Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture

Abstract

Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture Frederick Buell (bio) For some decades now, discourses of terminal lament and epochal change have multiplied. We have heard about the destruction of our common culture, the death of literature, and the end of nature; and we have been experiencing the social transformations wrought by such phenomena as disorganized capitalism, late capitalism, flexible accumulation, post-industrialism, the service economy, the post-scarcity economy, the information age, the third wave, postcoloniality, postmodernity, postnationalism, and globalization. For some, we are witnessing no less than the emergence of posthumanity or, still more urgently, ultra-humanity. These claims represent ends of narratives, fragmentations of master narratives, and increasingly globalist extensions of master narratives; they span a discursive range from the mandarin-academic to the populist-counterculture. Of late, in the popular arena, an accident of chronology has added a still further popular term to this mix, the proclamation of the twenty-first century as a key turning point in our collective history. 1 One of the most recent of these frames of reference is globalization. Around as a term in academic discourse since the 1980s, globalization has emerged recently as a respectable player in theory, spreading well beyond the anglophone sociology that gave it birth. Indeed, Malcom Waters is right, I believe, in arguing that “just as postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept of the 1900s.” 2 Many—including me, although ambivalently—have been trying to make it that. Generally speaking, globalization focuses on the [End Page 548] ways in which nonlocal factors interact with local ones in producing sociocultural identities and forms. The most ambitious incarnations of this interest has been to sketch narratives of changing global-local orders—that is, narratives of changing forms of worldwide interaction and integration, narratives of a succession of world-systems. 3 Globalization thus traces prehistories to our current hyperawareness of the interrelationship between local and global interactions, histories that, for some, date back to the expansion of the West, for others the Middle Ages, and for still others early civilizations and before. 4 At the same time, globalization provides a basis for describing what is unique about the present moment—the subject that concerns us here. It explores the grounds for the widespread perception that another significant reorganization of global structure and local sociocultural forms is underway at the present moment. Descriptions of contemporary global reorganization have been very varied and have been advanced in a large number of disciplinary discourses. Very broadly, the process has been pictured in two extreme ways. On the one hand, the process of contemporary globalization is characterized as a new stage in the narrative of capital, one named variously as late capitalism, a regime of flexible accumulation, and disorganized capitalism. As such, globalization means deeper penetration, integration, and postmodern hyperdevelopment. Fredric Jameson has argued that multinational capitalism “ends up penetrating and colonizing [the] . . . precapitalist enclaves of Nature and the Unconscious.” But “penetration” retains also a more geographic meaning, describing the forcible incorporation of remote, fourth world peoples and locales. Tighter integration means increasingly that capital goes above and below the nation, both splintering it and transnationalizing it. Capital encourages, on the one hand, transnationalization, and, on the other hand, subnational localization—to which the vocabulary of marketing has responded by inventing the term glocalization. Thus, for example, transnational corporations (TNCs) have, via disaggregated production and the transnationalization of finance, knit remote localities throughout the world together, and just-in-time production has helped make this happen in real time. Penetration and integration are usually accompanied by hyperdevelopment, which means commodification of all areas of experience, and the development of a new kind of global postmodern consumer culture of flexibly produced, heterogenous, customized simulations. [End Page 549] Opposing this version of recent globalization—one largely based on extending a narrative of capital into a reorganizing present—is a more interactive, often sociologically-based depiction of the process. This approach extends the discourses of nationalism, postcolonialism, and internationalism into different kind of transnationalism, one that privileges new transnational communications networks as key mechanisms. Tighter communicative integration of the globe means, potentially, the splintering of national communities locally and...