Das Anschwellen der Symbole zur kulturellen Reproduktion der globalen Machtordnung

Abstract

This paper examines the role of cultural goods and their circulation from peripheral countries to core countries in maintaining the global power order from the Second World War to the present. To this end, the chapter begins by comparing the cultural and economic tendencies of the capitalist world society before World War II with its significant shift afterward. This shift can be summarized in three points: 1) the importance of consumption, 2) the change in the historical meaning and position of the human as such, and 3) the change in the scale of applying power. While this three-dimensional shift in core countries is perceived as an increasing experience of individual freedoms, multiculturalism, and the emergence of new art genres, peripheral countries like Iran have experienced it as a fractured moment that altered the function of the national state and its definition of nationality: the secular pre-revolutionary national state, which aimed to realize its national task by embracing universal values, was overthrown by an Islamist national state, whose aim is to reproduce allegedly “local” values and goods against “Western” ones. This process of inventing new cultural goods with traditional labels, culminating in the dominance of the Islamic Revolution and the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, had already begun at least ten years before the Islamic Revolution under the direct organization of the Pahlavi national state itself, an example of which is Persian classical music. While the middle class in peripheral societies tries to preserve its cultural existence, threatened under various dictatorial national states in the periphery, by expressing itself, the global power structure extracts new cultural goods from these resistances and offers them as consumer objects to the middle classes of core societies; this is what happened to Persian classical music and continues today with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The neo-fascist movements emerging worldwide could be interpreted as an immanent consequence of this cultural market, aiming to identify certain groups of population with symbols that have been used to prosper the market.