Lisa Kinch: Explorations in Architecture and Urbanism
Readings, thoughts and ideas related to studies at the Manchester School of Architecture
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Urban Futures
Books reviewed and evaluated in relation to thesis work include ‘Modernity at Large’ by Arjun Appadurai, ‘Economies of Signs and Space’ by Scott Lash and John Urry and ‘The Tourist Gaze’, also by John Urry.
Modernity at Large
Arjun Appadurai
Chapter 2: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy
Notes made whilst reading the chapter. Apologies in advance for any incomprehensive trains of thought.
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Consider modern world as an interactive system of a new order and density.
Cultural transactions have become much more commonplace.
Previous exchange (sustained cultural transactions) through:
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Forges of cultural gravity tend to pull away from formation of large-scale ecumenes (areas of inhabited land) towards intimacy/interest – this is changing.
—- Common interests: money, commerce, conquest, migration creating cross-societal bonds. Accelerated by technology transfer and innovation.
—- Resulting in permanent flow of ideas of peoplehood and selfhood creating ‘imagined communities’.
Benedict Anderson: ‘print capitalism’, development of mass communication without personal contact – cultural affinities reaffirmed/redefined + technological expansion – even faster exchange now! (transportation and information)
New condition of neighbourliness with those most distant from us. (Easier to make contact over large distance than to speak with next door neighbour!) Relations over distance, creating digital/virtual communities.
Media creating a ‘Global Village’ with no sense of place. Dual nature: theories of rootlessness, alienation, psychological distance as well as electronic propinquity/closeness. Close AND far away.
“…if a global cultural system is emerging, it is full of ironies and resistances.”
Global culture of the hyper-real – how does it affect/influence us?
—- Nostalgia without memory, looking back to a world we have never lost
—- Irony of politics of global cultural flow
Americans hardly live in the present – culture based on the past. Issue is no longer nostalgia, but a ‘social imaginaire’ built around reruns.
— What is the impact of popular culture and can we live in a present without a past?
A world of signs wholly unmoored from their social signifiers – all the world is a Disneyland!
United States no longer a puppeteer of a world system of images, but only one node in a complex network – a ‘transnational construction of imaginary landscapes’. US is, however, one of the MAIN nodes. The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life.
“The image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.”
Imagination is no longer considered simple escape, elite pastime, mere fantasy or contemplation. Imagination has become an organised field of social practices – work, negotiation etc. Imagination is now central to all forms of agency.
Imagination is itself a social fact and is ‘the key component of the new global order’.
— Imagination as social practice – work, culture, organisation
Cultural homogenisation vs. cultural heterogenisation – tension!
- homogenisation: Americanization or commoditisation (merging cultures)
- heterogenisation: indigenisation – by absorbing global culture, the indigenous becomes more apparent
“There is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are nearby. One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison.”
New global cultural economy should be seen as complex, overlapping disjunctive order. Can no longer be understood by centre-periphery model but instead as intersecting networks.
There are five dimensions of global cultural flows, previously discussed in post about Economies of Signs and Space.:
They are not objectively given relations, they look different from every angle of vision. They are deeply perspectival constructs and apply at different scales.
Ethnoscapes, technoscapes and financescapes are subject to their own constraints and incentives as well as acting as constraints and parameters for movements in the others.
The five landscapes are building blocks of what Appadurai calls ‘imagined worlds’ – the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread across the globe.
“An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds […] and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them.”
Audiences confused by blurring of boundaries between realistic and fictional landscapes. The farther away audiences are form direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds very different to actual reality.
“Mediascapes tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives.”
Mediascapes create sets of metaphors by which people live. They help constitute narratives of ‘the Other’ – fear? – desire for acquisition and movement?
Relationship between reading, representation and the public sphere (roots in enlightenment)
Relationship of reading to hearing and seeing varies in important ways around the globe. Determines morphology of ideoscapes as they shape themselves in national and transnational contexts.
—- What does this mean to global cinema?
Current global flows occur in and through the growing disjuncture among Appadurai’s five landscapes. People, money, ideas and images move at great speed, scale and volume – flows are central to politics of global culture.
Deterritorialisation is a central force in the modern world. Permeable boundaries. Ne opportunities for industries thriving on deterritorialised communities in need/search of contact with their homeland.
“…invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt.”
—can Hollywood build this kind of imagined community?
Ideas and images produced by mass media often are only partial guides to goods and experiences deterritorialised populations transfer to each other.
— Is possible to, as an outsider, understand the process?
Are human relations, ideas of ‘the Other’ damaged/broken down by chaotic mixing of cultures? Female/male relations?
National and international mediascapes can be and are exploited by nation states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference.
— Are we all the same? Can we be? Do we want to be?
States find themselves pressed to stay open by the forces of media, technology and travel. Fuelling consumerism, need/want for commodities and spectacles even in the non-Western world.
Conflicts between ideoscapes and mediascapes!
Martial arts gained popularity through popular films, spurring violence and gun trades (?) – films linking images of violence to aspirations for community in some imagined world. VIOLENCE = COMMUNITY?
Marx’s fetishism of commodity replaced by production fetishism and fetishism of consumer.
Consumer as an actor or as a chooser? Global advertising key technology for worldwide dissemination of ideas of consumed agency.
Is globalisation homogenisation or is it not? It is, at least, using the same methods.
— Revolt against similarity
— Cultural heritage and identity are important
Balance needed: too much openness to global flows – nation state threatened by revolt. To little openness and state exists the international stage.
“…both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varies mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures.”
How do small groups (families) deal with new global realities when reproducing (and accidentally also reproducing cultural form)?
Transgenerational stability of knowledge
Pains of cultural reproduction in a disjunctive global world are not eased by effect of mechanical art and mass media. They provide useful resources for counternodes of identity against which youth can project parental views or desires. Parent no longer main point of reference. Media providing new role models and aspiration.
What is the role of mass media? What rights and responsibilities could and should it have?
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Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
