I usually refer to "asymmetrical multiculturalism" as the strange collusion between liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists. Marxy put it rather more bitchily in a debate we were having yesterday about the meaning of a swastika he saw on a Harakjuku fashion-punk: "I'm against right-wing politics, Momus is for, as long as they aren't Western peoples." (My counter-argument was that there's nothing inherently right wing about preserving national cultural differences: artists, museum curators and restauranteurs do it as well as right wing bigots. What's more, the punk in question was decontextualizing a foreign symbol; he was more like the non-Christian Japanese women who wear crosses around their necks than a rabid nationalist.)
To me, the Guardian piece is great journalism. It gives me an outline of a plausible situation, a familiar contradiction, one I've attempted clumsily to describe myself, and it gives me a handy term for it, one I can carry around in my pocket and produce at dinner parties. I'm free to google "asymmetrical multiculturalism" or order books by the Canadian academic who coined the term. It's exactly the kind of thing that didn't happen in the piece about blogging I participated in last week, broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster last night.
Radio Ulster blogging item (3.2MB mono mp3 7min 01secs)
Now, I understand that the show's producers thought that these academic references were too clunky for a seven minute piece on blogging on a local BBC network. I realize that editors have a layman listener in mind, a kind of internalized granny character who's never even heard of blogging and doesn't want her first meeting with the concept to be cluttered up with incomprehensible jargon. I realize that you can't put links in a radio broadcast, and that the books I mentioned probably aren't easily available in Belfast. I realize that to make the references useful I'd have had to spell "Zengotita" and "Shirky" on air. I realize that the producers had to condense ten minutes of Momus-on-blogging to about 90 seconds, so that they could fit in the highly relevant (and much more accessible and amusing) points being made by Rhodri Marsden (
rhodri) and Neil Scott (neil_scott). But the result of all that "plain commonsense" and "professionalism" was that the bit in my spiel that did make it past the gatekeepers of the show was a reference to Hollywood and blogging as a star system. The piece got bookended with a Moby track and much talk of Moby-as-blogger. In fact, at the end of the item it was Moby's blog address that was given out instead of mine (although Rhodri and Neil got their blogs plugged). It was assumed that the putative granny who hadn't heard of blogging had heard of Moby. "Ah yes, that nice young Christian vegan with the bald head and the coffeetable techno records," says your putative granny.What really irked me about the presentation was the attempted populism of it: the assumption that people want recognition rather than cognition, repetition rather than revelation. So the producer inserted something familiar, a track from Moby's "Play" album, left in a bit about Hollywood but took out the "ladders" I deliberately inserted, googlable references interested listeners could have used to climb from what they already know to things they don't yet. Zengotita and Shirky are both "ladders" to really important stuff completely relevant to the debate on blogging, stuff that might have been made accessible even if there was no time to discuss it on air. I wasn't there for the money (there was none) or even to get my blog plugged, but I do feel I was there to point to those "ladders", and I feel irritated that they were kicked away.
