From sociologists like Appadurai, Giddens, and Pieterse to human geographers like Massey, theorists of globalization have challenged the old notion of culture as a web of meanings that are imposed or recognized by a local community. Globalization, they argue, has created a new contingency in the formation of cultural identity, allowing for hybrid or multiple identities that operate across the lines of any localized cultural community. Habits of sports spectatorship, for instance, are shaped at once by local practice and global templates; while national identity may influence rooting interests, it has a decreasing role in conditioning the meaning of spectatorship itself. (The organization of the humanities disciplines on national lines, an inheritance from the age of nation-building, seems in this light anachronistic at best).
The insights of Global Studies theorists pose a challenge to the study of culture in the narrower sense of what is now almost universally conceived as “the arts”: if we read/view/listen/create out of (or in response to) our cultural community’s assumptions about meaning-formation, what happens when that cultural community is hybrid, contingent, or multiple? For generations, criticism assumed a bounded Western cultural community as the standpoint from which the arts were regarded (how many volumes have rationalized their limitation to Western texts or artifacts on the basis of “The West” forming a bounded cultural community); if the cultural community we now inhabit comprises both a local and a global consciousness, as Global Studies theory holds, then the position from which we write criticism of the arts changes in two ways.
First, the nature of audiences has changed; from the academic community to the self-organizing fan collectives that surround phenomena like “Star Wars,” membership is global, crossing the lines of any definably bounded cultural communities. Taken together, the fact of belonging to such audiences and the consciousness of so belonging creates an identity, a subject-position, that one may call “global.” A global consciousness is not universal; it adds a layer to the multiple value systems that condition an audience’s response to art, but it does not displace more local values nor does it have a superior authority to the values of local communities. But it should antiquate the idea of a bounded Western cultural community that privileges texts or artworks belonging to that ostensible community.
Second, the basis of humanistic criticism is the audience of one; aware as I am of critical theory, my criticism begins in my individual response to the work of art, which I then articulate and theorize so that it may enter a public discourse. The fact of a global community does not obviate the audience of one as a basis for humanistic criticism: indeed, dialogue between the sociological study of globalization and disciplines like Art History and Comparative Literature can only be meaningful if one does not subsume the other; I take the individualistic basis of criticism of the arts as the fundamental distinction between humanistic disciplines and the social sciences. My responses to artworks of all kinds are conditioned, of course, by the cultural communities in which I move; my desires and emotions, my consciousness itself, are conditioned by a set of global communities with which I am equally enmeshed in dialogue as I am with the New York metropolitan area where I have lived nearly all my life.
A brief example (that bears far more extensive investigation) of the influence of global consciousness might be the way I construct the relationship between F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Thomas Alfredsson’s Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008). Nosferatu, as I construe it, reflects the values of a bounded community: Count Orlok, the vampire, is an Eastern European outsider who resides in Transylvania, which is envisioned in the film as an alien and threatening world, marked as different from Germany as much by the Slavic clothing of its inhabitants as by the presence of vampires and werewolves. Orlok’s entry into the German city of Wisborg is figured as a visitation of the plague; he is accompanied by rats and coffins, and the populace attributes the string of deaths that follow in his wake to a mysterious disease. By contrast, in Let the Right One In, the vampire Eli (who is of no fixed gender) brings escape from the very sort of bounded community that Nosferatu envisions as being under threat, liberating “her” human consort, Oskar, from a strictured and stifling little town into a world of indefinite boundaries. The film ends with Eli and Oskar on a brightly-lit train bound for no specified destination. That I construct the relationship between the films in relation to the boundedness of the communities they represent, I would argue, testifies to the influence of an element of global consciousness in myself.
Works Cited
Alfredson, Tomas, dir. Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). EFTI, 2008. Film.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota, 1996.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990.
Massey, Doreen B. World City. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007.
Murnau, F. W. dir. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens. Jofa-Atelier, Prana-Film, 1922. Film.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.