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Re: [microsound] death of monoculture



1.

How could there be a culture that promotes individuality? Isn't
culture precisely the realm of shared experience that defines groups
of people as objectively distinct societies?

Not only that, but language and artistic practice depend on a shared
context for their comprehensibility (though in its broadest sense, for
non-semantic artistic forms that shared context might only be the fact
of being biologically human itself).

2.

Now to get back to "monoculture", capitalism seems to have an inherent
tendency to cause traditional cultures to disintegrate. From a certain
point of view, one could view this as revolutionary, in as much as it
often causes authoritarian aspects of traditional cultures to lose
their normative power, leading to a perceived increase in individual
freedom. However, along with the disintegration of traditional culture
comes the rise of the so called "culture industry", which fabricates
cultural artifacts on an industrial level as a replacement for
traditional culture. Typically, the range of cultural artifacts
offered by the culture industry has tended to fall within a very
narrow range.

"Monoculture", in these terms, might be more properly called "monopoly
culture", i.e. the domination of the culture industry by a small
number of large corporate entities. Key to this monopoly was control
over the means of distribution of cultural artifacts. The death of
monoculture is simply an increase in competition within the culture
industry as a result of changes in the manner of distribution of
cultural artifacts, since in the internet age it is no longer possible
for a small number of companies to maintain control over the channels
of distribution.

::David Powers

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Marinos Koutsomichalis
<marinos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
 Do we really want a "pop",
> "global", "mono" or any-kind of culture that doesn' t promote individuality?

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