#appadurai

In some way, all things are congealed moments in a longer social trajectory. All things are brief deposits of this or that property, photographs that conceal the reality of the motion from which their objecthood is a momentary respite. Consider the objects of traditional plastic art, such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, buildings, or monuments. Despite their aspiration to the illusion of permanence, they are only momentary aggregations of material, such as paint, bricks, glass, acrylic, cloth, steel, or canvas. These underlying materials are ever volatile, which is why museums always insist that we “do not touch.” What is at risk is not just aura or authenticity but the fragility of objecthood itself.

The Greeks were not exempt from this way of thinking, and Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave is an early version of the journey from darkness to light, from shadow to substance. And ever since, the idea of a trajectory has formed and framed Western thought, even to the extent of creating a retrospective narrative of the inevitability of the West itself, constructed out of the bits and pieces of Greek philosophy. Biblical mythology, Roman law, Gothic architecture, Renaissance humanism, and many more minor elements, constantly composed into a retrospect story of “rise and fall,” of progress and stasis, of dark and bright episodes, all framed in a grand trajectory that we still see, with remarkable lack of distance, as the story of the West. But the story of the West is no more than one version of our deep bias toward what I call trajectorism. And this is the meta-trap that social science inherited most powerfully from its great ancestors in religion and pre-industrial humanism.

Mapping emotional geographies

Wir brauchen eine liberale Multitude. Sie ist die einzige Antwort auf die regressive Multitude, die gegenwärtig in und jenseits von Europa auf dem Vormarsch ist.

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 world is elsewhere), 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 unleashing 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 global order.