed proselytization as their prime task. Today, they are a bit more discreet, the result of pressures coming from proponents of contradictory secular norms, such as religious tolerance. These days the proclaimers of secular norms are the less modest ones. Indeed, in the last two decades, they seem to have what the French would call le vent en poupe. Their claims usually go under the aegis of a presumed universal norm of human rights. (3) We now have world courts that purport to prosecute persons who violate egregiously what are considered world norms obligatory even for heads of sovereign states. We have organizations which seek to override one presumed universal norm, the sovereignty of states, in the name of other presumed universal norms deriving from natural law, which these organizations claim give them (and all of us) "the right to intervene." One has to presume, of course, that the intervenors are defenders of the global culture and practice its obligations themselves. For a very long time, multiple religions have each claimed to announce the one (and only) universal truth, which has meant that we have had competing claims for the content of global culture. Such competing claims are not only impossible to reconcile in terms of intellectual argument but have had very noxious social consequences in that they have led to outbreaks of immense violence. Secular groups outside the religious frameworks have sought to reconcile these conflicts by insisting on a universal norm of supposedly higher priority, the norm of tolerance. Today we have a comparable conflict between competing secular universal norms, most notably that between the primacy of national sovereignty and the primacy of human rights. This competition has also had noxious social consequences. Is there an outside group interested in reconciling this conflict? How can it be reconciled? Can it be reconciled? A good example is the Balkans imbroglio of the past decade. Many terrible things have occurred. Some of these things have been labeled ethnic cleansing and have been denounced as genocide, or war crimes, or crimes against humanity. An ad hoc international tribunal to judge such crimes has been created. And today a number of political and military figures have been indicted, and some of them have been detained and placed in the custody of the court to undergo trials. There is now in addition a proposal to create a permanent court of this variety, to be called the International Criminal Court. The United States, which has supported the ad hoc tribunals dealing with human rights violations in the Balkans and in Africa, has announced that it is totally opposed to the creation of a permanent court, since such a court might bring before it U.S. citizens, and notably U.S. military personnel, for alleged violations of universal norms. The U.S. has suggested that there might be illegitimate political motivations in accusing U.S. citizens, but has derided the idea that there might be illegitimate political motivations in accusing citizens of Bosnia or Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Sierra Leone. The political resolution of the question has been, thus far, a function of world political/military strength. In today's world, those who come from weaker states may be prosecuted. Those who come from stronger states may not be prosecuted. This certainly

makes for a clearcut procedure, but hardly one that is defensible as the implementation of global norms.(4) Now let us look at the other side of the picture. We all know how different life is lived in different parts of the world, and the degree to which, on a daily basis, people in these different areas respond primarily to the demands of their local "culture." The global cultures which I have been describing are probably unknown to a sizeable majority of the world's population, and scarcely too meaningful even to the highly educated minority who are conversant with these assertions of a global culture. This is true even in the very heartland of the defenders of universal norms, the organizations created to proclaim them and sustain them. Take, for example, the very interesting case of Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, formerly holder of the see of Lusaka, Zambia, who in May 2001 married a women in a ceremony officiated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Rev. Moon asserts he is the messiah fulfilling the salvation that Jesus failed to accomplish. Clearly Archbishop Milingo, in these actions, was violating the universal norms proclaimed by his Church. Threatened with excommunication by the Vatican, Milingo renounced the marriage three months later. Milingo had already been in trouble at an earlier time because of sanctioning faith healings and exorcisms, and was forced to resign his see, but at the time he was not excommunicated or even defrocked. However, his present action went even further in defying the global culture the Church proclaims. No doubt, in these actions, he was responding to other cultural claims, more local ones, than those of the Church. This is not unusual; what is unusual is that someone so central to the Church's hierarchy would do this so publicly. In recent years, there has been a vigorous repudiation of the concept of global culture, of its very possibility and desirability. It has located itself within various knowledge movements - deconstruction, postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, cultural studies - although of course each of these movements encompasses a wide range of views. The heart of the argument is that the assertion of universal truths, including universal norms, is a "meta-narrative" or "master narrative" (that is, a global narrative), which in fact represents merely an ideology of groups who have power in the world-system, and therefore has no epistemological validity. I am very sympathetic to the suggestion that various proclaimed universal truths are in fact particularistic ideologies. However, saying this nonetheless leaves entirely open the question of whether or not there do exist universal norms. As many have pointed out, few of the critics are ready truly to exclude all universal claims, since that would undermine their own intellectual and/or political positions. This then leads to wondering about the degree to which the critique of global norms, of meta-narratives, is a tactic designed to demolish "Eurocentrism" - no doubt a worthy objective - in order to permit a reconstructed universalism, as opposed to a definitive opposition. Some speak of constructing "counter-narratives."(5) And there are some who wish to recognize that "universalism is always historically contingent,"(6) without abandoning the reality that the pressure to create an acceptable global culture has been a permanent part of humanity's history. Furthermore, "the claim to universality, however qualified - universal relevance, universal applicability, universal validity - is inherent in the justification of all academic disciplines."(7)

So, I come now to the question, is the concept of global culture salvation, a menace, or a myth? As should be clear, this is simultaneously an intellectual, a moral, and a political question. One cannot separate the three levels of consideration. Intellectually, the issues are classic ones. They are the antinomies between universalism and particularism, between nomothetic and idiographic epistemologies, between the global and the local. These binary contrasts are the terms in which most debates in social science have been conducted for the last 150-200 years. I will not be the first to say that these are false debates, totally unresolvable in the form that they have been classically posed. But I wish to stake out this position with some firmness. All universalisms are particular. But there are no particularities that can be expressed or analyzed outside of universalist categories. There are no constant social realities across all of time and space, but we cannot know any specific social reality except as part of meta-narratives. Global culture is as real or as unreal as any so-called local culture. My own view is that we can only make sense of social reality by conceiving of the world as composed of historical social systems. These are entities that are substantially self-regarding and self-sufficient, have rules according to which they operate, and above all have lives. They come into existence, they develop according to their rules, and eventually their processes move far from equilibrium, leading to a bifurcation, chaotic oscillations, and finally a resolution into a new order, which means the end of the former historical social system. Thus historical social systems are both systemic (they have rules) and historical (they have lives and evolve). In this sense, our epistemology must be both nomothetic and idiographic, or rather it can be neither. For a very long time now, most such historical social systems have been world-systems - the word "world" simply referring to a social system that has an axial division of labor and is large enough to encompass multiple "local" cultures. I have been arguing that the modern world-system is one that originated in a part of the globe in the long sixteenth century, expanded to incorporate all the other territories on the earth within its orbit, and has today reached the point of structural crisis, during which it is transforming itself into something other than the capitalist world-economy that it has been. I shall not repeat here the arguments for this basic position.(8) When even physicists are acknowledging that the presumably basic laws of physics change over time, at least "slightly,"(9) how could social scientists imagine anything else were true about human social life? As for the other extreme, those who insist that everything is specific, we should always remember that the thickest description we can imagine necessarily is phrased in terminology that is conceptual and therefore generalizing. What this position implies in terms of our intellectual tasks is that we need to cease arguing about priorities amidst these antinomies. If all social life is both systemic and historic, global and local, then social science resembles an Escher drawing in which whether we go up the staircase or down the staircase makes no difference since, in either case, we shall be on the identical staircase going in the identical direction. The point is to be conscious of this, and thus to seek to sketch the whole staircase in correct detail. The staircase is there, but of course not forever.

One must wonder why what seems to me at least an obvious epistemological truism not is only not widely asserted but is on the contrary vigorously contested. As with all cases of resistance to clarity, or what is asserted to be resistance, the only explanation one can offer is an account in terms of consequences, an account that is more plausible than alternative accounts. One explanation has been offered in the recent efforts to criticize universalisms. Universalisms, it is said, are assertions that defend power positions in the real world. This is quite true. But this is equally true of localisms or particularisms. Indeed, the insistence on either end of the antinomy permits groups controlling structures of knowledge to limit what can conceivably be observed in research, what kind of findings are seen to be plausible and therefore acceptable, and what kind of policy implications can be drawn from this knowledge. They are very powerful tools in the political arena, precisely because they are put forward as intellectual arguments and not as moral ones, and even less as political ones. The classical epistemological debates freeze our intellectual possibilities, and freeze in particular our ability to see the interplay between the intellectual, the moral, and the political aspects of the structures of knowledge. They therefore make infinitely more difficult, if not impossible, arriving at substantive rationality, and push us to rely on the ever more fragile platform of formal rationality.(10) Accepting the idea that (social) science cannot be reductionist or essentialist and must aim at plausible interpretations of complex reality is the beginning of the creation of a social science that addresses simultaneously and inextricably intellectual, moral, and political questions. Or as the philosophers of the world have long told us, we must search for the true, the good, and the beautiful (three avatars of each other), knowing full well that we shall forever wander around its uncertain edges. ______________________________________________________ Go to List of Papers Go to Fernand Braudel Center Homepage 1. Lingua Franca, eds. The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000; Yves Jeanneret, L'affaire Sokal ou la querelle des impostures, Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1998. 2. "Civilizations and Modes of Production: Conflicts and Convergences," in R.B.J. Walker, ed., Culture, Ideology, and World Order, Vol. 5 of Studies in a Just World Order. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984, 60-69; "What Can One Mean by Southern Culture?" in N.M. Bartley, ed., The Evolution of Southern Culture. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988, 1-13; "Culture As the Ideological Battleground of the Modern World-System," Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, XXI, 1, Aug. 1989, 5-22, and Theory, Culture, & Society, VII, 2-3, June 1990, 15-30; "Culture Is the World-System: A Reply to Boyne," Theory, Culture & Society, VII, 2-3, June 1990, 63-65;

"The Geoculture of Development, or the Transformation of Our Geoculture?" Asian Perspective, XVII, 2, Fall/Winter 1993, 211-225; "The National and the Universal: Can There Be Such a Thing As World Culture?" in A.D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997, 91-105; "Cultures in Conflict? Who are We? Who are the Others?" Y.K. Pao Distinguished Chair Lecture, Center for Cultural Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Sept. 20, 2000 [forthcoming]. 3. The United Nations proclaimed in 1948 a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 4. See the acerbic comments of Alex de Waal: "So the global principle now extends far enough to take care of war criminals hostile to the US." ("The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc.," London Review of Books, XXIII, 16, Aug. 23, 2001), p. 15. 5. This is what Oren Yiftachel suggests Ella Shohat is doing ("Editorial: Inequalities: Fate or State?", Hagar, II, 1, 2001, p. 2). Shohat herself is concerned with the assertion of a "Mizrahi identity" against the Zionist construction of a "Jewish nation." She says: "[I]magining an intellectual space for critical Mizrahi work necessitates the pluralization and de-essentialization of all identities." She goes on to insist: "The concept of relationality that I am calling for should not be confused with cultural relativism. Although the concept of relationality goes back to structuralism and poststructuralism, I have also been using the term in a trans-linguistic, dialogic, and historicized sense. The project of a relational multicultural analysis has to be situated historically and geographically as a set of contested practices." ("Rupture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology," Hagar, II, 1, 2001, 89-91.) 6. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Reconstruction of the Social Sciences, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996, 88. See the discussion, pp. 85-93. 7. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Reconstruction of the Social Sciences, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996, 48. 8. I refer the reader to The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, l974; Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, New York: New Press, 1998; and "Globalization or the Age of Transition?: A LongTerm View of the Trajectory of the World-System," International Sociology, XV, 2, June, 2000, 249-265. 9. See the report on the findings of a group of astrophysicists, reported in The New York Times, Aug. 15, 2001, which revealed that at least one presumed "constant of nature" fine structure constant - turns out not in fact to be constant. 10. See my "Social Science and Contemporary Society: The Vanishing Guarantees of Rationality," International Sociology, XI. 1, Mar. 1996, 7-26, reprinted in The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999, 137-156.