The Pinball and the Machine: Global Cultural Homogeneity and the Commodity Form

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Arjun Appadurai’s “disjucture,” as a form of maintaining cultural heterogeneity and difference, exists only in light of the shifting global paradigm. That is, globalization, commodity fetishism, and consumer cultures repatriates disjuncture and difference into an overall commodity schema; thus rendering disjuncture and difference as functional operations of the tele-present multiscapes. In this sense, real disjunctures exist only in relation to a dying, pre-globalization paradigm since contemporary market forces and global cultural economies, by way of absorbing and repatriating disjuncture and difference, re-circulates difference as sameness thereby reconstructing social imaginations. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2008 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]