multiculturalism without responsibility? the contemporary universal exhibition

PENELOPE HARVEY

Multiculturalism without respo n si b i I i ty? The con te m po ra ry

Universal Exhibition

Intellectuals are worried that the populist and market oriented agendas of the mass media have reduced the creative impact of popular cu1ture.l A new breed of cultural commentators ensure that difference remains familiar, that surfaces, style and sales figures receive more prominence than social issues and responsibilities, and that experience, however narrow, unproblematically bestows authority rather than a sense of com- plexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. In other words, there seems to have been a transfer of expertise from the intellectuals to the new cultural producers of the mass communications industries. One response has been to insist on the difference between critical, authentic, progressive, popular forms and conservative, cliched, populist ones. However, the distinction is not so easily made, and the difficulty is not coincidental.

Populist cultural forms are contemporary manifestations of that perception of the world we call modernity, a perception that grounds difference in culture and promotes pluralism while simultaneously locating in such difference the blocks to human progress.2 Critical cultural production is itself an effect of modernity, and it is therefore to be expected that intellectual practice should, to some degree, find itself implicated in the very processes it seeks to undermine.

As an anthropologist, my interest lies particularly in the rapid expansion of the concept of culture which can now encompass all and any aspect of human social life. Within the discipline there is particular unease over the way in which culture is promoted by consumer industries to the extent that there appears to be no disparity between the cultural construct of critical theory and the cultural commodity of media discourse.

The issue of multiculturalism provides a focus for these concerns. The demands of minority groups within larger social entities for the recognition of cultural heterogeneity tend to require a politics of identity, where culture is used as a means to an end. These are the terms in which dialogue with hegemonic groups is deemed possible, for it is only through an awareness of the ways in which one group’s cultural assumptions system-

Multiculturalism without responsibility? The Universal Exhibition 31

atically erase the presence of others that progress can be made and change achieved.

Nevertheless, there are theoretical perspectives which find such a project untenable. Within anthropology, the standard response to 'difference multiculturalism'3 has been that

It risks essentializing the idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group or race; it risks reifying cultures as separate entities by overemphasizing their boundedness and mutual distinctness; it risks overemphasizing the internal homogeneity of cultures in terms that potentially legitimize repressive demands for communal conformity; and by treating cultures as badges of group identity, it tends to fetishize them in ways that put them beyond the reach of critical analysis - and thus of anthr~pology.~

The challenge for anthropology is to produce a concept of culture that has something else to offer multiculturalists. And what is offered has to go beyond mere relativism if we are to avoid the reiteration of old dilemmas. However, the problem is compounded by the fact that populist discourse is capable of encompassing not only the political strategy of minority groups but also the critical response of the intellectual, as can be shown by examining how multiculturalism operates in the contemporary Universal Exhibition.

The Universal Exhibition has always treated mass popular culture as a serious business, has always been concerned to marry education and entertainment, citizenship and consumption, high and low art, culture and commerce. The events clearly take both an industrial and an aesthetic form, and are not simply driven by both state and market forces but are actively and visibly involved in conflating the two.

Universal Exhibitions are constituted in the display of nation states, their cultures, industries and scientific achievements. In the late twentieth century, national and transnational participants in these exhibitions are sophisticated players, highly skilled in techniques of promotion and seduction. Many of the exhibits at the 1992 Expo in Seville were highly reflexive, even ironic, about the cumbersome epistemological apparatus required to render the nation visible as a cultural entity. Nations were selling themselves, but were using the latest techniques of rupture to generate difference and market p r ~ f i l e . ~ Not surprisingly, much of this enterprise was underwritten by multinational sponsorship rather than by national government funding.

A characteristic strategy of national display was the promotion of multiculturalism. National exhibits did not simply reproduce what are often presented as hegemonic understandings of national cultures or political identities. Practices were thoroughly deconstructive, although the effects

32 Critical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3

were hardly radical. The Expo’92 thus provided a concrete example of how deconstruction on the one hand, and the generation of information on the other, do not necessarily constitute enhanced understanding, let alone radical practice - as critics of postmodernism have long argued. Never- theless, the exhibition did provide an interesting example of cultural theory in practice.

Multiculturalism at the World’s Fair

One of the more interesting changes which can be seen in the Universal Exhibitions of the past century is the degree to which nation states have been concerned to publicly demonstrate cultural homogeneity. In recent decades, national cultures have often been quite openly presented as heterogeneous and fluid communities. This is not to say that multiculturalism replaces a notion of homogeneity, but that the concepts of sameness and difference are presented as compatible rather than opposed. Hetero- geneity is now the self-conscious identity of modern societies, but our new hybrid forms are reformulations of nineteenth-century paradigms in which processes of unification and differentiation always did operate simultaneously.

Today it is common to claim that in such matters we have moved from biologism and scientism to the safety of culturalism, that we have created distance and surety by the very act of the critique of essentialism and the demonstration of its impossibility: but that shift has not been so absolute, for the racial was always cultural, the essential never unequivocaL6

In the Great Exhibitions of the pre-World War I era the importance of distinguishing the cultural from the biological as principles of difference was reflected in the varying treatment of human subjects at the fairs. A key feature of European colonialism was the way in which populations were constituted as either ’nationed’ or ‘raced’, as possessors of particular cultural attributes or bearers of racial characteristics.7 This general paradigm, which both perpetuated and instantiated the culturelnature dichotomy of modernist thought, was particularly visible in the traditional and colonial villages which formed a novel part of the fairs at the turn of the century. At the Franco-British Exhibition held in London in 1908 the amusement section of the International and Colonial Exhibition displayed recon- structions of Irish and Scottish villages alongside Dahomeyan, Somali and Senegalese villages. While the former were offered as nostalgic images of foundational lifestyles, the historical traditions of European ’nations’, the latter were offered as concrete evidence of racial difference.


The proximity of these ’villages’ on site had the effect of accentuating the distance between the European ’primitive’ and its colonial counterpart. This was further reinforced by the suggestion in the guidebooks that, even in these supposedly simple European communities, there was evidence of an inherent superiority in relation to the colonized races represented. The predominance of adjectives such as ’healthy‘, ’beautiful’ and ’industrious’ together with descriptions of the Irish and Scottish living quarters as ‘spacious’, compare favourably with the constantly repeated assurances that the Africans are in fact much cleaner than they look.R

Rydell’s detailed social histories of the US World’s Fairs9 also stress this close relationship between the emergence of national cultures and the development of colonial empires. The colonising process was presented as a search for the acquisition of raw materials (natural resources) for the greater (cultural) progress of the ’human race’ (citizens of nation states). The raw materials and manufactured products were displayed in the main venues of these early exhibitions, yet the peoples who inhabited those parts of the world from which these materials were extracted were displayed in the amusement zones as benchmarks against which to measure their cultural distance from the industrialised nations. lo Furthermore, while there was a certain incorporation of difference in the universal pretensions of these early fairs, those who were excluded from the liberal model of an overarching cultural parity of citizens were subject to the imperial discourse of incorporation as property. The contrast with the presentations in 1992 of the multicultural nation state was quite striking and will be illustrated here by a discussion of the exhibits of the European Community and of Spain.

The European Community - an icon for the multicultural state

Classified by the organisers as an International Organisation11 rather than a nation state, the European Community was the one such organisation which nevertheless still presented itself in the image of the nation state, with flag, capital city, population figures and territorial extension. This was super-nation rather than supra-nation, providing an umbrella and a low- profile but pervasive rationale for the centrality of other European states at the Spanish Expo. For most Europeans it was not the commemoration of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas which marked 1992 as significant, but the emergence of the single European market, the establishment of ‘a vast zone without internal frontiers where goods, services, people and capital move as freely as within one country’.12 The Community’s aims of a single

34 Critical Quarferiy, vol. 38, no. 3

currency, political union, and common foreign and security policies high- light its chosen identity as that of nation state writ large. This nation state is one which embraces the cultural diversity of its constituent nations:

On the one side, we see a disparate family of nations embracing many differ- ing cultures; on the other, a desire to develop a common identity, to make Europe ‘European’ - but without succumbing to the colourless uniformity of ‘Europeanism’ or to the temptation of blindly imitating the past.I3

The European Community offered three versions of its presence at the Expo’92. In the first place there were the separate pavilions of the twelve member states. Second, the entity was made more tangible by the exist- ence of a separate European Community Pavilion. The exhibition space of this pavilion was in fact underground, but its visible icon was a 50m tower showing the flags of all the nation states of the Community. Its explicit symbolism was that of a ’large beacon, recalling the message of unity in the diversity of the European Community countries’. Finally there was the Community Site, the central space of the Avenue of Europe along which were ranged twelve towers linked by cloth ’sails’ which provided shade for visitors, and again symbolised ‘the unity and interdependence of the Community countries’. These tangible images of the Community were themselves produced as a collaborative effort between the constituent nation states in the spirit of interdependence, unity and diversity. The Italians had been largely responsible for the infrastructure which was maintained by the Portuguese. The office was run by the French and the Belgians. The architect was German and the interior was designed by the British company Imagination, previously responsible for John Major’s Electoral Road Show, the re-launch of the new privatised British Telecom plc, and the promotion of Euro Disney.

The exhibition itself was entitled ’From Renaissance Europe to the renaissance of Europe’ and told the story of the ’discovery’ of the European Community via the emergence and collaboration of the Western European nations. The starting point of Renaissance Europe was chosen to coincide with the importance Spain was placing on 1492 as the origin of Western modernity. The visitor walked through the underground exhibit space past larger than life-size tableaux representing the great discoverers and in- ventions of the fifteenth century. There was a huge model of Copernicus at work, and images of Columbus and other ’great travellers’. The emergence of banking institutions and that of the printing press were presented as key cultural innovations which had definitively shaped the course of European history. However, attention was also given to the centrality of conflict in European history, culminating in the destruction caused by the Second


World War, and the urgent need to rebuild Europe and to forge a new European Community to ensure future peaceful coexistence and pros- perity. The exhibit ended with a display of the Treaty of Rome and reference to the first European elections. The ECU was on show alongside reams of printed information about EC institutions for visitors to take away.

The European Community was thus produced at the Expo as a model of the Western egalitarian nation state, an image which other nations, notably Spain, also used in their self-presentations for global effect.

Spain - the multiculturalism of a European heartland

As host nation, Spain appeared in many guises at the exhibition. Spain‘s European presence was emphasised by the position of its main pavilion at the head of the Avenue of Europe, a location from which Spain was also linked both to its former colonies and to its disaggregated component parts, the seventeen ’autonomous communities’,14 ranged around the Lake of Spain. Expo’92 as a state company was also responsible for the theme pavilion^.'^ Thus, while the Spanish pavilion picked up very strongly on the idea of a particular national genius and mission in the world, Spain was also present at the exhibition as a global force, an international community, a multicultural nation with a transnational culture. The catchphrase used in the official guide was ‘Spain, Waiting to be Dis- covered’ and the principal themes were given as tradition and modernity, the union of cultures, history and language.

In the Spanish exhibit, 1492 was highlighted as a significant moment of integration symbolised by the expulsion of both the Jews and the Moors and the formation by Fernando and Isabella of a Christian Spanish state. Historically then, multiculturalism worked against the integrity of the nation, and the Jewish and Arab cultural foundations were presented as influences visible as traces in the subsequent history of the Spanish nation, their integration facilitated by their subordination to the political control of the Christian monarchs. Contemporary multiculturalism, as represented by the presence of the pavilions of the autonomous communities, is an altogether different kind of subdivision of the nation. Here the elements of the whole are produced as equal partners, constitutive elements each with its particular history, economic activity, even languages and customs, but with no overlap of territory or interest. These are the constituent nations of which the larger nation is formed, and their presence at the Expo’92 was yet another statement of the way in which Spain, as nation state, presented itself as a facilitator, a cultural mediator, a force for integration and political


co-operation, building collectivities through paying attention to individuals, a fine instantiation of the liberal project! Just as there was no tension in being British, German, French, etc. and simultaneously Euro- pean, so in the idealised Expo world there were no tensions involved in being Basque or Catalan and simultaneously Spanish. The state is simply the integrative possibility or structure for the rational realisation of collec- tive enterprises. The differences that constituted the communities of the Basque Country and Catalonia for example were, in the logic of the Expo, equivalent to those through which the region Rioja or the metropolis Madrid had themselves emerged as discrete entities.

These examples illustrate how the concept of difference operates in the egalitarian national model. While surface differences may be tolerated, even actively promoted, deeper, ontological differences are suppressed and excluded. Verena Stolcke makes this point powerfully in the contrasts she draws between the internal multiculturalism of the EC and extra- community differences evoked by the presence of ’guest workers’, migrants, refugees, etc.I6 Importantly, then, the egaIitarian principle distinguishes between kinds of difference. There is the difference that ident- ifies those to be associated, illustrated here by the cases of the EC and the Spanish presentation of multiculturalism, and the differences that are repressed, removed from sight, rendered invisible for the damage they would cause to the integrity of the nation state. In this regard it is interesting to note how the cultural differences which had to be removed from sight in the fifteenth century, to enable the emergence of Spain as Christian nation state, are now brought back as foundational differences, the rich cultural heritage which distinguishes Spain from its neighbours. The presentation is particularly ironic when seen alongside the national histories of the Spanish-American colonies, where specificity is also presented in terms of mixed origins, but where, thanks to Spanish colonial law, racial difference was never entirely subsumed into the nation. These Latin American histories of rnestisaje retain the idioms of race that Spanish history has rendered cultural.

The United Kingdom: fighting against stereotypical associations of state and nation

The tour around the pavilion of the United Kingdom was designed to evoke an exploration of ‘original Britain in partnership with the world’. The guides, referred to as navigators, welcomed the public into the first venue of the pavilion, a room with banked TV screens showing images of daily life, the ordinary diversity of British people going about their daily


business, 'a friendly hello from some of the 57 million U.K. residents'. Before these images were shown, the navigators quizzed the visitors on what they knew about Britain. This was a deliberate attempt to elicit a particular set of stereotypes - of an isolated, unemotional, tradition-bound people who drink tea and sherry, have no social life or social skills, and constantly complain of bad weather. The navigators themselves were to present the first challenge to this image. They were young, friendly, out- going and all proficient in at least two languages.

The issue of multiculturalism was also left implicit in this drive to present the nation as forward-looking, not dwelling on the historical past. The image the organisers wanted to project was of a unified democratic nation whose scientific and technological expertise was of use to the wider global community where connections and communication are more important than origins and particularities.

The particularity of the British was thus not presented in terms of a specific continuity of content or form, such as might be represented in the heritage genre which the organisers sought to avoid, but rather in a combination of aptitude and attitude. Through this combination equality and difference could be presented as a mediation of the particular (the skills and knowledge of named individuals) and the universal (the general appli- cations of these skills and knowledges). To be British in these terms required no reference to ethnicity or race, to class, gender or age. The spirit of the nation was presented as the activities of free and equal individuals working creatively in ways that the state could direct towards common transnational interests. According to this version of the modern nation state (adopted with great enthusiasm by the Thatcher government), the relationship between state and nation should provide no more than a possibility for enhancing the relationship between individual enterprise and its more general application.

In such an exhibit the kind of relationship between parts and wholes is substantially different from that demonstrated by the focus on multiculturalism in the exhibits of the European Community and of Spain. At the UK pavilion there was no focus on the relationship between nation and state, individual and society, smaller constituent units and the encompassing whole. And this because, as Margaret Thatcher herself most famously spelt out, the concept of society becomes theoretically obsolete in such a model, as do all collectivities, be they nations, states, or larger entities such as the European Community. Difference, however, does remain important, but as a value, as the possibility for the distinctions that make individual products or persons visible and viable as such.

The British exhibitors had reduced the reference to state and nation to a


minimum in their exhibit. The flag was the most salient national symbol, the backdrop to the water cascade that formed the front of the pavilion. There is no doubt that such an exhibit relied heavily on an established international image of national cohesion which could then be challenged in the performative strategy of evoking and confounding the stereotype. The more enduring ways in which state and nation are conflated in the pro- jection of British national identity, the particular history of empire, the significance of an insular territory in the consolidation of a sense of national boundaries during the upheavals of the two World Wars and the evocation of these principles in the reticence and distrust towards the ‘continentals’ in the formation of the European Community, are strong enough to need no mention. In this sense the UK exhibit produced an archetypal image of the nation state; the relationship between state and nation was assumed and not displayed.

What the three preceding examples have in common is that the state was consistently presented as an institution which furthers the interests of the nation and enables the expression of national culture. This, however, was not the only perspective on the relationship between state and nation at the Expo.

Czechoslovakia: problematising the link between state and nation

Czechoslovakia was one of the European nations which had, since accept- ing the invitation to participate in the Expo’92, experienced radical political change in the ’velvet revolutions‘ of 1989-90. As a satellite state of the Soviet Union, there had been no expectation of the conflation between state and nation which Western European nation states sought to achieve in the public promotion of national culture. Indeed, the nation was a focus for resistance and antagonism towards the state, whose authority was quite openly based on the military and economic power of the Soviet Union.

Thus, unlike the twelve nations of the European Community, whose status as nation states was taken to be relatively self-evident and whose exhibits were dedicated to displays which drew attention to their particular national contributions to world cultural progress, Czechoslovakia had to find a space to define its contemporary status in contrast to both its own recent past as a modern socialist state and its more distant national, but pre-modern social organisation. It could not assume an implicit organic development from nation to nation state. Historical discontinuity on the political front had to be balanced with a sense of historical continuity on the cultural front.


Czechoslovakia’s pavilion looked to the architectural style of the pre-war period, functional, simple and straightforward, ’a way of thinking and a civic attitude, with important democratic content’. This notion of democ- racy was central to the exhibit. The pavilion contained a large, abstract glass sculpture, displayed through a show of light and sound. There was no guide, no directions for visitors to follow. A roomful of people entered via an escalator every fifteen minutes or so. There was no seating, no indication of position from which to observe the sculpture which covered three sides of the exhibition space. The music and light show began and when it ended an exit door opened for people to leave.

Printed pamphlets emphasised the history of Czechoslovakia, and the need for capital investment if the renovation of democratic traditions was to be maintained. 1492 was pinpointed as a bad time for Central Europe. While Western Europe was getting richer, Central Europe was losing its economic capacity, diminished in part by the wars which had protected Western Europe from its Eastern enemies. There was an appeal to modernity as a particular form of integration, one which espoused humanist values and principles of egalitarian difference and free choice rather than particular productive technologies. The literature stated that the Commu- nist regimes had invested in the wrong kind of modernism, a modernism which brought about overinvestment in heavy industry to the detriment of the environment and of the human community, as had occurred in fascist Germany and totalitarian Spain. Progress, it was stressed, cannot be measured in terms of utility, but only through the development of the human spirit:

The greatest human discovery is not an object of utility but rather the capacity to perceive, to grasp and to experience together. The capability of the human genius is to break the barrier of the rational world of pure technical perfection and enter into the world of dreams.

The discoveries to be experienced in this pavilion were those that took place in the minds of visitors. However, the interesting point is that the territorial and sovereign integrity of the state is thus undermined in the moment of its assertion, a point which seemed to be stressed by an editorial signed by the President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. The value he sought to promote was responsibility, particularly the responsibility of intellectuals for the dissemination of cultural values:

We still do not know how to place morals above politics, science and econ- omics. We are still unable to understand that the only real backbone of all our actions - if they are to be moral - is responsibility. . . . If the hope of the world


lies in the sphere of human consciousness, then it is more than understand- able that the intellectuals just cannot endlessly avoid their share of responsibility for the world and conceal their dislike of politics under the alleged need to be independent.

The importance given to the role of the intellectual in preserving life itself brings me to my final and most striking example of the ways in which the archetypal Western nation state, the individualist, egalitarian model, was explicitly produced as an object of contemplation at the exhibition, not taken for granted but publicly questioned.

Switzerland: the nationlstate deconstructed

An independent guide to the exhibition introduces the visitor to the Swiss pavilion in the following way:

The Swiss have taken a risk. This country of 6.5 million is attempting to show the off-beat side of Switzerland through its art. They may have gone too far. From the towering paper column which glows in the dark, to the unusual exhibits and finally to the ’piece de resistance,’ the restaurant, visitors are confronted by oddities. Do they succeed in convincing you there is another side to Switzerland? You decide.17

The Swiss pavilion not only vaunted cultural heterogeneity, it went further through a deliberate use of irony and reflexivity to suggest that the integrity of the nation state is somewhat irrelevant in the late twentieth century. This statement was made in the context of a pavilion which was nevertheless bounded, fixed, and aiming to display the ‘typically Swiss’. Furthermore the Swiss watched themselves producing this image, and reflected upon the process. The pavilion structure was designed to empha- sise values of environmental conservation and the transience of human endeavour. The wooden structure with its paper tower was entirely re- cyclable, a feature almost too transient in the face of Seville’s heavy rain storms. The theme of impermanence and deconstruction was echoed in the art work that was the dkor of the restaurant. A glass floor revealed the debris of a local bar, screwed up papers and bits of half-eaten food and discarded eating utensils, complemented by the ’eaten by’ food settings which hung from the ceiling. Important historical figures had left their traces in the remnants of their meals.

In the main space of the exhibition hall, the issue of national culture was also treated with similar deconstructive irony. ’Instead of Swiss cheese, Swiss chocolate, Swiss herdsmen, Swiss mountains, Swiss precision, Swiss banks: Swiss culture!’ Swiss culture, equivalent to other artefacts, persons, skills, institutions, was introduced through the work of twelve


artists whose works constituted a sense not only of heterogeneity but also of process. By this means culture was revealed as an elusive, even ephemeral entity. ‘We soon discover that a Swiss culture as homogeneous as this term implies, does not in fact exist.’ The identity of the artists themselves was questioned and the fact that they did not all live and work in Switzerland was discussed. It was acknowledged that diaspora exists because many feel the need to move away from the narrow confines of places of origin. Swiss artists work abroad, artists from other countries work in Switzerland, Swiss culture cannot be located in a bounded territory. And where that territory was evoked, as a bounded political unit, it was the heterogeneity of the inhabitants that was brought to the fore.

The work of Ben Vautier, born in Naples and living in Nice, summed up for me the spirit of this pavilion. His connection to Switzerland the nation was as the great-grandson of a Swiss painter. His work is described thus in the exhibition brochure (a newspaper of course, transient, mundane, ecological).

For him there are no taboos. He even disposes of nations, rearranging the world according to ethnic viewpoints. He informs the Swiss, for example, in one of his pictures, that Switzerland does not exist (’La Suisse n’existe pas’). The French-speaking part of Switzerland goes to France, of course, the German-speaking region to Germany, northern Ticino and Grisons to Ratien, and the remainder of Ticino to Italy. But not to worry: practically every country suffers the same fate! And at least he has some words of consolation for us: ‘je pense donc je suisse’.

Despite a more radical self-consciousness, the Swiss pavilion was in many ways following a similar agenda to that of the other pavilions discussed above. Here we find, for example, an attempt to counter stereotypes which were simultaneously subtly reinforced through their negation. Furthermore there were certain aides-m4moire. At the exit to the pavilion there was a small shop where Swiss chocolates, watches and clocks were on sale. The products became more archetypally Swiss in the face of the blatant challenge to this notion in the rest of the pavilions. And archetypal Switzerland was also represented in the main exhibition spaces. There was reference to the Alpine landscape and to the salience of the multiculturalism of the nation state.

However, the Swiss pavilion did feel risky. It seemed to undermine the possibilities for its own autonomous participation. It instantiated the receding horizons of identity which deconstructive postmodernism has inflicted on so many political projects which depended on the identification and organisation of particular communities or interest groups. With far more irony, the Swiss pavilion made quite explicit what the UK exhibit


invoked, namely the fact that there is an awareness of nationalism in contemporary Europe that diverges from that of the integrational cultural objectification of the nation state, and moves towards an image of the nation as the product of individual interests and expressive capacities. In such exhibits we can see that nation states are not simply products of international politics, as the historical exhibits of many nations might lead us to expect, but are also the products of a cultural propensity to hyper- individualism and to the economy of multinational capitalism which supports such values.

In this scenario the contemporary nation state no longer requires either cultural homogeneity or territorial integrity. But what challenge does this stance entail? These ideas can be quite easily incorporated into the previous model of the nation state, and indeed at the Expo they exist happily side by side, unremarkable and unproblematic companions. The key to such integration, which is perhaps most succinctly summed up in Ben Vautier's slogan 'je pense donc je suisse', lies in the fact that we are dealing with communities of like individuals, even where these individuals can no longer be confined to bounded territories. The Swiss according to this exhibit are alike in their creative response to the deterritorialisation of Swiss culture.

Grossberg has argued that the global postmodern has no proper dia- lectic.I8 It pluralises and deconstructs itself, yet it originates in the West, and thus constructs a form of homogenisation through difference. What the Expo can show us is how difference can be incorporated to the extent that homogenisation is no longer required to be visible. Difference multiculturalism plays into the terrain in which the nation state no longer requires an image of coherence to promote itself.

Intellectual consumers and the limits to hybridity

What then are the more radical alternatives from within critical anthropology and cultural studies? The argument from anthropology would be that we need to look at the social practices that sustain particular forms of cultural difference, the relationships in which both hybrid and singular entities come into being. This approach is contrasted with easy pluralism, where difference is simply there, or na'ive radicalism which presupposes that hybrids are intrinsically disruptive.

However, the ability of the pluralism model to absorb critical alternatives and disperse their effect should not be underestimated. If critical work depends on revealing the interdependence between entities and the historical processes through which such entities emerge, then we have to be


prepared to ask questions about our own conceptual apparatus. Argu- ments about nation states and multiculturalism should lead us to look at the productivity of difference itself in contemporary capitalist culture, and question the extent of our collusion. If our legitimate concern is to look at how cultural constructs mediate the social process, what about the construct of the ’construct’ itself?

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have noted in relation to this debate that theory deconstructs totalising myths while activism nourishes them. Theory and practice seem to pull in apparently opposite dire~ti0ns.l~ However, if we consider that in practice deconstructivist theory is involved in actively reproducing the notion of culture as construct, just as multiculturalism, even of a critical kind, reproduces the notion of identity, we can begin to see the complicity between academic theory and populist practice.

Bearing in mind that the hybrid entity which is the nation and the market is far from emancipatory for its new citizenslconsumers, we should not be disingenuous about what makes these redefinitions of identity or modernity available to us today. The alliance of state and market is very strong and is produced through metaphors and concepts which our theoretical language is barely keeping pace with. What is the power of deconstruction when transnational companies openly use national identities as logos, or affirm cultural difference as something that can simply be chosen, as Benetton have done in their recent global promotion campaigns? Multi- culturalism without responsibility is not simply the problem of mass popular culture, of crude populism or naive postmodernism - it is also a project which commonplace theoretical assumptions such as the ‘cultural construct’ sustain.

Notes

See for example Simon Frith and Jon Savage, ’Pearls and Swine: The Intel- lectuals and the Mass Media’, New Left Review, 198 (1993), 107-16. Zygmunt Bauman, ’Legislators and Interpreters: culture as the ideology of intellectuals’, in Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1990), 1-25. Terence Turner, ’Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What is Anthropology that Multiculturalists should be mindful of it?’, Cultural Anthropology, 8:4

Turner, 412. One of the crucial dynamics of difference evident in this exhibition was between those nation states that understood the event to be about the ‘business of culture‘ and who deployed this reflexive irony in the process, and those who attempted to distinguish business from culture and tried to provide more standard representations of a particular national heritage. There

(1993), 411-29.


9

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were also those who retreated from the possibility of representing the nation and used the event to sell products with only minimal national profile. See Penelope Harvey, Hybrids of Modernity: anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition (London: Routledge, 1996). Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 27. See Daniel Segal and Richard Handler, ‘How European is Nationalism?‘, Social Analysis, 32 (1992), 1-15. Annie Coombes, ’Ethnography and the formation of national and cultural identities‘, in Susan Hiller (ed.), The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art (London: Routledge, 1991), 206-7. Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 2876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and World of Fairs: The cenfury-of-progress expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Tony Bennett, ’The Exhibitionary Complex’, in N. Dirks, G. Eley and S. Ortner (eds) CulturelPowerlHistor: a reader in contempora ry social theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 143. There were four other pavilions representing international organisations at the Expo’92: The International Olympic Committee, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the Inter-American System, and the United Nations System. The European Community in the 1990s (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 1991), emphasis added. The European Community 1992 and Beyond (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1991). Such as Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands and the Basque Country. There were four of these: the Pavilions of the Fifteenth Century, of Navi- gation, of Nature and of the Future. Verena Stolcke, ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology, 36 (1995), 1-24. The Best of the Expo (Seville: On Site Publications, 1992), 96. I refer here to a public lecture given by Grossberg to the Institute of Popular Culture at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, ’The Politics of Multiculturalism’, Art & Design, 43 (1995), 10-16.

multiculturalism without responsibility? the contemporary universal exhibition

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