Appadurai - Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

I am really struggling the Appadurai reading (mostly, understanding and writing about it), though I enjoyed it. So for now I'm going to post incomplete stuff that might end up more complete later but will at least allow me to stop worrying about it for awhile. So:
--

First, here are some other Appadurai things that are helping - this interview, largely about activism/grassroots movements. Also this short article, about capitalism being 'faith based' (this one seems kind of useful in being a more explicit example of a 'financescape', or how an economic system involves (is?) 'the imaginary').

Largely what I wanted to focus on from our text was Appadurai's concept of the imaginary (which he says is developed partly from Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined communities, and partly from the French word/concept 'imaginaire' (31)).

"The image, the imagined, the imaginary - these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is somewhere else), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleasing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order"

Appadurai gives examples of 'imagined worlds' - ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes (33-36)*. I guess here is where I start struggling most - it is hard for me to think of finance, media, etc. as 'imaginary' in the definition I first think of - they seem real, at least if anything beyond simply physical stuff can be real. But Appadurai's 'imaginary' isn't the imaginary I'm getting stuck on, for at least a couple of reasons. Maybe most helpful is that he is discussing a 'social imaginary' - it is collective, shared, rather than individual (as an imaginary friend is). Somehow I think this adds greater deliberateness to it, and certainly an organised-ness. Another thing is that maybe a return to the related words (in his explanation, even) is helpful - image and imagined. Also, obviously these 'scapes' still have real and inescapable effects - they are 'no longer mere fantasy' or 'mere contemplation'.



*The -scape suffix I find really great, and he says it 'allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes' (33), which is nice.

--
Works cited:
Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy". Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. p.27-47.

Appadurai, Arjun. "Welcome to the faith-based economy." 14 Oct. 2008. The Immanent Frame. Accessed 22 July 2009. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/10/14/welcome-to-the-faith-based-economy/

Appadurai, Arjun. "Airoots Interviews Arjun Appadurai (full version)". 21 September 2008. airoots.org. Accessed 9 September 2009. http://www.airoots.org/airoots-interviews-arjun-appadurai-full-version/