Arjun Appadurai_Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture and Economy
Appadurai begins his examination of globalism with a very thorough explanation of what he terms the five dimensions of global cultural flow: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes; the relationships between these scapes being “deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable;” the speed, scale and volume of each of these flows so great that the disjunctures between them have become “central to the politics of global culture.” It is these landscapes which Appadurai identifies as the building blocks of “imagined worlds”; worlds which are “constituted by the historically situated imagination of persons and groups spread around the globe.” The question that arises can be phrased thusly: is Appadurai’s globalism an existential reality, a virtually constructed reality, or some combination of both (and if so, what is the structure of this composition)? Are each of the scapes presented by Appadurai not increasingly virtual within themselves, as well as in terms of their relationship to one another? These constantly mutating disjunctive scapes seemingly have no implicit connection to anything physical or geographical; although they are influenced by real world activities, can they not be understood as active within their own virtual reality? Can this globalism, if it can indeed be considered a virtual reality, be re-grounded in a given instance, in a given singularity, at a given point in time and in a distinct physicality in order to reconstitute it as a reality? Is this the new purpose of cultural production; to take stock of the unique structure, composition, and interplay of active scapes in a given region or locality and attempt a response to, or seek a connection with these different, indigenous, heterogeneous ‘imagined worlds’?
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