C.A - Although the contemporary world may be one in which modernity is at large, whereby a process of flows and scapes intertwine the disparate times of local and global, doesn't the existence of economic restrictions that limit the access to new technologies introduce once more a rupture within modernity?

Arjun Appadurai:

Well, that's true … it's true that the idea of modernity at large doesn't mean modernity equally available to everybody, it's certainly true that globalisation as everyone, almost everyone agrees, is creating severe problems of equity, of access, and simply of inequality … so modernity is not available in the same way to all populations in all parts of the globe and certainly electronic technologies are unevenly distributed. Nevertheless, it is the case that one of the qualities of modern technologies principally is that they are relatively cheaply available in their broadcast mode so that TV, for example, reaches a very large population and, of course, that used to be true already of newspapers. Newspapers were a very cheap way to get access. So to be an active user or participant is a restrictive facility, because to interact, to yourself send your message requires being able to use a computer, to be computer literate, to have access to the technologies etc. But at least to participate in what Benedict Anderson called the 'imagined community' through these things is certainly now something possible for others.

The second point is that you don't have to be a direct owner of the means of electronic communications to be a beneficiary; you can participate through other peoples' equipment, through other peoples' access or exposure, so there are secondary and tertiary ways of being involved in that world. So I would say yes, it is very important that globalisation produces new forms of inequality at microaccess, but I think that in some ways electronic media particularly also allows some transcendence of these very inequalities. So I would definitely not go so far to call it rupture; I would certainly call it a complication so we cannot be unqualifiedly optimistic and say modernity at large means modernity without a price.

C.A - Could the distinction drawn between post-modern and the modern refer to this complication?

Appadurai:

I myself am reserved about the idea of the post-modern because I think that the post-modern is a way of talking about certain kinds of reflexivity, and certain kinds of contradictions, and certain kinds of debates that arise within the rupture of the modern itself. So I don't regard the post-modern as an epochal change, and so I don't use the word very much. And therefore I call my book Modernity at Large rather than post-modernity, which is to say modernity at large, or even post-modernity at large, because I think that the post is … in a historical sense we aren't in any post yet. But we are certainly in a phase where there is greater self-consciousness about what is involved in modernity. So I tend to be a bit reserved about it. But on the other hand, I feel that these are terms which depending on how one uses them, they can be meaningful. To me, this particular one does not illuminate what you have just asked particularly. So you might label it that way, there's nothing wrong with that. But I'm not sure if analytically it opens some new angle on inequality, on economic apartheid. Because post-modern theory very much often has to do with the consciousness side of things rather than the material inequalities, so to make that connection takes some more work that the term post-modern itself is equipped to do.

C.A - And when you talk about post-nostalgia, do you refer to this in a way, to living the past within the present?

Appadurai:

Yeah. Yes. It is certainly true that, because of various new features of the media, and of migration, and of a general increase of forms of interactivity, and of self-consciousness - which is itself then interactive -, all kinds of primary forms of consciousness like nostalgia become … have to be placed in quotations marks or can be placed in quotation marks in the sense that we can refer to them as if they are states outside of ourselves and actually begin to long for nostalgia itself. And that's the kind of thing I was pointing at, that people not only miss things which we call nostalgia. But they miss nostalgia itself.

C.A - I see

Appadurai:

So again one could say this is post-modern. But to me analytically I'm not sure what that adds. I prefer to stick to the phenomena themselves, and leave the labelling open.

C.A - And in terms of electronic technologies stimulating the imagination … in terms of novel ways of how people imagine themselves. Considering that the sense of identity always derives from imagining oneself against an 'other', to what extent do media producers have an influence in creating the forms through which we imagine ourselves against an 'other'?

Appadurai:

Well, there's no question in my own view that the media has transformed the conditions under which self and other are imagined and produced. And that's been true for a long time, but electronic media, as I stress in my book Modernity at Large, certainly intensify the ability of media to saturate our consciousness and the ability of media to permit us to be delocalised or to transcend our local situations in various ways. So that is certainly the case. As to the problem of the other, I think the media is double-edged, as it is in many other matters. On one hand the media - again I use the term very generally to refer to all forms of electronic media as well as to a lot of pre-electronic media, because media as a whole includes all of those things. But we have some forms which are extremely recent, especially the cyberforms; other forms which are very old - radio, newspapers and so on, even things like painting, art, which have long and deep histories. But if you take the whole sector as inflected by its newest member, electronic media, I think there are two potentials which are in a way opposed. On the one hand I think the new media, especially the interactive component of the media allows a proliferation, multiplication or increase in the number of images of both self and of other available to ordinary people anywhere. So I think there's a kind of expansion and that you could see it whether you see it through advertising, you can see it through music, you can see it through cinema, you can see it through anything else. There's a kind of multiplication. On the other hand, because the power of the media is so big, because the media is not collectively and democratically owned, because particular interests certainly control the media, as we know a relatively finite group of companies and interests control a very large amount, especially non-governmental media - and even governmental media of course by their nature are controlled by people who control the government - so we know the media is not everyone's. That being so, that means there are interests and once there are interests there's a narrowing. So we know that the extreme case of that process are total or totalitarian societies, where only a very narrow end of images of self and other is allowed to be seen. This can be seen as restricting the resources available to imagine them. So we have a double point. And I would say that depending on where you are situated regionally, where you are situated economically, where you are situated in terms of your capability to consume the media, you can be either beneficiary of the multiplication or the victim of the reduction. So indeed there is a double possibility. So I think it would be wrong to consider the media as a direct and one way fact, either to see that they are completely expanding the means of self-understanding or that they are completely restricting. So in this sense, as far as images of the other are concerned, the media's role can go both ways. It depends on the social context, it depends on the conditions of access, and it depends on the plurality of producers and consumers. And if that plurality is greatly reduced, it's true that the images of the other will also be greatly reduced. But if plurality is great, there's always room for debate. So someone might want to push a certain idea about the other, but someone else will say that's the wrong idea - so immediately we have debate, we have contestation, we have plurality.

C.A - You oppose the use of the term culture on the grounds that it connotes substance, a certain essentialism, in opposition to the term culturalism, which points towards a dimension of difference, which can serve to articulate group identity. Can we also speak of cyberculturalism instead of cyberculture, and if so, what are the implications of affirming group identity through a means that simultaneously implodes subjectivity, through the possibility of one being able to assume various identities online?

Appadurai:

Yes, here again I think that's a very interesting idea that the world of cybercommunication might itself also generate new forms of culturalism and surely it does. So that we can certainly say that through communicating electronically, whether by computers or by computer related technologies like the one we're using right now, all sorts of groups, who are not face to face groups, who are not in the same region, who are not necessarily speaking the same language, can join together in new solidarities of various kinds and therefore we are getting, if you like, new forms of identities and identification. Now… this… the new arena has new properties about it, you're absolutely right, one of which is that no one is in a position to be utterly certain who they're interacting with and whether the identity is an assumed identity. So from that point of view there is a kind of cybernetic communication. Cybercommunication increases the possibility of somewhat playful or inventive or hypothetical identities. But the reality is that a lot of cyber based groups are tightly connected to actual political movements, and so on and so forth, in as it were physically material, real spaces. Separatist movements, for example, the sikhs, the curds and so on, communicate very actively through these means as do many, many kinds of activists. And I think you can look at the internet listserves, and groups, chatgroups and so on, in which this kind of intensely political conversation goes on. Two things are interesting. One it's very rare that those groups only reproduce existing ideas - so it's not that they immediately allow fundamentalism to develop. In fact, the contrary. If you look at the cyberdebates and groups, contestation is going on all the time. But people say 'I don't agree with so and so' … I think this … and in a way people feel freer to disagree on the Net than they might face to face, because they worry … So, for example, young people, say, from India, who are on listserves with people their own age might say 'we'll talk about arranged marriages: is it good, do we like it, do we not like it?' You know, that may be hard if they're under adult eye, under supervision, and face to face, because there's too much at risk. So there's room to explore and to debate on the one hand. But it is also true, secondly, that all sorts of internet based groups - activist groups for example - very quickly, by the nature of what they're talking about - can see whether someone is actually simply trying out an identity or whether they're seriously involved in the issues. It's not that hard to tell. That said, the third fact is that certainly electronic communication across national boundaries, across local boundaries, across age boundaries, does permit powerful ideological orientations about place, about space, about history, about memory to solidify, creating identities we may call culturalist. Whether they're fundamentalist or not is another matter. Because fundamentalism often is in the eye of the beholder. But certainly we can say that powerful political and cultural signatures can emerge so that people deepen their attachment to a religion, or to a particular political cause, or to a particular vision of the world. That is true so I think in general again the idea that new methods and modes of communication simply create a realm of elective freedom, of jouissance, of play, of experimentation … that would take on its own ghost too far. Because certainly at the same time there is a counterprocess, or dialectically opposed process, where identities can solidify, congeal, identifications can become clearer, ideological confusions can be eliminated. So both things go on. I think the formation of identities in … if you like cybercultural identities … is always a dialectical process where there's a kind of opening up of possibilities as well as a kind of - I wouldn't call it closing down - but certainly a solidifying or congealing. That's why it's not again so easy to analyse or understand and why it's very important to look at these cases where one can closely - because it may be that the one or the other side is more effective …

C.A - And not think in terms of ideal types …

Appadurai:

Exactly, I'm thinking of a continuum ranging from the most playful, experimental and hypothetical ones that actually simply … for example, I would say that the kinds of sites and interactive spaces associated with queer culture are much more playful in the serious sense of play - because they're pushing certain boundaries - there're others who simply want to get some business done; say, they want to topple a particular government, or oppose a certain hegemony, if you like, narrow-cast in their aims and they can use new technologies to, as it were, intensify the narrowing ideologically speaking. Whereas, as I say, queer groups for example are interested in pushing the boundaries, in exploring their own boundaries much more … So partly, it's a matter of who are the groups and what do they want. And as in the past with much older technologies we can say that the technology itself doesn't determine whether you're going to get openness, play, and fantasies, and trial and error, or closure …

C.A - The technology does not determine …

Appadurai:

Right, the technology has both possibilities. I think very much human purpose appears in which way things evolve, as before, as always.

C.A - In terms of the cyborg, I was wondering whether the cyborg reveals a transnational dimension to the extent that it transcends the contextual specificities of humanity. And, in this sense, does it reveal both a genealogical and historical dimension or would you say that one should take more, perhaps, of a genealogical approach towards analysing the cyborg … because you talk about a historical approach as being more contextually specific?

Appadurai:

Right … yeah, that's a fascinating question. I myself have not given as much thought as I should to cyborg forms, ideologies and materialities. But I've certainly been trying to follow the literature from, let's say, the sociology of science and parts of cultural studies and so on, that uses the cyborg as a kind of trope of new emergent identities, new emergent forms of sentient being. And in post-modern fiction, especially in film and so on, like "Blade Runner" etc., we see that there is a kind of … as well as in the realities of cloning etc., we see a lot of increase in interest of various societies in cyborg possibilities. I think your question is very interesting because there's a tendency to think of the trope or the figure of the cyborg as entirely futurist, as entirely new, as a kind of complete rupture. And I think you're right to say these things don't come fully new. They always have histories and genealogies. In the case of cyborg images as well as cyborg technologies, what I would say is that the history so to speak is the specific history of technological possibilities of the West. In other words, it comes out of the history of science and technology. So that is a history which would put it very much - sorry I have inverted my own thoughts. The genealogy would be like that, would be a very specific history of the West. But the history I think would open a new arm in the sense that I use it in Modernity at Large, a much wider set of traditions and possibilities where many human societies have played around with forms that are only, if you like, part human. So religious forms, forms of spirituality, forms of spirit beings, these are all what you might call cyborg forms because their materiality is not narrowly human. They may have animal elements, they may have bestial elements, they may have, if you like, angelic elements. Ancestors, you might say, in many societies are cyborg forms because they are not here; they are not visible, yet they're with us, they're active, they do things; conversely, there are many, many forms in many societies which cross the line between human and what we would call animal and so on. So if you take cyborg simply to mean hybrid space, or hybrid form, in which the limits of being human are stretched, then any societies have imagined histories in which such forms exist. So the history of the cyborg then is much broader; the genealogy, I would say, is tied to a particular stream of experimentation with technology in the West. So, yeah, that's the best I can say.

C.A - And in terms of virtuality - the term virtuality - would you see it as referring to an unlimited archive of distinctions? And, if so, isn't it ironic that the Internet has been regarded as susceptible of fostering fundamentalist actions - you have referred to this before - within tightly knit groups bearing, presumably, a strong sense of identity in religious terms?

Appadurai:

I think that's right. There is an irony and the question is how much that irony is real and how much that irony is a product of a certain appearance. And the appearance which we again need to be careful about is that the virtual is a completely open-ended archive. Because of course people, the human beings who inhabit the virtual, are themselves embedded somewhat. So the people who are in the computer screen have a whole life - which is not only the computer screen - so we know that whatever you might explore in cyberspace, there are other materialities to which you are always subject. The materiality of everyday life, eating, sleeping, surviving, and so on. More so for some than others. The imagination, of course, is a great equaliser. So whether you are poor or rich, whether you have two meals a day or four, you can travel, as it were, you can fantasise about various things like people much wealthier than yourself, much better off, much more privileged. But I would still say that the virtual is not an infinite archive because it always is in relationship to images that come from nearerby. So it's always somewhat limited. But I would again say we don't want to therefore swing over to the other side of the continuum, and say everything is pure limit or pure limitation or fundamentalist in the sense that people can be simply indoctrinated. There's always room for debate. And the debate is on the one hand in cyberspace itself, as I said, people have debates - 'are things like this or are things like that?' On the other hand, even if your cyberspace imaginary is limited, your daily life will bring you into things that will contest that. So there's always friction and contestation and contradiction. And I would say that in the end of my book also I try to use the concept of the production of locality. And so the local is never simply a fact in which people are confined. They are themselves producing the local. So even everyday life is not simply a factual prison in which people operate. Even that is somehow created. So in all these cases, I think, there is a kind of interesting tension. Whether in everyday life or in cyberspace, people can imagine possibilities. But they never imagine them exactly as they please, because they are in conditions which also come to them, which they don't fully control.

C.A - And lastly, how does one negotiate between the local and the global online. Is it possible to negotiate between the local and the global in terms of, for example, a diasporic public sphere. You have alluded to this throughout this interview… And I would like to know whether issues such as, for example, the accusation, well, by the part of some people, that, for example, the Internet fosters such types of fundamentalist actions … Can such issues be reduced to attempts by Nation-States to infiltrate the global as a strategy of control over other locals?

Appadurai:

Two things I'd say to that. One is that the - yeah - Nations-States are always trying to intervene in both the local and the global, because in a sense they're most concerned about sovereignty which is a form of the local. So they might say, 'other Nations is their business, but we are like this, and we don't do such and such a thing…we have laws that don't allow this and so on'. In a sense they have their local as their main concern. But in all cases I would say no one is free of the pull of locality; no one lives entirely in a space which is global. The other way … we might turn it the other way and say 'the global is lived always locally'. It's always lived locally. So you can have a vision, which reaches very far, but the vision is produced under certain conditions, conditions of your everyday life, and so on. Actually, I think the world we are entering is one in which the dynamics of relation between local and global increasingly is not a spatial matter; that the local is small and the global is big, that the local is near and the global is far. These are the images with which we come, but the reality is that peoples' local lives are often mediated by ideas about the global, on the one hand. So the global is never absent from the local. Conversely, globality is never imagined globally - you always have to assume that the person is living somewhere with certain interests, with certain commitments, with certain friendships, with a certain history, biography, etc. So in a way, it might be best to say that the local and the global are like two strands in a kind of DNA which are always co-producing identity, co-producing loyalty, co-producing identification, and certainly Nation-States want to have a privileged say in how that interaction works. But, again, they don't necessarily always succeed in their effort.