Transcript Document

The Imaged, Imagined and Imaginary
Imagination as a Social Practice
in the Global (Dis)Order
•Where Are You From?
•What Is Your Identity?
The Namesake by Mira Nair
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"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. No
longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer
simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and
structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and
no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the
imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense
of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of
agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of the
imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states
and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a
social fact, and is the key component of the new global order"
Arjun Appadurai
“Our only choices are the
secular universalism of the
cosmopolitan market and
the everyday particularism
of the fractious tribe.”
Early Theories of Int’l Comm
• Nation=modernity: Western-Eurocentric
concept: Defined against an Other
• Reifying the “Superior Self”
• Nation as politically, economically,
geographically and culturally coherent?
• Dangerous binaries arise: traditional
East; modern West
Early Theories of Int’l Comm
• 50s-60s: Modernization Approach
(aka) Dominant Paradigm: Lerner,
Schramm, Pye
• Based on a behaviorist understanding
of media effects: Magic bullet theory;
• Close link between development and
communication;
• Excessive focus on nationalism and
no regard for other identity nodes like
gender, ethnicity, class, and religion;
• Modernizing the Middle East. —
Subtitle of Daniel Lerner’s 1958 book,
The Passing of Traditional Society
• Modernizing the Mideast. — Headline
for a December 13, 2002, news story
on CBSNews.com reporting the George
W. Bush administration’s plans for Iraq
and beyond
Modernization Model
• Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional
Society (1958): modern is defined
narrowly in 2 questions
• Traditionals are illiterate, local, and
fatalist
• Moderns are cosmopolitan, literate, and
politically engaged
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Development strategies after WWII: models
like the Marshall Plan would work
elsewhere.
These strategies included: transfer of
technologies and rapid industrialization
Modernization Model
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Creation of Spheres of Influence: Imposition of
economic, military, cultural power on different
parts of the world.
Communication theories of persuasion and
diffusion of innovation coming from the US
helped draft the first communication strategies
for development.
Print and Broadcasting were taken as a
vehicle for the passing of these ideas. e.g.
creation of Voice Of America, Radio Marti,
Radio Moscow, Radio Vatican, etc.
Critical Turn
• mid 60s: Dependency Critique:
• research in the modernization period
was primarily imperialist;
• imperialism has enduring influence
that transfers in soft power;
• The “Center” sets the terms for global
exchange, trade and the structure
global markets
Dependency Critique
• World Systems Theory: Wallerstein
(1974) : world divided into center,
semi-peripheral and peripheral
countries
• Asymmetrical relationship between
center-periphery leads to “dependent
development”
• Herbert Schiller “Mass
Communication and American
Empire” (1969): the US undermines
local cultural autonomy
Dependency Critique
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Cultural/media imperialism (70-80s)
Imbalance of news and program flow coming mainly
from the US
Beginnings of the NWICO (new world information and
communication order)
Dependency critique: attention for the first time to
media ownership and control
Flow of cultural goods from center constitutes an act
of imperialism
focus on structure: political economy, one-way flow
from the center- no focus on the role of culture and
people’s agency
Culturalist Turn: Structure and Culture
• Ideology and power: closely relatedperpetuated at everyday sites of interaction:
school, workplace, religious site, media
• Structuralist view: meaning is not a practice,
but a social production achieved through
language and symbolization
• Post-structuralist view: culture is fluid, a
dynamic playing field in which identities are
formed.
• Culturalist turn: postmodernists- loss of master
narratives- Enlightenment project is political
Postcolonialism
• “The postcolonial condition is the
supplement that haunts and taunts Euro
modernities, speaks its tragedies and
ironies”
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Frantz Fanon
‘As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol
of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I
recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out
of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention
to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try,
then to find value for what is bad - since I have
unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour
of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in
which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy,
conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman
in short, I have only one solution, to rise above this
absurd drama that others have staged around me, to
reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable,
and, through one human being, to reach out for the
universal.‘
Black Skin, White Masks
Postcolonial Critique
Arjun Appadurai
Limitations of earlier Theories
• Too much focus on center-periphery paradigm
• Too much focus on nation as only unit of
analysis
• Does not address migratory push and pull
forces
• “The complexity of the current global economy
has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures
between economy, culture and politics which we
have barely begun to theorize.”
Cultural Framework of Globalization
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Power- operates from multiple centres, not one centre
Individual Agency: individuals not nations alone are actors- different
indigenization processes happening
Identity/Citizenship: multiple, imagined, transnational, moving feast,
different locales and cities
Blurring of lines between 1st and 3rd world
Access- images, information, software, technologies, etc.
Authority- challenges the Enlightenment project and master narratives
about the world
Publics- emergence of different counterpublics locally, regionally and
globally
Appadurai’s Disjunctive global Cultural Order
“Scapes of Globalization”
Ethnoscape
s
Ideascapes
Finanscapes
Technoscape
s
Mediascape
s
Imagined Worlds
Ethnoscapes
the landscape of
persons who
constitute the shifting
world in which we live:
tourists, immigrants,
refugees, exiles,
guestworkers and
other moving groups
and persons
constitute an essential
feature of the world,
and appear to affect
the politics of and
between nations to a
hitherto
unprecedented
degree.”
Ideoscapes
Also concatenations
of
images, but they are
often directly political
and frequently have
to do with the
ideologies of states
and the counterideologies
of movements
explicitly
oriented to capturing
state power or a
piece of it”
Technoscapes
“the global configuration,
also ever fluid, of
technology, and of the fact
that technology,
both high and low, both
mechanical and
informational, now moves at
high speeds across various
kinds of previously
impervious boundaries”
driven by “increasingly
complex relationships
between
money flows, political
possibilities, and the
availability of both un- and
highly skilled labor”
Financescapes
the flow of capital:
“currency markets,
national stock
exchanges, and
commodity
speculations move
mega-monies
through
national turnstiles at
blinding speed”
Mediascapes
“refer both to the
distribution of electronic
capabilities to produce and
disseminate
information (newspapers,
magazines, television
stations and film production
studios) which are now
available
to a growing number of
private and public interests
throughout the world, and
to the images of the world
created by these media”
(330).”Tend to be imagecentered, narrative-based
accounts of strips of reality”