In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001) 773-802



[Access article in PDF]

Literature As Proleptic Globalization, or a Prehistory of the New Intellectual Property

Caren Irr


During 1999 and 2000, public protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C., helped to solidify a first world activist narrative about globalization. Focusing on the roles played by international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these protests described globalization as a face-off between corporate, regulatory bodies and the vast majority of the world's populace. 1 Further, they have drawn attention to the premises and effects of specific policies of the international institutions. In the activist rhetoric about globalization, disputes over debt servicing, structural adjustment, fair labor standards, and environmental regulations are not identified as the results of an aberrant form of neocolonialism. Instead, the antiglobalization protestors assert that all of these policies together amount to a reorganization of the economic and political forces that constitute contemporary capitalism. Giving these forces names, faces, and institutional specificity then makes it possible to begin to legitimate some alternatives.

It is in this spirit of a quest for alternatives [End Page 773] that I wish to ask what kind of literature is ultimately central to globalization. After all, literature is very much a question of international economic policy. Not only have national literatures historically taken on the responsibility of commenting on the condition of politics in a particular culture, but also, as a commodity, profession, and institution by which cultures speak to one another, literature is closely bound up with the practices of international trade.

To date, most theories of globalization have granted a prominent role to nonliterary culture or "media" (along with information technology, finance capital, reorganization of labor, declining sovereignty of nation-state, and other elements) when they describe contemporary developments. Sometimes these theories describe the "culture" transmitted by the media as a static collection of inherited values; 2 other times, culture seems a superstructural effect or response to market forces. 3 In still other versions, culture appears to offer a residual area of resistance where politically significant transformation of mass-produced forms takes place. 4 But in few of these discussions of globalization does the literary medium figure centrally; film, food, music, and fashion have been more common topics. Autobiographies of the education of postcolonial intellectuals often pay some attention to literature as a mode of representation, but one less frequently finds scholarship bringing a broadly defined materialist account of policy together with reflection on the economics of literature in particular.

I would like to add the following assertion to the existing efforts to survey and assess the emerging relation of culture and globalization (or, more narrowly, literature and globalization): in the context of globalization, "literature" as intellectual property forecasts the treatment of a wide array of the new economy's most valuable products. Along the way, literature does not lose its capacity to represent various political or social themes, nor does the struggle for new styles or voices cease to be significant. Contests over the power and reproduction of tradition also retain their force. Nonetheless, in the context of contemporary globalization, literature in its aspect as intellectual property has a historically original role. As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, literature as intellectual property, in earlier phases of capitalist development, operated first as a homology for mercantilist means of accumulation and then as a synecdoche for industrial expansion; in the context of globalization, literature as intellectual property operates proleptically. If we understand by globalization the outsourcing of major elements [End Page 774] of industrial production to the third world and the reorganization of much first world labor along post-Fordist lines, accompanied by an acceleration and geographical remapping of the routes of capital's circulation, then globalization is a process that relies heavily on the capitalization of lines of communication and the labor involved in the communications industries. While recent electronic communication technologies make this process possible, the forceful establishment of capitalist property relations in the texts that are...

pdf

Share