Culture and Commodity: Globalization and the Culture Industry [Part 1]

In a shrinking world, where space and place have been dominated by time (identified by Heidegger as “uniform distancelessness”[1]), where national differences are being superceded by “gender and identity politics, ethnic and religious movements, minority rights, and indigenous people”[2] , how should one engage cultural differences? In an increasingly borderless, globalized world, are cultures clashing (the polarization thesis), becoming converged and monolithic (the homogenization thesis), or experiencing a cultural global mélange (the hybridization thesis)?
However, before a description of cultural activity can be determined, a normative description of the concept of culture must be offered. This is where the paradigms of hybridization, homogenization, and polarization jump the proverbial gun. With a weak foundation, these theses will deteriorate and begin to crumble. Therefore, using the thought of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, this paper will offer a critique of the descriptions of culture used as the foundation for these three paradigms; the polarization thesis, the homogenization thesis, and the hybridization thesis. It would seem that these three paradigms begin with a description of culture that ignores Arendt’s critique of “mass culture” and Adorno’s critique of the “culture industry”, and, therefore, these three paradigms, when referring to “culture” are instead referring to the commodities of the culture industry. They are referring to commodities that are consumed, rather than culture that endures, outlasts, and cultivates nature for human habitation.
The trajectory of this paper will begin with a survey of the three accepted paradigms of culture in the face of globalization; the polarization thesis, the homogenization thesis, and the hybridization thesis. In the second section will consist of an overview of Arendt and Adorno’s critique of mass culture (Arendt) or the culture industry (Adorno). This will then be applied to the description of culture employed as the foundation of these three paradigms. Finally, the third section will briefly survey the three paradigms through the lens of Adorno and Arendt’s critique of the culture industry.


[1] Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, Poetry, Language, Thought, Perennial Classics, 2001, 163-164. “Man puts the longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts the greatest distances behind himself and this puts everything before him in the shortest range.” Through time, space has been conflated and abolished. Heidegger continues, “What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near us…What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near – is, as it were, without distance? Everything is getting lumped together into uniform distancelessness. How? Is not this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?...What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent.”
[2] Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003, 41-42.