Kellner: Globalization
Globalization and the Postmodern Turn
By Douglas Kellner
There's no doubt about it, globalization is the buzzword of
the decade. Journalists, politicians, business executives,
academics, and others are using the word to signify that something
profound is happening, that the world is changing, that a new
world economic, political, and cultural order is emerging. Yet the
term is used in so many different contexts, by so many different
people, for so many different purposes, that it is difficult to
ascertain what is at stake in the globalization problematic, what
function the term serves, and what effects it has for contemporary
theory and politics.
A wide and diverse range of social theorists are arguing that
today's world is organized by increasing globalization, which is
strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system,
supplanting the primacy of the nation state by transnational
corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and
traditions through a global culture. Marxists, advocates of worlds
systems theory, functionalists, Weberians, and many other
contemporary theorists are converging on the position that
globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment.
Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that
developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new
global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism
as a new cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989;
Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). In significant modern and
postmodern social theories, globalization is thus taken as a
salient feature of our times.
Yet the conceptions of globalization deployed, the purposes
for which the concept is used, and the evaluations of the
processes described by the concept vary wildly. For some,
globalization entails the Westernization of the world (Latouche
1996), while for others it involves a cover for the ascendancy of
capitalism (Ferguson 1992). Some see globalization as generating
increasing homogeneity, while others see it producing diversity
and heterogeneity through increased hybridization. For business,
globalization is a strategy for increasing corporate profits and
power, for government it is often deployed to promote an increase
in state power, while non-government social organizations see
globalization as a lever to produce positive social goods like
environmental action, democratization, or humanization. Many
theorists equate globalization and modernity (e.g. Giddens 1990;
Beck 1992), while others claim that the "global age" follows and
is distinctly different from the "modern age" (Albrow 1996).
Indeed, for some theorists, we live in a global age or epoch, in
which globalization is the defining concept (Axford 1995 and
Albrow 1996), while others find claims for the novelty and
centrality of globalization exaggerated (Hirst and Thompson 1996).
Yet the ubiquity of the term "globalization" suggests that it
is part of a reconfiguring and rethinking of contemporary social
theory and politics that is caught up in some of the central
debates and conflicts of the present age. It is certainly arguable
that during the past decades, the world has been undergoing the
most significant period of technological innovation and global
restructuring since the first decades of the twentieth century.
Part of the "great transformation" (Polyani 1957) to a new stage
of technocapitalism has involved a fundamental restructuring and
reorganization of the world economy, polity, and culture for which
the term globalization serves as a codeword. It is bound up with
debates over postFordism, postmodernism, and a series of other
"posts" that themselves signify a fundamental rupture with the
past. It is thus centrally involved in debates over the defining
features and changes of the present era.
In this article, I will sort out some of the dominant uses of
the term globalization and will propose the need for a critical
theory of globalization that overcomes the one-sidedness and
ideological biases involved in most conceptions. My argument is
that the discourse of globalization can be articulated with both
theories of the modern and the postmodern because we are currently
involved in an interregnum period between an aging modern and an
emerging postmodern era (Best and Kellner 1997). In this period of
transition, in a borderlands between two epochs, globalization
signifies both continuities with the past, with modernity and
modernization, as well as novelties of the present and the already
here future. I also want to argue that globalization must be seen
as a complex and multidimensional phenomena that involves
different levels, flows, tensions, and conflicts, such that a
transdisciplinary social theory is necessary to capture its
contours, dynamics, trajectories, problems, and possible futures.
Theorizing Globalization
Talking cogently about globalization requires, first, that we
sort out the different uses and senses of the term and try to
specify what processes it is used to describe. In a sense, there
is no such thing as globalization per se. Rather the term is used
as a cover concept for a heterogeneity of processes that need to
be spelled out and articulated. The term is not innocent nor
neutral in many of its uses and often serves to replace older
discourses like "imperialism" but also "modernization." As a
replacement for imperialism, it could displace focus on domination
of developing countries by the overdeveloped ones, or of national
and local economies by transnational corporations. Moreover, it
could serve as a cover to neutralize the horrors of colonialism
and could be part of a discourse of neo-imperialism that serves to
obscure the continuing exploitation of much of the world by a few
superpowers and giant transnational corporations, thus cloaking
some of the more barbaric and destructive aspects of contemporary
development.
Yet as a replacement term for modernization it can also rob
this previously legitimating ideology of the connotations that the
processes (i.e. modernization which has a positive ring to it) are
necessarily bringing progress and improvement, are part of an
inexorable trajectory of progress and modernity. Compared to the
discourses of imperialism (negative, critical) and modernization
(positive, legitimating), the discourse of globalization is on the
surface neutral. It thus displaces discourses of modernization
(good) and imperialism (bad), covering over their evaluative
components with a seemingly neutral term. And yet it too is bound
up with highly ideological discourses of the present age being
used by some to represent an entirely positive process of economic
and social progress, technological innovation, more diverse
products and services, a cornucopia of information and growing
cultural freedom, and a higher standard of living. Pro-
globalization boosters include champions of the market economy,
which with the triumph of Thatcherism-Reaganism in the 1980s
became a dominant ideology, Bill Gates (1995) and avatars of the
"information superhighway" and new technologies, and other
political and economic elites, supported by their academic
promoters and perhaps sociological analysts who exaggerate the
inexorable and irresistible trajectory of globalization while
covering over its more troubling aspects.
For its critics, however, globalization is bringing about the
devastating destruction of local traditions, the continued
subordination of poorer nations and regions by richer ones,
environmental destruction, and a homogenization of culture and
everyday life. These critics include Marxists, liberals, and
multiculturalists who stress the threat to national sovereignty,
local traditions, and participatory democracy through global
forces, environmentalists who fear the destructive ecological
effects of unchecked globalization, and conservatives who see
globalization as a threat to national and local cultures and the
sanctity of tradition.
The term globalization is thus a theoretical construct that
is itself contested and open for various meanings and inflections.
It can be described positively or negatively, or, as I shall
suggest, multivalently to describe highly complex and
multidimensional processes in the economy, polity, culture, and
everyday life. A critical theory of globalization attempts to
specify the interconnections and interdependencies between
different levels such as the economic, political, cultural and
psychological, as well as between different flows of products,
ideas and information, people, and technology. Critical theory
describes the mediations between different phenomena, the systemic
structure which organizes phenomena and processes into a social
system, and the relative autonomy of the parts, such that there
are both connections and disjunctions between, say, the economy
and culture. Concerned to relate theory to practice, critical
theory also attempts to delineate the positive potentials for
greater freedom and democratization, as well as the dangers of
greater domination, oppression, and destruction (Kellner 1989).
Grounded in historical vision, critical theory stresses the
continuities and discontinuities between past, present, and
future, and the possibility of constructive political action and
individual and group practice, grounded in positive potentials in
the current constellation of forces and possibilities (Best 1995).
The already highly complex articulations of the discourse of
globalization is rendered more complicated because globalization
is not only a replacement term for imperialism and modernization,
but it is caught up in the modernity/postmodernity debates as
well. Some theorists are claiming that globalization is replacing
concepts like modernity and postmodernity as the central thematic
of contemporary theorizing (Featherstone and Lash 1995; Waters
1995; and Albrow 1996), though others have assimilated the
discourse, variously, to both the modernity and postmodernity
problematics. For some, globalization thus constitutes a
continuation of the problematic of modernization and modernity,
while for others, it signifies something new and different and is
bound up with the postmodern turn, or an altogether novel and as
yet untheorized global condition. Yet here too, totally different
valorizations of the modern, postmodern, and globalization process
are possible. For some theorists, globalization is seen as a
process of standardization in which a globalized media and
consumer culture circulates the globe creating sameness and
homogeneity everywhere, thus bringing to light the bland and
boring universality and massification in the modern project.
Postmodernists champion, by contrast, the local, diversity,
difference, and heterogeneity, and sometimes claim that
globalization itself produces hybridity and multiplicity, arguing
that global culture makes possible unique appropriations and
developments all over the world with new forms of hybrid syntheses
of the global and the local, thus proliferating difference and
heterogeneity (Hall 1991). Postmodernists also argue that every
local context involves its own appropriation and reworking of
global products and signifiers, thus producing more variety and
diversity.
In the following discussion, I want to argue against all one-
sided and partial positions that see globalization either as a
necessary and positive vehicle of progress and diversity, or as a
force of insipid homogenization and destruction. Both of these
positions are obviously one-sided so, as in many cases where we
encounter one-sided and opposed positions, we should move to a
higher level to develop a critical and dialectical theory of
globalization which articulates both its progressive and
regressive features, as well as its fundamental ambivalence that
mixes old and new, innovation and destruction, and the global and
local.
Globalization: Economy/State/Culture
The term "globalization" is thus often used as a code word
that stands for a tremendous diversity of issues and problems and
that serves as a front for a variety of theoretical and political
positions. While it can serve as a legitimating ideology to cover
over and sanitize ugly realities, a critical globalization theory
can inflect the discourse to point precisely to these phenomena
and can elucidate a series of contemporary problems and conflicts.
In view of the different concepts and functions of globalization
discourse, it is important to note that the concept is a
theoretical construct that varies according to the assumptions and
commitments of the theory in question. Seeing the term
globalization as a construct helps rob it of its force of nature,
as a sign of an inexorable triumph of market forces and the
hegemony of capital, or, as the extreme right fears, of a rapidly
encroaching world government. While the term can both describe and
legitimate and normalize capitalist transnationalism, and
transnational government institutions, a critical theory of
globalization does not buy into ideological valorizations and
affirms difference, resistance, and democratic self-determination
against forms of global domination and subordination.
A critical theory of globalization is necessarily
transdisciplinary and describes the ways that global economic,
political, and cultural forces are rapidly penetrating the earth
in the creation of a new world market, new transnational political
organizations, and a new global culture. The expansion of the
capitalist world market into areas previously closed off to it
(i.e. in the communist sphere or developing countries who
attempted to pursue their own independent line of development) is
accompanied by the decline of the nation-state and its power to
regulate and control the flow of goods, people, information, and
various cultural forms. There have, of course, been global
networks of power and imperialist empires for centuries,
accompanied by often fierce local resistance by the colonized
entities. National liberation movements disrupted colonial empires
of power and created a "Third Way" between the capitalist and
communist blocs, especially in the period after World War Two,
marked by the success of a large number of anti-imperialist
revolutions. But as we approach the end of the twentieth century,
it would seem that neither decolonization nor the end of the Cold
War has loosened the hold of transnational systems of domination.
In addition to the development of a new global market economy
and shifting system of nation-states, the rise of global culture
is an especially salient feature of contemporary globalization.
Accompanying the dramatic expansion of capitalism and new
transnational political organizations a new global culture is
emerging as a result of computer and communications technology, a
consumer society with its panorama of goods and services,
transnational forms of architecture and design, and a wide range
of products and cultural forms that are traversing national
boundaries and becoming part of a new world culture. Global
culture includes the proliferation of media technologies that
veritably create Marshall McLuhan's dream of a global village, in
which people all over the world watch political spectacles like
the Gulf War, major sports events, entertainment programs, and
advertisements that relentlessly promote capitalist modernization
(Wark 1994). At the same time, more and more people are entering
into global computer networks that instantaneously circulate
ideas, information, and images throughout the world, overcoming
boundaries of space and time (Gates 1995).
Global culture involves promoting life-style, consumption,
products, and identities. Transnational corporations deploy
advertising to penetrate local markets, to sell global products,
and to overcome local resistance. Expansion of private cable and
satellite systems have been aggressively promoting a commercial
culture throughout the world. In a sense, culture itself is being
redefined for previously local and national cultures have been
forces of resistance to global forces, protecting the traditions,
identities, and modes of life of specific groups and peoples.
Culture has been precisely the particularizing, localizing force
that distinguished societies and people from each other. Culture
provided forms of local identities, practices, and modes of
everyday life that could serve as a bulwark against the invasion
of ideas, identities, and forms of life extraneous to the specific
local region in question. Indeed, culture is an especially complex
and contested terrain today as global cultures permeate local ones
and new configurations emerge that synthesize both poles,
providing contradictory forces of colonization and resistance,
global homogenization and new local hybrid forms and identities.
Globalization also involves the dissemination of new
technologies that have tremendous impact on the economy, polity,
society, culture, and everyday life. Time-space compression
produced by new media and communications technologies are
overcoming previous boundaries of space and time, creating a
global cultural village and dramatic penetration of global forces
into every realm of life in every region of the world. New
technologies in the labor process displace living labor, make
possible more flexible production, and create new labor markets,
with some areas undergoing deindustrialization (i.e. the
"rustbelt" of the Midwest in the United States), while production
itself becomes increasingly transnational (Harvey 1989). The new
technologies also create new industries, such as the computer and
information industry, and allow transnational media and
information to instantaneously traverse the globe (Morley and
Robins 1995). This process has led some to celebrate a new global
information superhighway and others to attack the new wave of
media and cultural imperialism.
Yet the very concept of globalization has long been a
contested terrain described in conflicting positive and negative
normative discourses. It is perhaps the early theorists and
critics of capitalism who first engaged the phenomenon of the
globalization of the capitalist system. Not surprisingly, the
defenders of capitalism, such as Adam Smith, saw the process
positively, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had more
critical perceptions. Producing one of the first major discourses
of globalization, Smith saw the European "discoveries" of the
Americas and the passage to the East Indies as creating a new
world market with highly significant consequences. Smith wrote:
Their consequences have already been great; but, in the short
period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed
since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the
whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What
benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result
from these events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting,
in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by
enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one
another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's
industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.
To the natives, however, both of the East and West Indies,
all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from
these events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful
misfortunes which they have occasioned. These misfortunes,
however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from
any thing in the nature of those events themselves. At the
particular time when these discoveries were made, the
superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of
the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity
every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter,
perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or
those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all
the different quarters of the world may arrive at that
equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual
fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations
into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. But
nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force
than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts
of improvements which an extensive commerce from all
countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily,
carries along with it (Smith 1962, Vol. 2: 141).
Smith thus envisaged the emergence of a world market system
as one of the most important features of modernity that would
eventually benefit the entire world. Although perceiving the
injustices of unequal relations of power and force, Smith
generally appraised the globalization of the world market as
"beneficial." With characteristic honesty, he cited the
"misfortunes" of the process of colonization, but optimistically
believed that the injustices of the process might be overcome. In
"The Communist Manifesto," Marx and Engels followed Smith in
seeing the importance of the globalization of the capitalist
market, although, of course, they differed in their evaluation of
it. Closely following the optic of Smith, they claimed:
Modern industry has established the world market, for
which the discovery of America paved the way... [the]
need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the
globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere... The bourgeoisie, by
the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication,
draws all, even the most barbarian nations into
civilization.... In a word, it creates a world after its
own image (Marx and Engels 1976: 486ff).
Both the classical liberalism of Smith and classical Marxism
thus see capitalism as a global economic system characterized by a
world market and the imposition of similar relations of
production, commodities, and culture on areas throughout the
world, creating a new modern world-system as the capitalist market
penetrates the four corners of the earth. For both classical
liberalism and Marxism, the bourgeoisie constantly revolutionized
the instruments of production and the world market generated
immense forces of commerce, navigation and discovery,
communications, and industry, creating a new world of abundance,
diversity, and prosperity:
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the
country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of
nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual
production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-
mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the
numerous national and local literatures there arises a world
literature (Marx and Engels 1976: 488).
This passage points to the resources and positive results of
the world market that provide the basis for a higher stage of
social organization. But in the Marxian vision, the globalization
process is appraised more ambiguously. For Marx and Engels, the
world market produced a new class of industrial proletariat that
was reduced to abstract labor power, rendered propertyless, and
had "nothing to lose but its chains" and a world to win. Marx and
Engels believed that the industrial proletariat would organize as
a revolutionary class to overthrow capitalism and produce a new
socialist society that would abolish poverty, inequality,
exploitation, and alienated labor, making possible the full
development of the individual and a more equitable division of
social wealth. They also envisaged the possibility of a world
global crisis which would generate world revolution, enveloping
the earth in a titanic struggle between capital and its opponents.
Their working class revolutionaries would be resolutely
internationalist and cosmopolitan in the Marxian vision, seeing
themselves as citizens of the world rather than members of
specific nations.
Curiously, the Marxian theory shared the illusions of many
market liberals that the development of a world-system of free
trade would eliminate nationalism and the nation-state, with both
downplaying their importance, in a new world economic system -- be
it capitalist or communist. Both Smith and Marx present
colonization and the globalization of the market society as
inevitable and as the basis of material progress. Both recognize
the injustices of the process for the victims of colonization and
the use of violence and superior force to subjugate non-Western
culture, but both are sanguine about the process and draw
distinctions between "barbarian nations" and civilizations that
ultimately present globalization as a "civilizing process"-- this
would indeed emerge as one of the dominant ideologies of
imperialism (which the Marxian tradition otherwise opposes).
Indeed, globalization has also had important political
implications. As Giovanni Arrighi documents, colonialization
benefitted successively the Italian city-states, Holland, and
England, which accrued political power and, in the case of
England, world empire through its role in trade, the establishment
of colonies, and finance and industry. In the aftermath of World
War Two, world-systems theory described "the creation of a system
of national states and the formation of a worldwide capitalist
system" as "the two interdependent master processes of the
[modern] era" (Tilly 1984: 147). Both Marxism and world-systems
theory stress the importance of the rise to global dominance of a
capitalist market economy that is penetrating the entire globe,
while world-systems theory stresses the equal importance of a
system of national states.
For several centuries, globalization proceeded on an
increasingly rising curve, bringing more and more areas of the
world into the world market-system. World War One and its
aftermath produced a slowing down of this process, however, first,
enmeshing much of the Western world in a highly destructive war,
followed by a period of economic boom and bust, protectionism,
growing nationalism, and the failure of internationalist economic
and political policy. World War Two once again engulfed much of
the world in an even more destructive and global war, though
already during the war itself events occurred that would shape the
post-War world economic order. At the Bretton Woods conference in
1944, monetary arrangements were undertaken which would help
produce a globalized world order. At the end of this meeting, the
World Bank and I.M.F. were founded, two major economic
institutions that would be at the basis of later arrangements such
as GATT and NAFTA. With the end of the war, world trade exploded
with a vengeance. National trade barriers were systematically
dismantled and eroded, global economic forces penetrated local
economies, and a global consumer and media culture traversed the
globe. The results have been auspicious:
As we look back fifty years later, we can see that economic
growth has expanded fivefold, international trade has
expanded by roughly twelve times and foreign direct
investment has been expanding at two of three times the rate
of trade expansion (Korten 1996: 15).
Yet the results of these developments have been highly
uneven. While economic elites and corporations have benefitted
tremendously the rewards have been unequally distributed. Gaps
between rich and poor, the haves and the have nots, the
overdeveloped and underdeveloped regions, have grown
exponentially. The wealthier nations continue to exploit the
people, resources, and land of the poorer nations, often leaving
environmental degradation behind. The debt crisis in which the
poorer countries owe the richer ones astronomical sums has
increased dramatically since the 1970s. There are more poor people
in the world today than ever before; violence on the local,
national, and global scale has erupted throughout this century of
unmitigated disaster and horror (Aronson 1984); the planet's
ecosystem is under siege and the "fate of the earth" lies in
immediate jeopardy. For much of the world, life is still "nasty,
brutish, and short," and prosperity, health, education, and
welfare remain distant dreams for much of the overpopulation of
the besieged earth.
Resisting Globalization
The concept of globalization can be disempowering leading to
cynicism and hopelessness, that inexorable market forces cannot
be regulated and controlled by the state, or that the economy
cannot be shaped and directed by the people, thus undermining
democracy and countervailing powers to the hegemony of capital
(see Hirst and Thompson 1996). A critical theory of globalization,
however, recognizes the reality of globalization, its power and
effects, but also seeks forces of resistance and struggle that
attempt to counter the most destructive aspects of global forces,
or which inflects globalization for democratic and locally
empowering ends. The present conjuncture, I would suggest, is
marked by a conflict between growing centralization and
organization of power and wealth in the hands of the few
contrasted to opposing processes exhibiting a fragmentation of
power that is more plural, multiple, and open to contestation than
previously. As the following analysis will suggest, both
tendencies are observable and it is up to individuals and groups
to find openings for contestation and struggle.
On one hand, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
satellite nations -- which provided the bulwark of a global
alternative to a capitalist market system -- market forces are now
largely unopposed by any system of nation-states, including those
that emerged out of opposition to colonial domination, with few
corners of the world able to resist the global flow of capital and
its products. Indeed, a world market economy disseminates
throughout the planet fantasies of happiness through consumption
and the goods and services that allow entry into the
phantasmagoria of consumer capitalism. A world financial market
circulates capital in international circuits that bind together
the world in a global market dominated by the forces and
institutions of finance capital. Capital thus circles the globe,
furnishing new products and fashions while eroding tradition and
national economies and identities.
Global economic change often has tremendous local impact.
Whole regions are devastated with the shutting down of industrial
production, moved to regions with lower wages and less government
regulation. Such "deindustrialization" has created vast "rust
belts" of previously prosperous industrial regions, as in the case
of Flint, Michigan, which suffered major economic decline with the
closing of General Motors automobile plants, an episode documented
in Michael Moore's film Roger and Me. Automation, computers, and
new technologies have eliminated entire categories of labor while
corporate reorganization has abolished segments of management,
producing vast unemployment. Corporations like Nike move from
country to country in search of lower labor costs and more docile
work forces. More than ever, the world economy is bound together
so that hurricanes in Japan or financial irregularities in Britain
influence the entire world.
Consequently, globalization involves new connections and the
integration of economies and cultures into a world system,
overcoming previous divisions and distances. Especially during the
period of the Cold War arising after World War Two, the system of
modern nation-states divided into two camps -- capitalist and
socialist -- producing a shifting series of alliances and
conflicts influencing countries from Vietnam to Nicaragua. During
this period, nations either pursued the capitalist or socialist
model of development -- or in the case of some so-called Third
World nations attempted to forge their own path of development. As
the term suggests, the Third World nations created by
decolonization were often considered to be less important to
global affairs than the conflict between the world superpowers and
the binaristic Cold War model provided a convenient rubric for
economic, political and cultural intervention into Third World
affairs, dividing the world into a global field of conflict
between the two superpowers with much of the planet caught in the
middle.
But with the collapse of the communist system, this period of
history came to an end and during the 1990s the capitalist market
model of globalization has become dominant and practically
uncontested. The analogue of such economic globalization is said
to be the triumph of democracy throughout the world with its
discourse and institutions of a pluralistic system of checks and
balances, parties, elections, and human rights (Fukuyama 1992).
For some decades, indeed, democracy has been interpreted as the
necessary accompaniment and/or condition of capitalism (Rostow,
Friedman, Fukuyama), while a tradition of critical theory
documents the tensions and conflicts between democracy and
capitalism.
And yet the decline of the power of the nation-state produces
a new geopolitical matrix in which transnational organizations,
corporations, and forces challenge national and local sites of
power and influence. In the wake of political developments such as
decolonization, the end of the Cold War, the formation of new
trade agreements and political unions, and the rise of global
transnational capitalism, national borders have shifted, resulting
in the increased power of transnational institutions. Accompanying
such momentous political changes are the increasing prominence of
world trade, financial speculations and investment, and global
cultural forces that operate outside the confines of the nation-
state as a discrete entity.
And yet new conflicts also have emerged exhibiting a surge of
nationalism and fundamentalism and clashes of cultures (Huntington
1996). It is curious how classical liberalism, Marxism, and
modernization theory downplayed the importance of culture and
local forms of social association, positing the inexorable advance
of the modern economy, technology, and politics which would
supposedly level out and homogenize all societies and culture,
producing a world global culture. Both capitalism with its world
market and communism with its international socioeconomic system
and political culture were supposed to erode cultural differences,
regional particularities, nationalism, and traditionalism. Thus,
both classical liberalism and Marxism promoted or predicted
globalization as the fate of the world: For capitalist ideologues,
the market was going to produce a global world culture, whereas
for Marxism the proletariat was going to produce communism that
would eliminate nationalism and create a communist international
without exploitation or war. Both saw the significance of national
borders being eliminated and both seriously underestimated the
endurance of nationalism and the nation-state.
Missing from both Marxist and liberal models has been an
understanding of how race, ethnicity, and nationalist sentiment
might intersect with class to produce local, political struggles
with complex causes. Indeed, from the late 1980s to the present,
there has been a resurgence of nationalism, traditionalism, and
religious fundamentalism alongside trends toward growing
globalization. The explosion of regional, cultural, and religious
differences in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia -- as well
as explosive tribal conflicts in Africa and elsewhere -- suggests
that globalization and homogenization were not as deep as its
proponents hoped and critics feared. Culture has thus become a new
source of conflict and an important dimension of struggle between
the global and the local. National cultures have produced
confrontations between Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, Armenians and
Azarbaijanis, Mohawk First Nation peoples and Quebecois, and in
South Africa struggles between the Umkatha tribe and the African
National Congress. Thus, both culture and nationalism turned out
to be more enduring, deeper, and fundamental than expected and
clashes between the global and local and various national cultures
with each other continue in a supposedly globalized world.
It is also in the realm of culture that globalization is most
visible and apparent. Global media and information systems and a
world capitalist consumer culture circulate products, images, and
ideas throughout the world. Events such as the Gulf War, social
trends and fashions, and cultural phenomena such as Madonna, rap
music, and popular Hollywood films are distributed through global
cultural distribution networks and constitute a "global popular"
(Kellner 1995). This global culture, however, operates precisely
through the multiplication of different products, services, and
spectacles, targeted at specific audiences. Consumer and media
industries are becoming more differentiated and are segmenting
their customers and audiences into more categories. In many cases,
this involves the simulation of minor differences of fashion and
style as significant, but it also involves a proliferation of a
more highly differentiated culture and society in terms of an ever
expanding variety and diversity of cultural artifacts, products,
and services.
However, there has also been a significant eruption of
subcultures of resistance that have attempted to preserve specific
forms of culture and society against globalization and
homogenization. Most dramatically, peasant movements in Mexico,
guerrilla movements in Peru, labor unions in France, students in
Britain and the United States, environmentalists throughout the
world, and a variety of other groups and movements have resisted
capitalist globalization and attacks on previous rights and
benefits. Seven dozen people's organizations from around the world
have protested World Trade Organization policies and a backlash
against globalization is visible everywhere. Politicians who once
championed trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA are now quiet
about these arrangements and at the 1996 annual Davos World
Economic Forum its founder and managing director published a
warning entitled: "Start Taking the Backlash Against Globalization
Seriously" (New York Times, February 7, 1996: A15).
On the terrain of everyday life, new youth subcultures of
resistance are visible throughout the world, as are alternative
subcultures of women, gays and lesbians, blacks and ethnic
minorities, and other groups that have resisted incorporation into
the hegemonic mainstream culture. British cultural studies has
accordingly explored both mainstream hegemonic cultures and
oppositional subcultures since the 1970s. It has focused on
articulations of class, race, gender, sexual preference,
ethnicity, region, and nation in its explorations of concrete
cultural configurations and phenomena. More recently, cultural
studies has also taken on a global focus, analyzing how
transnational forces intervene in concrete situations and how
cultural mediations can inflect the influence of such global
configurations.
Indeed, a wide range of theorists have argued that the
proliferation of difference and the shift to more local discourses
and practices define the contemporary scene and that theory and
politics should shift from the level of globalization and its
accompanying often totalizing and macro theories in order to focus
on the local, the specific, the particular, the heterogeneous, and
the micro level of everyday experience. A wide range of theories
associated with poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and
multiculturalism focuses on difference, otherness, marginality,
the personal, the particular, and the concrete over more general
theory and politics that aim at more global or universal
conditions.
It can be argued that such dichotomies as those between the
global and the local express contradictions and tensions between
crucial constitutive forces of the present moment and that it is
therefore a mistake to reject focus on one side in favor of
exclusive concern with the other (Cvetkovitch and Kellner 1997).
Our challenge to think through the relationships between the
global and the local by observing how global forces influence and
even structure ever more local situations and ever more
strikingly. One should also see how local forces and situations
mediate the global, inflecting global forces to diverse ends and
conditions, and producing unique configurations of the local and
the global as the matrix for thought and action in the
contemporary world.
Indeed, in many various fields and disciplines, theorists are
beginning to consider how global, systemic, and macrostructures
interact with local, particular, and microconditions and
structures. Such dialectical optics attempt to theorize the
intersection of the global and the local, how they interact and
mediate each other, and the new constellations being produced by
current interactions between these forces. In this way, one
overcomes the partiality and one-sidedness of undialectical
theories that fail to perceive the ways that the global and the
local interact so as to produce new social and cultural
configurations.
Analogous to the question of conceptualizing the interactions
of the global and the local on the level of theory, debates have
emerged over the proper locus and focus of politics today. Some
theorists argue that global and national problems require macro-
structural solutions, while others argue that the proper sphere of
the political is the local and the personal, and not the global or
national. Postmodern theories of power, for instance, have
stressed how power inhabits local, specific, and micro realms,
ignored by modern theories that located powers in centers such as
the economy, the state, or patriarchy. Postmodern politics urges
local and specific actions to intervene in discursive sites of
power ranging from the bedroom to the classroom, from prisons to
mental institutions.
Here too the old modern and new postmodern politics seem one-
sided. Power resides in both macro and micro institutions; it is
more complex than ever with new configurations of global,
national, regional, and more properly local forces and relations
of power, generating new conflicts and sites of struggle, ranging
from debates over "the new world order" -- or disorder as it may
appear to many --, to struggles over local control of schools or
the environment. Rethinking politics in the present conflicted and
complex configurations of both novel and established relations of
power and domination thus requires thinking through the complex
ways in which the global and the local are interconnected.
Theorizing the configurations of the global and the local also
requires developing new multidimensional strategies ranging from
the macro to the micro, the national to the local, in order to
intervene in a wide range of contemporary and emerging problems
and struggles. As Roland Axtmann suggests (1997), globalization
yields the possibility of new concepts of global citizenship that
will make us responsible and participatory in the problems and
challenges of the coming global village. To the slogan, "Think
globally, act locally," we may thus add the slogan, "Think
locally, act globally." From this perspective, problems concerning
global environmental problems, the development of a global
information superhighway, and the need for new global forums for
discussing and resolving the seemingly intransigent problems of
war and peace, poverty and inequality, and overcoming divisions
between the haves and the have nots may produce new conceptions of
global citizenship and new challenges for global intellectuals and
activists.
Axtmann also suggests that global citizenship and thus the
effects of globalization per se could promote a greater acceptance
of diversity, heterogeneity, and otherness rather than
globalization just promoting homogeneity and sameness (1997). Yet
globalization could produce as well new forms of imperialist
domination under the guises of universality and globality. Indeed,
there remains the danger that globalization functions as a cloak
disguising a relentless Westernization, or even Americanization,
of the world, much as did the old modernization theory that to
some extent globalization theory inherits and continues. But the
resurrection of tradition, ethno-nationalism, religious
fundamentalisms, and other forms of resistance to globalization
are motivated to at least some extent by a rejection of the
homogenization and perhaps Westernization associated with some
forms of globalization.
Globalization is thus necessarily complex and challenging to
both our theories and politics. But most people these days,
including theorists who should know better, operate with binary
concepts of the global and the local, the modern or the
postmodern, and promote one or the other side of the equation as
the solution to the world's problems. For globalists,
globalization is the solution and underdevelopment, backwardness,
and provincialism is the problem. For localists, globalization is
the problem and localization is the solution. But, less
simplistically, it is the mix that matters and whether global or
local solutions are most appropriate depends on the conditions in
the specific context that one is addressing. In a complex,
globalized world, there is no easy formula to solve the
intransigent problems of the present era, yet there are so many
problems on so many levels, that it should not be difficult for
people of imagination and good will to find opportunities for
intervention in a variety of areas.
Globalization and the Postmodern Turn: Concluding Remarks
Acting in the present age involves understanding the matrix
of global and local forces, of forces of domination and
resistance, and of a condition of rapid change and a "great
transformation" brought about by the global restructuring of
capital and multidimensional effects of new technologies. The
future is up for grabs, as are characterization of where we now
are, where we are going, and what concepts and perspectives best
characterize our present dilemma. I have suggested that we are
living in a period between the modern and something new for which
the term "postmodern" stands as a marker. One could, of course,
describe the tensions between global and the local, the modern and
the postmodern, and the old and the new, as a process of
postmodernization, of increasing complexity, fragmentation,
indeterminancy, and uncertainty. Yet it is my position that
although a postmodern turn is visible, continuities with the
modern are so striking that it is a mistake to posit a postmodern
rupture and exaggerate discontinuities.
This is certainly the case with globalization for clearly the
process has been going on for centuries and, as the earlier
discussion of Adam Smith and Marx suggested, globalization itself
is bound up with capitalist modernity and the expansion of the
capitalist system and relations of production which continues to
be one of the defining features of our present moment. Yet there
are also striking novelties in the present age. The rapidity of
globalization with its space-time compression, its simultaneous
forms of mass communication, its instantaneous financial
transactions, and an increasingly integrated world market is
surely a novelty. New technologies are changing the nature of work
and creating new forms of leisure, including the hyperreality of
cyberspace, new virtual realities, and new modes of information
and entertainment. Capital is producing a new technoculture, a new
form of the entertainment and information society, and everything
from education to work to politics and everyday life is
dramatically changing.
Yet I do not believe that these novelties are sufficiently
great at present to postulate a complete postmodern rupture.
Capitalist relations of production still structure most social
orders and the hegemony of capital is still the structuring force
of most dimensions of social life. Dramatic change and innovation
have been part of modernity for centuries, as has technological
development and expansion. Yet these phenomena, bound up with
globalization in its current phase, have created enough novelties
to require a rethinking of social theory and politics in the
current situation as a response to new developments in society and
culture.
In sum and to conclude: historical epochs do not rise and
fall in neat patterns or at precise chronological moments. Perhaps
our current situation is parallel in some ways to the Renaissance,
which constituted a long period of transition between the end of
premodern societies and the emergence of modern ones. Such periods
are characterized by unevenly developing multiple levels of
change, and the birthpangs associated with the eruption of a new
era. In fact, change between one era and another is always
protracted, contradictory, and usually painful. But the vivid
sense of "betweenness," or transition, requires that one grasp the
connections with the past as well as the novelties of the present
and future. Thus, it is important to capture both the continuities
and discontinuities of the postmodern with the modern, in order to
make sense of our current predicament.
Living in a borderland between the modern and postmodern
creates tension, insecurity, confusion, and even panic, as well as
excitement and exhilaration, thus producing a cultural and social
environment of shifting moods and an open but troubling future.
The concept of a postmodern turn is aware of the risks and dangers
in the current social constellation, as well as the hope of new
possibilities and excitement. The postmodern turn is thus deeply
implicated in the moods and experiences of the present and is an
important component of our contemporary situation (Best and
Kellner 1997). The very ubiquity of the discourse of the
"postmodern," its constant proliferation, its refusal to fade
away, and its seeming longevity -- several decades is a long time
for a mere "fad" in our rapidly changing world -- suggest that it
is addressing current concerns in a useful way, that it
illuminates salient present-day realities, that it resonates with
shared experience, and that it is simply an ingrained part of the
current critical lexicon that one has to come to terms with, one
way or another.
. Attempts to chart the globalization of capital, decline of the
nation-state, and rise of a new global culture include the essays
in Featherstone 1990; Giddens 1990; Robertson 1991; King 1991;
Bird, et al, 1993; Gilroy 1993; Arrighi 1994; Lash and Urry 1994;
Grewel and Kaplan 1994; Wark 1994; Featherstone and Lash 1995;
Axford 1995; Held 1995; Waters 1995; Hirst and Thompson 1996;
Wilson and Dissayanake 1996; Albrow 1996; and Cvetkovich and
Kellner 1997. I will draw on these and other studies during the
course of this article. Yet I am especially indebted to work with
Ann Cvetkovich on a book Articulating the Global and the Local.
Globalization and Cultural Studies (1997) and to work with Steven
Best on The Postmodern Turn (1997).
. A web site search on globalization that I did over several
weeks in early 1997 indicated that the concept of globalization
turned up in most major corporate web sites, as well as many state
and local governmental sites, political action group and social
movement sites, and a plethora of academic sites, with many of the
latter indicating globalization research projects, suggesting that
the concept provides cultural capital and economic awards for
academics as well as business.
. On postmodern theory, see Kellner and Best 1991 and on the
postmodern turn, see Kellner and Best 1997.
. See Polyani (1957: 189) on how market liberals failed to see
the importance of the nation state and nationalism, an oversight
shared by Marx. Today, it is mostly transnationalist neo-liberals
who continue to downplay the importance of the nation and who
champion transnational structures, though this was also long part
of the ideology of international communism.
. On deindustrialization, see Bluestone and Harrison 1982 and on
postFordism, see Harvey 1989.v
. Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis more accurately describes
the end of a peculiar period of history; see Fukuyama 1992 and the
critique in Derrida 1994.
. See Wolfe 1972; Cohen and Rogers 1983; Bowles and Gintis 1986;
and Kellner 1990.
. See the studies in and Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979;
Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler 1992; During 1993; and Kellner
1995.
. Such positions are associated with the postmodern theories of
Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty, and have been taken up by a wide range
of feminists, multiculturalists, and others. On postmodern theory,
see the survey in Best and Kellner 1991.
. See the discussion of Foucault, Lyotard, and the chapter on
postmodern politics in Best and Kellner 1991 and the discussion of
identity politics in Best and Kellner, forthcoming.
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