Culture, Identity and Hegemony: The Body in a Global Age

Abstract

The article argues that capitalism has reconstituted itself as a globalized system of transnational corporations and that a universalized, mass-mediated, consumer culture sustains its legitimacy in face of massive redistributions of wealth. The author argues that consumerism and privatized hedonism provide, on one hand, the basis for profits as well as identities that sustain hegemony, and, on the other hand, the ideological control of culture to produce willing consent to the new economic reality. The article shows that a ludic carnival culture of the grotesque has emerged that has fostered a migration of subjectivity from political economy and concerns with the social to lifestyles and identities of inversion and transgression. The author demonstrates his argument by an analysis of rituals of cultural consumption such as football, carnival and extreme forms of bodily adornment: tatoos, piercings and scarification. This `colonization' of the consciousness by the culture industry, mediated through the body, has led to an erosion of political communities and a waning of critical reason.