Media, Modernity and Technology by David Morley

Author:David Morley [Morley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Popular Culture, Media Studies, Technology & Engineering, Social Aspects
ISBN: 9781134317141
Google: 3Juw4qCAotgC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-09-27T03:38:34+00:00

Theorising regionality

If we are to look to a revised form of area studies – whether informed by post-colonial/cultural studies or not – to supply a more concretely regionalised perspective on globalisation, there is yet a further difficulty to be faced, which concerns the definition of the units of analysis to be used in such an enterprise. As Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, the problem with most forms of regional analysis, and specifically with the established paradigm of area studies, is that they mistake ‘a particular configuration of apparent stabilities for permanent associations between space, territory and cultural organisation’. These approaches rely on a conceptualisation of areas as relatively fixed or immobile aggregates of cultural traits with ‘more or less durable historical boundaries and … enduring properties’ (a tendency of which Huntingdon is perhaps the extreme case). However, we should recognise that they are, in fact, no more than ‘heuristic devices for the study of geographic and cultural processes’, rather than themselves being ‘permanent geographical facts based on any bedrock of natural, civilisational or cultural coherence’.69

This, ultimately, is the force of Appadurai’s argument about the significance of the disjunctures and contradictions between the global flows of objects, people, images and discourses across the surface of the globe – which often function to destabilise the boundaries of any given area or region. As he notes, the paths (or vectors) of the various global flows are not at all necessarily ‘coeval, convergent … or consistent’, but have different ‘speeds, axes, points of origin … [and] termination, which often are in contradiction with each other’.70 Thus, when the consumer advertising generated by the transnational mediascape functions so as to write the scripts of the migratory imagination worldwide, for many, who lack the visa required to physically enter the realms of their dreams, it is indeed hard for geographical diversities, cultural differences and national boundaries to remain isomorphic. To this extent, we might be better off, rather than taking geographical areas as the units of our cartography (and presuming that, within each one, we will find only one set of exclusive or dominant properties), if we take the various properties themselves (cultural, political and economic forms, for example) as the basic units, and then look to see where they are to be found, without assuming that they are naturally bound to geography. From this perspective, not only might we argue that the world now consists of a number of (various) powerful centres, each of which constitutes its own periphery, but also, following Immanuel Wallerstein, that cores and peripheries are better seen, not so much as linked locations, but as linked processes, which are only tendentially and provisionally inscribed in particular geographical places.71

Having now mapped out the terrain of our difficulties in understanding the regional geographies of globalisation, we must now turn to some fundamental philosophical difficulties concerning the relations of Western power and knowledge. These are problems which have a particular pertinence for area studies.

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