I'm less convinced, or more precisely, I think this discussion requires a LOT more specification to make much sense. (Ah, the danger of starting from a tweet.) It is true, as you say, that much of the contemporary feels very American. Consider aviation, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, currency, the internet, the sciences, the academy generally, and so forth. Even international corporations feel American, especially when their IP/capital/markets are so tied up in the US. Consider Toyota. Weird things like financial law, intellectual property, and so forth. None of this is exclusively American, and wasn't designed to be -- but if we must understand the global in terms of the national (I've written that we shouldn't), the idioms that comprise the contemporary feel American, if that makes sense. A Portuguese guy on Twitter rather proves the point. Incidentally, I was in Portugal giving talks on financial policy during the crisis/rule of the Troika -- if the point needed to be proven.
Second, it is difficult for a sensitive critic like you to make this argument convincingly, precisely because as a critic, you are attuned to subtleties. So we can speak of things as "English" or indeed "South African" and immediately acknowledge variations, subtleties, differences that mean things. I love paying attention to these things, too, not least within the frame of "America." I teach in Manhattan and Buffalo, a rust belt city (London and Birmingham) as it were, live in the Rockies and a college town, cross the great plains regjularly (see the last Intermittent Signal for some images) and have family in the South and Texas . . . Not homogeneous, at a certain level of granularity.
Third, which is why audience matters so much. For a certain cut of intellectual, especially in Europe, America flattens, and everything looks American, and this is seen as cultural domination. Meh, sure. At that level of abstraction, Manhattan looks like Texas looks like Palo Alto looks like Miami. And this, I assume, is what the Portuguese Tweeter was addressing.
But I don't think distinguishing between "culture" and "commerce" gets one very far. If anything, it's a rather American foible: I may do this, live in that, but what really matters is my subjective feelings, my approval of this or that, my stance on social media. So I live in an American world but disapprove of support for Israel or what have you, I'm just participating in the commerce, not the culture. Trivially true but not serious.
And I do agree with where you end up, that the contemporary tsunami requires a kind of bricolage. Design as necessity? Weird. Keep up the good work.
I'm less convinced, or more precisely, I think this discussion requires a LOT more specification to make much sense. (Ah, the danger of starting from a tweet.) It is true, as you say, that much of the contemporary feels very American. Consider aviation, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, currency, the internet, the sciences, the academy generally, and so forth. Even international corporations feel American, especially when their IP/capital/markets are so tied up in the US. Consider Toyota. Weird things like financial law, intellectual property, and so forth. None of this is exclusively American, and wasn't designed to be -- but if we must understand the global in terms of the national (I've written that we shouldn't), the idioms that comprise the contemporary feel American, if that makes sense. A Portuguese guy on Twitter rather proves the point. Incidentally, I was in Portugal giving talks on financial policy during the crisis/rule of the Troika -- if the point needed to be proven.
Second, it is difficult for a sensitive critic like you to make this argument convincingly, precisely because as a critic, you are attuned to subtleties. So we can speak of things as "English" or indeed "South African" and immediately acknowledge variations, subtleties, differences that mean things. I love paying attention to these things, too, not least within the frame of "America." I teach in Manhattan and Buffalo, a rust belt city (London and Birmingham) as it were, live in the Rockies and a college town, cross the great plains regjularly (see the last Intermittent Signal for some images) and have family in the South and Texas . . . Not homogeneous, at a certain level of granularity.
Third, which is why audience matters so much. For a certain cut of intellectual, especially in Europe, America flattens, and everything looks American, and this is seen as cultural domination. Meh, sure. At that level of abstraction, Manhattan looks like Texas looks like Palo Alto looks like Miami. And this, I assume, is what the Portuguese Tweeter was addressing.
But I don't think distinguishing between "culture" and "commerce" gets one very far. If anything, it's a rather American foible: I may do this, live in that, but what really matters is my subjective feelings, my approval of this or that, my stance on social media. So I live in an American world but disapprove of support for Israel or what have you, I'm just participating in the commerce, not the culture. Trivially true but not serious.
And I do agree with where you end up, that the contemporary tsunami requires a kind of bricolage. Design as necessity? Weird. Keep up the good work.