If everything were transparent, there would be no ideologies.

So is it always nationalist to resist US globalization? The US thinks it is, and wants you to agree; and, moreover, to consider US interests as being universal ones.

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles... Contemporary or postmodernist art... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.

And this fear that US models are replacing everything else now spills over from the sphere of culture into our two remaining categories: for this process is clearly, at one level, the result of economic domination - of local cultural industries closed down by American rivals.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.