Who the hell do you think I want to be?

[imomus]

As a general rule, British and American people idolize their own culture's richest, most famous and successful members, whereas the French idolize exotic foreign "others" -- the poorer, obscurer and further away the better. Or do I mean the lower middle classes of Britain, France and America worship bling and glitz, whereas the upper middle classes of those nations like documentaries about "unspoiled" ways of life? Yes, that's partly what I mean too.

There are clear cultural differences in attitudes to "the other". I see them daily in the editorial and textural differences between the cable TV stations I get. CNN and the BBC (while also somewhat different from each other -- the BBC has a slightly more "anthropological" approach) are basically financial, logistical, empirical, developmental and moral in their approach to the third world. French networks like TV5 and Arte, on the other hand, present long documentaries focused on "the art of living", on ways of being, on the aesthetic, the ethical and the textural. Whereas Anglo-media tends to portray traditional society as a deeply problematical zone of suffering, backwardness, poverty and oppression, Euro-media is more likely to ply the viewer with rich images of exoticism; to celebrate the otherness of the other rather than try to reduce it.

Anglo-Saxon coverage of the third world focuses on its difference as a kind of misery, whereas European coverage focuses on it as a kind of happiness. As a result, Anglo-Saxon policy (including Angrael's current multi-pronged war) is guided by a misapprehension: the idea that the "developing world" wants nothing more than to become like us. The more ambivalent European attitude is that we should make cultural "exchanges" with traditional societies, and, in some cases, become more like them. This attitude appalls the Angraeli right, who turn it into visions of a "Eurabia" where an "Islamofascist other" dominates white Europeans and converts them into "dhimmis"; tame, passive aphids.

I feel at home with the French attitude to Africa, Asia, the Middle East. And I feel increasingly alienated from -- and repulsed by -- the Anglo culture's focus on celebrity and aspiration. I locate the menace of fascism in bling-glitz culture, not in "Islamofascism". Comedian Bill Bailey has a funny line summing up the weirdly mixed British attitudes to bling-glitz: "We have this strange conflict, where we simultaneously say 'I want to be you' and 'Who do you think you are?', leaving us with a strange loop of 'Who do you think I want to be?'" It's a question the "developing world" is increasingly asking the West.

"Who do you think you are?" is what remains of the British interest in egalitarianism and fair play; let's cut down the mighty. "I want to be you" is a more recent meritocratic and Nietzschean American import of glitz-aspiration culture. The two impulses are at war in Britain (or do I mean in the lower middle classes?). In France, this deadly mix of envy and admiration is avoided. The attitude seems to be: "We are the French, and we are rich compared to these people in Mali. But they can teach us much about l'art de vivre. And above all, they are not the Americans, those vulgar imperialistic puritans."

The English Channel has always been much wider than its physical distance (less than thirty miles in places), but right now it feels positively oceanic, dividing, as it does, Angrael from the Eurozone.

Have a look at ShowStudio's Amaze Me microsite. Amaze Me is a competition organized by Sony Playstation Portable to motivate young people to be more creative. Mentors have been selected in various cities across Europe to issue challenges to young people, and judge the results. A short video clip sets a theme. You can watch these clips by city. Now, if I watch Berlin or Antwerp's mentors, I recognize people who think and feel very much as I do.

For instance, Droog Design's challenge to design ways that young people, who don't have much money, can optimize their very small living spaces seems deeply humane to me. The London mentors, on the other hand, prioritize bling and glitz. "Think of yourself as a brand," recommends hideous advertising man Graham Fink. "There are 60 million people in this country, what makes you so special? Why should I pick you over everyone else?" There it is, the image of a society of struggle, mutual hostility and competition in which everyone tries to profit at the expense of everyone else. Texturally too, Fink is creepy, with a stupid hairstyle and glinty, hostile eyes.

Or take Sarah Doukas. Her dyed blonde "I love money" hairstyle beats her to the point she spells out when she begins to speak: she's discovered "many of the world's most international models... in the most ordinary places". It's the exact opposite of the Droog Design approach. Creativity isn't about improving the lot of ordinary people, but about plucking a few lucky contenders out of the shitheap and giving them a chance to become celebrities.

An article in The Observer on Sunday repeated the bling-glitz trope. Rachel Dickens, an osteopath from Fulham, is one of an increasing number of Brits to go to live in France. "Her client list from the yachting set reads like the contents of Grazia magazine. She can't namedrop for reasons of confidentiality - 'I'd love to tell people, "Guess who I saw in their pants today!" but I can't. Let's just say that it's rock stars, pop gods, supermodels, royalty - some of the richest people in the world. As well as hairdressers and gardeners and office workers.'"

Rachel at least seems to be veering slightly away from the Anglo glitz-bling mindset. In France, she seems relatively open to the idea of changing her way of living and thinking: "If you arrive and expect everything to be run the way you're used to, then of course you're going to antagonise people. Who wants a foreigner telling them what to do? You have to relax, learn the culture, accept how things happen. "Just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong." That's a phrase I repeat to myself a lot.'"

Different isn't wrong; it's a start. It's safe to say, though, that she probably isn't yet tuning in to Arte Radio's Creations cartes postales, textural and exoticist sound postcards from Istanbul ("between minaret and demonstration, in the fabric ateliers, the souk and the café"), Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali. She's probably not quite in that European place -- whether it's a cultural or a class place -- where people who not only aren't Americans and aren't celebrities, but are actually poorer than you are, have something to teach you about how you could live your life. That place where the answer to the developing world's "Who the hell do you think I want to be?" is no longer answered by the Western "Me!"

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...I suppose I should feel mildly offended by your saying "I feel at home with the French attitude..." (which includes the stance) "...they are not the Americans, those vulgar imperialistic puritans." Of course, there are many things about the image of America and Americans that I would like to shed, or at least not be identified with, hence my obligation to object. But why does it seem to me that you keep casting about for examples of groups that you can identify with or against, or hold up as having some sort of cohesive position, when reality is far slipperier than that? What is the value of these little Euler diagrams? Just for discourse? Or for comfort? It feels a bit too clubby for my comfort.

On what I find to be an essentially unrelated subject, Droog Design's output has always struck me as being largely centered upon novelty and gadgetry. Have they produced anything that actually answered a practical need or improved upon existing designs? Sorry to be so critical, but I find nothing in their work that goes beyond the superficially clever. If I might offer a couple of examples of truly great designers whose work encompasses child-like delight and radical problem-solving, I can think of no greater than Charles Eames and Buckminster Fuller--true giants of design--and prototypical Americans--whose works will be remembered centuries after Droog Design's stuff is landfilled and forgotten.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But why does it seem to me that you keep casting about for examples of groups that you can identify with or against, or hold up as having some sort of cohesive position, when reality is far slipperier than that?

Because I believe firmly that you can have a culture of origin and a culture of destination, and that they don't have to be the same culture. Otherwise there's no journey, or rather, there's only the journey one culture takes through time. My own culture, Britain, has taken a journey which I'd describe (and I wish it had been more slippery and ambiguous, I really do) as "swinging right" since my childhood in the 1960s and 70s. So I'm interested in cauterizing my inner Briton. Or do I mean in re-inforcing an essentially British sense of fair play?

Anyway, culture tends not to work by tiny incremental empirical differences, but by definitions in relation to others. America and the developing world are the "others" for Europe, and, living in Europe now, I share the way these others get coded. But this is also, as I say, a matter of class perspective, and politics, and aesthetics. And I'm quite aware of the dangers of dismissing the "make them more like us" worldview (currently playing in a war theater near you as "force them to be more like us, for our own security").

[(Anonymous)]

Recently I read "Reassembling the Social" by Bruno Latour, and he was going on at one point about seperating 'agency' from 'figuration'. I think he was drawing on Greimas, and I didn't really know what he meant, having not much of a background in that kind of semiotics. I think you provided a good illustration here though:

"As a general rule, British and American people idolize their own culture's richest, most famous and successful members, whereas the French idolize exotic foreign "others" -- the poorer, obscurer and further away the better. Or do I mean the lower middle classes of Britain, France and America worship bling and glitz, whereas the upper middle classes of those nations like documentaries about "unspoiled" ways of life? Yes, that's partly what I mean too."

{British, Americans, and French} or {lower middle classes and upper middle classes} serve as different figurations for the same agencies. Thanks for helping me clear that up! I must say, I like the technique of giving more than one figuration; it helps one to see through the representation to the phenomenon, which in this case seems to be a matter of what kind of grass one finds greener - the expensive kind from the exclusive shop or the wierd purple kind across the valley. Sometimes it's so hard to tell the difference, though!

You should maybe visit weirder places when you come to America next time. Like Baltimore or Providence - those places are less cosmopolitan, maybe, but more weird, and probably more appreciative of weirdness as other than commodity.

Clay

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Interesting, Clay: I suppose this "figuration" allows a piece of rhetoric to rely on (necessary) binaries, but to put them "into 3D" by superimposing several contradictory binaries. It reminds us of the structuralist point that structuration is both necessary and arbitrary.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

It seems, to me, you're describing the ideal (wait for it) "scholastic" attitude: an intellectual playfulness, a retreat from the monolithic to the specific, a desire for a recombative ethos as opposed to a unchanging one. The degree to which this sort of ethic has been subdued in America saddens me deeply.

I locate the menace of fascism in bling-glitz culture, not in "Islamofascism".

...but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. The "menace of fascism" is ever-present. Whenever an ideology seeks to usurp all others, to supplant difference with a sterilized whole (ethnically, religiously, or through class oppression), fascism is bred. It's present in both, and both are to be avoided, if you ask me. Which you didn't. ;)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

We could get even more structuralist and say that a CNN Showbiz item "structures" its audience as glitz-bling types, whereas a documentary about faraway noble poor people structures exactly the same people as exoticists.

[(Anonymous)]

As so often before, you take some fair observations on human nature - in all countries - and force them to fit your preconceived idea that UK, America and Israel are bad while Japan and Europe are good (is the earth in those countries giving off some overpowering miasm?). Sure all of France just loves to "exchange" with the arabs. And the Germans have a great fondness for Turks and Poles. Czechs are currently having an amazing craic with the Gypsies.

Basically, what you're saying is that you don't like countries that exercise military or other power abroad. That doesn't leave a lot of innocents on th globe. Bhutan the new Japan, perhaps? Did you have a rivalry with your dad as a boy? Penis envy?

[zond7.livejournal.com]

I'm a long away from France (and so near to the United States), but the French take on the distant other described seems at least partly connected to Rousseau's "noble savage" meme, which always seemed to find a more comfortable home in France than anywhere else.

The U.S., of course, had a rather different take on that, as at the height of its popularity, Americans *were* the exotic noble savages. Benjamin Franklin managed to spin that for all it was worth to suck the French exchequer dry, to finance the American revolutionary war. (I can't imagine noble savagery finding any fit on the middle-class cellular walls of England.)

Distancing yourself from foreigners in order to better admire and learn from them has some advantages, but then, again, the further you place the Other from you, the easier it is to alienate them, even when they express an interest in joining you.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And this is one reason why Rupert Murdoch is so evil!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes... although I'd say that at the same time the Americans were, in some sense, the "exotic other", they were completing the genocide of the Native Americans, as well as importing slaves from Africa. And this genocide is one reason they have never felt comfortable with the Noble Savage idea. It just involves massive amounts of guilt (yes, even more than Europe's colonial history).

the further you place the Other from you, the easier it is to alienate them, even when they express an interest in joining you

I can't accept this. We've seen that Bin Laden's principal motivation is to remove American bases from Saudi Arabia. He seems pretty alientated to me. And his view is gaining ground in many countries now because, precisely, of the wars America has brought to Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. It's proximity which alienates.

[(Anonymous)]

ah, yes, I like that quite a bit. Although, in fairness, I suppose we could assign provisional group identities based on the likelihood that someone would change the channel in either case.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"Because I believe firmly that you can have a culture of origin and a culture of destination, and that they don't have to be the same culture. Otherwise there's no journey, or rather, there's only the journey one culture takes through time..."

I think that presumes that the "journey" is inevitably tied to a culture, a notion I'd dispute. Perhaps people from smaller cultures feel inexorably tied to a culture, but many Americans do not; indeed, most Americans--like myself--who are fairly widely traveled and educated, who get their information from a variety of sources and who don't subscribe to any convenient group-construct--consider themselves separate from any one culture.

"Anyway, culture tends not to work by tiny incremental empirical differences, but by definitions in relation to others."

That's certainly the currently fashionable postmodern model, but I don't find it all that useful, particularly as cultural differences dissolve at their boundaries. As I alluded to earlier, we're dealing with Venn diagrams, rather than Eulers. No matter what scale one chooses to view it at, the divisions between identified groups become increasingly impractical the more one accepts that individuals are exceedingly complex, irregular and constantly in flux. The exceptions are those who _try_ to fit into a particular culture (like those documented in the book "Exactitudes" by Arie Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek), and those who resort to nationalism and other modes of contrast.

Again, it may be an artifact of the "American as loner/rugged individualist" paradigm, but I find the notion of a "life journey" as being tied to any group in the present or future to be an unwelcome prospect. Does that inevitably mean that I miss the journey? I certainly don't think so; I find it all the more rewarding to discover whatever I might without consulting some cultural Baedeker.

[(Anonymous)]

I said that last thing about provisional group identities.

Clay

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the next step is to go the whole cultural-determinist hog and say "Ah, yes, but social conditioning also determines what an individual finds boring. When you zap, you're actually being zapped by your culture itself."

I'm not sure if I'm prepared to ride that hog quite that far, though.

[(Anonymous)]

oh, oh, which reminds me of another Latourian theme, which is assigning agency to non human actors (or 'actants' if one prefers). One could say simply that CNN projects glitzbling into the world. Then one could (or not) say something about what French documentaries do. And one could talk about what various people do with that state of affairs (watch enraptured, change the channel, complain loudly, move to france, throw out their tv).

This has been quite stimulating!

Clay

[tim-ellison.livejournal.com]

Mainstream American TV news should be seen as less of a reflection on a people and more of a monster of its own design than your post suggests.

[(Anonymous)]

It's absurd to compare the likes of CNN or BBCWorld with Arte. The first two are mainstream, global news channels. The third is a niche arts and culture channel that, even in France itself, is only watched by a tiny minority, and therefore is representative of nothing national. Rather it is representative of something international: it caters to a niche audience of older, arts-minded left-leaning middle-class people (like yourself). In most developed countries there's something a bit like Arte. In Australia there's SBS, which is very like Arte. There's BBC 4 in the UK.

With French culture, I think you're falling into the trap of assuming that the French culture that's exported and prized internationally by a certain class of people is representative of domestic cultural consumption. It isn't. Take a look at TF1, the highest-rating channel in France. You'll find it awash with schlocky aspirational programmes about the rich and famous, just like in England or the US. You won't find too many artful, art-de-vivre documentaries about Mali there.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's something in what you say: I'm responding to a bouquet of cable channels which I happen to have here, and pitting Anglo news channels against state-subsidized channels like TV5 (global Francophonie network) and Arte (French-German EU funded network -- I'd say its function is to maintain European cohesion rather than just interest a professional minority).

However, I do think that it's no accident that Anrael dominates rolling news networks while the Eurozone dominates cultural coverage. Angrael is currently the world's news agent or actor; news happens in English. (Of course, it will happen in Chinese sooner or later, and all this will change.) The EU, meanwhile, gets to specialize in the old Enlightenment ideas -- justice, equality, the noble savage and so on. TV5 and Arte are "Enlightenment networks", expressing the EU's marginality and humanity, its particular sense of having an "alternative narrative" to the opportunistic / equality of opportunity view expressed in Anglo policy and reporting.

Two structurations for the price of one: Europe has become the world's superego, America its id.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll go a step further - I'd rather slice up the hog and make bacon! (apologies to vegetarians!) A naked invocation of social conditioning, to me, has little of interest to say. Surely, something's happening in the world, and surely, other stuff in the world is related to it, but why bother saying what amounts to "X is doing Y because of all the factors within the domain of sociology that make X do Y"? It's like saying "oh, yeah, that flame burns red because of the scientific action of matter", but it's even worse, because grand sociological constructs have a shelf life of like 5 minutes.

A couple years ago, A Canadian philosopher (note the strategic location at the interstices of the Anglophone and Francophone worlds) named Ian Hacking did a sort of pragmatic analysis of "the social construction of X". In his telling, when an author talks about "the social construction of X", they typically mean:

1) X is typically taken for granted
2) however, X need not be the way it is
3) X is quite bad
4) X would be better some other way

Which is all well and good, but it points up the fact that social construction (which I'm treating, rather roughly, as cultural determinism by a different name) typically signifies a political project rather than an attempt, motivated by curiousity, to 'figure' out what is going on.

Whew! Pardon my display!

[(Anonymous)]

again, forgot to sign. Clay

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I hate all that "x is bad, because it's a construct" nonsense. As I was saying above, constructs are both arbitrary and necessary. They give, and they take away.

You aren't Clay Shirky, are you?

[(Anonymous)]

no, but that guy is cool.

Clay Templeton

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, that whole NYU School of Interactive Telecommunications thing is very interesting to me - I believe Clay Shirky is there, and Steven Johnson (author of a book called Emergence that I venture you might enjoy if you've not read it yet), and some others.

I'm presenting at a conference in Austin TX in November - American Society for Information Science & Technology - perhaps if I'm lucky I'll get to meet Mr. Shirky then.

Clay

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

I see how you can think that..my impression was that the projections of these cultural blocs was being wrestled with and how the projections/projects affect the sense of empowerment of those bathed in the glow.

Only last night a passionate friend raised the Oedipal issue(if i read between your lines)of "Kill Papa" as the premise of current criticism of the West and conspiracy theorising.

As I wean from the teat, supported by Papa's pay packet, when am I truly apart from him and grand Papa?

Perhaps the exotic other can help here when seen as the interloper in a stagnant familial relationship. Perhaps what we need now is an affair?

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

"Well, deep down, everybody's just the same, so of course those poor developing countries want to be like us!!!!!!"