Becoming Transnational and Becoming Machinery in Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seamen

The concept of transnationalism raises important questions with respect to the ways in which individuals define themselves within a given nation. The idea that a nation can consist as a cohesive singular entity is challenged as transnational communities undermine the idea that the symbolic structures, political systems, and economic centers singularly define a specific nation. Transnational communities re-present complex sets of relations that cannot be characterized as the product of or are in the service of one specific nationality. At the same time, global capitalism has the potential to erode or efface all claims to the multiple sets of relations that characterize transnational experiences by arranging all experiences within a pre-existing set of categories that do not recognize the multiple dimensions of the material conditions of existence. There is an antithesis between the productive drives of individuals involved in creating forms of existence that are not already symbolized and coded and the large economic power bases that must conscript individuals into a codified system of global capital. In this paper, I wish to begin by discussing some of the ways in which transnationalism is defined; while at the same time, I wish to explore some of the complex theoretical underpinnings of transnational discourse. By taking the language of transnationalism and exploring some of the theoretical concepts that this language might imply, we can then begin to talk about some specific instances of transnationalism depicted by Francisco Goldman in The Ordinary Seamen.

Recent scholarship on the subject of transnationalism has raised the prospect that the current language used to define immigrant experiences is becoming increasingly inadequate to describe the complexity of these experiences as they unfold in a highly mobile and technologically connected world. The very real prospect that im-migrants in the United States, for example, may maintain strong ties economically, socially, and culturally in both the host country and the country of origin together with the fact that the economic, social, and cultural relationships that are forged in the host country are intertwined with the country of origin raises the need to examine the complexity of emerging subjectivities that are imbricated in multiple and possibly conflicting nationalities and ethnicities. Ideas such as a fixed national identity and stable ethnic categories are becoming destabilized to the extent that the subjective experience of nationhood must be re-examined.

The set of symbolic practices by which individuals conceive of themselves as "belonging" to a nation operate on an unconscious level. We might view these symbolic practices as a kind of collective interpellation organized around specific symbols, ideas, and beliefs that allow a given population to cohere around a national identity. Lauren Berlant defines this condition thus:

The "National Symbolic"—the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to the "law" in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity; through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright.

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This "National Symbolic" is what is at stake in a newly emerging set of subjectivities that are no longer organized around a single set of experiences, beliefs and laws. If transnationalism and the experiences of the transmigrant involve the "discursive practices" of two or more nation states, then the possibility of a stabile National Symbolic becomes problematic. The status of natural law by which a nation is organized as a coherent singularity is precisely what is subverted through the emergence of transnationalism. The notion that there are large populations of people who define their status within two or more national subjectivities problematizes the stability of a fixed National Symbolic.

In a recent study by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, the language and phenomena of transnationalism is defined against older concepts of immigration that they find inadequate. Indeed, the very term "transnationalism," as it has been applied, is criticized...