I'm sorry that I'm posting my post in your comment section! I couldn't figure out how to post as a Contributor. (I swear, I'm usually more tech-savvy).
Morley, in part, explores different issues around the concept of ‘home’ as it is a term that takes up spatial, geographical, and highly imagined/de-historicized forms that are ultimately informed by a subscription to a structure (marked by both physical attributes as well as ideological attributes) and that designates concepts of anti-home/Otherness in its inherent definition. This concept of home and specifically Heimat then becomes significant when considering different types of migrancy, movement, sedentarism, exile, etc. that actually necessitate and invite the formation of concepts of home and homeland (for the migrant subject as well as for cultural subjects at large). Technology and media/mediated information then enter the picture. In the context of a growing global, highly technologically mediated and mobile world (a world marked by increasing virtual as well as actual mobilities and migrations) how can we approach an understanding of the formations of the ‘home’ concept in terms of its subscription to values/characteristics of nation-state? One significant question that Morley raises is, what is exactly happening to notions of borders in our contemporary world? Are borders wholly disappearing, as well as the notion of nation-state altogether? Or, are notions of borders merely shape-shifting to more accurately articulate identity-cultivation in a global and transnational experience? Specifically, Morley presents perspectives on the notion of nation-state dissolution (or the illusion of such) of Kenichi Ohmae, Hannerz, Michael Mann and Samuel Huntingdon. Ohmae presents us with a scenario where “we face a global logic which is slowly but surely dissolving the fabric holding nation states together alongside the progressive globalisation of markets for consumer goods. He argues that if economic borders have any continuing meaning at all, it is as the ‘contours of information flow....’”, and thereby presents a vision of the disintegration of the nation-state and a move toward a ‘borderless world’ (206). Morley then brings in Huntingdon’s alternate understanding of the state of the nation-state as a functioning entity, that ultimately sees the validity in Ohmae’s belief in the disintegration of the nation-state as the primary way of understanding borders in our world, but that presents us with more of a replacement model than that of a model of disappearance. Specifically Hungtindon argues that “what we see emerging is a ‘civilisation-based world order... [where] societies sharing cultural affinities co-operate with each other’ and, of course, vice versa -- as cultural (or civilisational, in Huntingdon’s terms) difference becomes the crucial fault line in generating conflict” (206). A question that emerges from these different predictions of the status of nation-state, is: Which model adheres to and addresses to the technologically mediated and economically conscious/governed understanding of how borders are operating (or coming to operate) on a global scale? An overarching question arises out of the Morley text. With this shift away from geographical and spatial understandings of identity and borders that very much confine the nation-state paradigm, commingled with history of defining/designating alterity both spatially/architecturally (as suggested in the case studies raised in the book’s excerpts), where and how can we locate the ways in which alterity is now being reappropriated in the virtual/technological/mediated spaces that seem to be penetrating/supplementing cultural spaces? How is Otherness being constructed in the face of these shape-shifting borders?
I'm sorry that I'm posting my post in your comment section! I couldn't figure out how to post as a Contributor. (I swear, I'm usually more tech-savvy).
ReplyDeleteMorley, in part, explores different issues around the concept of ‘home’ as it is a term that takes up spatial, geographical, and highly imagined/de-historicized forms that are ultimately informed by a subscription to a structure (marked by both physical attributes as well as ideological attributes) and that designates concepts of anti-home/Otherness in its inherent definition. This concept of home and specifically Heimat then becomes significant when considering different types of migrancy, movement, sedentarism, exile, etc. that actually necessitate and invite the formation of concepts of home and homeland (for the migrant subject as well as for cultural subjects at large).
Technology and media/mediated information then enter the picture. In the context of a growing global, highly technologically mediated and mobile world (a world marked by increasing virtual as well as actual mobilities and migrations) how can we approach an understanding of the formations of the ‘home’ concept in terms of its subscription to values/characteristics of nation-state? One significant question that Morley raises is, what is exactly happening to notions of borders in our contemporary world? Are borders wholly disappearing, as well as the notion of nation-state altogether? Or, are notions of borders merely shape-shifting to more accurately articulate identity-cultivation in a global and transnational experience? Specifically, Morley presents perspectives on the notion of nation-state dissolution (or the illusion of such) of Kenichi Ohmae, Hannerz, Michael Mann and Samuel Huntingdon. Ohmae presents us with a scenario where “we face a global logic which is slowly but surely dissolving the fabric holding nation states together alongside the progressive globalisation of markets for consumer goods. He argues that if economic borders have any continuing meaning at all, it is as the ‘contours of information flow....’”, and thereby presents a vision of the disintegration of the nation-state and a move toward a ‘borderless world’ (206).
Morley then brings in Huntingdon’s alternate understanding of the state of the nation-state as a functioning entity, that ultimately sees the validity in Ohmae’s belief in the disintegration of the nation-state as the primary way of understanding borders in our world, but that presents us with more of a replacement model than that of a model of disappearance. Specifically Hungtindon argues that “what we see emerging is a ‘civilisation-based world order... [where] societies sharing cultural affinities co-operate with each other’ and, of course, vice versa -- as cultural (or civilisational, in Huntingdon’s terms) difference becomes the crucial fault line in generating conflict” (206).
A question that emerges from these different predictions of the status of nation-state, is: Which model adheres to and addresses to the technologically mediated and economically conscious/governed understanding of how borders are operating (or coming to operate) on a global scale?
An overarching question arises out of the Morley text. With this shift away from geographical and spatial understandings of identity and borders that very much confine the nation-state paradigm, commingled with history of defining/designating alterity both spatially/architecturally (as suggested in the case studies raised in the book’s excerpts), where and how can we locate the ways in which alterity is now being reappropriated in the virtual/technological/mediated spaces that seem to be penetrating/supplementing cultural spaces? How is Otherness being constructed in the face of these shape-shifting borders?