#appadurai

[noosphe-re]

In some way, all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory. All things are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite. Consider the objects of traditional plastic art, such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, buildings, or monuments. Despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, they are only momentary aggregations of material, such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel, or canvas. These underlying materials are ever volatile, which is why museums always insist that we “do not touch.” What is at risk is not just aura or authenticity but the fragility of objecthood itself.

Arjun Appadurai, The Thing Itself

[the-picture-of-eve]

The Greeks were not exempt from this way of thinking, and Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave is an early version of the journey from darkness to light, from shadow to substance. And ever since, the idea of a trajectory has formed and framed Western thought, even to the extent of creating a retrospective narrative of the inevitability of the West itself, constructed out of the bits and pieces of Greek philosophy. Biblical mythology, Roman law, Gothic architecture, Renaissance humanism, and many more minor elements, constantly composed into a retrospect story of “rise and fall,” of progress and stasis, of dark and bright episodes, all framed in a grand trajectory that we still see, with remarkable lack of distance, as the story of the West. But the story of the West is no more than one version of our deep bias toward what I call trajectorism. And this is the meta-trap that social science inherited most powerfully from its great ancestors in religion and pre-industrial humanism.

Arjun Appadurai in The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013), p. 223

[broodedserendipity]

Mapping emotional geographies

To battle the anxiety, one has to first let it seep in. Photo Courtesy: Whi

I wrote the last word of my second chapter for my Master’s thesis – chapter on the state of the art– where you talk of other ‘state of the art’ theorists (in my case, Castradious and Appadurai on imaginaries and Dipankar Gupta on caste and class) like you revere their thoughts and are, for the sake of your own academic…

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[global-cultural-economy-memes]

[global-cultural-economy-memes]

[neonellipsis]

Watching as the last petals fall but the stem and 🙅‍♀️ remains - 🏴 Something in me triggers a reaction to a neighbour when she asks if I have been going to Third World (read: poor) countries, to work, and her husband had also asked if I were doing social work. “I”m not doing humanitarian work,” I tell her, watching my inner seethe begin—she has no hint of my inner condition except a certain bluntness to my tone. She is bemused. “I don’t see the work in that way.” 🛃the act of love, applied with best intents, can strip people of their sovereignty. Doesn’t the coo-ing over poor adults and children reduce people not only to material lacks, which may be real or a matter of poverty policy/rhetorical framing, and to spiritual and emotional lack, but also reduces them to an inability to care for one’s people? Thus failures of leadership, long-term thinking, good executive decision-making, and other qualities associated with functional adulthood. Humanitarian aid built on uneven ground is flawed from its foundations... 🚸 〰️It is made for the powerless in exchange for their bodies and their future〰️ ...foundations that frame people so that the “population wearing out in the space of ordinariness becomes a figure saturated with emotion that is said to have been generated by a lack of or need for the responsibility of the still seemingly sovereign privileged classes.” (Berlant, 2008, 101) Poverty porn functions after all, as a rhetorical device that frames and encloses people into essentialised recipients of affective (love, care), and monetary donations. In humanitarian aid we find people continually making the subjects of aid “rhetorically radiant with attention, compassion, analysis, and sometimes reparation” (101). They are wearing out, worn out - Not only from their everyday living, but the very rhetorical guise of being helpless, forlorn, and love-starved, that we ask them to carry. 🛂 And from the eternal line between hope and subjugation ... possibility and probability ♾ #appadurai #berlant #humanitarian aid

[ratlosnetzwerk]

Wir brauchen eine liberale Multitude. Sie ist die einzige Antwort auf die regressive Multitude, die gegenwärtig in und jenseits von Europa auf dem Vormarsch ist.

Appadurai, Arjun (2017): Demokratiemüdigkeit. In Heinrich Geiselberger (Hrsg.): Die große Regression. Eine Internationale Debatte über die geistige Situation der Zeit. S. 35. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

[watertongues]

The image, the imagined, the imaginary — these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real world is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the global order.

Arjun Appadurai, on "Disjuncture and Difference," Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.