Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.27-47.
Arjun Appadurai is a social–cultural anthropologist focusing on modernity and globalization. The text “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” discusses the impact of globalised mass media and the transplant of one society’s social scenarios into another’s.
Now days things like 50’s American kitchenware, Retro and Bauhaus design and come back tours by retired musicians create a sense of reliving times gone by. The sense of nostalgia has been manifested from a common social imagination constructed from the spread of mass image media. Owen Hatherley (writer and architect critic) describes these forms of appropriations as legislated nostalgia, which has the power to convince a body of people into having a memory that is not theirs.
There is a fine line between nostalgia and retrospective retake. The continual appropriation of fashions and styles that characterise particular decades have forced people into having a certain feeling or a ‘legislated nostalgia’ when picturing the past. Film (a major culprit) has led us to believe we have extended our experiences into what it was like in the past (such as classics like Grease). With this ‘knowledge of the past we are able to have a quasi-emotive response (Fearing Fictions, 5) due to the narratives and characters portrayed in our favourite historically positioned movies. “The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate…” (Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy, 30)
There is further Disjuncture when these caricatures of histories travel outside of their original culture, such as in western styled bars and restaurants in foreign countries. The appropriation of a wild western bar usually based more on the Hollywood styled western film sets distorted exaggeration. This is not a real nostalgia where the person actually longs for the better time in their past memories but one that has been mediated through film and pop cultures. The remakes exceed the original and become caricatures.
The globalised mass media is creating nostalgia without memory. In the future will we be looking back retrospectively or actually longing for better times gone by? Perhaps we will create a Social imagination, in which our knowledge of history is clouded by a globally homogenised imagery where histories may become myths.
Appadurai, Arjun “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.27-47.
Fox, Dan et al. Nostalgia: Frieze Art Fair. 2009. What’s the Role of the Past in Fashioning the Future? Podcast [online]. [Accessed 3/5/2011] http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/details/nostalgia_whats_the_role_of_the_past_in_fashioning_the_future/
Walton, Kendal “Fearing Fictions”, Journal of Philosophy, 75, 1978, pp 4-27
Baudrillard has some really interesting ideas on creating nostalgia without memory- that more and more information produces less and less meaning in this age of electronic mass media. I find it interesting how American culture is always at the epicenter of all of the discussions on a disjuncture in replicated culture. Heidegger also has some great writing on the threat of technology as Americanism.
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