Jordy: Notes and Responses: Disjuncture

Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy
Arjun Appadurai

Does the globalization mean that local cultures are becoming more homogeneous? NO

Is it really possible to become homogeneous? By the other cultures coming into contact with one another does that necessarily entail copying and assimilation? Is it a negative thing that cultural influences are flowing across boundaries? Is this a new phenomenon or just an old story that has a new technological and high-speed twist?

It is true that when cultures meet / combine / interact / engage that there is a potential for abuse and oppression. You don’t have to look any farther than the Native Americans encounter with the Europeans for a classic example and there are examples of colonialism still occurring in various parts of the world. However, I do not think that I necessarily result in homogenization. It would be very hard to argue that Native Americans are some how homogenized into European culture. Obviously, there culture has been transformable / obliterated / oppressed, but they still resiliently hold their own identity and culture. I think greater challenged for Native American culture in Winnipeg is not only the holding onto their identities, but also determining their place in a larger global context. The question that remains is how to place yourself in a larger context of media and cultural belief? How do you change opinion? Do you go with the flow and risk losing identity and control? Or do taking part and using media to counteract and exist in the context retain cultural identity?

Disjuncture? It is these disjuncture and differences that so often drive us apart, which are what is required in a global context. What causes some disjuncture to be negatively received? What was the disjuncture between in Rwanda? Why was that disjuncture explosive and violent? What is the difference between that type of disjuncture and one that can peacefully coexist? If these disjuncture exist within these “scapes” how can they be used to make our differences a good thing, rather what drives us apart?

Contradicts:

- Globalization,
- Postmodernism
- Post colonialism
- Oppositions “global/local” and “north/South”

Suggestion:

- Flows / scapes of information, technology, images, people, ideas, capital…
- Mutation of flows
- Relationships are antagonistic and distant
- Pass through national boundaries
- Greater possibilities of colonies centres, and nations to states (favors globalize)

Other question: Who is losing out in the globalization?

Problem with global interactions is the tension b/w cultural homogenization and heterogenization

i.e. Homogenization: Americanization… Contradiction to argument: indigenization
- Music, housing, science and terrorism

New economy is understood as complex, overlapping, disjunctive order…
Cannot be understood in terms of old periphery or push pull migratory models

Exploring disjuncture: five dimensions:

1. Mediascape
2. Ethnoscapes
3. Technospaces
4. Finanscapes
5. Ideoscapes

Scapes:

- Perspective constructs
- Different actors
- Historical, linguistically and political

*** Individual actor is the least locus of the perspective set of landscapes
- “Imagined” worlds
- Multiple worlds
- Contest and subvert
- Characterize international capital as they do fashion styles…

“Global flows occur in and through the growing disjuncture (disconnected, separated, incoherence) between ethnoscapes, technospaces, finanscapes, mediascape, and ideoscapes’

“The sheer speed, scale and volume of each of the flows is now so great that the disjuncture have become central to the politics of global culture”

“Deterritorialization” i.e laboring classes into wealthy areas;

My visit to Princeton: It was an odd experience when you visit one of the most prestigious and elite schools in North America. It is renown to be for the rich and the future rich. What amazed me was the realization that a mostly Mexican labor force supported the entire school campus. There was a stark contrast of the mostly Caucasian students and the mostly Mexican workers. Thus, it seems that the barriers of distance, wealth, and culture had collapsed into an odd world of inequalities.

Invented Homelands:

What does it mean to from a place? Do you have to be born there? Is it a question of genealogy? Inheritance? How do you determine where you are from and when does it become part of a group? How do you take ownership of place?

For instance, when will I feel that I am from Canada? When will my Canadian citizenship become my predominant culture identity and not my cultural heritage? Or is the reverse the underlying condition? Maybe Canada’s identity crisis is a demonstration of what the global culture is becoming. Such as an ethnoscapes in which you can live in one place, but identify with multiple places and cultures. Perhaps Canada’s identity is a mixed, varied, unsure, and plural state?

The role of the nation state in the disjunctive global economy of culture:

Nations in search of states:

- Imagined groups which seek to create states of their own or carve pieces out of existing states i.e. Quebec

States in search of communities:

- Museumizing and representing all groups as uniform through out the world

*** states and nations are at each others throats (imaginative and roaming nationhoods)
Primordia have become globalize;

- Locality has been turned into staging ground for identity
- Localities stay connected by sophisticated technologies
- Become a global force slipping b/w the cracks of borders..

i.e. Palestinian and Israel conflict

Uncertain / fluid interplay b/w production and consumption

- Fetishism of the commodity
o Production fetishism
o Fetishism of the consumer

Production fetishism:

- Illusion created by contemporary transnational production loci, which masks translocal capital…
- Free trade zones as the model
- Not masking social relations, but production relations
- The locality (factory, site of production, nation state) becomes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production processes

Consumerism fetish:

- Consumer has been transformed (through commodity flows , mediascape) into sign
- “ These images of agency are increasingly distortions f a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact they are at best a chooser”

“the globalization is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenizations (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, clothing styles…). Which are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, fundamentalism, in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role”

i.e Chinese revolt

Thus, triumphantly universal and resiliently particular