global processes of migration have steadily been feeding new elements into the global sphere of cultural circulation.
Culturalization II: Cultural Essentialism
Along with globalization, hyperculture has spread both within and beyond the old Western world. Over the course of its ascent since the 1980s and 1990s, however, a countermovement has developed that could be called “the International of cultural essentialism.” It has been startling to observe how this movement, too, invokes culture, even though its understanding of culture’s game of valuation and devaluation is entirely different from that of hyperculture. This cultural-essentialist countermovement includes the diverse forms of fundamentalism within the three monotheistic religions, the numerous and powerful proponents of heightened cultural nationalism (in Russia, China, or India, for instance), and the right-wing populist and identitarian movements in Europe and North America. Though situated somewhat differently, North American identity politics, and regional movements in places such as Scotland and Catalonia, are at least related to these variants of cultural essentialism. At first glance, all of these tendencies can hardly be reduced to a common denominator; viewed from a greater distance, however, one sees that they are all opposed to cosmopolitan hyperculture and that, oddly enough, this opposition is itself waged through the medium of culture and identity.
Keep in mind that cultural essentialism exists in a number of different varieties, which range from regional identities to fundamentalist terrorism and which, at first glance, hardly seem to be related at all. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognize certain common structures. Central to this understanding of culture is the following point of departure: the collective identity of a community. Whereas the keystone of liberal hyperculture is individual self-development, cultural essentialism is based on the collective, the community, the locus of culture. Here, culture (as the sphere of what is valuable) is that which holds a community together and defines its common identity.18 The individuals involved have accordingly integrated themselves into the collective, where they earn self-evident recognition without competing for it, simply by being part of the group. Cultural essentialism is thus a form of communitarianism. This basic structure applies just as much to religious groups as it does to cultural nationalists or self-conscious ethnic communities. Here, the collective is not a general and anonymous global society but is itself something unique, with its own particular history, beliefs, and origin. In short, the locus of singularity in hyperculture is the individual person, whereas, in cultural essentialism, the community as a whole becomes singular, somewhat like a nation: it distinguishes itself from others and has a complexity “entirely its own”.
Cultural essentialism constructs a rigid boundary: between one’s own group and others, between ingroup and outgroup. Whereas, in hyperculture, culture and its valuable goods are mobile, dynamic, and unpredictable – and transgressing boundaries is the rule – the central objective of cultural essentialism is to stabilize the symbolic boundary between the internal world and the external world. Here, the internal world of one’s own culture is attributed a stable and seemingly unassailable value. In Benedict Anderson’s terms, these are “imagined communities,” communities that exist in the collective imagination and cultivate their own self-image, history, and moral code.19 The ideal of cultural essentialism is, therefore, the homogeneity of the community, its unambiguity, and its uniformity, which absorb the differences that exist between its individuals. Of course, a rather strong distinction is draw between the inside and the outside: in contrast to the sacred nature of the inside, the external world seems profane, or even worthless. The context of cultural essentialism thus gives rise to “neo-communities.” The prefix “neo-” is necessary here because, unlike the case of traditional communities, neo-communities are not collectives into which people are simply born; instead, they are communities that people consciously choose to join.20 Cultural neo-communities can coexist with friendly indifference toward one another – according to the manner of ethno-pluralism – but they can also aggressively distance their own culture from the outside and even, in extreme cases, wish to eliminate it. For religious fundamentalists, the outside consists of nonbelievers; for aggressive nationalists, it consists of other, inferior nations; and for right-wing populists, the outgroup consists of immigrants and the cosmopolitan elite.
In cultural essentialism, one’s own culture is therefore not a matter of negotiation; it is rather the ineluctable point of departure. Culture seems to have an essence of its own, and time and space – that is, its history and place of origin – are the two important pillars upon which this culture is based. There is no praise for the present or the future; at its core, cultural essentialism is rather a retreat into the past, into the history and traditions from which a given religion, nation, or people supposedly emerged. It is often a common homeland that lends such groups their identity, and thus cultural essentialism is typically critical of globalization: the circulation of goods and people is here perceived as a potential threat to one’s own identity.
As mentioned above, cultural-essentialist currents largely take the form of movements that oppose the developmental trends of hyperculture that are systematically favored, and have become dominant, in Western societies. Of course, instantiations of cultural essentialism have historical precursors – such as the nationalist movements in the nineteenth century, with their discovery of the “people” (and even of “race”) – but in late modernity they have a different social significance: they can be interpreted as a mobilization of peripheries against society’s center, and this is true both within national societies and on the global level. This mobilization of peripheries does not take the form of class conflicts in the traditional (social-material) sense; instead, it adopts the form of identity conflicts.21
As diverse as the individual forms of cultural essentialism may be – ethnic communities, religious fundamentalisms, nationalism, right-wing populism – they all share in common the fact that they are overwhelmingly represented by population groups that, over the course of the transformation from industrial modernity to the post-industrial society of singularities, perceive themselves as losers of modernization. In terms of social structure, we are dealing here with members of the new underclass and the old middle class.22 For the latter, hyperculture and its cosmopolitanism are the domain of “elites,” whereas their collective identity movements are the medium in which the disgruntled, devalued, and aggrieved have come together to oppose what they perceive to be their unjust loss of social status and cultural influence. In this late-modern iteration of cultural essentialism, feelings of superiority and inferiority form an unusual alliance: those who feel inferior attempt to establish their own superiority via a collective identity.
At the same time, cultural essentialism can also be interpreted on the global level – that is, in the relationships between national societies – as a mobilization of the peripheries against the center. In this case, the “center” is a real or imagined West from which forms of cultural essentialism in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, China, or India – in countries, that is, that perceive themselves as victims of Western hegemony – are attempting to distance themselves.23 Here, too, it is the case that discrimination and perceived affronts from the privileged – that is, from “the West” (in the form of the British as former colonizers, the United States as a superpower, the European Union under German and French leadership, etc.) – have been transformed into self-ascriptions of presumed superiority, which are meant to secure the identity of the slighted nations in question. If cultural essentialism exerts any influence beyond the social groups that have been left behind by modernization, it does so on the level of the state – for instance, through government-supported cultural, educational, and immigration policies.
Hyperculture and Cultural Essentialism: Between Coexistence and Conflict
What we have witnessed in many areas of late modernity is a polarization between two regimes of culturalization: between hyperculture and cultural essentialism. Only by adopting this abstract perspective does it become clear that, in fact, mutually hostile groups – such as the Salafists or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, Evangelicals
