Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity

Abstract

The speed, intensity, and extent of contemporary global transformations challenge many of the assumptions that have guided the analysis of culture over the last several decades. Whereas an earlier generation of scholarship saw meaning and interpretation as the key problems for social and cultural analysis, the category of culture now seems to be playing catch-up to the economic processes that go beyond it. Economics owes its present appeal partly to the sense that it, as a discipline, has grasped that it is dynamics of circulation that are driving globalization — and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation. There is a certain historical irony to the contemporary discovery of the centrality of circulation to the analysis of the globalization of capitalism. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1969) inaugurated what would later be called the “linguistic turn” by applying Prague School linguistics to the analysis of circulation and exchange in precapitalist societies; by focusing on the structural analysis of the “total social fact” of exchange, he sought to overcome the dichotomy of economy and culture that is characteristic of modern thought. In hindsight, it can be seen that his use of phonology as the model for structural analysis raised fundamental issues about structure, event, and agency that con