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Chapter 8 | Michael Dorland (continued) Globalization, in other words, forces exchange and métissage; it’s the great gumbo of global cultural production and the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel. To the extent that it makes of global culture one of translation, it makes translation into the new lingua franca, This, on its positive side, makes it possible to finally begin to overcome the fragmentation of Canadian civil culture; and so allow cultural productions to take their place as a plurality of cultural formations within a pluralized world. But I must of course address some of the negatives, mustn’t I? So let me list four topics that globalization further complicates. First, the/our problematic assumptions about distinctiveness. Secondly, their essentialism. Thirdly, their frivolousness. And fourthly, the importance of story or narratives. Firstly, then, the assumptions about distinctiveness. Part of our problem here stems from the displacement by political (or policy) considerations of what more properly belongs to the realms of either aesthetics or business. A politicized aesthetic is a form of fascism, as Walter Benjamin claimed in his famous essay on mechanical reproduction. I wouldn’t put it quite that strongly, but the point then becomes one of having to attempt to reconcile very contradictory, if not impossible, imperatives. The question of the politicization of business is a bit trickier, since business is not in my view exactly a perfect form of rationality. So suffice it to say that politicizing business overrides “normal” market rules. What we end up with, either way, in University of Vermont law professor Oliver Goodenough’s wonderful phrase, are policies of “defending the imaginary to the death” (1998). And this is nihilism, because it is not clear whose imaginary is being defended. Or secondly, if it isn’t nihilism, it is the essentialization of certain traits claimed to be distinctively “Canadian.” Whatever else that might mean, this is a strategy of exclusion on the basis of a normative Canadianess that once again shifts the burden of criteria of evaluation to the political powers, their funding agencies, their bureaucracies, etc. But perhaps enough has been said by others about this aspect of things in particular, for me not to have to repeat them once again. Thirdly, frivolousness. Political power is exactly this: power, and so it must be deployed, or so political philosophy tells us, in conjunction with some virtue: call it wisdom, intelligence, or prudence. Power combined with stupidity or cowardice is not a happy combination. I said above that in the realm of cultural policy and cultural industries policies, we have excelled at producing “discursive economies.” Let me state this even more bluntly: the discourse on culture and cultural policy in this country is a completely captive discourse, captured above all by state priorities that change, how shall I say it gently? whimsically? In other words, this “captive discourse” consists of little more than stock issues endlessly reiterated: basically, 1) define a problem (badly), and 2) devote enormous energies to “solving the problem.” When that doesn’t work, start all over again (just as badly). Stock issues, then, and like clichés and stereotypes, are very difficult to change, or to think outside the boxes they lead to. Let me rapidly mention two (I am sure you can make your own list): one is the American threat which I’ll simply ignore; another is that Canadians wants Canadian stories; we want to be able to tell our own stories, as the cliché goes. This brings me to point four, and the importance of stories. Human beings are among other things storytellers; stories are how we largely make sense of things and others. But of course the question becomes “who is the we” whose stories are to get told, and who decides this? We circle back, in other words, to the problem of who is authorized to speak, who is a lawful speaker; questions that are, as I said, at the center of what constitutes the civil or public culture of this country, and about which we as speakers have never satisfactorily been able to agree. Nor do I propose to resolve these issues here. I am quite content, if I have succeeded at all here, to leave you with a sense of the depth and breadth of the problem. What I can say, however, is that an answer is suggested by the problematics of translation, not understood as the mechanical transcription of one language into another, but as the creation of new texts across cultures. |
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