Slash 0

h s a l S

L'Éternité Elle est retrouvée. Quoi ? - L'Éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil. Mon âme éternelle, Observe ton voeu Malgré la nuit seule Et le jour en feu. Donc tu te dégages Des humains suffrages Des communs élans Et voles selon... - Jamais d'espérance Pas d'orietur. Science et patience, Le supplice est sûr. Plus de lendemain, Braises de satin, Votre ardeur Est le devoir. Elle est retrouvée ! - Quoi ? - L'Éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil. A. Rimbaud

Slash cut-up by N.

Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy by Arjun Appadurai

The central problem of today's global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. A vast array of empirical facts could be brought to bear on the side of the 'homogenization' argument, and much of it has come from the left end of the spectrum of media studies (Hamelink, 1983; Mattelart, 1983; Schiller, 1976), and some from other, less appealing, perspectives (Gans, 198S; Iyer, 1988). Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization,

or

an

argument

about

'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner (Barber, 1987; Feld, 1988; Hannerz, 1987, 1989; Ivy, 1988; Nicoll, 1989; Yoshimoto, 1989), and much more needs to be done. But it is worth noticing that for the people of lrian Jaya, Indonesianization may be more worrisome than Americanization, as Japanization may be for Koreans, Indianization for Sri Lankans, Vietnamization for the Cambodians, Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic Republics. Such a list of alternative fears to Americanizan could be greatly expanded, but it is not a shapeless inventory: for polities of smaller scale, there is always a fear of cultural absorption by polities of larger scale, especially those that are near by. One man's imagined community (Anderson, 1983) is another man's political prison.

This scalar dynamic, which has widespread global manifestations, is also tied to the relationship between nations and states, to which I shall return later in this essay. For the moment let us note that the simplification of these many forces (and fears) of homogenization can also be exploited by nation-states in relation to their own minorities, by posing global commoditization (or capitalism, or some other such external enemy) as more 'real' than the threat of its own hegemonic strategies. The new global cultural economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centerperiphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries). Nor is it susceptible to simple models of push and pull (in terms of migration theory) or of surpluses and deficits (as in traditional models of balance of trade), or of consumers and producers (as in most neo-Marxist theories of development). Even the most complex and flexible theories of global development which have come out of the Marxist tradition (Amin, 1980; Mandel, 1978; Wallerstein, 1974; Wolf, 1982) are inadequately quirky, and they have not come to terms with what Lash and Urry (1987) have recently called 'disorganized capitalism'. 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. I propose that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes. (2) I use terms with the common suffix scape to indicate first of all that these are not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision, but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and.political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as sub-national grouping and movements (whether religious, political or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their own sense of what these landscapes offer. These landscapes thus, are the building blocks of what,

extending Benedict Anderson, I would like to call 'imagined worlds', that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe (Appadurai, 1989). An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined 'worlds' and not just in imagined communities, 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. The suffix scape also allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes which characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. By 'ethnoscape', I mean 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. This is not to say that there are not anywhere relatively stable communities and networks, of kinship, of friendship, of work and of leisure, as well as of birth, residence and other filiative forms. But that is not to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move. What is more, both these realities as well as these fantasies now function on larger scales, as men and women from villages in India think not just of moving to Poona or Madras, but of moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find themselves in South India as well as in Canada, just as the Hmong are driven to London as well as to Philadelphia. And as international capial shifts its needs, as production and technology generate different needs, as nation-states shift their policies on refugee populations, these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to. By 'technoscape' , I mean the global configuration, also ever so 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. Many countries now are the roots of multinational enterprise: a huge steel com-

plex in Libya may involve interests from India, China, Russia and Japan, providing different components of new technological configurations. The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by obvious economies of scale, of political controi, or of market rationality, but of increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities and the availability of both low and highly-skilled labor. So, while India exports waiters and chauffeurs to Dubai and Sharjah, it also exports software engineers to the United States (indentured briefly to Tata-Burroughs or the World Bank), then laundered through the State Department to become wealthy 'resident aliens', who are in turn objects of seductive messages to invest their money and know-how in federal and state projects in India. The global economy can still be described in terms of traditional 'indicators' (as the World Bank continues to do) and studied in terms of traditional comparisions (as in Project Link at the University of Pennsylvania), but the complicated technoscapes (and the shifting ethnoscapes), which underlie these 'indicators' and 'comparisions' are further out of the reach of the 'queen of the social sciences' than ever before. How is one to make a meaningful comparision of wages in Japan and the United States, or of real estate costs in New York and Tokyo, without taking sophisticated account of the very complex fiscal and investment flows that link the two economies through a global grid of currency speculation and capital transfer? Thus it is useful to speak as well of 'finanscapes', since the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move mega-monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast absolute implications for small differences in percentage points and time units. But the critical point is that the global relationship between ethnoscapes, technoscapes and finanscapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable, since each of these landscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives (some political, some informational and some techno-environmental), at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for the movements in the other. Thus, even an elementary model of global political economy must take into account the shifting relationship between perspectives on human movement, technologjcal flow, and financial transfers, which can accomodate their deeply disjunctive relationships with one another.

Built upon these disjunctures (which hardly form a simple, mechanical global 'infrastructure' in any case) are what I have called 'mediascapes' and 'ideoscapes', though the latter two are closely related landscapes of images. 'Mediascapes' refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.), 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. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audience (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in television film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and 'ethnoscapes' to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of 'news' and politics are profoundly mixed. What this means is that audiences throughout the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards. The lines between the 'realistic' and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the further away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct 'imagined worlds' s' which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other 'imagined world'. 'Mediascapes', whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be imagecentered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places. These scripts can and do get disaggregated into complex sets of metaphors by which people live (Lakoff and Jbhnson, 1980) as they help to constitute narratives of the 'other' and proto-narratives of possible lives, fantasies which could become prologemena to the desire for acquisition and movement. 'Ideoscsapes' are also concatenations of images, but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies

of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or a piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment world-view, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and images, including 'freedom', 'welfare', 'rights', 'sovereignty', 'representation' and the master-term 'democracy'. The master-narrative of the Enlightenment (and its many variants in England, France and the United States) was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relationship between reading, representation and the public sphere (for the dynamics of this process in the early history of the United States, see Warner, 1990). But their diaspora across the world, especially since the nineteenth century, has loosened the internal coherence which held these terms and images together in a Euro-American master-narrative, and provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which different nation-states, as part of their evolution, have organized their political cultures around different 'keywords' (Williams 1976). As a result of the different diaspora of these keywords, the political narratives that govern communication between elites and followings in different parts of the world involve problems of both a semantic and a pragmatic nature: semantic to the extent that words (and their lexical equivalents) require careful translation from context to context in their global movements; and pragmatic to the extent that the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public policies. Such conventions are not only matters of the nature of political rhetoric (viz. what does the aging Chinese leadership mean when it refers to the dangers of hooliganism? What does the South Korean leadership mean when it speaks of 'discipline' as the key to democratic industrial growth?). These conventions also involve the far more subtle question of what sets of communicative genres are valued in what way (newspapers versus cinema for example) and what sorts of pragmatic genre conventions govern the collective 'readings' of different kinds of text. So, while an Indian audience may be attentive to the resonances of a political speech in terms of some key words and phrases reminiscent of Hindi cinema, a Korean audience may respond to the subtle codings of Buddhist or neo-Confucian rhetorical strategy encoded in a political document. The very relationship of reading

to hearing and seeing may vary in important ways that determine morphology of these different 'ideoscapes' as they shape themselves in different national and transnational contexts. This globally variable synaesthesia has hardly even been noted, but it demands urgent analysis. Thus 'democracy' has clearly become a master-term, with powerful echoes from Haiti and Poland to the Soviet Union and China, but it sits at the center of a variety of ideoscapes (composed of djstinctive pragmatic configurations of rough 'translations' of other central terms from the vocabulary of the Enlightenment). This creates ever new terminological kaleidoscopes, as states (and the groups that seek to capture them) seek to pacify populations whose own ethnoscapes are in motion and whose mediascapes may create severe problems for the ideoscapes with which they are presented. The fluidity of ideoscapes is complicated in particular by the growing diasporas (both voluntary and involuntary) of intellectuals who continuously inject new meaning streams into the discourse of democracy in different parts of the world. This extended terminological discussion of the five terms I have coined sets the basis for a tentative formulation aout the conditions under which current global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. This fomulation, the core of my model of global cultural flow, needs some explanation. First, people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths: of course, at all periods in human history, there have been some disjunctures between the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale and volume of each of these flows is now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture. The Japanese are notoriously hospitable to ideas and are stereotyped as inclined to export (all) and import (some) goods, but they are also notoriously closed to immigration, like the Swiss, the Swedes and the Saudis. Yet the Swiss and Saudis accept populations of guest-workers, thus creating labor diasporas of Turks , Italians and other circum-mediterranean groups. Some such guest-worker groups maintain continuous contact with their home-nations, like the Turks, but others, like high-level South Asian migrants tend to desire lives in their new homes, raising anew the problem of reproduction in a deterritorialized context.

Deterritoralization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world, since it brings laboring populations into the lower class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home-state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, including Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. In the Hindu case for example (Appadurai and Breckenridge, forthcoming) it is clear that the overseas movement of Indians has been exploited by a variety of interests both within and outside India to create a complicated network of finances and religious identifications, in which the problems of cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home. At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impressarios and travel agencies, who thrive on the need of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt. The creation of 'Khalistan', an invented homeland of the deterritorialized Sikh population of England, Canada and the United States, is one example of the bloody potential in such mediascapes, as they interact with the 'internal colonialisms' (Hechter, I 974) of the nation-state. The West Bank, Namibia and Eritrea are other theaters for the enactment of the bloody negotiation between existing nation-states and various deterritorrialized groupings. The idea of deterritorialization may also be applied to money and finance, as money managers seek the best markets for their investments, independent of national boundaries. In turn, these movements of monies are the basis of new kinds of conflict, as Los Angelenos worry about the Japanese buying up their city, and people in Bombay worry about the rich Arabs from the Gulf States who have not only transformed the prices of mangoes in Bombay, but have also substantially altered the profile of hotels, restaurants and other services in the eyes of the local population, just as they continue to do in London. Yet, most residents of Bombay are ambivalent about the Arab presence there, for the flip side of their presence is the absence of friends and kinsmen earning big money in the Middle East and bringing back both money and luxury commodities to Bombay and other

cities in India. Such commodities transform consumer taste in these cities, and also often end up smuggled though air and sea ports and peddled in the gray markets of Bombay's streets. In these gray markets, some members of Bombay's middle-classes and of its lumpenproletariat can buy some of these goods, ranging from cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, to Old Spice shaving cream and tapes of Madonna. Similarly gray routes, often subsidized by the moonlighting activities of sailors, diplomats, and airline stewardesses who get to move in and out of the country regularly, keep the gray markets of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta filled with goods not only from the West, but also from the Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore. It is this fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money, commodities, and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart. For the ideas and images produced by mass media often are only partial guides to the goods and experiences that deterritorialized populations transfer to one another. In Mira Nair's brilliant film India Cabaret, we see the multiple loops of this fractured deterritorialization as young women, barely competent in Bombay's metropolitan glitz, come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bombay, entertaining men in clubs with dance formats derived wholly from the prurient dance sequences of Hindi films. These scenes cater in turn to ideas about Western and foreign women and their 'looseness', while they provide tawdry career alibis for these women. Some of these women come from Kerala, where cabaret clubs and the pornograpic film industry have blossomed, partly in response to the purses and tastes of Keralites returned from the Middle East, where their diaspoic lives away fom women distort their very sense of what the relations between men and women might be. These tragedies of displacement could certainly be replayed in a more detailed analysis of the relations between the Japanese and German sex tours to Thailand and the tragedies of the sex trade in Bangkok, and in other similar loops which tie together fantasies about the other, the conveniences and seductions of travel, the economics of gloal trade and the brutal mobility fantasies that dominate gender politic in many parts of Asia and the world at large.

While far more could be said about the cultural politics of deterritorialization and the larger sociology of displacement that it expresses, it is appropriate at this juncture to bring in the role of the nation-state in the disjunctive global economy of culture today. The relationship between states and nations is everywhere an embattled one. It is possible to say that in many societies, the nation and the state have become one another's projects. That is, while nations (or more properly groups with ideas about nationhood) seek to capture or co-opt states and state power, states simultaneously seek to capture and monopolize ideas about nationhood (Baruah 1986; Chatterjee, 1986; Nandy, 1989). In general, separatist, transnational movements, including those which have included terror in their methods, exemplify nations in search of states: Sikhs, Tamil Sri Lankans, Basques, Moos, Quebecois, each of these represent imagined communities which seek to create states of their own or everywhere carve pieces out of existing states. States, on the other hand, are everywhere seeking to monopolize the moral resources of community, either by flatly claiming perfect coevality between nation and state or by systematically museumizing and representing all the groups within them in a variety of heritage politics that seems remarkably uniform throughout the world (Handler, 1988; Herzfeld, 1982; McQueen, 1988). Here, national and international mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomical control over difference; by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference; and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage. One important new feature of global cultural politics, tied to the disjunctive relationships between the various landscapes discussed earlier, is that state and nation are at each's throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture. This disjunctive relationship between nation and state has two levels: at the level of any given nation-state, it means that there is a battle of imagination, with state and nation seeking to cannibalize one another. Here is the seed-bed of brutal separatisms, majoritarianisms that seem to have appeared from nowhere, and micro-identities that have become political projects within the nation-state. At another level, this disjunctive relationship is deeply entangled with the global disjunctures discussed throughout this essay: ideas of nationhood appear to be steadily increasing in scale and regularly crossing existing state boundaries: sometimes, as with

the Kurds, because previous identities stretched across vast national spaces, or, as with the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the dormant threads of a transnational diaspora have been activated to ignite the micro-politics of a nation-state. In discussing the cultural politics that have subverted the hyphen that links the nation to the state. it is especially important not to forget its mooring in the irregularities that now characterize 'disorganized capital' (Lash and Urry, 1987; Kothari, 1989). It is because labor, finance and technology are now so widely separated that the volatilities that underlie movements for nationhood (as large as transnational Islam on the one hand, or as small as the movement of the Gurkhas for a separate state in the NorthEast of India) grind against the vulnerabilities which characterize the relations between states. States find themselves pressed to stay 'open' by the forces of media, technology, and travel which had fueled consumerism throughout the world and have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and spectacles. On the other hand, these very cravings can become caught up in new ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes, such as 'democracy' in China, that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its control over ideas of nationhood and 'peoplehood'. States throughout the world are under siege, especially where contests over the ideoscapes of democracy are fierce and fundamental, and where there are radical disjunctures between ideoscapes and technoscapes (as in the case of very small countries that lack contemporary technologies of production and information); or between ideoscapes and finanscapes (as in countries, such as Mexico or Brazil where international lending influences national politics to a very large degree); or between ideoscapes and ethnoscapes (as in Beirut, where diasporic, local and translocal filiations are suicidally at battle); or between ideoscapes and mediascapes (as in many countries in the Middle East and Asia) where the lifestyles represented on both national and international TV and cinema completely overwhelm and undermine the rhetoric of national politics: in the Indian case, the myth of the law-breaking hero has pieties and the realities of Indian politics, which has grown increasingly brutalized and corrupt (Vachani, 1989). The transnational movement of the martial-arts, particularly through Asia, as mediated by the Hollywood and Hongkong film industries (Zarilli, forthcoming) is a rich illustration of the ways in which long-standing martial arts traditions, reformulated to meet the fantasies of contemporary (sometimes lumpen) youth populations, create new

cultures of masculinity and violence, which are in turn the fuel for increased violence in national and international politics. Such violence is in turn the spur to an increasingly rapid and amoral arms trade which penetrates the entire world. The world-wide spread of the AK-47 and the Uzi, in films, in corporate and state security, in terror, and in police and military activity, is a reminder that apparently simple technical uniformities often conceal an increasingly complex set of loops, linking images of violence to aspirations for community in some 'imagined world'. Returning then to the 'ethnoscapes' with which I began, the central paradox of ethnic politics in today's world is that primordia, (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood o of kinship) have become globalized. That is, sentiments whose greatest force is their ability to ignite intimacy into a political sentiment and turn locality into a staging ground for identity, have become spread over vast and irregular spaces, as groups move, yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities. This is not to deny that such primordia are often the product of invented traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) or retrospective affiliations, but to emphasize that because of the disjuncture and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national politics and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality (however large) has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between state and borders. But the relationship between the cultural and economic levels of this new set of global disjunctures is not a simple one-way street in which the terms of global cultural politics are set wholly by or confined wholly within, the vicissitudes of international flows of technology, labor and finance, demanding only a modest modification of existing neo-Marxist models of uneven development and state-formation. There is a deeper change, itself driven by the disjunctures between all the landscapes I have discussed, and constituted by their continuously fluid and uncertain interplay, which concerns the relationship between production and consumption in today's global economy. Here I begin with Marx's famous (and often-mined) view of the fetishism of the commodity, and suggest that this fetishism has been replaced in the world at large (now seeing the world as one, large, interactive system, composed of many complex sub-systems) by two mutually supportive descendants, the first of which I call product

fetishism, and the second of which I call fetishism of the consumer. By production fetishism I mean an illusion created by contemporary transnational production loci, which masks translocal capital, transnational earning-flows, global management and often faraway workers (engaged in various kinds of high-tech putting out operations) in the idiom and spectacle of local (sometimes even worker) control, national productivity and territorial sovereignty. To the extent that various kinds of Free Trade Zone have become the models for production at large, especially of hightech commodities, production has itself become a fetish, masking not social relations as such, but the relations of production, which are increasingly transnation. The locality (both in the sense of the local factory or site of production and in the extended sense of the nation-state) becomes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process. This generates alienation (in Marx's sense) twice intensified, for its social sense is now compounded by a complicated spatial dynamic which is increasingly global. As for the fetishism of the consumer, I mean to indicate here that the consumer has been transformed, through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them) into a sign, both in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum which only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent; and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production. Global advertising is the key technology for the world-wide dissemination of a plethora of creative, and culturally wellchosen,. Ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where he or she is at best a chooser. The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, clothing styles and the like) which are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, fundamentalism, etc. in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows and the nation-

state is threatened by revolt--the China syndrome; too little, and the state exits the international stage, as Burma, Albania and North Korea, in various ways have done. In general, the.state has become the arbiter of this repatriation of difference (in the form of goods, signs, slogans, styles, etc.). But this repatriation or export of the designs and commodities of difference continuously exacerbates the 'internal' politics of majoritarianism and homogenization, which is most frequently played out in debates over heritage. Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular. This mutual cannibalization shows its ugly face in riots, in refugeeflows, in state-sponsored torture and ethnocide (with or without state support). Its brighter side is in the expansion of many individual horizons of hope and fantasy, in the global spread of oral rehydration therapy and other low-tech instruments of well-being, in the susceptibility even of South Africa to the force of global opinion, in the inability of the Polish state to repress its own working-classes, and in the growth of a wide range of progressive, transnational alliances. Examples of both sorts could be multiplied. The critical point is that both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied 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.

ts rio , d g un ece Yo (Gre

8) 200 e r mb ice

CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM (excerpt from “T. A. Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism” By Hakim Bey)

Chaos CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions. There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky. To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age--shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever. Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror--everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain. Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with

obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings. Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs. The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they'd call it an act of terrorism--so let's take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence. Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Grafitti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments--PTart can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshieldwipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as

strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

Eugène Atget

The Rise of Glocality: New Senses of Place and Identity in the Global Village Joshua Meyrowitz

All experience is local. Everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste is experienced through our bodies. And unless one believes in out-of-body experiences, one accepts that we and our bodies are permanently fused. We are always in place, and place is always with us. Similarly, as we move through our daily routines, choose places to live, to work, and to send our children to school, we are dependent on the nature of the specific locality. Our bodies are bound by the laws of space and time, and—barring the development of Star-Trek-like teleportation—always will be. We cannot work in Budapest and stop home for lunch in Paris. Our children cannot attend school every weekday in Berlin and play soccer daily in Rome. We cannot get a tan on the Riviera in the morning and ski in Aspen, Colorado right after lunch. As much as we may flirt over the telephone or the internet, we cannot consummate a loving relationship, or produce offspring through the most common and pleasurable method, without bringing the space and time coordinates of two human bodies into synchrony. Moreover, we are all very aware of how long it takes to commute to and from a work office or to travel to an international conference. The travel time is real, even when we work with or present conference papers about virtual space and telecommunications. In short, no matter how sophisticated our technologies are, no matter how much we attempt to multi-task, we cannot be in two places at the same time. The localness of experience is a constant. And the significance of locality persists even in the face of massive social and technological changes. Our most basic physical needs for shelter and food must be met locally. Even in the era of online shopping and just-in-time delivery, there is still no convenience quite like the local convenience store.

The Generalized Elsewhere Enduring localism, however, does not negate the reality of globalization. Nor does the essential localness of experience negate the significance of forms of communication that seep through walls and leap across vast distances. For although we always sense the world in a local place, the people and things that we sense are not exclusively local: Media of all kinds extend our perceptual field. And while all physical experience is local, we do not always make sense of local experience from a purely local perspective. Various media give us external perspectives from which to judge the local. We may be mentally outside, even as we are physically inside. The work of Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead makes the convincing case that even the human sense of self is not defined by the physical boundaries of our bodies. The self, they argue, is a reflected concept. It develops as we come to see ourselves as social objects. That is, we understand the social “meaning” of our behaviors and words as we imagine how others are imagining us. The self develops through our perceptions of other people’s perceptions. Cooley refers to this as “the looking-glass self.” Mead speaks of “the generalized other” from whose perspective we view and judge our own behavior and utterances. He also describes “significant others,” those people with whom we have particularly important relationships and whose imagined views of us are especially powerful. The notion of a reflected self is related to media and locality in at least two ways. First, media have extended the boundaries of experience so that those whom we perceive as significant others or as part of the generalized other are no longer only the people we experience in face-to-face interaction. People from other localities also serve as self-mirrors. Although this “mediated generalized other” does not eliminate our reliance on locality and the people in it for a sense of self, it dilutes and modifies it. Moreover, even within the general locality, those in our immediate physical proximity— inhabitants of our neighborhoods, and even of our homes—have progressively less influence on our self-image as we increasingly use mobile and immobile phones, email, and various modes of transportation to maintain contact with others who are more distant, but still relatively local and physically accessible. Second, by giving us perspectives external to the locality, media expand our perception of what I call “the generalized elsewhere.” The generalized elsewhere serves as

a mirror in which to view and judge our localities. We are now more likely to understand our place, not just as the community, but as one of many possible communities in which we could live. We are less likely to see our locality as the center of the universe. We are less likely to see our physical surroundings as the source of all of our experiences. Even for those of us who feel deeply connected to a locality, we are now more likely than in past centuries to think of where we live as it is imagined from elsewhere. We may, for example, think of our locality as being north of or south of somewhere else; or as being more liberal or more conservative than, older or newer than, more or less exotic than, colder or warmer than other places.

Glocality: Being Inside and Outside at the Same Time Consciousness of both self and place demands at least some sort of minimally external perspective. For most citizens of the globe, however, external perspectives are no longer minimal. Today’s consciousness of self and place is unusual because of the ways in which the evolutions in communication and travel have placed an interconnected global matrix over local experience. We now live in “glocalities.” Each glocality is unique in many ways, and yet each is also influenced by global trends and global consciousness. Although we continue to live in various physical localities, we now increasingly share information with and about people who live in different localities. We more frequently intercept experiences and messages originally shaped for, and limited to, people in other places. Not that long ago, even the general appearance of distant locations—and of the people who inhabited them—was not that easily accessible. As recently as the Golden Age of Radio in the United States an entire radio drama could be based on the mystery and danger surrounding a trip from New York to California. (Such was the case with Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker, first broadcast in 1941, which was hailed as a classic of the medium.) Yet, at the start of the television era in the U.S., TV programs provided live hookups of scenes of New York and California. This began the process of demystification of cross-country travel and of distant parts of the country and the world. The same demystification of distant locales via television has occurred in many other countries.

Today, with hundreds of TV channels, cable networks, satellite systems, and millions of computer web sites, average citizens of all advanced industrialized societies (and many not so advanced societies) have images in their heads of other people, other cities and countries, other professions, and other lifestyles. These images help to shape the imagined elsewhere from which each person’s somewhere is conceived. In that sense, all our media—regardless of their manifest purpose and design—function as mental “global positioning systems.” Mediated images, even when limited by false or ethnocentric assumptions, form a context for the use of voice-only mobile-phone calls. When philosopher Henry David Thoreau assessed the planned construction of a telegraph line from Maine to Texas, he responded by wondering whether a person from the southern state of Texas would have anything to communicate to a person from the New England state of Maine. Today, such restricted notions of place-bound topics for conversation seem outdated. We can conceive enough of the life space of others to imagine having at least a few topics of conversation with almost anyone else on the planet. Even seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers can be pierced, at least in small ways, in the glocality. In the Middle East, for example, the idea for the Hello ShalomHello Salaam phone hotline came into being when an Israeli Jew named Natalia dialed a wrong number on her mobile phone and reached a Palestinian named Jihad. With their numbers recorded on each other’s phones, they began to call each other and established a phone relationship that included checking on each other after bombings and terrorist attacks. The hotline that sprung from this accidental relationship allows Jews and Palestinians to listen to hundreds of voice messages from each other and decide whether they want to make direct contact. In the first three months of the service in 2002, 25,000 people used the hotline. The global view that modern media engender often alters the meaning of interactions in the locality. In the past, workers in a factory, women at home, children in school, and patrons of a neighborhood shop typically conceived of their behaviors as taking place in local space and in keeping with what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called “local knowledge.” Pleasure and pain, conflict and communion were thought to occur in the factory, the family home, the school, and the neighborhood. Problems with a supervisor, a spouse, a teacher, or a shopkeeper were once most likely to be viewed as

personal difficulties between individuals. Today, however, the mediated perspective from elsewhere, or “view from above,” redefines many local problems into “social issues”; that is, into struggles between more abstract “social categories.” When a promotion is denied, it is now likely to be linked to sex discrimination or racism; a problem with a husband is likely to be defined in terms of spouse abuse or sexism. Similarly, when someone is annoyed by the smoking behavior of the individual at the next table in a restaurant, it is now likely to be viewed less as an issue of individual habit or as individual lack of courtesy than as part of the larger battle between smokers and non-smokers (or even a battle between health activists and global conglomerates). Thus, although most intense interactions continue to take place in specific physical settings, they are now often perceived as occurring in a much larger social arena. The local and the global co-exist in the glocality.

Increased Attachment to Places As I have argued extensively elsewhere, electronic media lead to dissociation between physical place and social place. Yet, in many ways, electronic media also foster greater emotional attachments to place. Not that long ago in human history, only a small minority of people traveled more than a radius of a few miles during their entire lives. Before the Industrial Revolution, connections to place were pre-determined, in most cases, by where a person was born. Virtually everyone one knew was local, and local space shaped virtually everything and every person one knew. Place-connection was similar to an arranged marriage made by one’s parents at one’s birth. There was not much conscious identification with place because there was little perceived choice. Today, the revolution in connection to places is akin to the historical shift from arranged marriage to romantic love. And it is attended by similar conflicting attributes: both greater emotional attachment and more potential for disruption, divorce, and remarriage. Ironically, we witness the expression of more explicit passion for localities, along with more travel away from them and more frequent relocations to elsewhere. Not that long ago, a move from one city to another was marked by a loss of, or at least major changes in, contact with family, friends, and the overall texture of daily experience. However, as more of our interactions and experiences have become mediated through radio, TV, telephones, email, and other devices, we can now transport most of

our nexus of interactions with us wherever we go. To the extent that people, using phones and email, construct individualized social networks (or what Sidney Aronson, writing about telephones in 1986, termed “psychological neighborhoods”), the “community of interaction” becomes a mobile phenomenon. It does not exist in any physical space. For certain types of work—particularly those that involve writing or creating on the computer, either individually or collaboratively—even our co-workers may stay the same when we move to another city or country. These changes do not obliterate connections to places. Indeed, they may even enhance some aspects of connection to physical location. Now that a move from one locality to another has a diminished impact on our networks of contacts with other people and places, we can choose the places we live based on other criteria. We increasingly choose our localities and react to them in terms of such variables as setting and appearance: weather, architecture, quality of schools, density of population, available entertainment, general appearance, even “love at first sight.” And we may check the wisdom of our choices by checking the ratings of our selected locales in printed and online guides to the “best places to live.”

Locality as Backdrop Although we now often choose a place more carefully than people did in the past, our interactions with place have come to resemble what Relph calls, in a somewhat different context, “incidental outsideness” and “objective outsideness.” That is, the more that our sense of self and experience is linked to interactions through media, the more that our physical locales become the backdrops for these other experiences rather than our full life space. Other than that we must be in some place while we have various mediated experiences, there is no essential connection between the physical setting we are in and the mediated experiences we are having in that location. Indeed, on mobile phone calls, we often finding ourselves describing, in a manner that makes sense from a distance, where we are and what we were doing before the call began. Thus, we are, in a way, both inside and outside the locale at the same moment. As a result of multiple mediations of our experience, we can come to live in places without ever fully integrating into the place-defined community, such as the local gover-

nment or local community groups, or local religious organizations. Moreover, we can exit places psychologically without ever leaving them physically, such as when we leapfrog over potential “significant others” who are local to find self-mirrors who are more to our liking. A gay teenager who feels demeaned and isolated locally, for example, may find identity-support in online chat rooms and web sites for gays. The mere existence of a 24-hour hot line that can be reached via a mobile phone in a crisis may provide local comfort. In 2002 and 2003, antiwar activists in conservative pro-war U.S. towns described using similar means to maintain their sanity without having to move to another locale. The current more “romantic,” yet ultimately relatively superficial attachments to place encourage more frequent relocations. The global dimensions of any glocality, after all, can be retained even as a locality is abandoned for another. Travel is also more easily managed as distant places seem less strange and less dangerous and as contacts with those “back home” (or anywhere) can be maintained wherever we roam.

MultiMulti-Layered Identities and Situational Definitions The media-networked glocality also affords the possibility of having multiple, multilayered, fluid, and endlessly adjustable senses of identity. Rather than needing to choose between local, place-defined identities and more distant ones, we can have them all, not just in sequence but in overlapping experiences. We can attend a local town zoning board meeting, embodying the role of local concerned citizen, as we cruise the internet on a wireless-enabled laptop enacting other non-local identities. And we can merge the two as we draw on distant information to inform the local board of how other communities handle similar issues and regulations. All the while, we can remain accessible to friends, family, and colleagues from anywhere via a text-message enabled mobile phone.

Boundary Disputes The pre-electronic locality was characterized by its physical and experiential boundedness. Situations were defined by where and when they took place. The definitions of situations (that is, the answer to the question: “What is going on here?”) could, in sociologist Erving Goffman’s phrase, “saturate” a time- and space-defined setting.

Now such boundedness requires some effort: Turn off the mobile phones, PDAs, and laptops. Banish radio and television. Schools and churches continue this struggle to make “a space apart.” Couples alone together in intimate settings often engage in the same effort. In many instances, the “rules of distraction” are now explicitly negotiated (e.g., “emergency calls only,” “silence the ringers on your phone,” “textmessaging will be considered cheating on an exam”). In most settings in a post-modern society, however, the definitions of the situation are multiple and unstable, able to shift with the ring or buzz of a telephone or with the announcement of a “breaking story.” Different participants in a time/space field are more likely than ever before to be engaged in different activities with diverse frameworks for comprehending “what is going on.” Most people are less troubled by their own sudden shift in interactional boundaries and situational definitions than they are by similar sudden shifts among those around them. More permeable situational boundaries affect more than the particular behaviors within them; they also reshape social identities in general. It is extremely difficult to maintain some of the traditional distinctions in life experiences that characterized the modern, print-era society. In a print era, for example, the different levels of coding of text served to isolate children from the informational worlds of adults and even from children of different ages. Now, such distinctions are much more difficult to preserve. Children are routinely exposed to what was long considered “adult information.” In a place-defined culture, it was also possible to separate men’s places from women’s places. At the height of influence of Western print culture, for example, the Victorians, emphasized the distinction between the public male realm of rational accomplishments and brutal competitions, from the private female sphere of home, intuition, and emotion. Now, our electronic media bring the public realm into the home, and bring intimate topics, images, and sounds into the public sphere. Yet, just as there is a blurring of traditional distinctions betweens children and adult experiences and between male and female spheres, so is there a breaking down of the traditional similarities among what people of the same age or same gender experience. We are witnessing both macro-level homogenization of identities and microlevel fragmentation of them. Not long ago, a few key demographic variables could largely predict a large chunk

of the activities and social identity of a person. Today, while many class and economic differences remain, the patterns of distinction are not as clear. Indeed, I would argue that it has never been more difficult than it is now to predict what a person will know or be doing based on traditional demographic variables. A few decades ago, if we knew that a person was 16 years old, African-American, female, and living in rural Georgia in the U.S., we’d have a good idea that she’d have an informational world and would be engaged in daily activities similar to those of her peers and completely different from those of a white, male, 18-year-old, living in a suburb of New York City and his peers. Now, it’s much more likely that people of the same demographic categories will be different from each other while also overlapping in knowledge, behaviors, and expectations with those of different demographic categories. Although advertising researchers keep coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways to segment the population into demographic clusters for the targeting of ads, the real trend is the rise in individual idiosyncrasy.

Between Local and Global: Tension and Fusion Such changes in the senses of “us” vs. “them” and in “here” vs. “elsewhere” are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Yet, they are significantly different from older, place-bound experiences. We both lose and gain. We lose the old comfort and simplicity of being in bounded systems of interaction where our “insider” role is taken for granted. Yet, with a wide array of electronic media, including the mobile phone, we are also liberated from the same bounded and confining experiences. We are free to choose our own networks for membership and our own customized levels of engagement in each network. We are free, as well, to shape our degrees of connection to local space.

La Società dello Spettacolo Guy Ernest Debord (Cap. 1- La Divisione perfetta)

E senza dubbio il nostro tempo... preferisce l’immagine alla cosa, la copia all’originale, la rappresentazione alla realtà, l’apparenza all’essere... Ciò che per esso è sacro non è che l’illusione, ma ciò che è profano è la verità. O meglio, il sacro si ingrandisce ai suoi occhi nella misura in cui al decrescere della verità corrisponde il crescere dell’illusione, in modo tale che il colmo dell’illusione è anche il colmo del sacro. (Feuerbach, Prefazione a “L’essenza del Cristianesimo”). 1. L’intera vita delle società, in cui dominano le moderne condizioni di produzione, si annuncia come un immenso accumulo di spettacoli. Tutto ciò che era direttamente vissuto si è allontanatoin una rappresentazione. 2. Le immagini che si sono staccate da ciascun aspetto della vita, si fondono in un unico insieme, in cui l’unità di questa vita non può più essere ristabilita. La realtà considerata parzialmente si dispiega nella propria unità generale in quanto pseudo-mondo a parte, oggetto di sola contemplazione. La specializzazione delle immagini del mondo si ritrova, realizzata, nel mondo dell’immagine resa autonoma, in cui il mentitore mente a se stesso. Lo spettacolo in generale, come inversione concreta della vita, è il movimento autonomo del non-vivente. 3. Lo spettacolo si presenta nello stesso tempo come la società stessa, come parte della società, e come strumento di unificazione. In quanto parte della società, esso è espressamente il settore più tipico che concentra ogni sguardo e ogni coscienza. Per il fatto stesso che questo settore è separato, è il luogo dell’inganno visivo e della falsa coscienza; e l’unificazione che esso realizza non è altro che un linguaggio ufficiale della separazione generalizzata. 4. Lo spettacolo non è un insieme di immagini, ma un rapporto sociale tra le persone, mediato dalle immagini. 5. Lo spettacolo non può essere compreso come l’abuso di un mondo visivo, il prodot-

to delle tecniche di diffusione massiva di immagini. Esso è piuttosto una Weltanschauung divenuta effettiva, materialmente tradotta. Si tratta di una visione del mondo che si è oggettivata. 6. Lo spettacolo, compreso nella sua totalità, è nello stesso tempo il risultato e il progetto del modo di produzione esistente. Non è un supplemento del mondo reale, il suo sovrapposto ornamento. Esso è il cuore dell’irrealismo della società reale. Nell’insieme delle sue forme particolari, informazione o propaganda, pubblicità o consumo diretto dei divertimenti, lo spettacolo costituisce il modello presente della vita socialmente dominante. È l’affermazione onnipresente della scelta già fatta nella produzione, e il suo consumo ne è corollario. Forma e contenuto dello spettacolo sono ambedue l’identica giustificazione totale delle condizioni e dei fini del sistema esistente. Lo spettacolo è anche la presenza permanente di questa giustificazione, in quanto occupazione della parte principale del tempo vissuto al di fuori della produzione moderna. 7. La separazione fa parte essa stessa dell’unità del mondo, della prassi sociale globale, che si è scissa in realtà e in immagine. La pratica sociale, di fronte alla quale si pone lo spettacolo autonomo, è anche la totalità reale che contiene lo spettacolo. Ma la scissione in questa totalità la mutila al punto da far apparire lo spettacolo come il suo scopo. Il linguaggio dello spettacolo è strutturato con i segni della produzione imperante, che sono nello stesso tempo la finalità ultima di questa produzione. 8. Non si possono opporre astrattamente lo spettacolo e l’attività sociale effettiva; questo sdoppiamento è esso stesso sdoppiato. Lo spettacolo che inverte il reale è effettivamente prodotto. E nello stesso tempo la realtà vissuta è materialmente invasa dalla contemplazione dello spettacolo, e riprende in se stessa l’ordine spettacolare, offrendogli un’adesione positiva. La realtà oggettiva è presente su entrambi i lati. Ogni nozione così fissata non ha per fondo che il suo passaggio all’opposto: la realtà sorge nello spettacolo e lo spettacolo è reale. Questa reciproca alienazione è l’essenza e il sostegno della società esistente. 9. Nel mondo falsamente rovesciato, il vero è un momento del falso. 10. Il concetto di spettacolo unifica e spiega una gran diversità di fenomeni apparenti. Le loro diversità e i loro contrasti sono le apparenze di quest’apparenza socialmente

organizzata che dev’essere essa stessa riconosciuta nella propria verità generale. Considerato secondo i suoi veri termini, lo spettacolo è l’affermazione dell’apparenza e l’affermazione di ogni vita umana, cioè sociale, come semplice apparenza. Ma la critica, che coglie la verità dello spettacolo, lo scopre come la negazione visibile della vita; come negazione della vita che è divenuta visibile. 11. Per descrivere lo spettacolo, la sua formazione, le sue funzioni e le forze che tendono alla sua dissoluzione, bisogna distinguere artificialmente degli elementi inseparabili. Analizzando lo spettacolo, si parla in una certa misura il linguaggio stesso dello spettacolare, in quanto si passa sul terreno metodologico di questa stessa società che si esprime nello spettacolo. Ma lo spettacolo non è niente altro che il senso della pratica totale di una formazione economicosociale, del suo impiego del tempo. È il momento storico che ci contiene. 12. Lo spettacolo si presenta come enorme positività indiscutibile e inaccessibile. Esso non dice niente di più che “ciò che appare è buono, e ciò che è buono appare”. L’attitudine che esige per principio è questa accettazione passiva che esso di fatto ha già ottenuto attraverso il suo modo di apparire insindacabile, con il suo monopolio dell’apparenza. 13. Il carattere fondamentalmente tautologico dello spettacolo, deriva dal semplice fatto che i suoi mezzi sono nel contempo anche i suoi scopi. È il sole che non tramonta mai sull’impero della passività moderna. Esso ricopre tutta la superficie del mondo e si bagna indefinitamente nella propria gloria. 14. La società basata sull’industria moderna non è fortuitamente o superficialmente spettacolare, essa è fondamentalmente spettacolista. Nello spettacolo, immagine dell’economia dominante, il fine non è niente, lo sviluppo è tutto. Lo spettacolo non vuole realizzarsi che solo in se stesso. 15. In quanto indispensabile parure degli oggetti attualmente prodotti, in quanto esposizione generale della razionalità del sistema, in quanto settore economico avanzato, che manipola direttamente una crescente moltitudine di immagini-oggetto, lo spettacolo è la principale produzione della società attuale. 16. Lo spettacolo sottomette gli uomini viventi nella misura in cui l’economia li ha totalmente sottomessi. Esso non è altro che l’economia sviluppantesi per se stessa. È il

riflesso fedele della produzione delle cose e l’oggettivazione infedele dei produttori. 17. La prima fase del dominio dell’economia sulla vita sociale aveva originato, nella definizione di ogni realizzazione umana, un’evidente degradazione dell’essere in avere. La fase presente dell’occupazione totale della vita sociale da parte dei risultati accumulati dell’economia, conduce a uno slittamento generalizzato dell’avere nell’apparire, da cui ogni “avere” effettivo deve desumere il proprio prestigio immediato e la propria funzione ultima. Nello stesso tempo ogni realtà individuale è divenuta sociale, direttamente dipendente dalla potenza sociale da essa plasmata. Le è permesso di apparire solo in ciò che essa non è. 18. Là dove il mondo reale si cambia in semplici immagini, le semplici immagini diventano degli esseri reali, e le motivazioni efficienti di un comportamento ipnotico. Lo spettacolo, come tendenza a far vedere attraverso differenti mediazioni specializzate il mondo che non è più direttamente percepibile, trova normalmente nella vista il senso umano privilegiato, che in altre epoche fu il tatto; il senso più astratto, più mistificabile, corrisponde all’astrazione generalizzata della società attuale. Ma lo spettacolo non è identificabile con il semplice sguardo, anche se combinato con l’ascolto. Esso è ciò che sfugge all’attività degli uomini, alla riconsiderazione e alla correzione della loro opera. È il contrario del dialogo. Dovunque c’è una rappresentazione indipendente, là lo spettacolo si ricostituisce. 19. Lo spettacolo è l’erede di tutta la debolezza del progetto filosofico occidentale, che costituì pure una comprensione dell’attività, dominata dalle categorie del vedere; così come si fonda sull’incessante dispiegamento della precisa razionalità tecnica che è derivata da questo pensiero. Esso non realizza la filosofia, filosofizza la realtà. È la vita concreta di tutti che si è degradata in un universo speculativo. 20. La filosofia, in quanto potere del pensiero separato, e pensiero del potere separato, non ha mai potuto da se stessa andare oltre la teologia. Lo spettacolo è la ricostruzione materiale dell’illusione religiosa. La tecnica spettacolare non ha dissipato le nubi religiose, in cui gli uomini avevano collocato i propri poteri distaccati da se stessi: essa li ha semplicemente ricongiunti a una base terrena; così è la vita più terrena che diviene opaca e irrespirabile. Essa non rigetta più nel cielo, ma alberga in sé il proprio rifiuto, il proprio fallace paradiso. Lo spettacolo è la realizzazione tecnica dell’esilio dei poteri

umani in un al di là; scissione realizzata all’interno dell’uomo. 21. Più la necessità viene ad essere socialmente sognata, più il sogno diviene necessario. Lo spettacolo è il cattivo sogno della moderna società incatenata, che non esprime in definitiva se non il proprio desiderio di dormire. Lo spettacolo è il guardiano di questo sonno. 22. Il fatto che la potenza pratica della società moderna si sia staccata da se stessa, e si sia edificata un impero indipendente nello spettacolo, non può spiegarsi che con quest’altro fatto, che questa potente pratica continuava a mancare di coesione ed era rimasta in contraddizione con se stessa. 23. È la più vecchia specializzazione sociale, la specializzazione del potere, che è alla radice dello spettacolo. Lo spettacolo è quindi un’attività specializzata che parla per l’insieme delle altre. È la rappresentazione diplomatica della società gerarchica innanzi a se stessa, dove ogni altra parola è bandita. Il più moderno qui è anche il più arcaico. 24. Lo spettacolo è il discorso ininterrotto che l’ordine presente tiene su se stesso, il suo monologo elogiativo. È l’autoritratto del potere all’epoca della sua gestione totalitaria delle condizioni d’esistenza. L’apparenza feticistica della pura oggettività nelle relazioni spettacolari nasconde il loro carattere di relazione tra uomini e tra classi: una seconda natura sembra dominare il nostro ambiente con le sue leggi fatali. Ma lo spettacolo non è un prodotto necessario dello sviluppo tecnico visto come sviluppo naturale. La società dello spettacolo è al contrario la forma che sceglie il proprio contenuto tecnico. Se lo spettacolo, esaminato sotto l’aspetto ristretto dei “mezzi di comunicazione di massa”, che sono la sua manifestazione superficiale più soggiogante, può sembrare invadere la società come una semplice strumentazione, questa non è concretamente nulla di neutro, ma la strumentazione stessa è funzionale al suo auto-movimento totale. Se i bisogni sociali dell’epoca, in cui si sviluppano simili tecniche, non possono trovare soddisfazione se non tramite la loro mediazione, se l’amministrazione di questa società e ogni contatto fra gli uomini non possono più esercitarsi se non mediante questa potenza di comunicazione istantanea, è perché questa “comunicazione” è essenzialmente unilaterale; di modo che la sua concentrazione consente di accumulare nelle mani dell’amministrazione del sistema esistente i mezzi che gli permettono di continuare questa amministrazione determinata. La scissione generalizzata dello spettacolo è inseparabile dallo Stato moderno, vale a dire dalla forma generale della scissione nella socie-

tà, prodotta dalla divisione del lavoro sociale e organo del dominio di classe. 25. La separazione è l’alfa e l’omega dello spettacolo. L’istituzionalizzazione della divisione sociale del lavoro, la formazione delle classi avevano elevato una prima contemplazione sacra, l’ordine mitico di cui ogni potere si ammanta fin dalle proprie origini. Il sacro ha giustificato l’ordinamento cosmico e ontologico che corrispondeva agli interessi dei padroni, ha spiegato e abbellito ciò che la società non poteva fare. Ogni potere separato è dunque spettacolare, ma l’adesione di tutti a una simile immagine immobile non significava altro che il comune riconoscimento di un prolungamento immaginario alla povertà dell’attività sociale reale, ancora largamente avvertita come una condizione unitaria. Lo spettacolo moderno al contrario esprime ciò che la società può fare, ma in questa espressione il permesso si oppone in modo assoluto al possibile. Lo spettacolo è la conservazione dell’incoscienza nel cambiamento pratico delle condizioni d’esistenza. Esso è il proprio prodotto, ed è esso stesso che ha posto le sue regole: si tratta di uno pseudo-sacro. Esso mostra ciò che è: la potenza separata sviluppatasi in se stessa, nella crescita della produttività realizzata mediante il raffinamento incessante della divisione del lavoro nella parcellizzazione dei gesti, allora dominati dal movimento indipendente delle macchine, al lavoro per un mercato sempre più esteso. Ogni comunità e ogni senso critico si sono dissolti nel corso di questo movimento, nel quale le forze che hanno potuto crescere separandosi non si sono ancora ritrovate. 26. Con la divisione generalizzata del lavoratore e del suo prodotto, si perde ogni punto di vista unitario dell’attività svolta, si perde ogni comunicazione personale diretta tra i produttori. Seguendo il progresso dell’accumulazione dei prodotti divisi e della concentrazione del processo produttivo, l’unità e la comunicazione divengono attributo esclusivo della direzione del sistema. Il successo del sistema economico della separazione è la proletarizzazione del mondo. 27. Per la riuscita stessa della produzione separata in quanto produzione del separato, l’esperienza fondamentale, legata nelle società primitive a un lavoro principale, sta spostandosi al polo dello sviluppo del sistema, verso il non-lavoro, l’inattività. Ma questa inattività non è per nulla liberata dall’attività produttiva: dipende da essa, è una sottomissione inquieta e ammirativa alle necessità e ai risultati della produzione: è essa stessa un prodotto della sua razionalità. Non ci può essere libertà al di fuori dell’attività, e nell’ambito dello spettacolo ogni attività è negata, esattamente come l’attività reale è

stata integralmente captata per l’edificazione globale di questo risultato. Così l’attuale “liberazione dal lavoro”, l’aumento dei divertimenti, non costituiscono in alcun modo liberazione nel lavoro, né liberazione di un mondo modellato da questo lavoro. Nulla dell’attività rubata nel lavoro può ritrovarsi nella sottomissione al suo risultato. 28. Il sistema economico fondato sull’isolamento è una produzione circolare dell’isolamento. L’isolamento fonda la tecnica, e il processo tecnico isola a sua volta. Dall’automobile alla televisione, tutti i beni selezionati dal sistema spettacolare sono anche le sue armi per il rafforzamento costante delle condizioni d’isolamento delle “folle solitarie”. Lo spettacolo ritrova sempre più concretamente i propri presupposti. 29. L’origine dello spettacolo è la perdita dell’unità del mondo; e l’espansione gigantesca dello spettacolo moderno esprime la totalità di questa perdita: l’astrazione di ogni lavoro particolare e l’astrazione generale della produzione d’insieme si traducono perfettamente nello spettacolo, il cui modo di essere concreto è giustamente l’astrazione. Nello spettacolo, una parte del mondo si rappresenta davanti al mondo, e gli è superiore. Lo spettacolo non è che il linguaggio comune di questa separazione. Ciò che lega gli spettatori non è che un rapporto irreversibile allo stesso centro che mantiene il loro isolamento. Lo spettacolo riunisce il separato ma lo riunisce in quanto separato. 30. L’alienazione dello spettatore a vantaggio dell’oggetto contemplato (che è il risultato della propria attività incosciente) si esprime così: più esso contempla, meno vive; più accetta di riconoscersi nelle immagini dominanti del bisogno, meno comprende la propria esistenza e il proprio desiderio. L’esteriorità dello spettacolo, in rapporto all’uomo agente, si manifesta nel fatto che i suoi gesti non sono più suoi, ma di un altro che glieli rappresenta. Questo perché lo spettatore non si sente a casa propria da nessuna parte, perché lo spettacolo è dappertutto. 31. Il lavoratore non produce più se stesso, egli produce una potenza indipendente. Il successo di questa produzione, la sua abbondanza, ritorna al produttore come abbondanza dell’espropriazione. Tutto il tempo e lo spazio del suo mondo gli divengono estranei con l’accumulazione dei suoi prodotti alienati. Lo spettacolo è la mappa di questo nuovo mondo, mappa che copre esattamente lo spazio del suo territorio. Le forze

stesse che ci sono sfuggite si mostrano a noi in tutta la loro potenza. 32. Lo spettacolo nella società corrisponde a una fabbricazione concreta dell’alienazione. L’espansione economica è principalmente l’espansione di questa produzione industriale precisa. Ciò che cresce con l’economia, muovendosi autonomamente per se stessa, non può essere che l’alienazione che era propriamente insita nel suo nucleo originario. 33. L’uomo separato dal proprio prodotto sempre più potentemente produce esso stesso tutti i dettagli del proprio mondo. Quanto più la vita è ora il suo prodotto, tanto più è separato dalla propria vita. 34. Lo spettacolo è il capitale a un tale grado di accumulazione da divenire immagine.

An American Prayer Jim Morrison

Do you know the warm progress under the stars? Do you know we exist? Have you forgotten the keys to the Kingdom? Have you been borne yet & are you alive? Let’s reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests [Have you forgotten the lessons of the ancient war] We need great golden copulations The fathers are cackling in trees of the forest Our mother is dead in the sea Do you know we are being led to slaughters by placid admirals & that fat slow generals are getting obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by T.V. The moon is a dry blood beast Guerilla bands are rolling numbers in the next block of green vine Amassing for warfare on innocent herdsmen who are just dying O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art & perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine & dying We live, we die & death not ends it Journey we more into the Nightmare Cling to life our passion’d flower Cling to cunts & cocks of despair We got our final vision by clap Columbus’ groin got filled w/ green death (I touched her thigh & death smiled) We have assembled inside this ancient & insane theatre To propagate our lust for life & flee the swarming wisdom of the streets The barns are stormed The windows kept & only one of all the rest To dance & save us W/ the divine mockery of words Music inflames temperament (When the true King’s murderers are allowed to roam free a 1000 magicians arise in the land) Where are the feasts We were promised Where is the wine The New Wine (dying on the vine) Resident mockery give us an hour for magic We of the purple glove We of the starling flight & velvet hour We of arabic pleasure’s breed We of sundome & the night Give us a creed

To believe A night of Lust Give us trust in The Night Give of color Hundred hues A rich Mandala For me & you & for your silky pillowed house A head, wisdom & a bed Troubled decree Resident mockery Has claimed thee We used to believe in the good old days We still receive In little ways The Things of Kindness & unsporting brow Forget & allow Did you know freedom exists in a school book Did you know madmen are running our prison W/in a jail, w/in a gaol, w/in a white free protestant Maelstrom We’re perched headlong On the edge of boredom We’re reaching for death On the end of a candle We’re trying for something That’s already found us We can invent Kingdoms of our own Grand purple thrones, those chairs of lust & love we must, in beds of rust Steel doors lock in prisoner’s screams & muzak, AM, rocks their dreams No black men’s pride to hoist the beams While mocking angels sift what seems

To be a collage of magazine dust Scratched on foreheads of walls of trust This is just jail for those who must Get up in the morning & fight for such unusable standards While weeping maidens show-off penury & pout ravings for a mad staff Wow, I’m sick of doubt Live in the light of certain South Cruel bindings The servants have the power dog-men & their mean women Pulling poor blankets over our sailors (& where were you in our lean hour) Milking your moustache? Or grinding a flower? I’m sick of dour faces Staring at me from the T.V. Tower. I want roses in my garden bower; dig? Royal babies, rubies must now replace aborted Strangers in the mud These mutants, blood-meal For the plant that’s plowed They are waiting to take us into the severed garden Do you know how pale & wanton thrillful Comes death on strange hour Unannounced, unplanned for like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve brought to bed Death makes angels of us all & gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws No more money, no more fancy dress This other Kingdom seems by far the best until its other jaw reveals incest & loose obedience to a vegetable law I will not go Prefer a Feast of Friends To the Giant family

Great screaming Christ Upsy-daisy Lazy Mary will get you up upon a Sunday morning ‘The movie will begin in 5 moments’ The mindless Voice announced ‘All those unseated, will await The next show’ We filed slowly, languidly into the hall. The auditorium was vast, & silent. As we seated & were darkened The Voice continued: ‘The program for this evening is not new. You have seen This entertainment thru & thru. You’ve seen your birth, your life & death; you might recall all of the rest - (did you have a good world when you died?) - enough to base a movie on?’ An iron chuckle rapped our minds like a fist. I’m getting out of here Where’re you going? To the other side of the morning Please don’t chase the clouds Pagodas, temples Her cunt gripped him Like a warm friendly hand. ‘It’s all right. All your friends are here.’ When can I meet them? ‘After you’ve eaten’ I’m not hungry ‘O, we meant beaten’ Silver stream, silvery scream, Impossible concentration Here come the comedians Look at them smile Watch them dance An indian mile

Look at them gesture How aplomb So to gesture everyone Words dissemble Words be quick Words resemble walking sticks Plant them They will grow Watch them waver so I’ll always be A word-man Better than a birdman But I’ll charge Won’t get away W/out lodging a dollar Shall I say it again Aloud, you get the point No food w/out fuel’s gain I’ll be, the irish loud Unleashed my beak At peak of powers O girl, unleash Your worried comb O worried mind Sin in the fallen Backwoods by the blind She smells debt On my new collar Arrogant prose Tied in a network of fast quest Hence the obsession Its quick to admit Fats borrowed rhythm

Woman came between them Women of the world unite Make the world safe For a scandalous life Hee Heee Cut your throat Life is a joke Your wife’s in a moat The same boat Here comes the goat Blood Blood Blood Blood They’re making a joke Of our universe

Matchbox Are you more real than me I’ll burn you, & set you free Wept bitter tears Excessive courtesy I won’t forget

A hot sick lava flowed up, Rustling & bubbling. The paper-face. Mirror-mask, I love you mirror. He had been brainwashed for 4 hrs. The LT. puzzled in again ‘ready to talk’