Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”

 Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1996): 27-47. Print.

Arjun Appadurai in this text examines cultural flow and its method of transmission. There are two pages that I find especially interesting, that focus on “nostalgia without memory” (Appadurai, 30), a concept I find very interesting. Appadurai talks about the nostalgia inherent in American society, that is then passed on to other cultures, the Philippines for example, the “mega-technologies of the twenty-first century garbed in the film-noir scenarios of sixties’ chills, fifties’ diners, forties’ clothing, thirties’ houses, twenties’ dances, and so on ad infinitum.” (Appadurai, 30) creating a present that also exists in the past. This idea that memory makes time flexible is very interesting to me, recently I read an article by Jason Skeet that examined how Giles Deleuze and Virginia Woolf dealt with time, especially in relation to cinema. Deleuze hypothesised that our crystalline conception of time is actually mobile that “the past is constituted at the same time as the present, with memory existing virtually alongside this present. Singular moments (or haecceities) in the past may continue into the present, growing and accumulating new layers of possibility and meaning” (Skeet, Jason. “Woolf plus Deleuze: Cinema, Literature and Time Travel” Rhizomes.16.2 (2008):13. Print.) this idea is fascinating, the idea that time is flexible, dependent on our needs and recollections, that we can in fact change the past through our memories. Appadurai addresses similar issues of time and memory, but with the flow or culture being the controlling element, “if your present is their future, and their future is your past, then your past can be made to appear as simply a normalized modality of your present” (Appadurai, 31). The idea that time and memory are dependent is curious, similar to the question of ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a noise?’ in relation to time I believe this can be true, if no one remembers us did we ever exist? Or does it matter whether we did? Man is obsessed with immortality, and as true immortality is impossible we are obsessed with leaving a mark that we will be remembered by.  Deleuze quotes Fellini in saying “we are constructed in memory” (Skeet, 11) tying into the concept that we exist simply because we are remembered, and not because we existed, that are actions, and others memories of them are in fact more important than ourselves.