Modernity At Large By Guy Debord: Analysis

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai proposes several frameworks to understand the global cultural flow in the modern society. It includes ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai, 33). Among these five categories, the idea of ethnoscapes indicates that the availability of job opportunities leads to human migration across the globe. The capital flow causes a direct change of an individual’s decision to migrate for an employment. This idea coincides with the analysis in The Society of Spectacle written by Guy Debord. In the book, Debord addresses the spectacle of modern society subsumes individuals into the work places to form an imagined community (Debord, Ch.172). However, in Appadurai’s framework, the power relationship between the employer and the employee deserves to be
In the modern society, most of the people are identified as an employer. Regardless the professionalism of the occupation, the mere hierarchy in this relationship is to employ, or being employed. The social classes used to be determined by the occupation, for instance, lawyer, doctor, and teacher receive a higher social status while some jobs are considered with lower social status such as clerk, salesperson and artisan. The impact of capitalism becomes more and more influential to our life and empowers the employer to obtain the absolute power to select the employee. Moreover, due to the long working hours, the identity of being an employer occupied most of the time in our everyday life, so it should be accounted for a larger proportion to our identity formation.

Further to this interpretation, this creative project examines how does the fabrication of identity functions when an individual acknowledges being an employer. I am inspired by the poem Writing a Resume written by Wislawa Szymborska. Szymborska satirizes the simplification of resume that it omits too many details for understanding a person. All the ambiguities have to be