1

Week 6 EXPORTING AMERICA, EXPORTING CAPITALISM: CULTURAL IMPERIALISM AND SOFT POWER

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM The Role of US Private and State Media The CIA and Abstract Expressionism “Free Media”: Corporate Ownership and Control CULTURAL IMPERIALISM THEORIES CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM: AGENCY, ETHNOGRAPHY SOFT POWER AS CULTURAL IMPERIALISM Problems?

Readings: Chapter 9, Tanner Mirrlees, “American Soft Power, or American Cultural Imperialism?,” pp. 199-228,

in: The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire. Chapter 10, Paul Cammack, “UN Imperialism: Unleashing Entrepreneurship in the Developing

World,” pp. 229-260, in: The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire.

2

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

An anti-imperialist perspective, on the cultural means and cultural outcomes of US imperialism

The Role of US Private and State Media

Focused especially on the role of the US media

US transnational corporations dominated in the production and distribution of information and communication

The US state itself was active in disseminating and controlling

information that favoured US political and economic interests

3

propaganda outlets:

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: http://www.rferl.org/ Voice of America: http://www.voanews.com/ Martí News: http://www.martinews.com/ Magharebia: http://magharebia.com/en_GB?change_locale=true

4

The CIA and Abstract Expressionism CIA, funding and promotion of Abstract Expressionism as a counter

to Soviet realism

5

New York City, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (http://www.moma.org/)

CIA-funded international tours such as “Advancing American Art,” programs such as the “Congress for Cultural Freedom”

MoMA: William Paley, president of CBS, CIA, sat on members’ board

of the museum’s International Program; John Hay Whitney, OSS, Museum’s Chairman; Tom Braden, first chief of CIA’s International Organizations Division, executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

President Dwight Eisenhower:

“Our aim in the Cold War is not conquering of territory or subjugation by force. Our aim is more subtle, more pervasive, more complete. We are trying to get the world, by peaceful means, to believe the truth. That truth is that Americans want a world at peace, a world in which all people shall have opportunity for maximum individual development. The means we shall employ to spread this truth are often called ‘psychological.’ Don’t be afraid of that term just because it’s a five-dollar, five-syllable word. ‘Psychological warfare’ is the struggle for the minds and wills of men.”

6

“Free Media”: Corporate Ownership and Control ideological doctrine of free information, in private hands Tanner Mirrlees, the US sought to establish “a global US corporate

media monopoly by opening up the national telecommunication systems of postcolonial states to American techno-capital and commercial programming”

“Backed by the American state, US corporations pressured (with help from the local elite) the privatization of national telecommunication infrastructures, dumped their commercial media on the emerging markets of postcolonial states, and transmitted American values, ideologies, and images around the world”

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM THEORIES 1) promoting American products and American styles, encouraging

foreign consumerism and foreign dependence of American products, serving US economic interests

2) promoting the political ideology of the US during the Cold War, US foreign policy

7

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck:

Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Mirrlees: “They read Disney comics as vehicles of U.S. cultural imperialism. Disney comics…touted the possessive individualism of the American way of life, implied excessive consumerism was the path to happiness, and (like so many colonial texts) constructed non-Americans as culturally savage and primitive”

US cultural imperialism theory, as summarized by Mirrlees:

(a) “the global export of the capitalist/commercial form of the US media

system, (b) “the economic and ideological domination of the global

communication system by US corporations, and, (c) “the homogenization and integration of the world with the social

relations and cultural values of a globally expanding yet American-led capitalism” (Mirrlees, p. 200)

8

US cultural imperialism’s effects: (a) Diverse populations transformed into a new audience for American

advertising firms, becoming new consumers (b) Capacity of postcolonial states and populations to autonomously

produce media: diminished (c) Struggles for cultural autonomy: undermined (d) Cultural dependency (e) A reduction in cultural differences (Mirrlees, pp. 200-201)

9

CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM: AGENCY, ETHNOGRAPHY assumptions Hypodermic needle view of information transfer, reception—controlling

what people think Technological determinism—controlling how people think

People in the Third World as passive, lacking any cultural filters,

unable to produce hybrid creations assuming that economic domination translated into cultural

homogenization Ethnographies by US anthropologists: the same US media product

can be reinterpreted; can provoke nationalist responses; the technologies are incorporated and reshaped according to local cultural conventions

Agency

10

SOFT POWER AS CULTURAL IMPERIALISM Avowal: appropriating the idea of cultural imperialism as an openly

proclaimed ideal of US policy The US as the world’s first universal nation, indispensable to the

management of world affairs, with a duty to globalize the principles of liberal capitalist democracy—American exceptionalism & American universalism

To dominate the world’s information flows, to also become the world’s only information superpower

Post-Iraq 2003: a crisis of legitimacy Mirrlees (p. 205): “The propaganda of weapons of mass destruction

and the con of pre-emptive regime change may have duped half of the U.S. population, but it did not fool the world. Nor did the imperialism-lite of human rights discourse with its belated attempt to organize global consent to a political leadership that had already been identified as fraudulent”.

11

To counteract this loss of American legitimacy: “soft power” Joseph S. Nye (former Carter administration official, Harvard

University)

Soft Power Public Diplomacy Strategic Communications Information Operations Psychological Operations (PsyOps) Military Information Support

Operations (MISO)

To attract others to American values, to coopt them rather than coerce, to rule by consent

US government agencies, private corporations, and NGOs Counteract negative press, even counteract negative blogging

12

Example 1: “Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders” http://www.wired.com/2009/01/usaf-blog-respo/ “Ex-Air Force Chief: Recruit Bloggers to Wage Afghan Info War” http://www.wired.com/2009/05/ex-air-force-chief-recruit-bloggers-to-wage-afghan-info-war/ http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/12/09/this-is-war-also-us-bombing-civilians-in-iraq/ Countered by: “xbradtc” and “Josh” Who are they? http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/07/06/the-killing-fields-of-marja/ http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/06/27/marjeh-afghanistan-x-ray-of-mcchrystals-bleeding-ulcer/ See “Matt” Example 2: “Al Jazeera and U.S. Foreign Policy: What WikiLeaks’ U.S. Embassy

Cables Reveal about U.S. Pressure and Propaganda” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/forte220911.html

13

Nye on American cultural dominance:

American “English is a lingua franca like Latin”; America is “the world’s number one exporter of films and television

programs”; “America publishes more books than any other country”; America “has twice as many music sales as next-rated Japan”; America “publishes nearly four times as many scientific and journal

articles as the nextrunner-up Japan”; And, America houses 28 percent of the “1.6 million students enrolled

in universities outside their own countries.” Problems?

If the world is Americanized or becoming more American… why the need for soft power?

Soft power advocates validate cultural imperialism theory by putting it into practice, but then scorn the theory for being neo-Marxist