Articulations of Capital in a Globalized Culture

Abstract

This essay analyzes popular culture in the era of global monopoly capital. Through symbolic capitals, the violence of globalization is misrecognized as emergent global cultures in and through which popular culture functions as a field of struggle and as a way to attain cultural legitimacy. This tendency for empire to articulate and legitimize its stakes in popular culture through the use of various capitals is demonstrated in the Global Pinay beauty pageant segment featured in the now defunct noontime television show Magandang Tanghali Bayan (ABS-CBN). However, the articulation is not directly experienced since it is mediated by the discourse of a globalized culture. This essay affirms the mediatedness of cultural products and hence their non-reducibility to their economic conditions of possibly through an exposition of the operations of various capitals in the Global Pinay pageant. The economic field is not reducible to the functions of a symbolic system by historiucally locating the discourse of globalized culture that frames the Global Pinay pageant.