fall 2003 | The Culture Issue
Self-Inscribed Identities: Andrew Whitworth-Smith
Introduction The purpose of this paper will be to examine how social movements and political activist groups use technology to counter social relations of power as well as to create solidarity networks around the world in this current age of globalization. I address how politics of representation work to form cultural politics and consider the ways in which certain media sources, whether new media such as the Internet, or traditional media such newspapers, film and television are used as a platform to leverage political space while in many instances ensuring survival at the ground level. In order to do so, it will be useful to first explore some contemporary and relevant theory surrounding notions of identity, culture and globalization before briefly casting our gaze upon the practices of the Zapatistas, a case study from southern Mexico. From Globalization to Global Discontent That which defines globalization forms a large debate in contemporary cultural theory. Argentine-Venezuelan sociologist Daniel Mato has written extensively on the idea that it is not a thing but rather “a long standing tendency toward the greater interconnection of peoples, their cultures, and institutions that results from many diverse social processes.”2 Through this perspective we realize that globalization is not solely a contemporary paradigm, but a long, ongoing historical process wherein different cultures enter into new and diverse relations while adopting and juxtaposing cultural attributes. The Arabs, for example, were well-known for picking and choosing ideas within the countries they had conquered, so that a mosque in Cordoba would contain a number of Iberian architectural elements, as would, let’s say, the cuisine of everyday life be a fusion of the multicultural reality of the area. However, this cultural intermingling took on more dynamic dimensions with the encounter of Europe and the Americas, steadily becoming more integrated in global processes with the subsequent imperialism that bolstered the rise of our modern capitalist world. Yet, if globalization has historically been a growing world reality, what then marks our era as an age of globalization? According to Mato, it is the global consciousness of this increasing interconnectivity that in turn conditions practices of society and representations of numerous social actors everywhere.3 In this sense, globalization cannot be seen as an overarching superstructure, as put forth by some,4 but rather a series of phenomena that manifests itself through global flows of human agency and networking—both from above and below in the hierarchy of power relations. In fact, Mato raises the point that one should not speak of globalization, but rather globalizations.5 There are a great many paradoxes in this current age of globalization; it is riddled with contradictions and disjuncture. Whereas it engenders a greater interconnectivity of peoples of the world, breaking down previously defined spatial-temporal boundaries and, thus, bringing us all, in a sense, closer together, at the same time we have witnessed a greater gap in the distribution of wealth than the world has ever known—a distancing between the world elite and the poor majority. This is due, in large part, to the global dissemination of neoliberal economic policies, characterized among other things by a switch from protectionist policy to open markets as well as the privatization of state-owned land and industries. Based on models drafted in western capitalist centers, neoliberalism has played a central role in securing the hegemony of western elites in post-colonial societies. The rise of the multi-national corporations and the organizations that oversee and often facilitate their worldwide control (the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) have increasingly rendered the role of the nation-state obsolete, and instead have served to foster a greater division between the first and the third world. This has created a situation that leaves the economies of poorer countries at the service of foreign debt and unable to meet the needs of their own people.6 The 2001 economic collapse of Argentina, the IMF’s most lauded darling, proved unequivocally the limits of rampant privatization while the organization’s structural adjustments programs, for example, have caused a decrease in social programs, resulted in the systematic (often violent) seizure of land from peasants, increased the feminization of poverty and the rise of child labor, wreaked havoc on the environment and endangered the livelihood of those that work from it, and so forth. The list of grievances goes on and on. Western hegemonic centers—and their elite counterparts in the periphery—have also become the dominant brokers of transnational cultural capital. It is noteworthy that contemporary scholarship has discarded notions of a static locality that remains somehow uninformed of the changing nature of proximate beings, or unable to incorporate change to the benefit of their society. Today, cultural barriers have all but dissolved and academics look to cultures as hybrid and capable of living different temporalities side-by-side within modernity.7 However, through the influx of mass media, Internet, and satellite controlled by a select group of world elites, images and discourses are exported to the periphery altering in many ways the socio-symbolic character of diverse societies and cultural groups. Questions about the construction of identity and cultural production—which is always inscribed in some process of “othering”—are now relational to the cultural production and system of values of the center. As Chilean cultural critic Nelly Richard writes,
If these global processes are a historical continuation of an inevitable interconnectivity, yet at the same time mediated by flows of human agency directed from either side of unequal relations of power (from above and below), then what strategies might the third world adopt in order to offset the verticality of these relations, realizing instead a more horizontal and dialogical engagement with this network of authority? What can they do to foster local and relevant material gain? As this paper has argued, these processes of globalization—and neoliberalism alike—are centered in human praxis. And as disagreement and conflict are part of our human nature as social beings, it is not surprising that at the same time in which a greater collective consciousness of these very processes emerges, there should also arise another collective consciousness—what Brecher et al. call a planetary withdrawal of consent from the “Washington Consensus,”9 or what we could more generally call a greater global consciousness of discontent. Consequently, this new age has seen the rise of social movements that work increasingly more on a transnational scale, partly in response to the conditions brought about by this new world order, and partly in response to long standing grievances that, with the tools of the information age—Internet, digital imagery, satellite, fiber optics, and so on—find new ways of aligning solidarity networks with people fighting for similar aims in different regions of the world. Where the State can no longer buttress increasing discrepancies in social equity, these networks turn to a wider public sphere in order that they might leverage possibilities—that is to say, they work through a renewed international civil society. Civil Society & New Media as vital domains of Cultural Production
The Internet has become a new cultural landscape, a vast public space and a powerful organizational tool through which civil society groups may maneuver. Though originally designed for military intelligence during the Cold War, and subsequently opened to the hands of the market, the Internet also offers democratic alternatives while (re)constructing special interests. Such spaces make possible the hashing out of conflicts surrounding the construction of identities and the definition of spaces in which those conflicts can be expressed. However, the polemic of defining identity and power in our postmodern world void of form, boundaries, and structural absolutes is that they are completely contingent, in constant flux with no fixed point of origin. In his essay entitled Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, Arjun Appardurai points to the means through which contemporary power structures maneuver. Previous divisions between global and local are transcended by what he labels technoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.11 Technoscapes refer to the sphere in which technology on all levels moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries. Mediascapes suggest the image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality and what they offer. In this context, scripts can be formed of imagined lives of the “other,” and for the obvious purposes of power agendas. Ideoscapes are the (perhaps homogenizing?) key ideologies and concepts that cross the globe. Based mostly on a western narrative they include free trade, democracy, and human rights such as gender-equality, freedom of expression, private property, and so on. Many times, transnational social movements in search of a greater global legitimacy position themselves through these newly scripted keywords; for example, indigenous groups suddenly speak of biodiversity, or the women’s groups address the feminization of poverty. There is debate over the extent to which these ideoscapes contribute to forming a universal cultural citizenship, that is to say, a homogenization of a mass global (western/consumer) culture abounds,12 though it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore. It is enough to point out that the struggle over cultural representation in the age of globalization is simply a new working out of the same old dialectic between the continuing contradictions of power and the human condition. Let us take into account Jürgen Habermas’ statement that “social movements arise at the seam of the lifeworld of civil society and the system, and express the tension between them.”13 Civil society, thus, is a forum through which social groups jockey for legitimacy within the restructured world of neoliberalism. This lifeworld manifests itself, in the age of globalization, in the form of increased interconnectivity of burgeoning social movements that has risen from the seams of the tension between neoliberal policies and the faltering role of the state, channeled through the new technological means that were created for this very restructuring. In the view of Argentine philosopher Néstor García Canclini, technology and the media narratives cultivated through it have set up a contradictory space in which theatre and politics, performance and action widen their scope with the inclusion of what Alvarez et al. identify as the “subaltern counter-publics.” It is to these counter-publics that I now turn. Transformation of Public Politics: the Zapatista Use of Cyber Space
On January 1, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was to go into effect—the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, or the Zapatistas as they are commonly known) staged an armed uprising, taking command of seven municipalities in Chiapas, the southernmost province of Mexico. Their claim was to challenge the perpetuation of 500 years of a cultural imperialism that has left millions of indigenous peasants dispossessed and marginalized in their own land. Unlike other uprisings of its kind, however, the Zapatistas were quick to gain an advantageous position in forming the public’s perception of them, even quicker than the government. From the jungles of Lacandona they transmitted their first of many communiqués, La Declaración de la Selva de Lacandona, to the world via the Internet. Within fourteen days, the armed group had declared a ceasefire and through the use of modern media proceeded to engage the government (along with the whole world) in an off-again/on-again dialogue that has spanned a decade. There is much speculation as to how the masked guerilla rebels—led by the eloquent and charismatic Subcommandante Marcos—quickly gained access to modern technology while emerging with such a fortified ideological foundation; however questions of space prohibit its elaboration here.15 What is important to emphasize, nevertheless, is the Zapatista’s opting for the pen over the sword, so to speak, as they have chosen to use the funding received from local communities, as well as other outside donations, not towards the purchase of weapons—like other guerrilla groups—but in securing autonomy over self-representation and the ability to tell their stories from an inside perspective. The Zapatista’s use of the Internet was in large part an attempt to untie the negative images and coverage that the mass media—long in partnership with the PRI, Mexico’s seventy-year monopolistic state party—had scripted of them literally overnight. This form of negotiating identity marks a transformation in revolutionary tactics and speaks to an understanding of the power of the scripted narrative over violence in forming public opinion, and the role technology has in its propagation. And yet, their efforts functioned at the level of resistance, if not empowerment, in the face of a hegemonic power structure with an ethos of corruption, disinformation and military violence. Fittingly, Antonio Gramsci, the twentieth century Italian insurgent himself, called culture “a political field, a battlefield of ongoing war of position.” By reaching out through cyberspace, the EZLN extended their struggle to a larger cultural arena, positioning their political space, as it were, within an international civil society. Their coalition-building crossed national borders and broke down symbolic divisions between mobilizing groups. Far from being solely an issue of local landless peasants, it struck a chord of global magnitude among such initiatives as the indigenous peoples movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement while creating a greater synergy across ethnicities, religions, class, gender, languages, and localities. In fact, the Zapatistas themselves refuse to be identified as any one specific identity group, such as an indigenous group, as their efforts are aimed at transforming the entire nation, at reinvigorating civil society for all.16 Diverting the world’s attention from the celebratory inauguration of NAFTA to their rebellion in the backlands was by all means a strategic move. Its symbolism reflects their opposition to the culture of neoliberalism and free trade—a direct threat to their livelihoods—and exhibits it to a global audience. Long before Lori Wallach envisioned the Battle of Seattle—a cornerstone of the Globalization from Below movement—the Zapatistas, in their January 1996 “First Declaration of La Realidad,” conceived of the Intercontinental Forum against Neoliberalism, the agenda of which was to organize a broadly based internationalist culture of opposition and to combat the cultural homogenization that is part and parcel of neoliberalism. Their initiative has sparked anti-neoliberalism meetings in Japan, Germany, Africa, and Australia.17 Moreover, their struggle for recognition has been, in a sense, re-territorialized,18 reaching even the cozy homes of middle-class U.S.A. According to author and independent media activist DeeDee Halleck, within the first week of the Zapatista uprising, their declaration was published in newspapers worldwide; it was translated into several languages and put into hard copy through many different newspapers, universities and other venues. E-mailers reacted with comments and speculation from the very beginning while Subcommandante Marcos, poetic in his approach, became the first “superhero of the Internet,”19 a feared adversary, indeed, to Richard’s network of authority. Myriad actors partook in the movement of resistance, on both a global and local scale, in a variety of ways, evoking what Alvarez et al. consider the “social movements web.” That is to say, more than just the organization and active members, the web also includes partial participants, sympathizers, collaborators in NGO’s, churches, universities, and so forth. On the importance of these solidarity connections in the formation of socio-symbolic identities, Mato states: “Social representations […] are shaped not in isolated social spaces, but through transnational processes with the intense participation of both “global” and “local” agents.”20 In fact, Subcommandante Marcos has sought to make those involved in the international civil society be forced to engage this trans-cultural dispute. George Yúdice writes of a communiqué from Marcos:
Negotiating cultural reproduction and identity is a complex process, a campaign that the Zapatistas may never completely harness. However, they have succeeded in challenging the status quo, and what is produced as truth. Though they may not wield absolute autonomy over the means of their representation, they have at least networked among multiple community media groups, published a majority of their communiqués in la Jornada—Mexico’s mainstream leftist newspaper—and gained the support of many new media activist and performance art initiatives, such as the Electronic Disturbance Theatre based in New York City,22 as well as having worked with other transnational solidarity groups. The EZLN has even established an updated bi-lingual website,23attracting over four million visitors. This has meant survival in the face of a militaristic government intent on silencing them at whatever cost. Ironically, by contesting Televisa—Mexico’s corporate media conglomerate and State sweetheart—and its initial representation of the insurgency through clever handling of the Internet, the Zapatistas opened a new dimension to Waisbordian watchdog journalism.24 The eyes of the watchdog—in this case, the international arena—gazed not only upon the indiscretions and human rights abuses of the State-sponsored military and paramilitary forces,25 but also exposed the partiality of the media institutions directly in support of the State. Televisa was left no choice but to give prime-time exposure to the conflict and feign a critical eye towards their greatest sponsor, the PRI, as the Zapatistas had made themselves, and have since remained, “newsworthy.” As DeeDee Halleck sums up so well, “the Zapatistas’ expert handling of the electronic media shows that there is no inherent contradiction between technological modernization and grassroots mobilization.”26 In this age of globalization, the means by which the powers from above systematically subsume the majority of the population of the world— that is to say through their privileged access to information and mainstream media outlets—are the very means by which the subaltern may globalize solidarity and emerge triumphant. Conclusion The case I have acquainted the reader with marks a situation in which marginality becomes a space of power. The Zapatistas’ practices constitute the periphery approaching the sphere of the center, or at the very least, using the tools set up for the perpetuation of the center’s privileged position to claim representation for themselves. However, their actions do more than redefine identities; by means of cagey interpretations of contemporary media, they have (re)scripted an alternative model of social empowerment. The Zapatistas do not contend for political power, as such in the form of coercion. In fact, as a group the EZLN has steered clear of running for any political seat,27 while the municipalities within Chiapas concern themselves primarily with retaining autonomy over issues such as education and land-rights within their community. What they do aspire to overturn within the current governmental structure is their status as second-class citizens, and to thereby promote the right to a dignified life, free of fear and violence—the basic tenet of our own western narrative. However, it is important to keep things in perspective. Though the subaltern has in this instance emerged from the shadows, ruffling more than a few hegemonic feathers in the process, the balance of power is far from being in their favor. Nevertheless, they have bequeathed a lesson to future solidarity groups. The vast technology-based system of networks, which serves as the watchful eye by making possible more dynamic interactions between sympathizers across the globe, may significantly affect the outcome of complex socio-political struggles that have a profound impact on people’s everyday material lives, at the level of their continued existence. It is the expediency of this paradigm, it seems to me, with which all social movements must nowadays embark.
Notes: 1 George Yúdice, ‘The Globalization of Culture and the New Civil Society,” Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: The Cultural and the Political in Latin American Social Movements, eds. Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), 353-79. |
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Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought