13 Composite Monoculturalism in the Era of the Distribution of the New Global Imaginary

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the following questions: what is a composite monoculture? How does it form structures and order things? What sort of new composite human do these structures and orders produce? The composite monoculture controls schemes of thinking and processes of desire through a super-marketization of society and the creation of a symbolically centralized democracy – how is this achieved? These questions are based on the presumption that production, distribution, and consumption are schematized practices of thinking, which form a system of persuasion; therefore, the article considers not only material, but also ideational products. With this in mind, the concept of production is separated into the following categories: universal, mass, monopolizing, totalitarian, global, and composite monocultural components. The concept of monoculturality signals a kind of production independent of the traditional capitalist production monopolists, small businesses, and state economies. Monoculturality concerns not only goods, but also demands, desires, and ideas; it makes unities of human beings. The article seeks to explain why people choose and trust symbols, names, pictures, and theories common to many countries, institutions, and groups, and why they like to be monads that eschew swarms of qualities. Monoculturality is considered a subaltern form that can be interpreted similarly to concepts such as Herbert Marcuse’s one-dimensional man, Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrums, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s desiring machines, and the global imaginary as theorized by Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay. Super-marketization is interpreted as the main principle for moulding life into a monoculture. It produces deserts of culture by spreading the same names, symbols, goods, and orders into large territories, which produces an illusion of diversity that hides the monoculturality lying at core of contemporary thinking and behaviour. However, anthropologists and new critical nomads see the diversity for what it is – an illusion – and see the potentially disastrous results of the growth of a composite monoculture and its super-marketization. These anthropologists and nomads seek to build new structures for understanding the world. This article underscores the importance of obscurity, self-othering, transgression, and creative disruptions as key means for providing unique cultural and life niches. The main thesis here is that the dialectic of host-and-guest in the deinstitutionalized process of open organizations and through the dynamics of creative groups can help to resist the tendencies borne of monoculturality.