Opengender

As productive in, or at least coextensive with, a shift from Marxist to post-modern or Foucauldian explanatory frames in academic disciplines, capitalism itself seems also to have been fundamentally reconstructed and revalorised. The world order of capitalism and its characteristic construct of the sovereign nation state is fragmenting, along with the 'north-south divide' which was produced in the politically centralised organisation of western capitalist imperialism. The new world order has been posited as moving away from a "vertical geography of economic power to a 'horizontalising' divide between rich and poor (Mattelart et al, 1984: 421). Infotech and new media are widely seen as an axis of this shift. In turn, shifts in the global economy have restructured infotech and media industries:

[T]he state of the world economy has had important repercussions in the communications field. The accent on productivity and accelerated realization of surplus value is transforming both work organization and production processes [...] The most significant areas are those of publishing and the press [...] forced to implement an increasingly industrialized production. The growing penetration of international products into national communications markets testifies to the progress of internationalization in publishing, advertising, marketing, and audiovisual production. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 423)

The construct of capitalism has been displaced from the centre to the margins in cultural studies, but capitalism remains, all the same, at least tacitly acknowledged as a productive force. Indeed, the whole discourse of 'infotech' materialises a shifting relationship between industrial and cultural (or discursive) production.

The increasing commercialization of the cultural sector and the parallel development of the new technologies of communication have projected culture into the heart of industrial and political structures [...] The relationship between culture and industry is gradually being added to a debate formerly centred on that between culture and the state, an extension which has produced a rupture with existing definitions of 'culture.' (Mattelart et al, 1984: 422)

The collapse of the Cold War distribution of power might also be seen as a major factor in a 'crisis' in the Marxist paradigms upon which Cultural Studies has been based:

Marxism, a major point of reference for the whole cultural studies project in the U.K., has been undermined not just from the viewpoint of the postmodern critics who attack its teleological propositions, its meta-narrative status, its essentialism, economism, Eurocentrism, and its place within the whole Enlightenment project, but also, of course, as a result of the events in Eastern Europe, with the discrediting of much of the socialist project and with the bewildering changes in the Soviet Union which leave the Western critic at a loss as to what is now meant by right- or left-wing politics. (McRobbie, 1992: 719)

At the same time, whilst Marxism classically saw the media as an ideological tool of oppression and (middle-class) liberalism saw it as crucial to the maintenance of a democratic state (Curran and Seaton, 1991), such dichotomies are also now themselves in crisis:

Ultimately, profitability is tending to supplant the media's traditional function of preserving the res publica, and in the process is transforming profoundly the rules of democracy. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 423)

Taken as a whole, this confusing and confused postmodern discursive terrain has tended to sediment an overall view that we are, at best, 'stuck with' capitalist 'democracy' — a view strenuously fostered by multi-national industrialists:

As the head of a multinational corporation with more than 1,000 offices worldwide, Wriston argued that nothing should stand in the way of "an integrated economic and financial marketplace which government," and all of us, "must learn to live with." (Sinha and Stone, quoting Walter Wriston, Chair of Citicorp's, (1979) speech "Information, Electronics and Gold; cited in Sinha and Stone, 1995: 279)

Nevertheless, if capitalism is seen as itself a discursive product whose materiality is (re)produced through repetitive activity, then it presumably can, like any other discursive effect, become 'undone.' On the other hand, it is clearly not appropriate for the resistant practitioners of 'identity,' who's critiques were fundamental in the problematisation of Marxism, to return to a deterministic economism:

[T]he kind of Marxism which cultural studies can retain in these very different circumstances is as yet unclear. What does seem certain is that the return to a pre-postmodern Marxism [...] is untenable because the terms of that return are predicated on prioritizing economic relations and economic determinations over cultural and political relations by positioning these latter in a mechanical and reflectionist role. The debate about the future of Marxism in cultural studies has not yet taken place. Instead the great debate around modernity and postmodernity has quite conveniently leapt in and filled that space. (McRobbie, 1992: 719)

In the 'South' there seems to be less poverty of imagination. Although the middle-classes of many nations readily pledge remunerative allegiance to the globalisation of bourgeois consumer culture, there has also been considerable organised resistance to new forms of cultural imperialism — from the level of ethnographically imagined communities to that of national governments:

International organizations of an essentially technical nature have also begun to feel the political effects of an increasingly global questioning of the geopolitical distribution of power in the field of information. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 424)

The North American experience is also a-typical even in the Western bloc.

In countries where the networks of mass-cultural production and distribution were immediately integrated into a market philosophy, an acceleration of the commercialization process is less likely to be experienced as a radical rupture. (Mattelart et al, 1984: 422)

European traditions of state regulation of production, as well as the Marxist critical separation between capitalism and the sphere of its ideology, produced a different discourse in Europe. Gilroy (1993a) noted that, in contrast with the 'multiculturalist' climate of the United States, Britain lacked "a political language for making sense of its post-colonial and hetero-cultural condition." (24)

The characteristic product [...] is an image of the nation as a cultural archipelago: a string of discrete locations on which dissimilar sovereign cultures can reproduce without any unwelcome intrusion from neighbours. (Gilroy, 1993a: 24)

However, as well as furnishing a referent for resistance, national or cultural difference has also been deployed as a marketing tool of the global economy (Gilroy, 1993a: 25). Any appeal to national identities (and, of course, the figure of the nation itself articulates a history of violent imposition) as potential saviour of cultural specificity is always-already recontextualised by the multinational deployment of media technology and simply serves to commodify the identities themselves for recirculation (for example the culturally hybrid style of MTV's satellite service to the Indian sub-continent). Thus, the strategic drawing of ethnographies of (sub)cultures, both globally and in the west, can be seen as already presenting themselves for commodification and recirculation (25).

Within the west, it has been disputed whether the proliferation and recirculation of (life)styles facilitates or challenges the commodification of identity, the hyper-production characteristic of contemporary capitalism, and the 'over-development' of western economies (Mercer, 1990). Wiegman (1994) saw consumption as the characteristic context of identity production in contemporary representational regimes both in the academy and more generally. By claiming the name 'lesbian' we effectively already endorse commodification. Thus, "we have little alternative action but to participate" (Wiegman, 1994: 4).

Epstein and Straub (1991) argued that capitalism has a recuperative, appropriative mode which allows "marginalized or stigmatized forms of sexual behaviour and identity to filter into consumer culture — packaged in disguised forms which take away the edge of any political threat posed by those sexualities. But although the marketing of gender ambiguity is both recuperative and conservative, it may nevertheless allow "those who are politically marginalized opportunities to 'decode' ambiguity in more politicized interpretation" (Epstein and Straub, 1991: 10). The recirculation of marginal, subaltern, or subcultural codes of identity might, at the same time, also be regarded as the cutting edge of post-modern practices of resistance:

Were we able to think consumption differently as a process figuring integration, engulfing, the loss of boundaries, dependency, and collaboration, we might better be able to re-conceive the apparatuses of mass distribution and mass consumption as technologies with an enormous capacity for mobilizing new political communities [...] we, too, are implicated in the commodification of culture as producers and consumers [...] the process of community-building [is] a process no longer directed by us as the knowing, politically correct avant-garde, but one that includes us as co-opted but nonetheless struggling participants. (Radway, 1992: 516)

The 1960s New-Left construct of encoding resistance to 'recuperation' into marginal cultural production has very clearly lost any meaning in this discursive context in which sub-cultural, ethnic or sexual styles are produced in subversion of dominant aesthetic values, but then reappropriated in fragmentary form, commodified and recirculated through the dominant culture.

[W]e confront a series of 'style wars,' skirmishes of appropriation and commodification played out around the semiotic economy of the ethnic signifier. The complexity of this force-field of inter-culturation ambushes any attempt to track down fixed meanings or finalized readings and opens out instead on to ambiguous relations of economic and aesthetic systems of valorization. (Mercer, 1990: 260)

The wearing of, for example, dreadlocks or fetish clothing can no longer be taken as indexical signifiers of oppositional political practices. The commodification of identity has taken on new meanings and can be seen as offering new subversive potentialities and connections.

Black expressive cultures affirm while they protest. The assimilation of blacks is not a process of acculturation but of cultural syncretism (Bastide, 1978). Accordingly, their self-definitions and cultural expressions draw on a plurality of black histories and politics [...] creat[ing] material for the processes of cultural syncretism from extended and still-evolving relationships between the black populations of the over-developed world and their siblings in racial subordination elsewhere.

The effects of these ties and the penetration of black forms into the dominant culture mean that it is impossible to theorize black culture in Britain without developing a new perspective on British culture as a whole. (Gilroy, 1997: 340)

Effectively, a 'diasporic' black culture is able to disseminate and syncretise a culture of opposition through the very economic structures of capitalist imperialism. "A new structure of cultural exchange has been built up across the imperial networks which once played host to the triangular trade of sugar, slaves and capital" (Gilroy, 1997: 343). Despite these more challenging accounts of the commodification of identity and its effects, postmodern approaches might still be seen as "flawed by an inattention to the processes of exclusion which structure and limit access to consumption [...] Indeed, there often seems to be a wilful avoidance of questions of poverty and hardship" (McRobbie, 1977: 73).