culturaL GLOBALIZATION ReconsiderED JOHN TOMLINSON Professor of Cultural Sociology and director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham, England, has published on issues of globalization, cosmopolitanism, modernity, identity, media, and culture across a range of disciplines from sociology, anthropology, and media studies to geography, urban studies, and development studies, and lectured widely in academic, cultural, and political forums in Europe, the United States, and East Asia. He has acted as consultant to international public sector bodies including UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the NATO Defense College. His books include: Cultural Imperialism (Cassell, 1991) and Globalization and Culture (Polity, 1999), both of which have been widely translated. His latest book The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy was published by Sage Publications in October 2007. His current research interests include work on the impact of globalization in China, cultural and political cosmopolitanism, and a reassessment of the practices and processes of cultural regulation in Western societies between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD IN YSTAD This discussion attempts to contribute a little globalization, to this task. Firstly, by reconsidering the way has become one One sign of the maturity of the concept of glo- we approach cultural globalization conceptually. balization is its application to ever more particu- Secondly, by revisiting two of the main contro- of the routine lar aspects of human life. From the enormous versies that globalization has engendered, the ways in which list of published titles containing the phrases fate of cultural diversity and the incorporative we—that is to say “Globalization and...” or “The Globalization effects of commodification. And, finally, by of- ordinary citizens, of…,” we can now move way beyond general fering some thoughts on the issue of cultural analyses of political, cultural or economic glo- cosmopolitanism. and not just balization, through more specific but still fairly To launch this discussion I want to draw brief- academics—grasp broad categories—health, sport, literature, fam- ly on another of those specialist discussions modern cultural ily, war, sex, love, religion—and on to decid- of globalization that I began with. Not, how- existence. edly special interest reading. So without going ever, one of the standard “Globalization and…” through too many pages on Amazon, we can genre; an altogether more oblique and corus- find, inter alia, texts on The Globalization of cating piece. Mining, Globalization and The Great Exhibition, In his article, “Henning Mankell, the Artist of Globalization and Bioinvasion, Globalization and the Parallax View,” the philosopher Slavoj Zizek Islamic Finance, Globalization and Veterinary gives us, in under four pages, the globalization Medicine, Globalization and Cape Verdean Wom- of the detective novel. His focus is Mankell’s en, Globalization and The Good, and the rather best selling “Kurt Wallander” series, set in the splendidly specific, Globalization and Sushi. small town of Ystad in southern Sweden. There What this tells us is something more than the are three main moves in Zizek’s analysis. cynical fact that publishers know how to ride Firstly, he observes that the impact of global- a good wave. It tells us that globalization, over ization on detective fiction is, counter-intuitively, the relatively short historical spell of twenty-odd to emphasize the local context, exemplified in years, has become one of the routine ways in the mundane, often drab, provincial environ- which we—that is to say ordinary citizens, and not ment of Inspector Wallander’s Ystad. He con- just academics—grasp modern cultural existence. trasts this turn to the “eccentric local” with the Despite the ubiquity of the idea, it retains a paradigmatic settings of, “classic XXth century good deal of unresolved complexity. This is par- modernism” in the detective genre: metropoli- ticularly so in the sphere of culture, consisting tan cities like London, New York, or Los Ange- as it does in the peculiar entanglements of glo- les. Zizek argues that this popular attraction of balizing political, economic and technological very particular locales represents a more general dynamics with human meaning construction, cultural phenomenon, a new articulation of the identity and imagination. As we become more cosmopolitan imagination: familiar with the process, and as we encounter its effects in more and more instances of every- A true global citizen is today precisely the one day life, so its subtleties and its contradictions who (re)discovers or returns to (or identifies become more apparent. This has at least taken with) some particular roots, some specific us beyond the more simplistic initial responses. substantial communal identity—the “glo- Most serious commentators, for instance, no bal order” is ultimately nothing but the very longer automatically assimilate the idea of cul- frame and container of this mixing multitude tural globalization entirely to the category of of particular identities. (Zizek, 2004:1) cultural domination—of cultural imperialism, Westernization, Americanization, and so on. And This sense that the global is in itself insub- the prediction that globalization would lead to stantial, no more than a “frame and container” a wholesale homogenization of global culture—a for a multitude of particular identifications, is proposition still actively canvassed amongst in- crucial for grasping the impact of globalization tellectuals up to the end of the Twentieth Cen- in the cultural sphere. No one actually inhabits tury—now seems almost touchingly naïve in our the global: neither physically (since embodi- age of cultural and political turbulence. But we ment ties us all to localities) nor imaginatively still have a long way to go both in conceptual- (since meaning requires particularity). To under- izing cultural globalization and in making sense stand the force of cultural globalization then, we of the vexed cultural-political issues it is gener- need to study localities and the way they are ating for us. being transformed. CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION RECONSIDERED JOHN TOMLINSON 215 This brings us to Zizek’s second move, which GLOBALIZATION AND LOCALITY is to explore the specificity of Ystad as a setting for the novels. Here the attractions of locality Zizek’s analysis of the detective genre gives us cannot be assigned to a nostalgic retreat into an some clues to the way we might produce more imagined ideal of Gemeinschaft—one of the more precise general conceptualizations of cultural commonly assumed responses to the challenges globalization. Tightening up our conceptualiza- and threats of globalization. Mankell’s stories tions is not, of itself, going to solve the myster- are tinted in the somber hues of the Scandina- ies of globalization—for this we need, like any vian climate and pervaded by a Bergmanesque good detective, to do painstaking empirical work. existential angst. But more significantly, Zizek But it will help us at least to ask the right sorts detects in Ystad signs of, “the long and painful of question. decay of the Swedish welfare-state”: The example of Mankell/Wallander’s Ystad sug- gests two things in this respect: firstly, that the key Mankell evokes all the traumatic topics which concept that should concern us is not the global give rise to the New Right populism: the flow but the local and, secondly, that the way we un- of illegal immigrants, soaring crime and vio- derstand the local must itself be more precisely lence, growing unemployment and social in- formulated. Let’s take these one at a time. security, the disintegration of social solidarity. What is the global? Where is the space of the (Zizek, p. 3) global? If we ask these questions, we end up with answers that have very little purchase on The cases that Wallander eventually solves the economic, political, and cultural dimensions —in, it has to be said, fairly conventional acts of of globalization. The global is the entire physical textual closure—are built around some key sourc- territory of the world, or, perhaps more relevantly, es of the anxiety and uncertainty of global-mod- the global is the entire populated territory of the ern life in the developed world. Most significant world. We can’t make the specification any nar- of these are the structural economic instability rower than this or we loose the force of the con- that results from unruly global market forces, cept entirely. And yet these huge scales give us and the incursion of various carriers of difference very little help in understanding what globaliza- into settled localities. Although Mankell’s plots tion is or how it affects us. Of course it is true confront the entire range of issues that trouble that the environmental implications of industrial the liberal conscience of contemporary Swed- capitalism have potentially global scale, affect- ish society, as Zizek notes, a recurrent theme is ing all the landmasses, the oceans, and even the the triggering of often-gruesome consequences atmosphere. But this is not the point. in Ystad by events in less favored parts of the The point is that the global is not a space or world. Ystad’s implausibly high murder rate is even an entity that we can meaningfully under- thus often complicatedly linked to questions of stand as being causally implicated in globaliza- racism and xenophobia, the plight of refugees, tion. It is not the same as global capitalism—by sex slavery, the trading of human organs in the which we mean a system of production and con- Third World, or criminal gangs from the post- sumption networked across most, but certainly communist states of Eastern Europe. Admittedly not all, of the localities of the world (and showing Sweden’s ultra liberalism—as expressed, for ex- great variation in its concentration within these ample in its immigration policies—tend to inten- localities). Neither is it a political space: for it is sify matters.