Last One! ...

In our final class discussion of cmc300 we finished talking about our theorists Michel Foucault and rounded up with Arjun Appadurai. Foucault argues how our society is constantly being watched upon nowadays through means of technology. "Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance." (101) We got into talking about how we sometimes or probably most of the time aren't even aware that we are being surveyed. In the airport for example I believe Rich mentioned how he went through security and was stuck in an x-ray machine with out even knowing...we are put on camera and in data more than we know it. We related this further to Jameson who believes that we live in a society where we don't want to merely be entertained by TV but we want to be in it! This is evident in Foucault's next quote that "we are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism." (101) Again we don't want to just watch, we want to be a part of 'it'...from here on we came to talk about Appadurai.

Appadurai's text I found to be very interesting. He mainly discusses how our global culture has changed so much with the rise of technology and hence transportation etc. He mainly points out our differences in other words disjunctures. Additionally how 'everything' including economy, technology, finance etc. are so complex nowadays with pastiche. I quote from Appadurai "the complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics that we have only begun to theorize." (588) Appadurai argues that we haven't even 'begun' to understand or have been able to theorize are complex economy, culture and politics nowadays. And I wonder if we will ever even be able to...