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2007 10: 123European Journal of Social TheoryMotti Regev

Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism  

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European Journal of Social Theory 10(1): 123–138

Copyright © 2007 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Cultural Uniqueness and AestheticCosmopolitanism

Motti RegevTHE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL, ISRAEL

AbstractAesthetic cosmopolitanism is conceptualized here as a cultural condition inwhich late modern ethno-national cultural uniqueness is associated withcontemporary cultural forms like film and pop-rock music, and as such it isproduced from within the national framework. The social production ofaesthetic cosmopolitanism is analyzed through elaborations on Bourdieu’sfield theory, as an outcome of the intersection of and interplay betweenglobal fields of art and fields of national culture. A sociological explanationfor the emergence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is proposed. It focuses onclaims by social sectors within national contexts for status and recognitionof their own contemporary cultural uniqueness.

Key words■ cosmopolitanism ■ culture ■ film ■ nationalism ■ pop-rock

The film Raja Harishchandra, released in 1913 and directed by DabasahebPhalke, is considered by film scholars to be the first feature film made in India.It is based on the Indian epic of the Ramayana, and its director relates that hewas inspired to make the film after seeing in Bombay, in 1910, the film La Viedu Christ (The Life of Christ), directed in France, in 1906, by Alice Guy-Blachè(generally considered as the first female film director). Dissanayake (2000), whorelates this episode in film history, asserts that Phalke wondered, after seeingGuy-Blachè’s film, ‘how long it would be before Indians would be able to seeIndian images of their divinities on screen’, and that he was overwhelmed bythe ‘potentialities of the art of cinematography’ (2000: 143). One century later,with a long history of mixing local dramatic and visual traditions with inspira-tion and influence from Hollywood films and European art cinema, Indiancinema is a salient art form through which contemporary Indian culturaluniqueness is expressed, performed and signified – be it in the works of filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal, or in the popular cinemaknown as Bollywood.

In the summer of 2003, the Spanish popular music magazine Efe eme publishedthe results of a critics poll to elect the ‘100 best albums of Spanish pop’. The

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album that turned up at number one was Veneno, released in 1977 by a band ofthe same name, and in fact carrying the name of its leading musician:

Veneno sounded fresh. Kiko Veneno was transmitting the legacy of Bob Dylan andthe California hippy through the sieve of those gypsies who were dying to play electricguitars. Rockeros aflamencados, flamencos rockerizados. It was impetuous music ofthe street, and it did not ask permission from London, nor from San Francisco – andnot from Madrid or Barcelona – in order to exist on its own terms. (Manrique, 2003,my translation)

Veneno is one name among many other pop-rock musicians and bands – RadioFutura, Rosendo, Mecano, Jarabe de Palo, Estopa, La Oreja de Van Gogh, LosRodriguez are just a few that come to mind – whose music has been perceivedby large sectors in Spain since the 1970s as an expression of Spanish contempor-ary cultural uniqueness.

Film in India and pop-rock in Spain are two particular examples of a muchwider phenomenon, namely, the institutionalization of contemporary culturalforms – of which film and pop-rock music are among the most salient – as legit-imate expressions of current ethno-national cultural uniqueness. This articleexamines some aspects of this phenomenon. Suggesting that the incorporation ofcontemporary cultural forms for expressing ethno-national cultural uniqueness hascreated a condition of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and looking at film and pop-rock music as primary examples, the article first characterizes the cultural realityto which the concept relates. It then moves on to analyze the logic underlying thesocial production of and the cultural practices that generate aesthetic cosmo-politanism. The third section offers a possible sociological explanation to the emer-gence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which focuses on the quest of an ever growingnumber of social entities within nation-states and across them for recognition oftheir distinctive modern identity and uniqueness. The article concludes with somecomments on expressive culture in late modern world society.

The Cultural Reality of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism

The term aesthetic (sometimes cultural) cosmopolitanism applies in the culturalrealm to the renewed general interest in the centuries-old concept of cosmo-politanism (see, for example, Beck, 2000; Cheah and Robbins, 1998; Hannerz,1990, 2004; Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). As suggested in the work of Urry(1995), Szerszinski and Urry (2002, 2006) and Tomlinson (1999), aestheticcosmopolitanism is located at the individual level, as a ‘cultural dispositioninvolving an intellectual and aesthetic stance of “openness” towards peoples,places and experiences from different cultures, especially those from different“nations”’ (Szerszinski and Urry, 2002: 468), or as having taste for ‘the widershores of cultural experience’ (Tomlinson, 1999: 202).

These formulations, as much as they serve as useful starting points, hint at asomewhat mechanical, dichotomous distinction between a culture ‘of our own’

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and cultures of ‘others’. In this usage, aesthetic cosmopolitanism presumes asself-evident the existence of ethnic and national cultures as spaces of exclusiveexpressive content, as symbolic environments to which certain cultural productsand art works inherently ‘belong’. Thus when individuals, as members of onenational or ethnic culture, have taste for cultural products or art works thatunequivocally ‘belong’ to a nation or ethnicity other than their own, they displayaesthetic cosmopolitanism. If, on the other hand, individuals have taste exclus-ively for cultural products and art works that conventionally ‘belong’ to theethno-national entity of which they are members, they do not count as aestheticcosmopolitans.

When examined closely, such an understanding of current aesthetic cosmo-politanism proves partial, because it does not fully cover the cultural complexityin late modernity. The image of ethno-national uniqueness implied by thisunderstanding of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is that of early to high modernity,when the invention of national traditions and imagining of nations were char-acterized by a quest for essentialism and purism. Such perceived essentialism hasbeen typically institutionalized by erecting ethno-national canons of traditionalforms of art – poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, folk and sometimes artmusic. The ‘exterior’ influences and sources of ethno-national culture wereconcealed, in order to glorify its authenticity, it being fully indigenous. Indeed,during early and high modernity, musical idioms, dramaturgical traditions orpatterns of visual presentation, associated with traditional forms of art, wereinstitutionalized as signifiers of specific nations or ethnic groups.

In late modernity, however, the cultural uniqueness of nations and ethnicgroups is no longer characterized by such a quest for exclusive, relatively isolatedspaces of cultural content and aesthetic form. The quest for essentialist purismhas been replaced by an admitted openness to late modern cultural forms. Theorthodox commitment to a rigid form of national culture has been replaced bya fluid conception of ethno-national uniqueness, one that is constantly andconsciously willing to implement stylistic innovations in art and culture fromdifferent parts of the world.

Many of the art works and cultural products that signify contemporary ethno-national cultural uniqueness routinely and openly include elements drawn from‘outside’ the nation or ethnicity which they represent. The production of ethno-national cultural uniqueness in late modernity, especially in the sphere ofcontemporary cultural forms, those based on modern technologies of expressionsuch as ‘moving pictures’ and electric manipulation of sound, is in fact a practiceof choosing, selecting and extracting elements from the plethora of expressivecomponents available at a global level, including the producers’ own traditions.These elements are then mixed and hybridized into recipes and products thatbecome signifiers of current cultural uniqueness of nations and ethnicities. Onceproduced, such cultural products and art works become themselves part of theglobal repertoire available as inspiration and influence to anyone interested.

The production of ethno-national cultural uniqueness in late modernity isinverted. Instead of looking exclusively back to their own group’s history, or

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inside, to their own community’s traditions, cultural producers and artistsretrieve much of their techniques and expressive patterns from the ‘outside’, fromcultural products and art works that signify ‘otherness’. At the same time, theirlocal products become available to cultural producers and artists in other partsof the world. Ethno-national uniqueness in late modernity is produced with thehelp of ‘others’, it is a co-production (Garcia Canclini, 2000). Current worldculture can be portrayed as a bank of visual, sonic and textual stylistic elementsand techniques of expression, from which every local producer at the nationallevel can draw materials for her own use, and in which every producer – oncegaining some publicity – deposits certain variants and nuances of such elements.

Therefore, in light of Beck’s succinct definition of cosmopolitanism as acondition in which the ‘otherness of the other is included in one’s own self-identity and self-definition’ (Beck, 2003: 17), I want to suggest that aestheticcosmopolitanism in late modernity should be located not necessarily at the indi-vidual level, but at the structural collective level, as a cultural condition that isinextricable from current ethno-national uniqueness. Put differently, I want tosuggest that aesthetic cosmopolitanism comes into being not only throughconsumption of art works and cultural products from the ‘wider shores ofcultural experience’, but also, and more intensively, through the creation andconsumption of much of the contemporary locally produced art and culture thatare believed to express ethno-national uniqueness. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism isthe condition in which the representation and performance of ethno-nationalcultural uniqueness are largely based on art forms that are created by contem-porary technologies of expression, and whose expressive forms include stylisticelements knowingly drawn from sources exterior to indigenous traditions. Assuch, aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not the exception in contemporary culturalpractices, but rather the normal and the routine. It could be labeled, followingBillig (1995), banal aesthetic cosmopolitanism.1 It is an ‘actually existing’ cosmo-politanism (Robbins, 1998), and a major manifestation of what Robertson(1995) has called glocalization: the (re-)construction of locality in response toand under the influence of globalization.

Understood in this way, the separation between production and consumptionof aesthetic cosmopolitanism becomes superfluous. If aesthetic cosmopolitanismbegins with a taste for cultures of countries, nations and ethnicities different fromone’s own, then at the level of production local cultural producers who have tastefor goods from cultures other than their own, become inspired and influencedin their own work by elements from these other cultures. Cultural elements fromalien cultures are thus inserted, integrated and absorbed into the producer’s ownethno-national culture. Consequently, consumers of home-made culturalproducts and art works become inadvertently open to experiences from otherethno-national cultures.

The consumption of ‘otherness’ within a given ethno-national culture doesnot involve only finished products and works from other nations. Rather, it mostoften takes the form of consuming local-national art and culture with elementsof ‘otherness’ weaved into them. Late modern aesthetic cosmopolitanism differs

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in this regard from early modern consumer cosmopolitanism, in which uppermiddle-class groupings, mostly in the West, purchased goods from the Orientand other places for the purpose of demonstrating taste in ‘exotic’ cultures, andcertainly not as part of their own sense of national uniqueness (see Nava, 1998).

As a form of ethno-national uniqueness, aesthetic cosmopolitanism comesinto being with the institutionalization of contemporary forms of art such as filmand pop-rock music as legitimate expressions of such uniqueness. It comes intobeing through works and genres whose aesthetic form and structure, by includ-ing components from ‘outside’ the given ethno-national culture, render theirconsumers inadvertent aesthetic cosmopolitans. It is, in other words, a cosmo-politanism made ‘from within’ the national framework (Beck and Sznaider, 2006).

The particularity of film and pop-rock music for aesthetic cosmopolitanismresides in the fact that these art forms are defined by the sophisticated technolo-gies of expression used for producing them: ‘moving pictures’ for film, andelectric, manipulated and recorded sound for pop-rock music. As implementa-tions of forms of expression that do not spring from the indigenous traditionsof most nations and ethnicities of the world, ethno-national genres of film andpop-rock embody in the very basic dimension of their existence an inclusion of‘otherness’ within ethno-cultural uniqueness. Tightly connected to the use of thetechnologies themselves is the influence of stylistic elements from ‘exterior’genres of film and pop-rock music. Film makers and pop-rock musicians incountries where these art forms have been imported, by using the technologiesof expression and by being influenced by such genres, weave into ethno-nationalculture elements of ‘otherness’ and thus produce aesthetic cosmopolitanism ‘fromwithin’.

Global Fields of Art and the Field of National Culture

Common characterizations of the emergence of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, whilereferring to it by other terms (globalization of culture would be the most prevail-ing), tend to emphasize forces that are ‘external’ to the national context, and inparticular the transnational, Western-based cultural industries. While the embed-dedness of national cultural industries in the networks of multinational corpor-ations should not be underestimated, these characterizations tend to overlook thelogic of cultural fields in the process, and therein the agency of cultural producers– film makers, musicians, critics – at the national level. Indeed, if the emergenceof a condition of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is a transformation of ethno-nationaluniqueness from essentialism to fluidity, a process of cultural change, then thelogic and practices of the local social forces working to produce it ‘from within’should be given more attention. Understanding how aesthetic cosmopolitanismis socially produced from within ethno-national culture entails looking atcultural producers as agents whose cultural work is structured by the simultane-ous position they occupy in at least two fields of cultural production: the globalfield of the art form in question (for example, the field of film or of pop-rock

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music), and the field of the ethno-national culture in which they are situated.Aesthetic cosmopolitanism emerges as the socially produced consequence of theinterplay between these two fields. Before looking into this interplay, let me char-acterize briefly the fields in question.

The fields of film and of pop-rock have the typical hierarchical structure andlogic of struggle of all artistic fields (Bourdieu, 1992, 1993). Namely, they havedominant positions, consisting of consecrated canonic artists and their works,and corresponding production of meaning positions (i.e. critics, journalists,historians and the like) that maintain the successfully imposed criteria of evalu-ation, as well as the dominant historical narrative of the art form. The actualhistories of the fields are those of struggles by new entrants who aspire to gainthe ultimate prize of becoming part of the canon. Such struggles might take theform of heresy (including attempts to transgress and redefine the dominantcriteria of evaluation) or be evolutionary, in the wake of already existing canonicpositions. In either case, the ever developing fields are constructed of a series ofadditions to the canon, each justified in its turn by power-holding producers ofmeaning (usually situated in the metropolitan imperial centers of world culture)as important stylistic innovations.

The justifications used for erecting the canons are permutations of thetraditional modernist ideology of autonomous art, meaning that the importanceof films and their directors, of albums and their musicians, is determined notnecessarily by relating to their impact in the sales market, but by pointing totheir aesthetic and cultural value (Allen and Lincoln, 2004; Appen and Dohering,2006; Irvin, 2001; Regev, 1994; Sight and Sound international critics and direc-tors poll, September 2002). That is, the canonic films and pop-rock albums arebelieved to be ultimate embodiments of the potential hidden in the expressivetechnologies of film making and pop-rock to be genuine artistic and creativemeans.

New additions to the canons are often justified by interpreting them as anexpansion of the creative possibilities hidden in existing or in some newlydeveloped technologies: use of camera movements, lighting, editing techniques,sequencing of shots, insertion of computerized animation in the case of film;sonic innovation in electric guitar playing, use of electronic instruments,sampling, new patterns of sound manipulation in the recording studio, in thecase of pop-rock music. Knowledge of the narratives of film and pop-rockhistory, as produced by the dominant production of meaning apparatus, andacquaintance with the actual stylistic features associated with canonic works andnames, as well as with established stylistic conventions of leading genres, are thedoxas of the fields, both in terms of craft and belief. At any moment in theirhistory, new entrants who aspire to gain rewards and prizes in the field of filmor pop-rock acquire at least parts of this knowledge in order to position them-selves on the stylistic map, learn the already existing patterns of creativity andattempt to surpass them by either continuity or heresy.2

The hierarchical structure and the logic of struggle that characterize fields ofnational culture are slightly different from fields of art. Here the canon consists

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of art works, cultural products and aesthetics traditions that have been institu-tionalized as consecrated expressions of ethno-national uniqueness. These aretypically associated with folk-rural and early urban cultural forms.

New entrants to the field struggle to gain recognition for new works, productsand genres as legitimate expression of nationhood. Such new aspirants typicallyconsist of ‘modernizers’, or ‘invigorators’ who want to update national culturewith whatever cultural innovations happen to appeal to them as worthy of ‘indi-genization’; new aspirants also include artists whose work emanates from thesocio-cultural reality of groups that have been excluded from dominant nationalculture: native regional or ethnic groups, but also migrants of various types. Theissue at stake, around which the field of national culture is organized, is the specificcultural capital and habitus or the institutionalized cultural repertoire thatdefines ‘natural’ membership in a given ethno-national entity (Lamont, 1995).Orthodox positions in the field are usually engaged with preserving thetraditional canon and rigid criteria of evaluation regarding ‘national authentic-ity’. Other positions try to expand or transform such criteria in a way that willallow inclusion of new aesthetics into the ethno-national canon.

Most importantly, the underlying doxa of the field consists of a commitmentto the notion of uniqueness. Even ‘invigorators’, for all the universalistic avant-garde aura that sometimes characterize their aesthetics, usually wrap their artwith justifications about how their cultural works include aspects of national orlocal authenticity, or take pride in the introduction of innovative aesthetics intonational culture. The same holds for most, if not every cultural producer thatchallenges dominant national culture from an ‘ethnic’ minority perspective.Thus, in Israel, for example, the invented tradition of Hebrewism became thecultural repertoire against which ‘modernized’ forms of Israeliness, as well asmizrahyiut (orientalism) had to struggle for legitimacy (Regev, 2000). And inIreland, idealized patterns of rural culture of Western Ireland have been institu-tionalized as the homogenized variant of ‘authentic’ Irishness, against which anyattempt to define a different variant of Irishness was measured (Gibbons, 1996;Graham, 2001).

Film makers and pop-rock musicians, especially (but not necessarily) thoseworking in countries other than the metropolitan, imperial centers of the culturalindustries, found themselves caught at the intersection between their artistic fieldand their field of national culture. In the interplay that arises from this intersec-tion, the global and the local, the ‘imperial’ and the ethno-national converge, andit is from this convergence that aesthetic cosmopolitanism is ultimately produced.

The working of this interplay, its social mechanism and cultural logic, can beanalyzed by considering two elaborations on Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural fields.The first comes from the work of Sewell (1992), who critiques Bourdieu’sanalysis of habitus because it ‘cannot explain change as arising from within theoperation of structures’ (Sewell, 1992: 16). He then goes on to argue that thetransformation of structures from within is possible thanks to five key character-istics of fields (or social structures), two of which are the multiplicity of structuresand the transposibility of schemas. These two imply that individuals, as social

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agents, are always situated in more than one field, and routinely transposeelements from one field-specific habitus to their actions and practices in a differ-ent field. Artists and other cultural producers are no exception: they occupy posi-tions in more than one field, each field with its own specific forms of capital andhabitus, with its own hierarchies, structures and schemas. The intersection of two(or more) fields of cultural production thus becomes a source of innovation andchange. The work of agency, of producing cultural change, is performed throughthe transposition of specific types of habitus from one field to another. Aestheticsensibilities, criteria of evaluation and creative patterns are some key elementstransposed by cultural producers from one field to another, as part of thedynamics of innovation and surpassing of existing patterns that characterize allartistic fields.

A second elaboration comes from the work of Toynbee (2000), who applies akey concept of Bourdieu’s field theory, that of ‘space of possibles’ (or possibilities),to the work of musicians in the field of popular music. Examining Bourdieu’sconcept, which defines the creative trajectories available to an artist at a givenmoment, Toynbee goes on to develop a model he calls ‘the radius of creativity’.His main point is that within the given space of possibilities available to an artistin the field, there is always the certain likelihood that some possibilities will bepreferred over others. This likelihood is a function of the artist’s own disposi-tions, the position she or he occupies in the field and the readily available creativemeans, as offered by the actual institutions within which the artist works. It isthis likelihood that ultimately defines which creative possibility will be adopted,including stylistic innovation.

In light of these elaborations, it should be asserted that in the very act ofbecoming film makers and pop-rock musicians, individuals in any country areself-mobilized into membership and actorhood in the global fields of these artforms. In this regard, and from a historical perspective, the encounter experi-enced by artists in countries outside the metropolitan centers with the creativepossibilities offered by the global, dominant forms of film and pop-rock musicis a core aspect of what is conventionally labeled ‘cultural imperialism’. Thisencounter, and the ensuing active joining of the fields, involve an acceptance ofa belief in the cultural significance and artistic value of the creative means andcanonic works of film and pop-rock. Once they come to perceive themselves asparticipants in the global fields, film makers adopt the imperative to keep trackand be updated with things that happen at the forefront of Hollywood cinemaand European art films (and upon approval from critics in the West, films fromother countries as well), while pop-rock musicians do the same in regard toAnglo-American pop-rock (and sometimes other locations as well). Stylisticinnovations as well as film makers or musicians that are valorized as ‘important’by the dominant (usually Anglo-American) production of meaning positions inthe fields are bound to influence and inspire film makers and pop-rock musi-cians all over the world. Such film makers and musicians wilfully let themselvesbe inspired and influenced, because it serves their interest to be active, updatedand relevant actors in the global field, and to determine their own path of

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creativity and innovation. But such film makers and musicians are also actors intheir respective fields of national culture, where they are propelled to create workswhose form, content and meaning arguably represent ethno-national uniqueness,singularity and distinction. As members of given ethno-national communities,and for their work to be accepted and legitimized (or eventually acclaimed) bylocal critics as ‘locally authentic’ (and not simply imitative), film makers andpop-rock musicians all over the world have been impelled throughout the historyof these art forms in most countries to make films and music that incorporateaesthetic idioms, stylistic traditions, genre formats and other expressive elementsfrom their ethno-national heritages.

Film makers and pop-rock musicians, in other words, find themselves at theintersection of two fields and with an expanded radius of creativity. The space ofcreative possibilities opened to them consists of both the general, global film orpop-rock traditions and the ethno-national heritage of which they are successors.Since likelihood of access to creative and institutional means that lead to successin the global fields has been historically low for film makers and pop-rock musi-cians in most countries, they opt, overwhelmingly, for those creative possibilitieswhose likelihood was much higher, namely, creative possibilities that allowmaking films and pop-rock music that bear clear ethno-national marks. Thismeans, in practice, transposing schemas from the global fields to the nationalfield and vice versa.

In the case of film, transposition consists of depicting ethno-national realitythrough the lens of Hollywood genres and techniques of representation, but alsocreating film genres that insert elements of indigenous dramaturgical traditions,local patterns of visuality (in painting, for example) and other native arts intothe mise-en-scène of films. A notable example consists of the East Asian filmgenres of swordplay and martial arts. Japanese jidai-geki films have their roots inthe aesthetics of Kabuki Theater and epic samurai tales, while China and HongKong wuxia and kung fu films bring to the screen influences from Chinese operaand ancient tales of morality. In addition, leading directors such as Japan’sHiroshi Inagaki and Akira Kurosawa, Hong Kong’s King Hu (Hu Jinquan), TsuiHark and John Woo, and China’s Yimou Zhang, developed sophisticatedshooting and editing techniques. On the other hand, these genres are also highlyinfluenced by Hollywood gangster films, westerns and melodramas, as well as byclassic editing techniques (so-called ‘constructive editing’) developed by Holly-wood and Soviet film pioneers. Cross-influences between these genres, havemade of them, for local as well as world-wide film spectators, a salient represen-tation of contemporary Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese and indeed, inter East-Asian cultural uniqueness. At the same time, the martial arts and swordplaymovies are known to have had an immense influence on film making all over theworld, including Hollywood, thus proving themselves to be not just ‘peripheral’or ‘national’ cinemas, but films that stand at the frontier of the stylistic develop-ment of the art form (Bordwell, 2000; Yoshimoto, 2000).

In the case of pop-rock music, one, if not the most significant example consistsof the sonic patterns of the electric guitar and vocal presentation associated with

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rock bands and rock auteurs. First introduced by the likes of Chuck Berry andBuddy Holly in the US in the 1950s, and then codified and popularized world-wide by Anglo-Americans like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan andJimi Hendrix in the 1960s, the patterns have been adopted by musicians invarious countries to create their own national variants of rock music. Singing innative languages and referring in the lyrics to subjects and issues that emanate fromlocal, ethno-national social reality has been one mode of indigenization of rockmusic. More noteworthy has been the incorporation into pop-rock of stylisticelements and creative techniques associated with local, ethno-national traditionsof folk and popular music. This practice includes use of native music instruments(sometimes modified to be electric), indigenous vocal techniques of enunciationthrough singing, native rhythmic patterns, and recording electrified pop-rockcover versions of traditional music (Regev, 2007). Local success by names suchas Mashina Vremeni and Aquarium in Russia, Bijelo Dugme in former Yugoslavia,Almendra in Argentina, Ehud Banai in Israel, Cui Jian in China, Noir Desir inFrance, Ulf Lundell in Sweden, Mogollar in Turkey or Os Mutantes in Brazil, toname only a few, stand as evidence to how pop-rock music has been indigenizedto represent ethno-national uniqueness in various countries. And with Jamaicanreggae music, as exported to the world by Bob Marley, or the pan-African styleof soukous, of the type associated with the likes of Zaiko Langa Langa and KandaBongo Man, indigenized pop-rock has ‘struck back’ as an influence on Anglo-American pop-rock (Regev, 1997; Stokes, 2004).

The term ‘hybridization’ is often used to describe the creative practicesemployed by film makers and musicians of the type just described, and itcertainly depicts the nature of their techniques of creativity. In light of the above,however, it should be stressed that hybridization is not an arbitrary or whimsi-cal creative practice, but rather an artistic practice structured by the social embed-dedness of film and pop-rock music in the intersections of their respective globalfields of cultural production with fields of national culture.

Recognition and Homology

The analysis of the work of film makers and musicians, as constrained and struc-tured by the fields in which they act, may provide a framework for understand-ing how aesthetic cosmopolitanism is produced. It does not, however, provide asociologically grounded explanation as to why aesthetic cosmopolitanism emergefrom within the ethno-national context. Addressing this point in this section, Iwant to argue that the social forces motivating the emergence of aesthetic cosmo-politanism are claims for recognition and status attainment. Recognition andattainment of status not only for art works – films, albums – from various ethno-national sources in their respective global art worlds, but recognition and attain-ment of status also for consumers of these works at the national level, andconstituting them as equal participants in contemporary world culture, on a parwith consumers of these art forms in the imperial centers of the West. The

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framework proposed here for such an explanation combines Fraser’s treatmentof recognition as a question of social status (2000, 2002) and Bourdieu’s notionof homology.

Late modernity, according to Bauman, is the time of ‘the great war of recog-nition’. According to him, the sole substance of the human rights principle is ‘astanding invitation to register claims and to bid for the claims’ recognition’(Bauman, 2001: 141). Indeed, late modernity is characterized by a fragmenta-tion of national societies into variants and factions, along variables such as gener-ation, gender, ethnicity, life-style and any combination of them. Each of thesedevelops its claim for difference, distinction and recognition. The previouslyimagined cultural homogeneity of national societies is criss-crossed by sub-national (and trans-national) notions of collective identity of various sorts. Thegrowing quantity and diversity of groups or identities seeking recognition withinnational contexts (or across them) imply that collective entities are intensivelyengaged in the invention, creation and construction of their own sense ofmodern cultural uniqueness. The question of difference and recognition impliesthat the collective entities struggling for and claiming recognition, will have inone way or another a genuine sense of modern cultural uniqueness, one that isanchored in the national or ethnic origin of these social groups. That is, membersof such entities, and symbolic representations of them as singular collectiveactors, tend to emphasize the particularity of their modern, contemporary formsof life, aesthetic sensibilities and judgments of taste. Claiming recognition entailsunderscoring cultural uniqueness.

But what is it exactly that is being demanded by social entities in latemodernity when they claim recognition? According to Fraser, recognition, as amajor aspect of the politics of equality, should be approached as a question ofstatus which examines institutionalized patterns of cultural value for their effectson the relative standing of social actors (Fraser, 2002: 24). Thinking about collec-tive actors, the boundary erection associated with the war of recognition is notonly about definitions of difference and uniqueness for social entities, but alsoabout gaining status for them. Global institutional patterns of cultural value, andespecially regimes of artistic value (Frow, 1995) disseminated by the culturalindustries and systems of scholarly knowledge, place much value on contempor-ary cultural forms, like film and pop-rock music, as components of taste andcultural capital that define late modern collective actorhood. On a scale of‘modernity’, of being ‘with the times’, collective actorhood whose sense ofuniqueness and difference is based (among other things) on works, genres andstyles of these cultural forms as major ingredients of its taste, enjoy higher status.With the exception of some orthodox taste cultures whose exclusive attachmentto traditional forms of high art renders them elitists, social entities whose tasteshardly consist of contemporary cultural forms, or are based on works and styleslagging behind recent stylistic trends, are relegated to a lower status on the scaleof modernity. They are not full and equal participants in the frontiers ofmodernity as constantly formulated by the global institutional patterns of culturalvalue. Such entities therefore tend to develop an interest in attaining status by

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becoming fully ‘modern’ in their tastes and aesthetic sensibilities. They developan interest for recognition of their cultural uniqueness as equal and on a par withthat of social entities in global metropolitan centers. In their quest for status,these entities form a social demand for works, styles and genres in art forms withwhich they will be able to assess their group-specific yet ethno-nationallyanchored uniqueness, and at the same time demonstrate their modernity. As tastecultures, they form a social market for ever developing styles and genres of ethno-national cinema and pop-rock music that have aesthetic affinity to trendy stylesfrom the global centers yet contain substantial presence of ethno-nationaltraditions to qualify for representation of uniqueness.

Put differently, the ‘great war of recognition’, where recognition is understoodas status, constructs a structural demand, a social market for art works thatcombines locally, nationally or ethnically anchored uniqueness with cutting edgetechnologies of expression and global stylistic innovations. National cinemas andpop-rock music obviously cater exactly to the demands of this market. Withthese forms of art adopted as components of their specific cultural capital, thesesocial entities constitute themselves in positions that preserve ethno-nationaluniqueness yet are inter-connected to stylistic trends in world culture as definedin the imperial centers of power.

This is not to suggest, however, that the working of the fields of culturalproduction is consciously or deliberately geared to this function of supply. Thesocial market for the cultural products and art works of aesthetic cosmo-politanism is indeed the environment that allows and encourages the constantdevelopment of these art forms within the national framework. It is the socialcontext in which fields of cultural production are embedded.

However, assuming that the work of film makers and musicians is based onan ideology of creative autonomy, and that it is motivated by field-specific inter-ests, the nature of the relationship between this work and the social environmentin which it is embedded should be clarified. This we can elucidate throughBourdieu’s concept of homology which refers to the unintended or unconfessedcorrespondence that exists between the struggles in the field of cultural produc-tion and social interests in the field of power. That is, successful struggles in fieldsof cultural production provide the components constantly required by new orexisting status formations for shaping and refining their tastes and life styles. Theconcept of homology encapsulates the process by which social interests arecatered by the emergence of new genres, styles and – applying the notion beyondits original use by Bourdieu – by new cultural forms (Bourdieu, 1993: 57–8).

Bourdieu emphasizes, however, that the social strength of homology springsexactly from the fact that there is no intended or conscious element of planningin the supply function that artistic fields fulfill for social groupings. On thecontrary, the power of new expressive forms, new aesthetic languages, newnuances of style and genre to become signifiers of distinction for specific socialgroupings lies in their being chosen and selected in acts perceived by their prac-titioners as free willing, as stemming from their inner capabilities and sensibili-ties (Bourdieu, 1993: 45).

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Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism and World Culture

In their account of world society and global culture, Meyer and colleaguesemphasize the role of rationalized instrumental culture, and downplay the roleof expressive culture (Meyer et al., 1997). In order to illustrate how nationalstates and societies are exogenously constructed in modernity by rationalizedinstrumental world culture, they use a hypothetical example of a newly‘discovered’ island society. Following its ‘discovery’, this hypothetical islandsociety will soon develop political institutions, school curricula, health caresystems, public administration, financial management and other forms of scien-tifically grounded rationalized instrumental culture that will make this societysimilar in many aspects to other nation-states around the world, regardless of itsparticular heritage. The authors, however, hardly say anything about the expres-sive culture of this hypothetical island society, about how its heritage will or willnot persist – as for Meyer, expressive culture has a secondary place in modernworld society (Meyer, 2000).

While Meyer suggests a model in which world culture develops through a pathof expressive diversity based on instrumental similarity, I would like to expandMeyer’s model and suggest that cultural uniqueness in late modernity isdeveloping along a path of ethno-national stylistic diversity based on expressive-technological similarity.

If we follow the example of the hypothetical island society, then, regardless ofits existing forms of expression in music and visual or verbal arts, local artists willsoon embrace film as a form of art to depict their existing mythologies andhistorical narratives, and musicians will plug their traditional instruments toamplifiers and incorporate electric guitars and synthesizers. In doing so, the filmmakers will undoubtedly be influenced by Hollywood genres, and musicians willrecord albums of their indigenized pop-rock music while absorbing influencesfrom the Anglo-American pop-rock tradition. While these developments inexpressive culture will probably meet with some fierce resentment from elders,others will enjoy watching local films and listening to their own pop-rock, andmight even be proud of their own locally authentic variants of contemporaryarts, because it will make them feel that this is what qualifies them, as a nation,to equal social actorhood in expressive world culture.

Aesthetic cosmopolitanism, then, is about proximity, or rather ‘phenomeno-logical proximity’ (Tomlinson, 2000) between the perceived ethno-nationaluniqueness of different entities. Essentially an effect of the global cultural indus-tries, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to a simple mode of imposition. Producedfrom within national contexts, by local social and cultural forces, it also cannotbe characterized as an expression of curiosity in ‘otherness’. It is rather, a practi-cally unavoidable consequence of late modernity, of the genuine interest ofgroupings around the world to join and participate in scenarios of ‘good life’disseminated from the metropolitan centers and through their prism.

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Acknowledgement

A fellowship at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden in Norrköping is grate-fully acknowledged.

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Notes

1 See also Beck and Grande’s contribution to this special issue of the European Journalof Social Theory.

2 For authoritative accounts of film history and canon, see Giannetti (2004), Mast andKawin (2005) and Thompson and Bordwell (2003). For pop-rock, see Covach (2006),Frith et al. (2001), Garofalo (2004) and Szatmary (2000).

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■ Motti Regev is a sociologist of culture and art whose major interest is inpopular music studies. He is the author of Rock: Music and Culture (1994, in Hebrew)and Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (2004, co-authored with EdwinSeroussi), as well as articles in the sociology of popular music. Address: Departmentof Sociology, Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel, 108Ravutski st., P.O. Box 808, Raanana 43107, Israel. [email: mottire@ openu.ac.il] ■

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