Arjun Appadurai and my fear of his popularity

I picked up Arjun Appadurai's book this evening, which I had bought as an impulse buy on Amazon last week. I really shouldn't have bought it, I realize now, but I hadn't heard of it when it came out and the topic (subtitle: "An essay on the geography of anger") seemed to be promising, perhaps as a corrective to his academic version (in Modernity at Large) of Thomas Friedman bombast about, 1. the existence of something called globalization 2. its essentially progressive and unstoppable nature. I really should know better than to make an impulse buy on a book like this, even if I can see myself producing the equivalent of Barthes S/Z on the text itself. It is much better to take it from the library and use it while i can.

(On a tangent here, I've really enjoyed taking the Hayek and Von Mises books out of the GMU law library. There is something ironic and almost counter culteral about borrowing their books from a public institution so committed to the destruction of public institutions using justifications hewn by these very theorists. I may have to summon all my strength not to treat the texts as my own and perform a tragicomedy of the commons in the margins of the books, saying exactly what i'd like to about their inane apologetics that, despite sounding high minded are basically the most stultifying ideological rantings I've ever read. They make some interesting observations from time to time, but they do so with such pride and conviction, such a sense of novelty and insight, that it's like, despite having read many things in their lives, they've forgotten how many other thinkers have said precisely what they are saying, save a very important exception: the thinkers before allowed some sense of human feeling and literary flair to creep into their prose. For the most part, they were also embatteled by a very different set of circumstances. when you consider that the things Hayek is trying to caution against and overturn aren't popular movements to abolish property rights, expropriate the expropriators, or communism or totalitarianism in any real sense, but social security, welfare and progressive taxation, it is really hard to envision him as anything more than a cranky uncle whose pearls of wisdom are lost in his generally smug self satisfaction at cynically evaluating anything you enjoy as the root cause of the eminant fall of western civilization. That the main foil of their argument--Marx or anyone remotely inspired by him--remains almost completely unexplored except as a straw man makes their desciples's animosity towards socialism almost comical. It also makes me very happy not to shell out the $100 or so it would cost me to buy the three very slim volumes of Hayek's work on "Law, Legislation, and Liberty" and pleased with the fact that the only way his ideas are then made available to me or anyone who won't pay this extraordinary price is through a public institution. Since I'm on a tangent, i've noticed the same thing with Milton Friedman's more technical/historical work--i.e. not his major ideological centerpieces like Capitalism and Freedom but the /monetary history of the united states/--and with Hernando De Soto's /Mystery of Capital/. Not only are they fairly expensive by publishing standards (the former more than the latter) but, no matter how many are available on the "Used" menu, the people selling them seem to want to defy any of the rationality of the market and keep their price high despite an obvious oversupply. Though de Soto's book--which seems to be assigned by someone somewhere in a class or just the product of even more impulse buys than my own--often has well over thirty or forty copies available for sale, the people selling them seem to really get behind his ideology and see their book as a real source of capital for them, refusing to accept anything less than an ideal price. Of course, unlike the small land owners that de Soto thinks would be the vanguard of capitalist led development in the "everywhere else" of the world where capitalism isn't "triumph"ing, they don't find themselves compelled to sell their books. Thus, though today there are 87 copies of the book available through used or new sales, only 10 or so are listed underneath the Amazon price for a new copy of the book. And only two or threee of those even approach a 50% discount of amazon's new price. I used to look at it to see if the price would ever go down to the $1 the book is really worth in terms of the wisdom it provides (which is to say, it is really important to see what bill of goods the World Bank and Corporate do-gooders are being sold): now I just go to the page to witness what has become comic evidence of both the irreconcilibility of these theories with actual real markets and the stubborn will to power of the people who think that they, finally, at last, have found the answer to saving people from poverty--and in the most unlikely of places: in a restatement of that genius of expropriation and "improvement" of private property, John Locke. Super stuff, really. The only thing that saves it from sounding like a sequence from a Kurt Vonnegut book is that the guy's name is Hernando de Soto: it is just way to obvious to not come off as contrived. Shame on the Cato institute for not being more literary about this.)

Back from the tangent...I bought Appadurai's book. I started reading it. And so far I am, unfortunately, disappointed and surprisingly unsurprised. After reading Fukuyama's mea culpa after the botching of the Iraq war I thought certainly his cosmopolitan cultural studies equivalent would have to make a bit of a concession to the far from rosy world we've inherited from him. At the very least, not having looked at the number of pages, I thought it would be on par with Castells volume on "The Power of Identity," if not in its breadth, at least in its attention to the issue. In some ways the analogy is apt, as Appadurai places this book in between his earlier theoretical celebration and an extensive forthcoming volume on those pillars of democratic society "NGOs" and how they step in to help people work through the problems of globalization and, one must assume, to help assauge their geographically bounded anger. I look forward to the two sentance caveat in that book about how NGOs aren't actually democratic. In the meantime, I have "The Fear of Small Numbers" which he assures readers, is merely a "transition and a pause in a long-term project" which "seek[s] to make globalization work for those who need it the most and enjoy it the least." This book is basically just the gunmetal and baby's blood sorbet to clear your palate of the good stuff in the first book about globalization and make you all the more ready to savor the even better stuff in the next book on globalization.

Like Hayek above, I sincerely wonder if he's aware of his own location in the intellectual field he inhabits. I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt and say that much of his value is in synthesizing his own ethnographic data, in being able to bring me anecdotes from the frontlines even if they support his basically rosy view of the world to come, with a few tweaks here and there. But he presents his perspective as if it is a watershed, as if he has something original to say about it and then describes the thin book in this way:

This study is concerned with large scale, culturally-motivated violence in our times.

"culturally-motivated violence"? What is that you ask? It is the violence that comes from deploying hundreds of thousands of US troops to protect our 'way of life," to use one of Raymond Williams's definition of culture? No that's not it. Even if it is much more "large scale," the people they kill, the houses and infrastructure they destroy, the chaos they cause has no organic link to our way of life whatsoever except that deep in the ground underneath all of this lies a fermented pool of dead dinosaurs and peat bogs that we could use to power the inefficient food, shelter and transportation systems that we identify with our "culture," thus this is not culturally motivated violence. No, by culturally motivated violence he means two things: on the one hand, Rwanda and Yugoslavia and on the other, in his words, "the war on terror" (though he's just being sloppy here in trying to deploy contemporary lingo: what he really means is "terrorism" which, just for a program note, is not large scale.)

I don't normally feel the need to, basically, mouth the words of Noam Chomsky with regard to the violence of the US in its actions around the world, but in this case I had to make an exception. On the other hand, my real exception to the book so far--and, admittedly, I've barely gotten through the intro and first pages of the first chapter--is that he is already being completely non-sensical in his use of the term "culture." I could get behind his definition of the "violence" in Rwanda as "Culturally Motivated" if what he meant was that there were key aspects of the culture that were involved in pushing the political conflict into a genocide. If he was talking about how the "cultural" division of the society into Hutus and Tutsis--a product of the colonial era--had created circumstances in which the World Bank and IMF programs (which first advised they stop growing any food for domestic consumption [a major cultural change] and to grow only coffee for export, advice they replicated across the globe, helping to reduce the price of coffee and thus significantly reducing the possible livelihood of Rwandan coffee farmers,
arguably creating the economic crash which, then, was exacerbated by several IMF devaluations of their currency) had an important, if not determining effect on creating the famine conditions in Rwanda, which made for a lot of angry, hungry people who could easily be enlisted in, first, the ongoing civil wars in the region and, then, using a fairly novel media of mass communication (i.e. the radio) a genocide; well then, yeah, I could see how that could be called "Culturally Motivated"

But he doesn't mean any of this. Though he promises to draw a distinction between himself and the likes of Samuel Huntington, I do wonder how much of a difference there will be in this distinction. My prediction, having not read the book, is that his major quibble will be that civilizations aren't unitary in the beliefs of its peoples, especially within the global "mediascape" of what he terms "high Globalization." I will try to withhold judgement, but for the most part, his first steps are down a very tedious and politically suspect path which, in the end, will likely shed very little light on either culture or the motivations of violence.

What I can say is that reading his characterization of this helped me to see that, in addition to m redefining the concept of culture in a more rigorous way, it is very important for me to set it in motion within a field of other kinds of efficacy, to be able to talk about culture itself as a motivating force--or at least address arguments of those who try to do so. My first instinct is to say that my main objection to Appadurai's use of this construction is a good indication of how i feel about it. In the first place, by using this construciton, he seems to be directly subverting his own stated goal, which was to talk about why this violence is related to globalization. But the upshot of his argument in its broad sweep seems to be that this "culturally motivated violence" is best understood as the result of people not understanding the process: if we can just get those NGOs in there to spread the good news, well then that violence might stop.

I'm being very unfair here. He stakes his position far from this; but it is just a bit further down the slope he's on and I think this has much to do with his flawed notion of culture here. Culture, for him, is progressive and worth having mostly when it emanates from the center: the periphery should accomodate its quiky traditional ways to this new reality and, perhaps, jazz it up a bit by performing their traditional cultures for the core in ways that can be pleasurably consumed. Again, a slippery slope. I'm tired and shouldn't be arguing right now, but I think I'm giving myself good advice here about the project and I'll probably still agree with my assessments when I get up in the morning. We'll see...