2006 “Comentario.” Cultural Analysis 5: 107-15 <http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~caforum/volume5/vol5_discuss1.html>.

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Of the approximately 200 sovereign-states in the world, over 160 are cultur-ally heterogeneous, and they are com-prised of 5000 ethnic groups. Between 10and 20% of the world’s population cur-rently belongs to a racial/linguistic mi-nority in their country of residence. Ninehundred million people affiliate withgroups that suffer systematic discrimi-nation. Perhaps three-quarters of theworld system sees politically active mi-norities, and there are more than 200movements for self-determination,spread across nearly 100 states (Thio2002; Abu-Laban 2000, 510; Brown andGanguly 2003, 1, n. 1; Falk 2004, 11). Eventhe “British-Irish archipelago,” oncefamed “as the veritable forge of the na-tion state, a template of modernity,” hasbeen subdivided by cultural difference,as a consequence of both peaceful andviolent action, and a revisionist histori-ography that notes the millennial migra-tion of Celts from the steppes; Romancolonization; invading Angles, Saxons,Jutes, Frisians, and Normans; attackingScandinavians; trading Indians, Chinese,Irish, Lombards, and Hansa; refugee Eu-ropeans and Africans; and the 25,000black folks in London in the 18th century(Nairn 2003, 8; Alibhai-Brown 2005).

There are now five key zones of im-migration—North America, Europe, theWestern Pacific, the Southern Cone, andthe Persian Gulf—and five key types ofmigration: international refugees, inter-nally displaced people, voluntary mi-grants, the enslaved, and the smuggled.The number of refugees and asylum-seekers at the beginning of the 21st cen-tury was 21.5 million—three times thefigure twenty years earlier (United Na-

tions Development Programme 2004, 6and 2; Massey 2003, 146; Cohen 1997).1

The International Organization for Mi-gration estimates that global migrationincreased from 75 million to 150 millionpeople between 1965 and 2000, and theUN says 2% of all people spent 2001 out-side their country of birth, more than atany other moment in history. Migrationhas doubled since the 1970s, and the Eu-ropean Union has seen arrivals from be-yond its borders grow by 75% in the lastquarter century. Many such people comeand go serially—one and a half billionairline tickets were sold in 2000 (Castlesand Miller 2003, 4; Annan 2003; UnitedNations Development Programme 2004,30).

This mobility, whether voluntary orimposed, temporary or permanent, isaccelerating. Along with new forms ofcommunication, it enables unprec-edented levels of cultural displacement,renewal, and creation between andacross origins and destinations. Most ofthese exchanges are structured in domi-nance: the majority of international in-vestment and trade takes place withinthe First World, while the majority ofimmigration is from the Third World tothe First (Pollard 2003, 70; Sutcliffe 2003,42, 44). In response to new migration,there are simultaneous tendencies to-wards open and closed borders. Noneof the major recipients of migrants racedto ratify the UN’s 2003 International Con-vention on the Protection of the Rightsof All Migrant Workers and Members oftheir Families (Annan 2003), even as theybenefit economically and culturally fromthese arrivals.

Opinion polling suggests sizeable

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majorities across the globe believe theirnational ways of life are threatened byglobal flows of people and things, andso they oppose immigration. In otherwords, their cultures are under threat. Atthe same time, they also feel unable tocontrol their individual destinies. Inother words, their subjectivities are un-der threat (Pew Research Center for thePeople and the Press 2003, 2004). This hasled to outbursts of regressive national-ism, whether via the belligerence of theUnited States, the anti-immigrant stanceof Western Europe, or the crackdown onminorities in Eastern Europe, Asia, andthe Arab world (Halliday 2004). Thepopulist outcome is often violent—raceriots in 30 British cities in the 1980s; po-groms against Roma and migrant work-ers in Germany in the 1990s and Spainin 2000; the intifadas; migrant-workerstruggles in France in 1990—on it goes.Virtually any arrival can be racialized,though particular feeling is often re-served for expatriates from former colo-nies (Downing and Husband 2005, xi, 7).If one takes the two most important sitesof migration from the Third World to theFirst—Turkey and Mexico—one seesstate and vigilante violence alongsidecorporate embrace in host countries, anddonor nations increasingly recognizingthe legitimacy of a hybrid approach tocitizenship (Bauböck 2005, 9).

The dilemmas that derive from thesechanges underpin John Gray’s critiqueof “the West’s ruling myth . . . that mo-dernity is a single condition, everywherethe same and always benign,” a veritableembrace of Enlightenment values. Mo-dernity is just as much to do with globalfinancial deregulation, organized crime,

and religious violence as democracy,uplift, and opportunity; just as much todo with fundamentalist neoliberalism,religion, and authoritarianism as free-dom, belief, and justice. At the same time,identity has become the fastest-growing,albeit often illegal, component of ad-vanced economies, via recreationaldrugs, industrialized sex, and cyber-fraud, as well as television, music, andsport (Gray 2003, 1–2, 46).

In addition to this international lump-ing and splitting, the specifically hetero-geneous hybridity of urban experienceis on the increase. Across the globe, cit-ies have undergone “macrocephalic”growth (Scott 1998, 49), to the pointwhere they burst at the seams—not somuch with opportunity and differentia-tion, but desperation and sameness. UNHABITAT estimates that a billion peoplereside in slum conditions, a figure ex-pected to double in the next three de-cades. In 1950, only London and NewYork were big enough cities to qualify asmegalopolises. By 1970, there were 11such places, with 33 projected for 2015.The fifteen biggest cities in 1950 ac-counted for 82.5 million people; in 1970the aggregate was 140.2 million; and in1990, 189.6 million. Four hundred citiestoday have more than a million occu-pants, and 37 have between 8 and 26million (García Canclini 1999, 74; Scott1998, 49; Dogan 2004, 347). Almost 50%of the world’s population lived in citiesin 2000, up from 30% in 1960. In fact morepeople are urban dwellers today thanwere alive in 1960; and for the first timein world history, more people now livein cities than rural areas. Most of the re-mainder are desperately poor peasants

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(Davis 2004, 5; Observatoire de la Fi-nance and the United Nations Institutefor Training and Research 2003, 19; Amin2003). Across Latin America, for instance,70% of people moved from the countryto the city in the four decades from themid-20th century, with Mexico City grow-ing from 1.6 million residents in 1940 to19–29 million today, depending on whichfigures you consult (Martín-Barbero2003, 40; García Canclini 2001, 13). Theemergence of capitalism in China is an-other key instance. It had 293 cities in1978. Today it has 640. These changes arereactions to economic, military, and so-cial polices, such as neoliberal econom-ics’ insistence on agricultural trade oversubsistence, military planning, and cor-porate domination over local concerns.In India, as many as 55 million peoplemay have been displaced from agricul-tural life because of dams constructed inthe name of development: the GreenRevolution dispatched surplus workersaway from rural disappointment andtowards urban hope (Castles and Miller2003, 3; Roy 2004; Davis 2004, 10, 7).

In the post-1989 epoch, crises of cog-nitive mapping—where am I and howdo I get to where I want to be?—havebeen added to by crises of ideologicalmapping—who are we and what do westand for? (UN HABITAT 2003; Martín-Barbero 2000, 336). No wonder MexicoCity’s people live with the heavily ironicmotto “La Ciudad de Esperanza”—thecity of hope. They go there for a bettermaterial existence. In doing so, they losethe familiarity and security of the every-day in a world that sometimes appearsto be “rushing backwards to the age ofDickens” (Davis 2004, 11).

At this time of crisis, art and customhave become resources for markets andnations—reactions to the crisis of belong-ing and to economic necessity. As a con-sequence, culture is more than textualsigns or everyday practices. It also pro-vides the legitimizing ground on whichparticular groups (e.g., African Ameri-cans, gays and lesbians, the hearing-im-paired, or evangelical Protestants) claimresources and seek inclusion in nationalnarratives (Yúdice 2002, 40 and 1990;Martín-Barbero 2003, 40).

This intermingling has implicationsfor both aesthetic and social hierarchies.Culture comes to “regulate and structure. . . individual and collective lives”(Parekh 2000, 143) in competitive waysthat harness art and collective meaningfor governmental and commercial pur-poses. So the Spanish Minister for Cul-ture can address Sao Paolo’s 2004 WorldCultural Forum with a message of cul-tural maintenance that is both about eco-nomic development and the preserva-tion of aesthetic and customary identity.Culture is understood as a means togrowth via “cultural citizenship,”through a paradox—that universal (andmarketable) value is placed on the speci-ficity of different cultural backgrounds.Similarly, Taiwan’s Premier can brokeran administrative reorganization of gov-ernment as a mix of economic efficiencyand “cultural citizenship” (qtd. in ForoCultural 2004 and Yu 2004). This simul-taneously instrumental and moral ten-dency is especially important in the US,albeit in a rather different way. For theUnited States is virtually alone amongstwealthy countries, both in the wide-spread view of its citizens that their cul-

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ture is superior to others, and the suc-cessful sale of that culture around theworld (Pew Research Center for thePeople and the Press 2003). The US hasblended preeminence in two culturalregisters, exporting both popular pre-scriptions for entertainment and eco-nomic prescriptions for labor. These havebecome signs and sources of the globalcrisis of belonging, even as their senderdisplays a willful ignorance of why therest of the world may not always and ev-erywhere wish to follow its example,despite buying its popular culture(Carreño 2001, 22).

My working assumption is that cul-tures are constitutively blended. Reac-tionary and progressive ideas about cul-tural essences are equally flawed, giventhe multiplicity of other affinities thateven those who share a particular cul-ture may have (Benhabib 2002, 4). Ratherthan operating from the idea of cultureas superordinate, I assume that it is sub-ject to the shifts and shocks of materialpolitics that characterize other socialnorms, and must be understood via ablend of political economy, textual analy-sis, and ethnography. I argue that theright has been as important in the cre-ation of cultural politics as the left,through forms of neoliberal governancethat turn identities into market and reli-gious niches that are linked to self-for-mation and social control through con-sumption. If this is correct, then for a pro-gressive politics to thrive, new forms ofsocial obligation must be levied in returnfor the fetishization of deregulated,commodified, and superstitious differ-ence. This can be done by appealing tocollective responsibility as a quid pro quo

for commercial and faith-based target-ing—a way of connecting what in theHispanic Americas is called la culturapolitica with la política cultural—linkingcivic culture to cultural policy.

The global crisis I have briefly de-scribed, and its associated cultural rami-fications, are, it seems to me, the back-drop to the papers collected here. BarbroKlein asks, “[i]n what way is the ascen-dancy of cultural heritage as term andphenomenon linked to the ascendancyof intense multicultural co-existence?How is the heritage of various ethnicOthers to be understood in relationshipto that which is regarded Our Own?” Inaddressing these questions, Klein refersto the Swedish case. Its fetishization ofthe peasantry in the 19th century reso-nates for me with the Mexican situation,where art forms akin to socialist-realistindigenous heroization of the worker canbe found outside Marxism, but insideevery zocalo (town-square), as part of uti-lizing inclusive heritage as a means ofmobilizing the popular classes. Some ofKlein’s analysis details moments whenSweden was an export culture, via itsgreat migration to the upper mid-westof the United States, and I wonderedabout how that exodus factored into do-mestic debates about the nation, and con-temporary policies of refugee migrationand Swedish culture abroad. Cris Shoreasks: “is the European Union (or, to useits earlier incarnation, the European Com-munity), one people or many? And whatis, or should be, the relationship betweenpeoplehood and culture in the EU’semerging system of supranational gov-ernance?” Shore ponders why cultureemerged as a key precept in the Union

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during the 1980s. Again, there are somepolitical-economic explanations, to dowith manufacturing and agriculturaldeindustrialization and culturalreindustrialization, as we can discernfrom the “euro-pudding” co-production offilm and television drama. For her part,Dorothy Noyes worries that “thereification of tradition as community-managed heritage tends to undermineone of the most important uses of localtradition, the collective negotiation ofintracommunity conflict—such that ourglobal Solomons are likely to be calledupon to judge more and more local dis-putes.” She examines intellectual prop-erty, a focus of global labor-based analy-sis (Miller et al. 2005). The implication Idraw from these papers is that culturallabor should be a new center of work incultural policy studies.

Apart somewhat from these originalempirical contributions by a diverse ar-ray of authors and perspectives, TonyBennett dichotomizes recent work incultural policy theoretically, separatingit into a grand binary of public-sphereromantic textualism versus tough-real-ity governmentality pragmatism. On thisreading, Habermas and disciples aremisguided, whereas Foucault and fol-lowers are correct line. The model of thegeneral critical intellectual as per the free-floating critic is flawed, because it relieson an endlessly deferred, almost irre-sponsible dialectical method. Con-versely, the specific intellectual, as per theWeberian bureaucrat, offers a goodmodel, because culture is about techni-cal specifications rather than conscious-ness.

It seems to me that this distinctionrelies on very large generalizations aboutbureaucracy—that assume it does whatit says, and that economic self-interest,specifically class interest, is separate fromhow policy is formed. Even if bureau-crats resemble the figures outlined here,they are often the pleasure-things of poli-ticians and corporations, as any accountof neoliberalism clarifies. None of the au-thors cited from the post-governmentality tradition has under-taken ethnographic or political-economicevaluations of contemporary culturaladministration across the world (or dis-played great awareness of that large lit-erature), so what is the basis for theirclaims about equivalent self-reflexivityamong direct servants of the state andcapital to that of critical intellectuals? Itis true that the claim for the general in-tellectual as an independent scion oftruth who cuts through special interestsis problematic—anyone actually watch-ing public intellectuals at work, as permedia mavens or other universal ex-perts, can see that. But it is also true thatdistance from the specific interests thatdrive policy, along with the protectionsof liberal education and other arms-length private and public infrastructures,propels a certain autonomy in contrastwith culturecrats.

These are stimulating, provocativepapers. Each one touches on issues I havelong pondered, and each one taught memany new things about them. I thinkthey could have benefited from a politi-cal-economic analysis that foregroundedthe sorts of issues with which I began thiscomentario. The questions of who gains,

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who labors, who flees, and who inter-prets are at the core of culture and itspolicies. In theoretical terms, the situa-tion seems to call for a blend of ethnog-raphy and political economy to compre-hend the labor of cultural policy.

Notes

1 Four million people travel as slaves each

year, generating revenues of up to US$7 billion

annually through forced labor, especially in the

sex industries (Maryniak 2003).

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