In his beautiful book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, the ethnographer Arjun Appadurai describes a set of social and cultural circumstances impacted by contemporary media technologies and mass migrations.
- How can we today speak of “architecture” or rigid structures in a contemporary setting where diverse codes are perpetually being brought into contact with one another through migration and communications technologies?
- Is it a mistake that the concepts of structure and system emerge right at that historical moment when migration brought on by the industrial revolution begins to erode these structures, calling them into question as a result of codes being scrambled everywhere?
- Does not structure appear at that precise moment when structure is disappearing?
- And might not the frantic search for structure and system everywhere be a symptom of the desire to make the Other exist, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Tue 19 Jun 2007 Meteorology as a Master-Science Posted by larvalsubjects under Constellation , Populations , Assemblages , Materialism , Darwin , Theory , Organization , Systems [15] Comments
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