S las h

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 inte-

ractions is the tension between cultural homoge-
nization 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 spec-
trum of media studies (Hamelink, 1983; Matte-
lart, 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 A-
mericanization, or an argument about
'commoditization', and very often the two argu-
ments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as ra-
pidly 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 Cambo-
dians, 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 ho-
mogenization 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 center-
periphery 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 com-
plex and flexible theories of global development which have come out of the Marxist
tradition (Amin, 1980; Mandel, 1978; Wallerstein, 1974; Wolf, 1982) are inadequa-
tely 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, lin-
guistic and.political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinatio-
nals, 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 per-
spectival 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 in-
ternational 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 reali-
ties 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 mo-
ving 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 techno-

logy, and of the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informa-
tional, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious bounda-
ries. 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 dif-
ferent components of new technological configurations. The odd distribution of te-
chnologies, 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 complica-
ted 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 sophi-
sticated account of the very complex fiscal and investment flows that link the two eco-
nomies 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 befo-
re, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move
mega-monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed, with vast absolute implica-
tions 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 para-
meter for the movements in the other. Thus, even an elementary model of global politi-
cal 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 infor-
mation (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, na-
tional 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 audien-
ces throughout the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and inter-
connected 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 perspecti-
ve, some other 'imagined world'.

'Mediascapes', whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-

centered, 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 politi-
cal 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 ideo-
scapes 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 Sta-
tes) was constructed with a certain internal logic and presupposed a certain relation-
ship 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 dia-
spora across the world, especially since the nineteenth century, has loosened the inter-
nal 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 in-
volve 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 indu-
strial growth?).

These conventions also involve the far more subtle question of what sets of com-
municative 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 de-
mands urgent analysis. Thus 'democracy' has clearly become a master-term, with po-
werful 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 mo-
tion 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 gro-
wing 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, te-
chnoscapes, 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 e-
xport (all) and import (some) goods, but they are also notoriously closed to immigra-
tion, 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 conti-
nuous 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 re-
production in a deterritorialized context.
 Deterritoralization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world, sin-
ce it brings laboring populations into the lower class sectors and spaces of relatively
wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criti-
cism or attachment to politics in the home-state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hin-
dus, Sikhs, Palestinians or Ukranians, is now at the core of a variety of global funda-
mentalisms, 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 pro-
blems 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 popu-
lation for contact with its homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which consti-
tute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fanta-
stic 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 Eri-
trea 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 Ja-
panese 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 resi-
dents 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 stre-
ets. In these gray markets, some members of Bombay's middle-classes and of its lum-
penproletariat can buy some of these goods, ranging from cartons of Marlboro ciga-
rettes, to Old Spice shaving cream and tapes of Madonna. Similarly gray routes,
often subsidized by the moonlighting activities of sailors, diplomats, and airline stewar-
desses 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 per-

sons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the media-
scapes and ideoscapes of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented coun-
terpart. For the ideas and images produced by mass media often are only partial gui-
des 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 metro-
politan glitz, come to seek their fortunes as cabaret dancers and prostitutes in Bom-
bay, 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 wo-
men 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 anal-
ysis 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 to-
day. 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 ano-
ther's projects. That is, while nations (or more properly groups with ideas about na-
tionhood) 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 pie-
ces out of existing states. States, on the other hand, are everywhere seeking to mono-
polize the moral resources of community, either by flatly claiming perfect coevality be-
tween 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, na-
tional and international mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separa-
tists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contem-
porary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomical control over difference; by crea-
ting various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference; and by sedu-
cing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopoli-
tan 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 se-
ed-bed of brutal separatisms, majoritarianisms that seem to have appeared from no-
where, and micro-identities that have become political projects within the nation-state.
At another level, this disjunctive relationship is deeply entangled with the global disjun-
ctures 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 na-
tion 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 volatili-
ties 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 North-
East of India) grind against the vulnerabilities which characterize the relations between
states. States find themselves pressed to stay 'open' by the forces of media, techno-
logy, and travel which had fueled consumerism throughout the world and have increa-
sed 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 to-
lerate 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 be-
tween 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 ethno-
scapes (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 me-

diated 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 aspi-
rations 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 grea-
test 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 capabili-
ties. This is not to deny that such primordia are often the product of invented tradi-
tions (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 so-
me 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 exi-
sting neo-Marxist models of uneven development and state-formation. There is a de-
eper change, itself driven by the disjunctures between all the landscapes I have discus-
sed, and constituted by their continuously fluid and uncertain interplay, which con-
cerns the relationship between production and consumption in today's global eco-
nomy. 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 high-
tech 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 simula-
crum 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 techno-
logy for the world-wide dissemination of a plethora of creative, and culturally well-
chosen,. Ideas of consumer agency. These images of agency are increasingly distor-
tions 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 dialo-
gues 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 de-
signs 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 suc-
cessful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the
resiliently particular. This mutual cannibalization shows its ugly face in riots, in refugee-
flows, 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 ran-
ge 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.
 8)
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 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--PT-
art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories,
small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-
wipers 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 expe-
rienced 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 deve-
lopment of Star-Trek-like teleportation—always will be. We cannot work in Buda-
pest and stop home for lunch in Paris. Our children cannot attend school every wee-
kday 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 pre-
sent 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 communica-
tion 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 perspecti-
ve. 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 boun-
daries 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 o-
thers,” 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 per-
ceive 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 ser-
ve 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 in-
fluence 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 per-
ception 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 intercon-
nected 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 fre-
quently 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 broa-
dcast 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 sha-
pe 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 men-
tal “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 outda-
ted. 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 Shalom-
Hello 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 e-
stablished 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 servi-
ce in 2002, 25,000 people used the hotline.

The global view that modern media engender often alters the meaning of interac-
tions 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 cal-
led “local knowledge.” Pleasure and pain, conflict and communion were thought to oc-
cur 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 hu-
sband is likely to be defined in terms of spouse abuse or sexism. Similarly, when someo-
ne 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 per-
ceived 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 be-

tween 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. To-
day, 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 grea-
ter 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 expe-
rience. 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 incre-
asingly 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 dif-
ferent 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 de-
scribed 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.

Multi-
Multi-Layered Identities and Situational Definitions

The media-networked glocality also affords the possibility of having multiple, multi-
layered, fluid, and endlessly adjustable senses of identity. Rather than needing to cho-
ose 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 communi-
ties 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 boun-
dedness. 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 strug-
gle 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 nego-
tiated (e.g., “emergency calls only,” “silence the ringers on your phone,” “text-
messaging 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 frame-
works 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 pla-
ces. 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 emo-
tion. 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 expe-
rience. We are witnessing both macro-level homogenization of identities and micro-
level 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 e-
xpectations with those of different demographic categories. Although advertising re-
searchers keep coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways to segment the popula-
tion into demographic clusters for the targeting of ads, the real trend is the rise in indi-
vidual 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, pla-
ce-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 gran-
ted. 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 e-
ach 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 vis-
suto si è allontanatoin una rappresentazione.

2. Le immagini che si sono staccate da ciascun aspetto della vita, si fondono in un uni-
co insieme, in cui l’unità di questa vita non può più essere ristabilita. La realtà conside-
rata 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 Weltan-
schauung 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 pro-
getto 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 do-
minante. 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 globa-
le, 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 imperan-
te, 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. O-
gni 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’essen-
za 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 criti-
ca, 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 ten-
dono alla sua dissoluzione, bisogna distinguere artificialmente degli elementi insepa-
rabili. 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 tramon-
ta 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 e-

sposizione generale della razionalità del sistema, in quanto settore economico avanza-
to, che manipola direttamente una crescente moltitudine di immagini-oggetto, lo spet-
tacolo è la principale produzione della società attuale.

16. Lo spettacolo sottomette gli uomini viventi nella misura in cui l’economia li ha to-
talmente 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 defi-
nizione 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 spettaco-
lo, 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, corri-
sponde all’astrazione generalizzata della società attuale. Ma lo spettacolo non è iden-
tificabile 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 separa-
to, non ha mai potuto da se stessa andare oltre la teologia. Lo spettacolo è la ricostru-
zione 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 necessa-
rio. 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 que-
sto 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 totali-
taria 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 spet-
tacolo non è un prodotto necessario dello sviluppo tecnico visto come sviluppo natura-
le. 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 comunica-
zione di massa”, che sono la sua manifestazione superficiale più soggiogante, può sem-
brare invadere la società come una semplice strumentazione, questa non è concreta-
mente 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 que-
sta potenza di comunicazione istantanea, è perché questa “comunicazione” è essenzial-
mente unilaterale; di modo che la sua concentrazione consente di accumulare nelle mani
dell’amministrazione del sistema esistente i mezzi che gli permettono di continuare que-
sta amministrazione determinata. La scissione generalizzata dello spettacolo è insepa-
rabile 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 divi-

sione sociale del lavoro, la formazione delle classi avevano elevato una prima contem-
plazione 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 inte-
ressi dei padroni, ha spiegato e abbellito ciò che la società non poteva fare. Ogni po-
tere separato è dunque spettacolare, ma l’adesione di tutti a una simile immagine immo-
bile 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’esisten-
za. 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 stes-
sa, nella crescita della produttività realizzata mediante il raffinamento incessante della
divisione del lavoro nella parcellizzazione dei gesti, allora dominati dal movimento indi-
pendente 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 pun-
to 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 con-
centrazione del processo produttivo, l’unità e la comunicazione divengono attributo
esclusivo della direzione del sistema. Il successo del sistema economico della separazio-
ne 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 spo-
standosi 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 sotto-
missione inquieta e ammirativa alle necessità e ai risultati della produzione: è essa stes-
sa 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’isola-

mento. L’isolamento fonda la tecnica, e il processo tecnico isola a sua volta. Dall’auto-
mobile alla televisione, tutti i beni selezionati dal sistema spettacolare sono anche le
sue armi per il rafforzamento costante delle condizioni d’isolamento delle “folle solita-
rie”. Lo spettacolo ritrova sempre più concretamente i propri presupposti.

29. L’origine dello spettacolo è la perdita dell’unità del mondo; e l’espansione gigante-
sca 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 per-
fettamente 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 superio-
re. 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 risul-

tato 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 al-
l’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 abbon-
danza dell’espropriazione. Tutto il tempo e lo spazio del suo mondo gli divengono e-
stranei con l’accumulazione dei suoi prodotti alienati. Lo spettacolo è la mappa di que-
sto 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’aliena-

zione. 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 rave-
n’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’