Arjun Appadurai-Disjuncture and difference in the global economy

Argument against the cliché that an increasingly global economy is having a homogenizing effect on cultural and political identities:

The division between Nation and State is demarcated through differing flows of information (‘scapes’) that are becoming more distant from each other.

The forces of commoditization become indigenized once introduced into a community (evident with the subspeciating of McDonald’s chains that cater to ethnic preferences in food items).

“The new global cultural economy needs to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order”:

What does this mean? Traditional models of the ‘balance of trade’ no longer apply to the new model of ‘disorganized capitalism’.

We owe this complexity to the disjuncture between culture, economy and politics present in the 5 dimensions of global cultural flow including ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financscapes, and ideoscapes. These scapes are perspectival in that they are subject to different linguistic, political and cultural situations of nations states, multi-nationals, communities and movements.

These are the building blocks that make up the imagined worlds of different groups that can ‘subvert the imagined world of the ‘official mind’ (authority).

Unprecedented mobilities of people, capital, technology and information provide an unpredictable landscape that is subject to its own constraints.

Imagined worlds of the ‘other’:

In an image centered world, the proliferation of strips of visual ‘reality’ into different sub-groups and nation-states promote the production of ‘imagined worlds’, the imagined lives of other peoples living in other lands. This contributes to the construction of fantasy and desire, which become the catalyst for human mobility and acquisition.

This contributes to the phenomenon of deterritorialization and displacement, evident in the rise of separatist movements at the state level and trans-national companies that seek out cheap labor and expatriates that move to seek out employment in different countries.