David Morley:
(Tomado de http://www.talaljuk-ki.hu/index.php/article/articleview/694/1/62/,
a través de la caché de Google, ya que la dirección
no era operativa en agosto de 2006).
One of the principal effects of the widely perceived loss of
certainty, security and safety in the destabilised “risk societies” in which we
now live, has been a widespread retreat into regressive forms of “closure”–
whether at a national or local level.
It is in this context
that we might best consider the significance of the defensive responses which
commonly arise among those who find their lives disrupted by the forces of
globalisation – what Etienne Balibar has called
“identity panics”. In a situation where people feel unable to control the wider
social relations in which they live they often tend to
retreat into obsessive forms of "particularism",
as a way of coping with this sense of threat.
Inclusion/Exclusion
One of my
concerns, in exploring these issues here, is to make some links between debates
about immigration policy, debates in urban studies about patterns of residence,
and debates within communications studies about patterns of media consumption.
I also want to link these questions to anthropological perspectives on
practices of boundary maintenance. In doing this, my primary focus will be on
anxiety-driven "rituals of exclusion" of alterity
– although I am aware that this is only one side of an ambivalent story, in so
far as alterity can also be a focus of desire (but
that’s another story...).
If various
contemporary forms of communication and mobility routinely transgress the
boundaries of the "sacred" spaces of the home, homeland or "Heimat", the issue is then how those
"transgressions" are characteristically regulated. Inevitably, these
regulatory processes generate conflict in their attempt to expel "alterity" beyond the boundaries of the ethnically or
culturally "purified" enclave – whether at the level of the home, the
residential neighbourhood or that of the nation. Here the issue is who is to
define who "belongs" or what is to be excluded as "matter out of
place" – to use the anthropologist Mary Douglas’ definition – whether that
"matter" is represented by "impure" materials which are
deemed to profane the home; by "strangers" of one sort or another who
are felt to profane the neighbourhood or by "foreign" cultural
objects which are seen to defile the symbolic space of the nation.
For Zygmunt Bauman, at stake here is a process in which the
figure of the "stranger" comes to incarnate risk itself and various
forms of alterity come to be felt to embody, by
proxy, the insecurity that now haunts many people's lives. Thus the stranger is
transmogrified – by cultural technologies such as CCTV cameras – into an alien,
and the alien into a threat – and "cleansing" our streets of these
strangers then stands in as a proxy solution for ridding ourselves of fear.
There
is a growing tendency towards residential
segregation
throughout the affluent societies of
the
West, as those who can afford to do so
increasingly
remove themselves from the
fractious world of the
decaying public sphere.
If, as I suggested
earlier, hyper-mobility is one of the key figures of our postmodern
condition, then its correlative is surely the gated community. There is a
growing tendency towards residential segregation throughout the affluent
societies of the West, as those who can afford to do so increasingly remove
themselves from the fractious world of the decaying public sphere. Here we
confront the politics of withdrawal and separation, both within the city, and
in the flight of privileged groups to the suburbs, or to the countryside, by
way of escape from the bourgeoning multiculturalism of city life. I want to
propose that we might usefully consider these processes of
"suburbanisation" in the light of Roger Silverstone's comments on
television as itself a "suburbanising" medium – which, through its
repetitive and reassuring patterns, consolidates the sense of security of those
within the communities it serves. In the conjunction of these processes, I want
to suggest, what we sometimes see emerging, rather than the much-advertised
fluid and hybrid forms of postmodern subjectivity,
are new forms of consolidation of old patterns of social and cultural
segregation. This isn't to suggest that this is all that the media do, or that
this is all there is to suburbanism. However, these
contemporary processes of cultural segregation are what I want to focus on
today precisely because I feel that this issue has been neglected by a great
deal of rather optimistically inclined cultural theory.
In this
context, it is worth noting that three quarters of potential house-buyers in
the
If the
home, the neighbourhood and the nation are all potential spaces of belonging,
this is no simple matter of disconnected, parallel processes. Each of these
spaces conditions the others and the question is to understand how, as Sibley
puts it, "the nation and the locality invade the home" – because
these spaces are simultaneously tied together by media messages, by the
workings of the real estate market, and by macro factors such as the
immigration policies of the state and the impact of the global economy.
I spoke
earlier of connecting the micro and macro levels of analysis – let me
try and give you an example of what I mean.
Let’s take the household first… by taking an example
from a research project which I was involved in, some years ago, on "The
Household Uses of Information and Communications Technologies". In that
project, one of our principal interests was in how households of different
types regulated the capacity of the new technologies to transgress their
boundaries. In the case of the particular family to which I will refer, we see
again, this time at a micro level, a fearful attempt to regulate boundaries
which are under pressure from external forces. In this case, the husband had
suffered what he understood to be a technologically-driven form of
unemployment, and he felt very much a victim of circumstances beyond his
control. He was extremely worried about his capacity to provide economically
for his family in the future and – in parallel with my earlier general comments
on the propensity of the weaker members of a "risk society" to try to
control whatever "local" boundaries are within their grasp – he and
his wife compensated for this by exercising a heightened degree of control over
the boundaries of the household itself. Thus, for example, they carefully
regulated their children's use of the telephone, with precise rules governing
the time they were allowed to spend on both outgoing and incoming calls (i.e.
this was not simply a question of the financial cost of the calls). Moreover,
they were very concerned about their children's consumption of television
programmes on the sets installed in their bedrooms. Their particular concern
was with the danger of the family's moral boundaries being transgressed, if the
children were to watch "foreign" programmes of an
"unsuitable" nature (in particular, what they referred to as
"foreign sex programmes" – which are perhaps doubly
"foreign" to the British). Were we to conduct this research today,
clearly, the parallel anxiety would be that which many parents now have about
the capacity of the internet to transgress the moral boundaries of their
household, by bringing their children into contact with similarly unwanted
materials.
However,
this concern with the policing of micro boundaries can readily be seen to have parallels
at other geographical scales. In recent years, various national
governments have attempted to control the consumption of "foreign"
media on their national territories, by outlawing satellite dishes,
and more recently, by attempting to monitor and control their populations'
access to the internet. Not so long ago, in an uncannily exact mirror image of
each other's policies, while the Iranian government was attempting to ban
satellite dishes, on the grounds that the foreign programmes they picked up
were part of a Western "cultural offensive" against Islam, the mayor
of Courcouronnes (a poor, mainly North African
immigrant district south of Paris) also banned satellite dishes from the high
rise blocks in which many of his constituents lived – ostensibly on the basis
that they represented a health hazard, as they might blow off in high winds,
and fall on people below. However the ban was in fact made at the instigation
of the French National Front, in whose eyes the dishes represented the threat
of a migrant population that lives on the geographical
Nations/Imagined communities
Let me now
turn to the question of the nation. My particular concern is with how the
nation comes to be presented as a "symbolic home" – or Heimat – for its citizens, and in the corresponding
question of who does or does not come to feel "at home" within it.
In the UK
Paddy Scannell, and in Sweden Orvar
Lofgen, have developed important analyses of the role
of broadcasting in the construction of a sense of national unity. Their central
concern is with the "educative" role of broadcast media in the
"cultural thickening " of the nation state.
Lofgren calls this the "micro-physics" of learning to belong to the
"nation-as-home", and he argues that broadcasting's national rhetoric
often takes ritual forms, whereby national symbols come to be inscribed in
domestic practices. Thus, he notes, in
National
broadcasting can sometimes create a sense of unity, as it links the peripheries
to the centre and brings the symbols of the nation into the homes of its
citizens. But this process is by no means always smooth, nor without moments of
tension. One Swedish listener in Lofgren's historical study recalls feeling
that "when the radio was on, the room wasn't really ours – the sonorous
voices with their (metropolitan) accents pushed our thick regional voices into
a corner, where we commented in whispers on the cocksure statements from the
radio".
Similarly,
in
(In some
contexts, the weather forecast can also serve to bring together those who are
separated by national borders. Thus, to go back to my earlier comments on the
demarcation of the European/Austrian border, research there shows that, while
most people on the Austrian side stress the importance of the border with
Slovenia, members of the Slovenian speaking minority living in Austria make a
point of listening to the weather forecast on Slovenian radio, because, as one
interviewee puts it, he feels that "we" – i.e. Slovenian speakers
living on both sides of the border – "belong together – at least so far as
the weather is concerned".)
Boundaries and identities
Let me turn
to the issue of how those within a bounded sphere can come to feel threatened
by the presence of that which they deem to be "foreign". (The
anxieties which drive this process are well captured in Juan Goytisolo's novel Landscapes after the Battle, whose
"anti-hero" is disturbed by the "de-Europeanisation"
of the French city in which he lives, "the emergence, in the perfectly
ordered Cartesian perspectives of (Paris), of bits and pieces of Tlemcen and Dakar, Cairo and Karachi...”) The question is
why the presence of alterity should so often be felt
to be threatening. In this connection Azouz Begag writes that an "immigrant" is best
understood as "a person designated as such by someone living in a
particular place who sees the presence of the Other as
a threat to their own sense of security within that territory". Similarly,
Marc Auge puts it, "perhaps the reason why
immigrants worry settled people so much is because they expose the relative
nature of ‘certainties inscribed in the soil’.”
However, to
go back to my earlier remarks about how the realms of the "far" and
the "near" are now increasingly "mixed up", it is important
to note that encounters with alterity can take place
not only in physical but also in virtual space. Here we return again to the
role of the media. In some cases, it seems that television can serve to bring
unwanted "strangers" into the home.
Thus, in
her historical account of viewers' letters written to the producers of Julia,
the black North American situation comedy of the 1960's, Anna Bodroghkozy discovers one from a white viewer – claiming to
speak for many of his "fellow Americans" – who says that, pleased as
he is with his continuing "success" in keeping black people out of
the physical neighbourhood in which he lives, he is outraged at their "symbolic
invasion" of his living room, via their representation on television.
Unfortunately, in the
Beyond the national –
For me the
ways in which virtual and material "geographies of exclusion" operate
in conjunction are the central issue. To move from the national to the
continental level, the hardening of "Fortress Europe's” external
boundaries which accompanied the Schengen agreement
on “internal” movement and trade, must be seen in conjunction with the European
Union's attempts to refurbish a version of "Euro-culture" which, in
harking back to its Graeco-Roman and specifically
Christian roots, is not designed to feel like home for many of those who
currently reside within its borders. As a young man of Turkish parents, living
in
In his late
years, Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the EU,
once said that if he had the chance to begin the “European Project” again he
would begin with culture. Much recent EU audio-visual policy can be seen in
this light – as a project in which the promotion of European unity is the goal
and information/media policy is seen as one of the key instruments to achieve
it. To this extent one might argue that what we see here is a concerted attempt
by the EU to construct the equivalent of a transnational
EuroCulture, enshrined in concepts and cultural
institutions such as the European Audiovisual Sphere, but based on a
geographically expanded version of the conventional model of national
broadcasting. These cultural policies are intended to create a synthetic
pan-European identity, but they use exactly the same strategies as did the old
nation states – centring on the promotion of flags, anthems, passports,
trophies and maps which are deigned to recreate a homogenised sense of
community and belonging. They thus recreate all the problems of traditional
forms of nationalism, insofar as they emphasise cohesion, integration, security
and unity and tend to the elimination – or at least marginalisation – of all
forms of complexity and difference. The better solution must surely be to develop
cultural policies which come to terms with the realities of cultural difference
and promote a positive evaluation of internal hybridity
and an openness to external forms of alterity. The alternative will, in effect, be the building
of a new, cultural “Iron Curtain”, with the key difference being that it hangs
a little further South and East than the old one did and is designed to
distinguish Europe’s frontiers by policing the limits of religious, as much as
political, difference as the defining aspect of how Europe and its culture is
to be understood.
To do this
would involve reconceptualising our notion of our
symbolic home – not now, as a sealed-in site of cultural homogeneity, but as
always made of mixed components – in Doreen Massey’s terms, as an ex-centric,
porous and flexible space form in which to move and encounter the world, rather
than as a Fortress into which we can retreat from it. This would be a model of
“home” which values dialogue over identity and which transcends any simple notion
of "imagined community" – at whatever scale – because of the
seemingly irreducible residue, in that concept, of a dream of homogeneity, as
the necessary basis of sociality.
Conclusion
Of course,
in some quarters it has been argued that, happily, the new technologies of
cyberspace are about to deliver us from all these problems, by enabling us to
create more democratically inclusive spaces of "virtual community" –
which will somehow leave behind the social and cultural divisions of the material
world. The problem is that cyberspace is itself a differentiated terrain, to
which we do not all have equal access. We are not all nomadic, fragmented
subjectivities, living in the same postmodern
universe. For some categories of people, the new technologies do offer rich opportunties for empowering forms of "connexity". However, for other people, without access
to such forms of communication, horizons may simultaneously be narrowing – and
they may be more closely locked into their localities than they ever were before,
while powerless to control the forms of economic, political and cultural
disruption that globalisation brings to them.
The virtual
geographies which are opening up to us are, of course, in many ways quite new –
however, my final comment would be that as we travel the electronic highways
and byways of cyberspace we should beware of the virtual reduplication, if in
new forms, of some of the oldest and most regressive structures of exclusion.
The author is Professor of Communication at