The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990S

The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s Veit Erlmann Presumably it is diference that kills otherness. Baudrillard 1990: 131 orld music is popularly believed to be a “roots” phenomenon, an Wexpression of national and ethnic identities and multicultural diversity. Yet, as the analysis of recent examples reveals, world music could also be more properly considered as a typical product of consumer society. The term “world music” itself had emerged in the mid-l980s, initially as little more than a handy term for musics as vastly heterogeneous as lambada, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Mory Kante’s Ykkt Yikt. By 1988, however, “worldbeat”-as world music is more commonly known in the U.S.-was described by Newsweek magazine as the fastest growing sector of the international pop market.’ Although, in the mid-l990s, this expansive trend has somewhat abated, elements of world music have now crossed over into a vast range of other musics, such as avant-garde jazz, John Zorn’s work comes to mind here, some recent New Age albums like Andreas Vollenweider’s Book of Roses and Hector Zazou’s Les nouvelles poly- phonies corses or even dancefloor and hip hop. This broadening of the phenomenon, it seems to me, directs attention to a number of issues which have been insufficiently explored in earlier discussions of world music. 1. “Pop takes a global spin.” Newsweek, 13 June 1988, pp. 72-74. Public Culture 1996, 8: 467-487 @ 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0899-2363/96/0803-03$1 .OO 467 468 My argument proceeds from the hypothesis that world music is more than a Public Culture new style, more than a new category for racks in the record stores. World music is a new aesthetic form of the global imagination, an emergent way of capturing the present historical moment and the total reconfiguration of space and cultural identity characterizing societies around the globe. Here my argument differs substantially from other, more familiar readings of the phenomenon that leave considerable space for the interpretation of different kinds of world music as an assertion of a politics of difference-of nation, community, and, most notably, race - and of the local, as resilient articulations of opposition against Western hegemony2:it maintains that synthesis is the central category of this global aesthetics in the making. Although representing no particular global cultural or political entity as such, world music offers the panoramic specter of a global ecumene, of a totality long deemed lost by contemporary critical thought. Beneath the truly exponential proliferation of signs and all the celebration of difference, world music, within its very constitution and aesthetic canon, seems to articulate the inchoate feeling expressed by the 1990 AT&T commercial: ”we are all connected.” But this is also a new type of synthesis for which the earlier notion of an organic totality seems hopelessly inadequate. Rather, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, we are dealing with a kind of transversality born from the random play of unrelated difference^.^ Much of this new aesthetics has already been put in place in certain forms of postmodern public culture such as video art. Here as in popular music more specifically, such as in alternative rock, as Will Straw argues in one of the most penetrating analyses to date of the music industry in the global era, this synthesis does not represent an attempt at “collective redirection” through which musical communities are brought into new alliances. Rather, cross- fertilization and hybridization in alternative rock produce what he calls “idiosyn- cratic passages.’4 Or, as Jean Baudrillard, the mastermind of simulation writes, this “hell of the identical,” amidst the orgy of differences, has all the qualities of a melodrama, of a psychodrama. In the psychodrama of the test and the interface, Baudrillard maintains, we simulate and dramatize, in an acrobatic act, the absence of the Other. In the interaction that results from this artificial drama- turgy, the subject becomes the Other of nobody. Fashioned in this manner, the interactive, transversal subject is not the product of some new form of exchange, but of the wholesale disappearance of the social and of difference as such.5 2. See, for instance, Goodwin and Gore 1990; Guilbault 1993; Waterman 1990. 3. Jameson 199 1:3 1. 4. Straw 1991:376. 5. Baudrillard 1990: 130. More specifically, my analysis here takes issue with two propositions fre- 469 quently made in current debates about world music. First, I see homogenization Global Imagination and differentiation not as mutually exclusive features of musical globalization and World Music that can be lamented, denounced, or demanded as needed, but as integral constit- uents of musical aesthetics under late capitalism. Synchronicity, the contradictory experience of the universal marketplace alongside proliferating neotraditional codes and new ethnic schisms, is the key signature of the postmodern era.6 Or, to use a more familiar image from the realm ofcommodity aesthetics: homogene- ity and diversity are two symptoms of what one is tempted to call the Benetton syndrome- the more people around the globe who purchase the exact same gar- ment, the more the commercial celebrates difference. From this view it follows that a quality which defines a system cannot at the same time function as an antithesis to that same system. The position must be questioned, then, that a subsystem or a series of differentiated subsystems such as the Third World, regional and local cultures present some form of challenge to the wider system of global capitalism, that diversity by definition subverts h~mogeneity.~In other words, I dispute the notion that certain forms of world music are to be seen as an antidote to the venom of Western consumer culture and cultural imperialism, and that, as Iain Chambers claims, the world’s musics “offer a space for musical and cultural differences to emerge in such a manner that any obvious identification with the hegemonic order, or assumed monolithic market logic, is weakened.”8 Perhaps it is because of the prevalence of this rhetorical stance against cultural imperialism that recent attempts to grasp the dynamics of the new global musics have tended to privilege the politics of global mass culture, the economic strategies of the multinational media, or the role of music in national politics. Although these and similar issues are crucial to any serious analysis of the new global cultural dispensation, in the tentative analysis of world music that follows I do not pursue such a line of reasoning. Deviating from ruling practice in popular music studies, my argument is relatively unconcerned with the classical parame- ters of cultural analysis. For instance, the industry, consumption, class, hegemony, resistance and other such obligatory categories play a secondary role here. I agree with Straw that the crucial site of the politics of popular music is neither 6. Friedman 1990. 7. For a succinct critique of old-time anthropological notions of cultures as a priori coherent wholes, see Moore 1989:38. 8. Chambers 1992: 141. 470 in the “transgressive or oppositional quality of musical practices and their con- Public Culture sumption, nor uniformly within the modes of operation of the international music ind~stries.”~ Rather, what seems to be required today is a more thoroughgoing examination of global culture which is not limited to analyses of postcolonial economics and power dynamics. I imagine a reflection on the aesthetics of these transcultural sounds as a globalphenomenon, a reflection that rather than looking at the global sales strategies of Sony and BMG and their impact on the national and cultural identity of countries like Kenya and Sweden,’O would examine the production of social differences through the “building of audiences around particular coali- tions of musical form.”” For this reason, I propose that an aesthetic theory of world music shift the focus more toward problems of the construction of historicity or the changes in mimetic representation in the electronic media. What follows are the outlines of such an aesthetic theory of contemporary world music.I2 Implicit in this attempt to sketch out the new global musical aesthetics is a certain element of cultural self-critique. If, as I argue, world music represents an attempt by the West to remold its image by localizing and diversifying itself through an association with otherness,I3 a serious analysis of global musics can only be written from a subject position in the West. Thus, this form of cultural critique is sensitive to the fact that “asymmetry and that among many Third World critics of Western hegemony, the present situation is frequently seen not so much as the completion of modernity, but rather as a lack of modernity in the first place. At the same time, my main concern in this essay is activated by an analysis of the ways through which ideologies of difference are produced in the West. An aesthetic theory of world music as cultural critique therefore cannot heroize 0therne~s.l~And, by the same token, it cannot engage in, say, the sort of influential anthropological project that attempts to bring “the insights 9. Straw 1991:384. 10. For example, Rutten 1991. For an exemplary study of audio cassette technology in North India, see Manuel 1993. 11. Straw 1991:384. 12. Although I would disagree with Steven Feld on a number of issues, his “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses and Commodification Practices of ‘World Music’ and ‘World Beat”’ (in Keil and Feld 1994:257-289) comes closest to the kind of aesthetic theory I have in mind. 13. See also Keil and Feld 1994:238-246. 14. Hannerz 1992:222.

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