Bass culture

[imomus]

In the comments section to yesterday's entry I quote an article in Monday's Guardian in which Julian Baggini and other philosophers examine imaginary scenarios designed to present typical modern problems and paradoxes. I particularly liked the first example, in which a "cosmopolitan" called Saskia is annoyed that a white waiter brings her poppadoms in an Indian restaurant, because she wants to be multicultural herself but prefers the wait staff in the "exotic" restaurants she visits to remain monocultural. "Saskia highlights one of the great inconsistencies of contemporary western liberalism," comments David Goodhart. "The Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann calls it asymmetrical multiculturalism, meaning that minority groups should express their ethnicity while dominant ones should transcend theirs."

I usually refer to "asymmetrical multiculturalism" as the strange collusion between liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists. Marxy put it rather more bitchily in a debate we were having yesterday about the meaning of a swastika he saw on a Harakjuku fashion-punk: "I'm against right-wing politics, Momus is for, as long as they aren't Western peoples." (My counter-argument was that there's nothing inherently right wing about preserving national cultural differences: artists, museum curators and restauranteurs do it as well as right wing bigots. What's more, the punk in question was decontextualizing a foreign symbol; he was more like the non-Christian Japanese women who wear crosses around their necks than a rabid nationalist.)

To me, the Guardian piece is great journalism. It gives me an outline of a plausible situation, a familiar contradiction, one I've attempted clumsily to describe myself, and it gives me a handy term for it, one I can carry around in my pocket and produce at dinner parties. I'm free to google "asymmetrical multiculturalism" or order books by the Canadian academic who coined the term. It's exactly the kind of thing that didn't happen in the piece about blogging I participated in last week, broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster last night.

Radio Ulster blogging item (3.2MB mono mp3 7min 01secs)

Now, maybe my memory is as selective as any editor, but when I think back to what I said in answer to the intelligent questions producer Stephen O'Hagan was asking me over the satellite line last week, I think the two most important things I said were citations of other people's ideas. I mentioned Thomas de Zengotita's book Mediation and spoke about blogging as "self-mediation". That made it into the programme in highly edited form; the word "self-mediation" appeared, but not the reference to Zengotita or his book. I also explained how network theorist Clay Shirky had somewhat changed my mind about my aphorism "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 people" with his essay "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality".

Now, I understand that the show's producers thought that these academic references were too clunky for a seven minute piece on blogging on a local BBC network. I realize that editors have a layman listener in mind, a kind of internalized granny character who's never even heard of blogging and doesn't want her first meeting with the concept to be cluttered up with incomprehensible jargon. I realize that you can't put links in a radio broadcast, and that the books I mentioned probably aren't easily available in Belfast. I realize that to make the references useful I'd have had to spell "Zengotita" and "Shirky" on air. I realize that the producers had to condense ten minutes of Momus-on-blogging to about 90 seconds, so that they could fit in the highly relevant (and much more accessible and amusing) points being made by Rhodri Marsden (rhodri) and Neil Scott (neil_scott). But the result of all that "plain commonsense" and "professionalism" was that the bit in my spiel that did make it past the gatekeepers of the show was a reference to Hollywood and blogging as a star system. The piece got bookended with a Moby track and much talk of Moby-as-blogger. In fact, at the end of the item it was Moby's blog address that was given out instead of mine (although Rhodri and Neil got their blogs plugged). It was assumed that the putative granny who hadn't heard of blogging had heard of Moby. "Ah yes, that nice young Christian vegan with the bald head and the coffeetable techno records," says your putative granny.

What really irked me about the presentation was the attempted populism of it: the assumption that people want recognition rather than cognition, repetition rather than revelation. So the producer inserted something familiar, a track from Moby's "Play" album, left in a bit about Hollywood but took out the "ladders" I deliberately inserted, googlable references interested listeners could have used to climb from what they already know to things they don't yet. Zengotita and Shirky are both "ladders" to really important stuff completely relevant to the debate on blogging, stuff that might have been made accessible even if there was no time to discuss it on air. I wasn't there for the money (there was none) or even to get my blog plugged, but I do feel I was there to point to those "ladders", and I feel irritated that they were kicked away.

I'm disappointed with the BBC Radio Ulster piece because I'm actually a big fan of Lord Reith of Stonehaven, the BBC's stern, tall, somewhat Presbyterian leader who, from 1922 to 1938, propounded the network's public service ethic of informing and educating the audience. I don't think you have to be populist on an arts show on a publicly-funded network like the BBC, or use baby talk, or indulge in "repetition culture" (only tell 'em what they know already), or prioritize recognition over cognition, or play fucking Moby records to get people's attention. "John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation." The 6'6" ghost of Lord Reith still stalks the BBC — he's hovering over Paganism in the Renaissance, for instance. But in some weird way I think Lord Reith now belongs to us bloggers more than he belongs to the BBC.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was having a debate with someone last week who told me that postmodernism had always existed. I feel rather the same way about your idea that multiculturalism has always existed. This is, if I may say so, a very modern idea, and somewhat PC. Sure, cultures have always mingled, but it wasn't "multiculturalism". It was brutal and self-interested. It was imperialist land-grabbing, military conquests and trade routes. Nobody was celebrating diverstiy for its own sake. Did the American settlers "celebrate the diversity" of the Native Americans? Did the Mongols "celebrate the diversity" of the nations they conquered? Did even British government try to keep Gaelic alive in Hebridean schools? Not until very, very recently has this idea of celebrating diversity become a fashionable policy. I'd say it's a postmodern idea.

The "multiculture of multicultures" idea gets dangerously close to the situation Terry Eagleton mocks when he says "Culture has descended from the macro to the micro -- from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?"

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I'm a micro-culture.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

South Asia and SE Asia are examples. Buddhist tolerance may have something to do with it, or it may be that animism and polytheism are more respectful of different ways of doing things than monotheism.

Well, to use your own techniques against you, how can you stereotype South and SE Asian cultures as being Buddhist, animist and polytheist and tell me they're consequently respectful of difference? Isn't that a huge generalisation that ignores the (monotheistic) Islamic influence in Indonesia? So unrespectful of difference was Islam in Java that it forced the puppeteers there to stop representing the human form in their shows, leading them to create the shadow play! Javanese culture as we know it now is certainly a result of contact with others, but not tolerant ones, and not people who could ever be described as "diversity-celebrating multiculturalists"!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't think we have to single Islam out; almost no cultural contact before the age of mass tourism and postcolonial guilt has been about "celebrating diversity".

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[jbmurray.livejournal.com]

I agree. imomus would seem again to be a victim of his own presentism.

Of course, the various heady cultural mixtures that have characterized history are usually pretty complex, falling somewhere between the current liberal ideal of "tolerance" (which is no less self-interested, let me say) and the ruthless "brutality" of a war of all against all. Pragmatism has usually been the order of the day.

[(Anonymous)]

The "celebration of diversity" (yuk!) is now a given, yes. Ironic then that while our governments, media and thinkers extol and promote it, we are actually shown up by historical precedents. What to cite? There are many examples to chose from. From antiquity one of the most important examples of cultural interplay was the cross-fertilization over a long period of Indian and Greek thought (not to ignore their influence on other cultures, or other cultures' influence on them).

You mention the Mongols, but they assumed the refined culture of those they conquered in India and the Middle East very soon after brutalizing them, turning their backs on the shamanistic nomadism that inspired their marauding.

The Muslim empires were exemplars of multiculturalism.

Finally, I would like to say that the descendants of the American settlers are destroying diversity with the same exuberance (a little less grossly perhaps, but equally nefariously) as their forebears. One of the first things the Americans did in Iraq was to ensure the populace had access to the joy and knowledge in American TV. MTV in Africa anyone? I would be willing to bet that many of the places that Western ethnomusicologists visited in the first fifty, sixty, even seventy years of this century would now yield recordings with nothing like the richness and "otherness" they once had.

We may give lip service to the idea of multiculturalism, but this century will surely see difference in all it's beauty watered down. Very sad indeed.