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return to interviews index translocation_new media/art: "Modernity at Large" Interview with Arjun Appadurai by Anette Baldauf and Christian Hoeller B/H: Your work which is mainly focused on the "cultural dimensions of globalization" attempts to mark or characterize a certain rupture within social theory: Global cultural flows are viewed as composed of complex, overlapping and disjunctive orders that do not allow of any homogenized perspective. While for instance the Marxist tradition has tried to consider such flows as ultimately determined by capital flows, your work puts a decisive emphasis on the role of mass migration and - even more importantly - of electronic media. What motivates this special emphasis? AA: The principal reason for this emphasis is my sense that the processes of globalization have radically altered the relations between subjectivity, location, political identification and the social imagination. As I say in my book "Modernity at Large", moving images meet mobile audiences. Hence, theories that rely on some sort of spatial or territorial stability which links economy, society and subjectivity inevitably miss the circulation of persons and of (mass-mediated) images and messages. These circuits are themselves not parallel or isomorphic so traditional geographical conceptions, even those which underly the best Marxist analyses of global capital, miss the disjunctive flows seen in migration and mass mediation. I am convinced that global capital flows are a vital part of the machinary behind these disjunctures but I do not think we have an adequately quirky picture of the dynamics of contemporary capital, especially of global financial capital. B/H: The global cultural economy as well as specific localities are - according to your approach - characterizable as disjunctures of 5 different spheres: irregular, perspectival constructs which you call "scapes" - ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideoscape. How are these spheres related to each other - for instance, are there certain regularities among them? - and how do they "come together" in specific instances? AA: Yes, disjunctures among the "scapes" does not mean that there is no pattern or logic but only that the traditional spatial models for understanding these links will not be helpful. The regularities are simultaneously spatially more extended and temporally accelerated. As the spatial links between different events become obscure and extended, the temporal links are so quick as to vanish before we can study them. Nevertheless, examples can be adduced. Some generic ones: media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well-being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities; flows of discourses of human rights which generate demands from work forces that are repressed by state violence which is backed by global arms flows; ideas about gender and modernity that circulate to create large female work forces at the same time that cross-national ideologies of "culture", "authenticity" and national honor create increasing pressures on just these working women to embody traditional virtues. The recent "crisis" of the emerging Asian economies is an even more interesting case of what may be called the "regularities of disjuncture". These economies, advertised by the World Bank and the IMF as stellar examples of rapid growth and market efficiency for more than a decade are now seen as poorly disciplined nests of "crony capitalism". The consensus among many scholars is that several of these economies, Thailand for example, were quite sound until they became targets of large amounts of speculative finance capital from outside that created unmanageable internal pressures, largely due to the disjuncture between such speculation and the real wealth of these countries. As these economies spin out of control, the velocity of global investment creates a sort of domino panic which returns to the wealthy countries of the West, who are forced to pump new monies into these economies (now including Japan and Russia) so that the costs of predatory financial speculation can be contained or reversed. From my perspective, shared by others like William Greider, all this has much to do with the global production of goods at a volume far beyond the capacity of consumers to buy, and with the radical split between financial speculation and trade in the world economy. What is important here is that the elites of these countries, who profited from the proceeds of modernization and development in earlier decades now are the brokers of runaway global financial speculation. In the United States, this sets up new contradictions between the reality that U.S. wealth needs these overseas economies to absorb its financial surpluses and the converse effect that the collapse of these economies threatens domestic economic stability. In every case, these fears about the thin line between winners and losers in the global economy as well as in particular countries encourages right-wing nativisms in both richer and poorer countries. B/H: Today's massive use of electronic media appears to engender a new high-lighting and dominance of imagination in social life: 1. of the image as the main communicative social fact, 2. of imagined communities, and 3. of (sometimes counter-hegemonic) imagined worlds. In what respect do these forms of imagination expose radical new dimensions as opposed to, say, just reinforce or re-format already existing imaginaries? AA: In some sense, this is a question of degree, of a continuum. Certainly new ideas about identity, affiliation, organization and aspiration often build open or extend pre-existing ones. Thus, the ways in which Chinese communities today imagine their linkages across Taiwan, Singapore, Hongkong, Mainland China, Vancouver, Los Angeles and elsewhere has roots in the movement of Chinese around the world in the nineteenth century and earlier. Yet there are radical new dimensions as well. Thus, those who consider themselves radical "Greens" may in some sense pereive their commitment to eco-globalism as primary and superior to their national affiliations, and this may also be true for some feminists, some scientists and some cyber-citizens who may see the Internet as their first community. Likewise, the ability of diasporic populations to exchange images, plans and projects rapidly through electronic media and face-to-face contact allows more simultaneous participation in multiple national public spheres, as in the case of Turks in Germany and Turkey, and Sikhs in the Punjab and in Canada. Finally, in the current experiments with the European Community, and with its new currency, new ideas about nation and trans-nation are being tested which are far different from earlier forms of league, federation, alliance or cartel among states and nations. B/H: At the same time as your approach re-emphasizes the role of the work of imagination in social life, it also claims that the link between imagination and the social is nowadays a highly global and deterritorialized one. This, in turn, creates what you call "diasporic public spheres" or "translocal communities". To quote a characterization of yours: "As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds form Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorializes viewers." (Modernity at Large, p. 4). How - to approach this important issue - are these diasporic publics related to the nation-state and to nationalisms that do not seem to go away? Inhowfar do they go beyond all affiliations with "the nation"? AA: The question of how these "diasporic" publics and their public spheres relate to existing or new nationalisms requires far more attention than I was able to give it in Modernity at Large. My sense today is that obviously nationalism is not dead even if nation-states are everywhere beset by crises of sovereignty and internal legitimacy. The renewed ethno-nationalisms that have emerged globally, frequently accompanied by shocking kinds of violence, are not a simple reaction to globalization. But they certainly reflect anxiety about immigrants, fears about economic interdependence and concerns about the status of minorities everywhere. The biggest way in which the new diasporic publics have affected contemporary nationalisms is by producing new kinds of majoritarianism. In other words, the lurking ethnic essentialism buried in every form of nationalism is now re-appearing as majoritarianism, which poses a special threat to democratic politics because it reduces the politics of citizenship to the politics of number. Conversely, the crossing of borders by migrants can produce new and aggressive forms of minority-driven terror, as with the Tutsi in certain phases of the crisis in Central Africa. In more general terms, nationalism still remains a vital form of identification for many groups, but it is increasingly a political sentiment divorced from territoriality and statehood. B/H: The new ethnicities, often produced by mass migration, are beset by incredible acts of violence. This ethnic violence (itself constantls displayed on a global scale by the mass media) is most commonly attributed to a revived tribalism and an explosion of raw, primordial feelings - a faulty explanatory model you call the "Bosnia Fallacy". What other explanation would you give of this phenomenon (i.e. one not relying on some sort of tribalism)? AA: I have tried to develop the beginnings of an answer to this question in Modernity at Large through my analyses of censuses, of cross-state transactions and of the "implosion" of external forces into localities. In my more recent work, which focuses on ethnic violence, I develop some of these ideas and have sketched them in preliminary form in an essay which just appeared in Public Culture under the title "Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization". Briefly, my current working hypothesis is that the extreme violence which accompanies many recent ethnic wars is a product of radical uncertainty about key social identities, which produces a surplus of anxiety and rage about categorical betrayal. This, in turn, results in the effort to vivisect the body of the ethnic "other" in a brutal parody of scientific efforts to "discover" the true form of the ethnic other. I also argue that this sort of radical uncertainty is directly tied to the larger processes of globalization that I discuss in Modernity at Large. Naturally, this is a tentative idea and may not account fully for all the kinds of ethnic violence we see today. But it does provide one alternative to the primordialist or tribalist perspective on large-scale ethnic violence and terror. B/H: Current theories consider globalization either as homogenization (increasing uniform Americanization and McDonaldization) or, on the other hand, as an essentalization of locality. Your theory which tries to offer a contextual and relational alternative to these two models attempts to capture a certain dialectic movement within the process of globalization: viz, the constant production as well as continuous dissolution of locality effected by this very process. What exactly is the status of site or locality within this dialectic movement? Or asked differently: Is there something like a vanishing of concrete sites in the midst of today's disjunctural cultural flows? AA: This is a very difficult question and I am not sure I have much to say beyond my discussion of the "production of locality" in Modernity at Large. Still, let me try to push myself. I certainly believe that site, situation and situatedness are of paramount importance in the globalized world in which we now live. But we need to avoid assuming that sites are the same as communities or that localities are simply geographical locations. Especially for prisoners, refugees, asylum-seekers, and other highly vulnerable groups, both sites and journeys remain real and difficult. So I would hesitate to embrace the trope of "vanishing" except to say that the kinds of borders, horizons, checkpoints and transitions that characterized a more settled form of national geography are now increasingly obscure or contested. Sites remain vitally important, even for global capital, as Saskia Sassen has eloquently argued, but for some groups and technologies, borders may be less relevant: consider scientists, arms-dealers and global financiers, as three examples. For others, for example the homeless in many societies, borders may be deeply relevant, since they can hardly move at will, but sites, in the sense of secure locations for the practices of everyday life, may have largely vanished. Also, as certain kinds of "public space" vanish in the modern metropolis, other forms of virtual space may become available, at least for the privileged global classes. B/H: What exactly is the "nature" (in social and political terms) of the new "virtual neighborhoods" or translocal migrant communities created in the aftermath of postnational movements? What active political role do you think these virtual communities can play in the future? AA: Of course, we need to note that not all virtual neighborhoods are diasporic not are all diasporic communities tied in to cyberspace. Yet if we examine the broad class of translocal communities, networks, organizations and visions, they do seem to contain a variety of political possibilities. Their potential is not always positive, as for example in the transnational networks of religious fundamentalists, of drug-traffickers or of arms-dealers. But if we look at the transnational links between human rights activists, feminists and environmentalists, for example, they seem to be developing important ways of intervening in debates about trade, science, technology and law on a transnational basis. Specifically, they are pushing for a more consistent and less hypocritical dialogue between nations, for a more democratic dialogue between state and non-state concerns and for a more articulate voice for the poor in policy discussions among richer nations and organizations. Thus, in the debates and discussions that surround the newly formed World Trade Organization, there is an increased presence of activists and intellectuals who do not speak for specific market or state interests but in the name of environmental justice, equity and participation without regard to national interest. In short, here as well as in discussions of child labor, toxic waste, AIDS, nuclear testing and other vital areas, we can see the potential for a vocabulary of participation, justice and dialogue which is not wholly dominated by reasons of state or by national boundaries or by protectionist motives. This is a vocabulary which, even if emergent and rudimentary, might provide the beginnings of a push to a world of sites and networks, rather than of ethnicities and territories. A German version of this interview was published in: springerin ö Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, 3 (1998), pp. 17 - 20. |
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