Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

The forces of cultural gravity seemed always to pull away from the formation of large-scale ecumenes, whether religious, commercial or political, towards smaller-scale accretions of intimacy and interest. Thus, the curiosity which recently drove Pico Iyer to Asia is in some ways the product of a confusion between some ineffable McDonaldization of the world and the much subtler play of indigenous trajectories of desire and fear with global flows of people and things. The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models. The task of cultural reproduction, even in its most intimate arenas,…