The Indigene and the Cybersurfer

Abstract

L'inavouable de la communaute, c'est aussi une souverainete qui ne peut que se poser et s'imposer en silence, dans le non-dit. [The unavowable of community, it is also a sovereignty which cannot help posing itself and imposing itself in silence, by way of unsaid.] (Jacques Derrida, Voyous; my trans.) In a call for papers for a special issue of ARIEL on Globalization and Indigenous Cultures, Fengzhen Wang and Shaobo Xie define our present world-wide situation in apocalyptic terms. We are, they say, experiencing rapid destruction of indigenous cultures by three corrosive forces working together. These are global capitalism, Western (primarily American) popular culture, and new communication technologies. New ubiquitous forms of telecommunication fuel irresistible hegemony of capitalism and American popular culture. Technology, capitalism, and American popular culture cooperate to uproot and destroy every autochthonous culture around whole world. processes of globalization, say Wang and Xie, are irresistibly sucking every nation and community into their orbit.... The desire of global capitalism challenges and undermines all traditional forms of human interaction and representation. Multinational capital with its ideology and technology seems to be globally erasing difference, imposing sameness and standardization on consciousness, feeling, imagination, motivation, desire, and taste. In exchange for multinational capital investment and for access to American lifestyles, fashions, values, and conveniences glorified and romanticized by Hollywood films, underdeveloped and pre-modernized of earth are unabashedly and unhesitantly surrendering their landscapes, resources, traditions, and cultural heritages to cultural capitalism. (Wang and Xie 1) The image of hegemonic orbit into which indigenous cultures are being sucked is particularly forceful. Western cultural capitalism is a kind of black hole into which everything around it swirls and then disappears, never again to be seen. Since I want to challenge to some degree paradigm so cogently expressed by Wang and Xie, let me begin by saying that I agree, for most part, with dismal picture they present of destructive effects of global capitalism and Western popular culture. I would add to their picture present terrifying mutation, in United States government, of global capitalism and ideologies of Western popular culture into a straightforward push toward global military conquest. This means a transformation of United States civil society into a permanent of emergency, a permanent of exception, a permanent of war. This goes along with a state of unrelieved and unrelievable that justifies suspension of civil liberties and of constitutional rights. If goal of so-called is to strike into hearts of American citizens, they have certainly succeeded in that, with eager cooperation of American government and American mass media. Examples of mediatic generation of are endlessly repeated television shots of Twin Towers falling down on 9/11 and endless repetition of phrases the war or terror and weapons of mass destruction. The threat to national security posed by terrorists is used to justify repression at home, in name of homeland security. It also justifies aggression abroad, again in name of homeland security. The slogan of imperialism used to be: Trade follows flag. Often, in nineteenth-century Western imperialism, missionaries were there first, attempting to convert heathen savages to Christianity. When missionaries got in trouble, an occupying army had to be sent in to protect them. Trade, that is, economic exploitation, followed soon after. …