Resistance to totalizing forces
Side street in Zamosc, Poland
Palladio's Villa Valmarana, reusing architectural themes in new ways, then spreading them worldwide
Architectural tourists at Palladio's Villa Rotonda, or is it Jefferson's Monticello?
Art made from the overflow of commodities
And then we reach the point where the counterarguments against the effectiveness of the cultural apparatus in the service of hegemony are to be heard, the question marks surrounding it noted. Some of them relate to the variable characteristics of the cultural apparatus itself. How insistent on the purity of their ideological message are its agencies? Do they really stand in unity behind the same ideology? We have accepted the possibility that thinking of the cultural apparatus in the singular may at times be misleading. It may not speak with only one voice. Even more basically, there are the doubts one may have about the willingness of recipients to accept, across dividing lines of interests, the gift of ideology. . .
The transnational flow of culture, by giving the periphery access to a wider cultural inventory, provides it with new resources of technology and symbolic expression to refashion and quite probably integrate with what exists of more locally materials. Local cultural entrepreneurs have thus gradually mastered the alien cultural forms, taking them apart to investigate their potentialities in terms of symbolic modes, genres, and organizations of performance. Thus new competences are acquired, and the resulting new forms are more responsive to, and at the same time in part outgrowths of, local everyday life: examples of what I just outlined as the tendency toward maturation, and also of the possibilities of import substitution. There are good examples of this in music. . .
At times... the depictions of the postmodern age deserve some of its own incredulity. When it is claimed, for example, that identities become nothing but assemblages from whatever imagery is for the moment marketed through the media, then I wonder what kind of people the commentators on postmodernism know; I myself know hardly anybody of whom this would seem true. It is a problem of postmodernist thought that as it has emphasized diversity and been assertively doubtful toward master narratives, it has itself frequently been on the verge of becoming another all-encompassing formula for a macroanthropology of the replication of uniformity, like any other conception of a Zeitgeist, or of national character. Hannerz 1992, 107, 241, 35