Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

To return from the horrific singular threat to those that have been general for writers of this century now in its final, summing-up decade. In repressive regimes anywhere, whether in what was the Soviet bloc, Latin America, Africa, China — most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored profoundly, with the artist’s rebellious integrity to the state-of-being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer’s themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.

There is a paradox. In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichaean ‘balance’. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely García Mÿrquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer and as a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade-in-arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats’s beast slouching to be born.

The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art; trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs.

— Nobel Prize Lecture, 1991

Process noun, GLOCALIZATION. Formed by telescoping global and local to make a blend; the idea is modeled on Japanese dochakuka (derived from dochaku , “living on one’s own land”), originally the agricultural principle of adapting one’s farming techniques to local conditions, but also adopted in Japanese business. . for global localization , a global outlook adapted to local conditions. The idea of going for the world market (global marketing) was a feature of business thinking in the early Eighties. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, Western companies had observed the success of Japanese firms in doing this while at the same time exploiting local conditions as well.’— Oxford Dictionary of New Words , 1991

That is the etymology of a word that is not yet recorded in that dictionary, Globalization . There is always something to learn from the way a term such as this one, now widely and unthinkingly used by us all, has been derived. Then we shall at least know, by its origins, exactly what we’re talking about. The term has emerged out of need for the expression of political, economic, social, and cultural changes. It’s an omnibus term, of course, not only carrying its variety of passenger interest, but travelling to and through different terrains. The best-known and accepted of these is, indeed, that for which the term was coined, while elaborating on its original limitations in Japanese understanding: the expansion of trade over the oceans and air-space, beyond traditional alliances which were restricted by old political spheres of influence, particularly in the era of colonialism, and by the barriers of the Cold War. Now there are new formations hiding behind the acronyms of new groupings of countries on the world terrain of trade, but at the same time other barriers, important ones, are being breached. One has only to glance round at the occupants of business-class seats in aircraft to see the flying caravan (I change metaphors) of government trade missions, industrialists and merchants, busy at their laptops in preparation for presentations that will vend — more valuable than spices ever were — minerals and commodities, industrial, mining, and communications plant, and — yes — arms, to the world-wide oases of buyers, who in turn will have something to sell: resources natural and manufactured which the traders lack back home.

Does the globalization of culture follow the same process?

On the principle of opening up the bounty of our world, ill-distributed as it has been by both nature and humans, it does. Both are gathered under the rubric of human development which is now understood as not achievable in isolation by any one country or even grouping of countries — a down-to-earth acceptance that we cannot come closer than this to the idealistic (and ideological) concept of one world which some of us are old enough to remember nostalgically. But the great difference is that culture is a ‘trade’ foremost in intangibles, not materials and money, and it is, paradoxically, both its power and its weakness that it is only partially dependent on the exchange of money in order to operate. In its essence, much of real culture, as opposed to the exploitation of culture as a billboard, TV-slot public relations commodity, has no market value. The exceptions, anyone will be quick to point out, are the popular music groups and individual musicians, arising in their home countries genuinely from the people’s culture rather than any elite, who are celebrated and highly paid while at the same time making the musical heritage of their own countries known and appreciated, all over the world. But writers who come from, let us say, Canada, Norway, Cuba, Egypt, to a poetry conference in Australia, dancers who come from Japan, India, the U.S.A., Spain, to a workshop in Ghana — their ‘rate of exchange’ is the expansion of ideas, the possibilities of their art, as coming from the life and spirit of the Other, the unknown country and society. No material benefit is involved beyond the staples of an airfare, food, and lodging. . The concept of selling and buying as a principle of globalization does not apply. The ethic of mutual enrichment without consideration of material profit is that of cultural globalization; by the very nature of trade globalization of the world’s material resources, this ethic is secondary to it.

Once one moves into the dimension of ethics, many questions present themselves. First, one must examine what the aim of globalization of culture is, or, to be less didactic, could be. Is it, in the attempt to heal the peoples of the world in their wounding divisions, the manifestations of xenophobia that underlie conflict, an aim of emphasizing the unity, the oneness of cultural expression? Therefore a conformity, even if of the highest order? A tactic to avoid value judgments of which is the highest art form among those achieved nationally, judgments influenced by the nature of what is regarded as culture in the various countries making such judgments? Or is the aim to value the differences , bring them into play across aesthetic frontiers and thus disprove the long-held sovereignty of national and political divisions over the development of human potential?

Most of us would agree the aim is the latter. Yet each answer brings another question; immediately, this is the question of language, since language is the means of many cultural activities corollary to the great one of literature itself. It is vital to that field of mixed media, the image and the spoken word, in the theatre and the theatre’s international extension, TV drama. Intellectual debate depends on language, although the exchange of ideas and insight comes without need of words in the revelation of paintings and music. Care has to be taken, however, that one or two of the short list of self-styled world languages do not become decisive in our reach for globalization of culture. This could be a subconscious lapse into the very state the concept of freeing culture seeks to end; a value decision that high culture, true culture, resides within those international ‘families’ allied by language affiliations (Romance languages, for example), shared frontiers decided after old wars, political alignments and realignments, ideological loyalties. The short list can’t be justified on account of number of speakers of a language, since vastly-spoken Chinese and Arabic don’t feature on it. Of course they don’t; and why? Because it is out of the old conditioning of Western culture, ‘the formidable structure of cultural domination’ Edward Said cites, that much of the drive towards cultural globalization, creativity freed to roam and procreate, has come; old habits engender autocratic attitudes that die hard!