Ongoing Process of Self-Legibility

“Here, national and international mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary national states do this by exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacle to domesticate difference and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global or cosmopolitan stage” (13)

This quote in Appundarai’s text on disjuncture and difference, gestures toward Anderson by specifying the contingent forces of the nation-state when threatened by deterritorialization. What I found most compelling is that the priority of the state is to encompass difference in order to protect against fragmentation of national identities – nationalism serves as both a means of cohesion and just as readily a threat to this community as its formation can splinter and regroup. The state’s job is to interpolate all of its it’s constituents because of the constant human desire/necessity of subject to be called into being through recognition by the exterior world. This is the effect of cultural reproduction – and the appeal of mediascapes to create a landscape of subjects that doesn’t necessitate a geographical dwelling. This necessity of subject interpolation is central to Thrifts discussion of the effect of numbers or ‘qualculation’ to shift our cognitive style determined by frameworks of time and space. This new sensory experience is based in relative space and bound to a series of axes invariably bound to the body and therefore will probably result in strengthened egocentric co-ordinate systems. This of course refers to the tool of ‘YOU’ and the zoom in feature of community mapping to reassure the human that they are in fact part of the map. Recording and archiving also serves this purpose. I began thinking of the naturalization of these ‘artificial paratextual forces’ as bound up in their role as prosthetics – not only in being attached to the body but by calling it into being – and this reliance/dependence results in an anxiety over the removal of this subject hood. Therefore, just as with the imagined relations of political ideology, this construction is preferably erased until it threatens our subject hood.  

food for thought: erasing the quasi-causality
Girl Effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw
Starbucks Vote Commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXB13hVL2Y8

Q: In Granovetter’s work he notes that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (pg 1374)  V/ Thrift’s recognition that “this perpetual mobile space is seen as one in which joint action arising out of several causes brings new things into the world.. the realm of the virtual continually marks up the world” (pg 592). What allows for this technological transcendent marking? Does it necessitate networks that encourage and maintain weak ties? I think I answered my own question. But what about the lack of paths/ties we have with our government? How is this trust (feeling of constituent that they can predict and affect behavior) built in our political system – without these connecting forces. When does mass-media motivate without personal ties which encourage it?