Postcoloniality and Globalization:Media and the Internet
Mark Poster in a recent article (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24:4, 379 - 393) asks the question "is the epoch of postcolonial studies over"? His conclusion is that postcolonial mode of theory is in the decline and moreover with globalization and dissemination of Internet we can encounter a “planetary culture” that “might yield an instantiation of globalization that was neither foreseen nor desired by its neo-liberal proponents" (p. 391). He bases this conclusion on some valid critique of postcolonial theories. He particularly draws on Bhaba's idea of “Third Space” and “hybridity” and argues that the hybridity created by the new media and “electronic spaces” are very different than that envisioned by postcolonial theorists like Bhaba and others. Instead of looking at the colonizer/colonized schema, he wants to focus on the media landscape using Foucault's notion of power. However, from a scholar like Poster it is surprisingly a flimsy argument that does not bode well with the realities of the new media associated with the other structural changes that is happening in the neo-liberal economic systems.
As mentioned above, Poster starts with Bhaba's notion of hybridity and argues that this hybridization is taking a new form with the advent of networked computers: “After the intense globalization of the past thirty years, the situation is altered and more complex still. For one thing, the peoples of the non-Western world are now, in large numbers, in the Western World, an outcome that has led to theories of multiculturalism and diaspora. To some extent, this is not new: Jews and Muslims inhabited Europe before Western globalization. The Chinese immigrated throughout Asia. Africans have been (unwillingly) placed in the West since the early days of globalization. Postcolonial theories of colonizer and colonized do not lend themselves to illuminate this sort of mixing. Second, the tremendous impact of the economic aspect of globalization has brought Western commodities to the rest of the world and has incorporated non-Western labor into the design and manufacture of Western goods and even increasingly for services, for markets all over the world. Postcolonial nations are now suffused with Western commodities, including the labor skills learned in Western universities and exported back home. Third, cultural objects now extend back and forth between the West and the rest through global communications systems.”
Although he mentions about labor and commodities but the direction of the article solely focuses on “global communications systems”. He brings in Appadurai's idea of “mediascape” in order to balance it with some postcolonial critique. To bring in media issue here is relevant, as he argues, but does that fill the gap of postcolonial theorizing?“As the migrants circulate through the space of nations, affected by mass media and armed with their own media, the condition of postcoloniality is altered. For postcoloniality depended upon a stable geography of nations, each one harboring its people or better peoples with the asymmetry of the West and the rest defining a cartography of interaction and strife.”
Postcoloniality is altered, there's no doubt about that. But is it just through diffusion of media and information? There is a certain aspect of “informationilzing” the issues in Poster's argument that needs to be carefully looked at.
He does find Appardurai's notion of media limiting, but how does he fix it? Poster is too much focused on the difference of the media rather than the structural differences that are attached to media such as copyright, ownership etc: “Appadurai’s thesis of globalization as migration and media, productive as it is, does not adequately explore the difference of media or appear to reflect an understanding of the specificity of media. The subtlety of his analysis does not extend to an appreciation of the particular material and cultural forms of media. In the passage quoted above, for instance, he attributes the “rupture” introduced by media in the constitution of the contemporary imaginary to “electronic media.” This is far too general a term. He seems to be referring to networked computing. But “electronic” refers as well to radio, television and film, not to mention satellite communications systems and mobile phones. In other passages he refers to mass media in a way that does not exclude the Internet but probably should since networked computing is a many-to-many communications system not a few-to-many apparatus like television or film. The murkiness of Appadurai’s understanding of media inhibits the analytic power of his argument, as I will attempt to indicate below. It does not account for the difference between media controlled by transnational capital and media that afford individuals positions of speech, between media that enforce and reproduce the opposition of producer and consumer to media that challenge that separation.”
Poster then brings in Foucauldian notion to understand the complexity of mediascape which I think is very useful: “In particular, Foucault’s notion of productive power is especially germane in the understanding of media. For Foucault, power produces relations and subject positions within those relations. Power for him is an apparatus (dispositif ) or mechanism, combining architectural spaces, practices, rules, and discourses. The confessional, the prison, the workshop and the school are prime examples of the operations of productive power. In each case individuals are positioned in such manner that they construct themselves in relations with others and with themselves. These relations are always asymmetrical, including some degree of domination. Individuals in these subject positions, however, are to a large extent unconscious of all the mechanisms that structure the situation in which they find themselves......This concept of power is particularly useful in understanding media effects and in fact, some of Foucault’s depictions of power sound as if he were speaking about computer networks.”
Then he falls in to the trope of “network” and “global” ideas of information which is not very helpful in understanding the complexity he is trying to unveil. To his credit he does point out the complexity of the "network" but does not follow through:“How then does the globally networked communication system of digitized computing imbrication users unconsciously into new configurations of rectification? This apparently innocent question is complicated by three areas of concern: first is the question of the multiple nature of the Internet; second, and related to the first, is the relation of preexisting social and cultural forms to digital culture; third is the relation of non-Western cultures with the Internet mode of information that was originally developed in the West.”
I was following his argument till now and pretty much agreed with it, but with the following arrangement he lost me: “The digital self that participates in Internet public spheres is different from the individual speaking in the angora or the coffee house, as well as from the representative of individuals speaking in democratic institutions like parliaments. Digital information machines construct subjects who are present only through their textual, aural, and visual uploads. The requirement of networked computing constructs subjects as producers of cultural objects, just like the speeches uttered in coffee houses or the essays published in newspapers, journals and books. Networked computing also enables subjects to distribute their own work to countless numbers of recipients, such as in globs, Listerine,multiple email distributions, web pages and file transfer protocol programs. In this respect, the digital self is more like a broadcaster than like an individual speaker at a meeting. Like some other media, a degree of anonymity is enabled by networked computing so that the assurances one has about identity in face-to-face situations or in publications that have strong gatekeeper functions such as newspapers and in print in general do not obtain.”
He goes on:“We cannot yet be confident in giving shape to this emergent identity but we must acknowledge its novelty. “
OK, I agree with the notion of novelty but so what? Then, he says: “Since the digital self also absorbs the accordances and constraints of the Internet, we can say that the positions of speech that are made possible in this medium are greatly expanded from what we have known before. To obtain such a speaking position in the digital world is vastly easier and more affordable than any comparable participation in the past. To speak in the angora one had to be a member of the elite of free citizens of Athens; to speak in the coffee house of early modern London, one had to be an adult, Christian (probably Protestant) male at least of the bourgeoisie; to speak in a salon in eighteenth century Paris, one had to be an invited aristocrat or bourgeois. To speak on the Internet, there are no age limits, no gender limits, and no religious, ethnic or national limits. Indeed there is no way to discern these traits in most Internet discussion forums, from Usenet to chat rooms, from Listerine to blogs"
Yes, there is not limit in the Internet like ancient Athens but that does not imply equal participation. I find the notion of “global space” and digital self” very limiting in a sense that it “absorbs the accordances and constraints of the Internet” as he implies but does not elaborate on it. And he is probably also sick of this “global” term so he leaps to the planetary dimension: “In this regard, digital subjects are solicited not to stabilize, to centralize, to unify the territorial identity they were given by birth or social position, but to invent and to construct themselves in relations with others. In the digital medium, subject formation becomes a task inherent in cultural exchange. And it does so at a planetary level.”
Here I think he is under the “global long-sightedness” (Olson 2005)virus which is not helpful to look at what is going on locally. The communication, interaction and hybridization that are happening is useful and we need a global lens, no doubt, however, but in the expense of ignoring the locality and the particularly that the postcolonial mode that provide. It is not yet settled that postcolonial theory is in the decline or not, there are new dimensions that needs to be looked and media is definitely one of them. However, the over hyped notion of "network" and the idea "planetary communication" only create jargons that undervalue the specificity of the smaller issues.
References:
Olesen, Thomas. 2006. “Transnational Protest and global Activism/Coalitions across Borders:
Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order. International Sociology. 21: 417422.
Poster, Mark. 2007. "Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications". Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24:4, 379 - 393
As mentioned above, Poster starts with Bhaba's notion of hybridity and argues that this hybridization is taking a new form with the advent of networked computers: “After the intense globalization of the past thirty years, the situation is altered and more complex still. For one thing, the peoples of the non-Western world are now, in large numbers, in the Western World, an outcome that has led to theories of multiculturalism and diaspora. To some extent, this is not new: Jews and Muslims inhabited Europe before Western globalization. The Chinese immigrated throughout Asia. Africans have been (unwillingly) placed in the West since the early days of globalization. Postcolonial theories of colonizer and colonized do not lend themselves to illuminate this sort of mixing. Second, the tremendous impact of the economic aspect of globalization has brought Western commodities to the rest of the world and has incorporated non-Western labor into the design and manufacture of Western goods and even increasingly for services, for markets all over the world. Postcolonial nations are now suffused with Western commodities, including the labor skills learned in Western universities and exported back home. Third, cultural objects now extend back and forth between the West and the rest through global communications systems.”
Although he mentions about labor and commodities but the direction of the article solely focuses on “global communications systems”. He brings in Appadurai's idea of “mediascape” in order to balance it with some postcolonial critique. To bring in media issue here is relevant, as he argues, but does that fill the gap of postcolonial theorizing?“As the migrants circulate through the space of nations, affected by mass media and armed with their own media, the condition of postcoloniality is altered. For postcoloniality depended upon a stable geography of nations, each one harboring its people or better peoples with the asymmetry of the West and the rest defining a cartography of interaction and strife.”
Postcoloniality is altered, there's no doubt about that. But is it just through diffusion of media and information? There is a certain aspect of “informationilzing” the issues in Poster's argument that needs to be carefully looked at.
He does find Appardurai's notion of media limiting, but how does he fix it? Poster is too much focused on the difference of the media rather than the structural differences that are attached to media such as copyright, ownership etc: “Appadurai’s thesis of globalization as migration and media, productive as it is, does not adequately explore the difference of media or appear to reflect an understanding of the specificity of media. The subtlety of his analysis does not extend to an appreciation of the particular material and cultural forms of media. In the passage quoted above, for instance, he attributes the “rupture” introduced by media in the constitution of the contemporary imaginary to “electronic media.” This is far too general a term. He seems to be referring to networked computing. But “electronic” refers as well to radio, television and film, not to mention satellite communications systems and mobile phones. In other passages he refers to mass media in a way that does not exclude the Internet but probably should since networked computing is a many-to-many communications system not a few-to-many apparatus like television or film. The murkiness of Appadurai’s understanding of media inhibits the analytic power of his argument, as I will attempt to indicate below. It does not account for the difference between media controlled by transnational capital and media that afford individuals positions of speech, between media that enforce and reproduce the opposition of producer and consumer to media that challenge that separation.”
Poster then brings in Foucauldian notion to understand the complexity of mediascape which I think is very useful: “In particular, Foucault’s notion of productive power is especially germane in the understanding of media. For Foucault, power produces relations and subject positions within those relations. Power for him is an apparatus (dispositif ) or mechanism, combining architectural spaces, practices, rules, and discourses. The confessional, the prison, the workshop and the school are prime examples of the operations of productive power. In each case individuals are positioned in such manner that they construct themselves in relations with others and with themselves. These relations are always asymmetrical, including some degree of domination. Individuals in these subject positions, however, are to a large extent unconscious of all the mechanisms that structure the situation in which they find themselves......This concept of power is particularly useful in understanding media effects and in fact, some of Foucault’s depictions of power sound as if he were speaking about computer networks.”
Then he falls in to the trope of “network” and “global” ideas of information which is not very helpful in understanding the complexity he is trying to unveil. To his credit he does point out the complexity of the "network" but does not follow through:“How then does the globally networked communication system of digitized computing imbrication users unconsciously into new configurations of rectification? This apparently innocent question is complicated by three areas of concern: first is the question of the multiple nature of the Internet; second, and related to the first, is the relation of preexisting social and cultural forms to digital culture; third is the relation of non-Western cultures with the Internet mode of information that was originally developed in the West.”
I was following his argument till now and pretty much agreed with it, but with the following arrangement he lost me: “The digital self that participates in Internet public spheres is different from the individual speaking in the angora or the coffee house, as well as from the representative of individuals speaking in democratic institutions like parliaments. Digital information machines construct subjects who are present only through their textual, aural, and visual uploads. The requirement of networked computing constructs subjects as producers of cultural objects, just like the speeches uttered in coffee houses or the essays published in newspapers, journals and books. Networked computing also enables subjects to distribute their own work to countless numbers of recipients, such as in globs, Listerine,multiple email distributions, web pages and file transfer protocol programs. In this respect, the digital self is more like a broadcaster than like an individual speaker at a meeting. Like some other media, a degree of anonymity is enabled by networked computing so that the assurances one has about identity in face-to-face situations or in publications that have strong gatekeeper functions such as newspapers and in print in general do not obtain.”
He goes on:“We cannot yet be confident in giving shape to this emergent identity but we must acknowledge its novelty. “
OK, I agree with the notion of novelty but so what? Then, he says: “Since the digital self also absorbs the accordances and constraints of the Internet, we can say that the positions of speech that are made possible in this medium are greatly expanded from what we have known before. To obtain such a speaking position in the digital world is vastly easier and more affordable than any comparable participation in the past. To speak in the angora one had to be a member of the elite of free citizens of Athens; to speak in the coffee house of early modern London, one had to be an adult, Christian (probably Protestant) male at least of the bourgeoisie; to speak in a salon in eighteenth century Paris, one had to be an invited aristocrat or bourgeois. To speak on the Internet, there are no age limits, no gender limits, and no religious, ethnic or national limits. Indeed there is no way to discern these traits in most Internet discussion forums, from Usenet to chat rooms, from Listerine to blogs"
Yes, there is not limit in the Internet like ancient Athens but that does not imply equal participation. I find the notion of “global space” and digital self” very limiting in a sense that it “absorbs the accordances and constraints of the Internet” as he implies but does not elaborate on it. And he is probably also sick of this “global” term so he leaps to the planetary dimension: “In this regard, digital subjects are solicited not to stabilize, to centralize, to unify the territorial identity they were given by birth or social position, but to invent and to construct themselves in relations with others. In the digital medium, subject formation becomes a task inherent in cultural exchange. And it does so at a planetary level.”
Here I think he is under the “global long-sightedness” (Olson 2005)virus which is not helpful to look at what is going on locally. The communication, interaction and hybridization that are happening is useful and we need a global lens, no doubt, however, but in the expense of ignoring the locality and the particularly that the postcolonial mode that provide. It is not yet settled that postcolonial theory is in the decline or not, there are new dimensions that needs to be looked and media is definitely one of them. However, the over hyped notion of "network" and the idea "planetary communication" only create jargons that undervalue the specificity of the smaller issues.
References:
Olesen, Thomas. 2006. “Transnational Protest and global Activism/Coalitions across Borders:
Transnational Protest and the Neoliberal Order. International Sociology. 21: 417422.
Poster, Mark. 2007. "Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications". Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24:4, 379 - 393