This document discusses the concept of hybridity and the role of the state. It argues that while globalization challenges the power of nation-states, states still retain significant political, legal and regulatory authority. The document advocates examining how states shape different forms of cultural hybridity through their media and cultural policies, and how hybrid cultural identities impact media policy. Specifically, it argues that states must develop competent policies around hybridity to mitigate tensions, prevent conflicts, and enhance representative democracy.
This document discusses the concept of hybridity and the role of the state. It argues that while globalization challenges the power of nation-states, states still retain significant political, legal and regulatory authority. The document advocates examining how states shape different forms of cultural hybridity through their media and cultural policies, and how hybrid cultural identities impact media policy. Specifically, it argues that states must develop competent policies around hybridity to mitigate tensions, prevent conflicts, and enhance representative democracy.
This document discusses the concept of hybridity and the role of the state. It argues that while globalization challenges the power of nation-states, states still retain significant political, legal and regulatory authority. The document advocates examining how states shape different forms of cultural hybridity through their media and cultural policies, and how hybrid cultural identities impact media policy. Specifically, it argues that states must develop competent policies around hybridity to mitigate tensions, prevent conflicts, and enhance representative democracy.
This document discusses the concept of hybridity and the role of the state. It argues that while globalization challenges the power of nation-states, states still retain significant political, legal and regulatory authority. The document advocates examining how states shape different forms of cultural hybridity through their media and cultural policies, and how hybrid cultural identities impact media policy. Specifically, it argues that states must develop competent policies around hybridity to mitigate tensions, prevent conflicts, and enhance representative democracy.
scholar Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996) when she wrote that “context is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influences the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context with which they are practices, identities or effects’’ (p. 125, emphasis in original). Using the notion of intercontextuality, we can maintain that hybridity is always already permeated with power, without, however, arguing in favor of a generalized hegemonic out- come. In other words, while most hybridities tend to be structured in dominance, the resulting hybrid forms and identities are not always and not necessarily reflective of total dominance. Critical transcultural- ism views the relationship between structure and agency in terms of a lopsided articulation. Articulation, according to Stuart Hall (1986), “is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together in a discourse, and a way of ask- ing how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects’’ (p. 53).5 Our attention, then, needs to be redirected from debating the political and theoretical usefulness of hy- bridity, to analyzing how structures and discourses operate in a variety of contexts to shape different hybridities, and how, in turn, hybrid cul- tural forms—as we have seen, for example, with Tele Chobis in Chapter Five—reflect at once the presence of hegemony and its limitations. While some, perhaps the most powerful, politico-economic structures are global, it may be helpful to pay more attention to the role of the state as a regulator of communication processes that shape hybridity. Critical transculturalism, as mentioned earlier, considers social practice as the site of agency whose scope is both translocal and intercontextual. The state, even as its economic prerogatives have been frittered away under globalization, retains most of its political, legal, regulatory, and military power. In these domains, the national state mediates between not only the global and the local, but also the local and other locals. It is therefore helpful to reappraise the role of the state in international communication, and to explore the implications of this role for the issue of cultural hybridity.
Policy Matters: Hybridity and the State
It is widely agreed that globalization challenges the Westphalian nation- state from “above’’ and facilitates internal dynamics that challenge the state from “below,’’leading to the conclusion that the nation-state may be a threatened form of political organization. However, many advocates
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of globalization depict the state as a problem to be solved, an argument
in different versions, from liberal economics to “cultural globalization,’’ in both public and scholarly settings. Criticism of the state is present both in academic discussions of cultural globalization (as discussed in Chapter Two) and in public discourse (as analyzed in Chapter Four), or both, for example, in free flow views hostile to the New World Informa- tion and Communication Order, analyzed in Chapter Two. Contra these depictions of the state as bureaucratic, protectionist, and authoritarian, which reflect the views of transnational capital, it may be productive to contemplate a positive role for the state. Recently, perhaps as a reaction to globalization’s hostility to the state, the nation-state has emerged as an explicit theoretical and empirical con- cern in international communication (Braman, 2002; Curran and Park, 2000; Morris and Waisbord, 2001). States have always been preoccu- pied with the mass media because electronic signals ignore territorial borders and breach sovereignty. The state’s role has traditionally been that of a protector of the nation, but, as discussed in Chapter Five in regard to British television exports, states have increasingly been act- ing as mediators between national spheres and global processes. In the international system, however, most states speak for their nation as a unified cultural entity, even when national diversity is acknowledged, based on the faulty holistic premise discussed earlier in this chapter. My advocacy for a renewed local knowledge leads me to focus beyond the state’s mediating role between the national and the global and consider the state’s role in administering the local, in all its diversity, within the national space. The local, that always already hybrid realm, is where re- lations between political, social, cultural, and economic forces take con- crete forms in people’s lives. And in terms of media, the links analyzed in Chapter Six between audience perceptions and media policy in Lebanon indicate that hybrid cultural identities have important implications for media policy. I will therefore conclude with some normative reflections on hybridity as a locus of interaction between the national and the local. Situating hybridity in fields of power as I have striven to do brings to the surface the tension between cultural politics of recognition and social demands for distribution, a tension that reflects the materialist-idealist divide and that is inherent between the local and the national. In many academic and intellectual quarters, these two visions—recognition and redistribution of justice—have had a conflictual relationship, the for- mer associated with the New Left and the latter with the Old Left, the first with “cultural studies’’ and the second with “political economy,”
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recognition with discourse or representation and redistribution with
material resource allocation. To many, this competition has been asym- metrical, with the notion of recognition ascending at the expense of the redistributionist view, as captured by political theorist Nancy Fraser (1997): “Claims for the recognition of group difference have become in- creasingly salient in the recent period, at times eclipsing claims for social equality . . . . Empirically, of course, we have seen the rise of “identity politics,’’ the decentering of class, and, until very recently, the corre- sponding decline of social democracy. More deeply, however, we are witnessing an apparent shift in the political imaginary, especially the way in which justice is imagined . . . . The result is a decoupling of cul- tural politics from social politics and the relative eclipse of the latter by the former’’ (p. 2). With its simultaneous emphasis on the material and discursive as- pects of hybridity, critical transculturalism aims to recouple cultural and social politics. Cultural research and criticism concerned with so- cial justice examines how socioeconomic structures enable, hinder, or even cripple individual and social agency. For example, by “creating’’ a multiracial option, the 2000 U.S. Census undoubtedly encouraged peo- ple who believed they fit in one of the older categories to see themselves in terms of this hybrid identity. In other words, the institutionaliza- tion of a category by the state legitimizes it in the eyes of individuals and groups, thus enhancing its appeal for people whose mixed iden- tity predisposes them to select the multiracial identity. From a critical transculturalism perspective, however, the fact that structure and ideas are reciprocally formative entails no necessary outcome. As we saw in Chapter Six, Maronite youth gravitated toward television content that is theoretically counter to the political sentiment prevalent in their com- munity. Whether this “subversive’’ consumptive behavior coalesces in real action at the social or political level; whether, to put it differently, segments of Maronite youth enact real social agency; and whether, in an extrapolation beyond the scope of this book, other Lebanese communi- ties do the same and initiate an indirect dialogue stimulated by media content, depends to a major extent on the state. States must devise competent media and cultural policies for hy- bridity to act as a progressive political reality that mitigates tension, averts conflict, and enhances representative democracy. These policies must coordinate public and private interests without systematically privileging the latter. In the United States, for example, with the ex- ception of public broadcasting, the primacy of commercial interests in
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broadcasting is clear, and this logic permeates both how the system works and how it is engaged by social movements. Negative media representations of minorities, for instance, are not monitored or sanc- tioned by the state; rather, activist groups address stereotypical media depictions by organizing commercial boycotts. Because media corpora- tions recognize the rising purchasing power of certain groups, they often accommodate their demands, whether these are ethnic groups, such as African Americans and Hispanics, or more recently the gay community. The situation is different in less commercial media environments. In Latin America, states tend to follow a preservationist approach to culture, and cultural policy thus concentrates on traditional folk art and crafts and elite plastic arts. In the past, media and popular culture were neglected by policy, and when included, they were treated ac- cording to the same “preservation of culture’’ logic, an approach now giving way to market considerations in the wake of economic liberaliza- tion (Garcı́a-Canclini, 1995/2001). In western Europe and Canada, on the other hand, commercial considerations have overshadowed public broadcasting ideals, but well-enshrined social democratic values and the laws these values have inspired have arguably worked against too rapid a change and mitigated the impact of liberalization. In the Arab world, the media are caught between the exacting de- mands of markets and the repressive tendency of states. Lebanon, its freewheeling economy and relatively free civil society notwithstand- ing, is no exception to this combination of laisser-faire media economics combined with authoritarian state control over content. This tension is mediated by a system of political patronage and partitioning of media and other resources perhaps best captured by the phrase “oligarchical capitalism,’’ in which media resources are distributed along sectarian lines and controlled by the elite of each confession. This system, as ex- plained in Chapter Six, devolves power and control to the confessional level, so that leading politicians in each group have a monopoly over public expression. Instead of enhancing the prospects of constructive dialogue between communities, this rigid structure concentrates the ability to communicate in the hands of unaccountable political leaders. Therefore, oligarchical media capitalism hardens pluralism into enclav- ism where recognition and redistribution are perfectly (at least in the- ory) aligned under elite control, and it preempts hybrid identities from developing into progressive political energy. An alternative policy must be imagined, at least from a normative, if not yet practicable, point of view. In the United States, where public
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