(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
‘Chineseness’’ (1994, viii). Chen applauds Tu’s endeavor that opposes the hegemonic and
essentialist discourses by using a living tree to designate cultural China; mainland China as the
root from which the strong branches and resilient leaves representing the Chinese diasporas are
developing.
But Haun Saussy’s definition of the comparative method which invariably returns to the point of
commonality, what he calls the trunk of the genealogical tree in his reading of Cultural China is a
more critical take: “the comparative method tended to dissolve identities, or at any rate their
singular expressions, into a common source… Comparative philology could, in the end, use up
its raison d’etre: after a sufficient number of examples are adduced, laws can be formulated and
historical accounts framed. In philology, the properly comparative moment came early in the
discovery process, as parallel phonetic series were established for the different languages and the
regularity of their differences showed them to be tributaries of a higher common source” (2006,
7-8). Perhaps his question: “What is the trunk – what does comparative literature discover?”,
regarding this “third thing” performing the connective function between cultures, finds its
answer in a political economic critique of mediatization. As the studies of political economy of
media have demonstrated, occupying the highest rung are media moguls such as Warner
Brothers, Universal Studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and Disney Productions et cetera, the
hegemonic control of which, to a certain extent, polices global filmic trends.
In order to give validity to the above assertion about the power given to the high priests of
media, Theodore Adorno’s political critique of the state’s fabulous calculations in “The
Religious Medium” is crucial: “The figures mentioned in this diatribe are, of course, utterly
fantastic. There is neither any basis for the estimate of thirty-two million laws made by “human
government” (whatever that may be), nor the slightest corroboration of the astronomical figure of
the “cost of crime” in America. To operate with the fantastic figures is an established Nazi habit.
The apparent scientific exactitude of any set of figures silences resistance against the lies hidden
behind the figures. This technique which might be called the “exactitude of error” device is
common to all fascists. Phelps, for instance, has similar fantastic figures about the influx of
refugees into this country. The greatness of the figure, incidentally, acts as a psychological
stimulant, suggesting a general feeling of grandeur which is easily transferred to the speaker”
(2001, 546). In fact, Adorno’s comment gives us a glimpse of what it means to fetishize the
representative role of the media, taking in everything transmitted without question. The pharse
“the exactitude of error” gestures to the crisis within instrumental rationality, which resulted in
the extreme terror of Nazi genocide. But the missing point in Adorno’s thesis is this: it is
precisely the fantastic, or rather its concomitant phantasmatic quality, which gives images their
power, perhaps the inter-subjective ethical dimension of reading predicated upon Michel
Foucault’s concept of the dynamics of power, one the emphasis of which is on power relations
rather than merely hegemonic dominance. Thus in what manner this power is used is another
matter. Perhaps the citation from Adorno’s “The Religious Medium” indicates the prevalence of
mastery in identity politics which, in turn, says something about the state’s, and, in this case, the
region’s measure of control.
And this is further adumbrated in Arjun Appadurai’s thesis which exposes the contradictions
found within discourses pushing toward internationalization, critiqued as a cultural
homogenization called “Americanization”, which is interchangeable with “commoditization”,
and arguably so: “The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between
cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization … The new global economy has to be
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