Editor's Note

As you have probably heard, after twelve years of groundbreaking leadership, Carol A. Breckenridge has retired from the editorship of Public Culture. A dozen years ago Carol, Arjun Appadurai, and their editorial collaborators envisioned a vanguard journal committed to the study of culture from the nonaligned perspectives of local, provincial, and global modernities. Central to this vision, as the editors announced in the first issue of the journal in 1988, was the concept of "global cultural flows" and a focus on the constitutive effects of cultural circulation on emergent national and cosmopolitan forms. Today, provincial modernities and cultural flows are the tacit assumptions of most studies of public cultural phenomena (see the recent special issues of Daedalus and Public Culture).

Though perhaps never meant as more than an incitement to render then- commonsense conceptions and experiences of culture corrigible, the now ubiquitous image of cultural flows has fomented no little irritation in some quarters of cultural studies--no small tribute to the influence of the founding editors. The cry of revolution sails on new winds, kunaberrug not merrawug. One root to this critical irritation is the image of flow itself. Does culture flow or is it moved along? What forms are imposed on cultural texts as the condition of their circulation across various types of social space (liberal and nonliberal public spheres, governmental and nongovernmental communiqués, face-to-face and textual proximities, et cetera) and communicative media (print, telemedia, pixellated and digital imagery)? How is the social space within which these texts move constitutive of--and itself renegotiated by--their movement?

Some conditions of circulation are deceptively straightforward, for instance, the linguistic code of a text. How many readers of Public Culture, for example, know the linguistic code of kunaberrug and merrawug, let alone the broad emergent relational values signaled by these terms? How many copies of the Millennial Quartet would have sold--and where--in Tamil? Of course, as authors in this special issue note, the business of translation is booming, urged on by newly integrated global capital and nation-states. What are the pathways and tendencies of these translation practices? Some conditions of circulation do not seem to be in the text in the way that textual interiority and integrity have been typically understood. These translation practices seem extratextual: one life form imposing its immanent structures on another. Here we would include the code of the machines of transmission; the political economy of particular local, regional, and national publics; and metanarrative stances and attitudes about what constitutes public significance. The latter can be stated more generally in terms of how texts are framed, say, how the news media simultaneously presents first order narratives about events and second order narratives about how these events are exemplary of a publicly recognized phenomena. But these aspects of cultural circulation seem extratextual only after a specific form of cultural work has already been imposed. This cultural work includes on one hand the abstraction of a text as a THING with discernible if fuzzy boundaries and thus--in the liberal capital public sphere--alienable, ownable. On the other hand, it includes the accumulation of value for texts that are able to break the context of their local horizon--in other words, the question of circulation as such.

Examining the conditions of cultural circulation demands a critical perspective on circulation itself, the seemingly self-evident value of a maximal scale of traversal. For, equally ubiquitous to the notion of cultural flows is the notion that for a social practice, text, or aspiration to reach an audience, incite a public, garner critical attention, and thus reshape public culture, it must move, and widely, with a form of openness that allows for maximal identifications. Scale and value are thus commonsensically related in a straightforward one-to-one way in liberal and capital cultures. But this is not a universal way of relating scale and value. Many cultural forms accrue value by their radical locality, by their restricted market.

And yet, the extralocal nature of local values means that even if we...