Tropics of Globalization: Reading the New North America

But since the best metaphor is never absolutely good, since otherwise it would not be a metaphor, does not bad metaphor always provide the best examples?

—Jacques Derrida

In the preface to Continental Shift: Free Trade and the New North America, William Orme, exasperated with the symbolic politics that accompanied the NAFTA debates, asserts, “By now, ‘the Nafta debate’ is no longer about the agreement itself, or about Mexico, but about competing domestic political agendas and irreconcilable world views.” Countering this substitution of politics and ideology for economics, Orme declares, “But, Nafta isn’t a metaphor—and neither is Mexico” (vii). While Orme’s assertion reflects a commonsense wisdom, its force dissipates when, at the beginning of the first chapter, he introduces his own NAFTA metaphor:

To be ‘for’ or ‘against’ greater North American trade is much like being for or against the weather. Like it or not, the continent’s economic integration is fast becoming a reality.

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Orme thus effaces the very material specificity for which he calls. Figuring NAFTA as the weather, Orme not only naturalizes capitalism, he universalizes it, the fluid movements of floating capital becoming so many high and low pressure systems in the global atmosphere. NAFTA would seem, then, to be inevitable, a force beyond our control, a veritable law of nature. By rejecting and then surreptitiously endorsing metaphor, Orme is able to trade on the currency of a seemingly stable referent even as he capitalizes on linguistic volatility.

Ironically, Orme’s use of metaphor offers an object lesson in how, to borrow from Gayatri Spivak, “literary criticism might supplement the social sciences.” ¹ While, by separating the linguistic from the economic, Orme would seem to elide any position from which literary critics—as those scholars trained in the tracking of metaphor—could participate in discussions of NAFTA, his own redeployment of metaphor demonstrates the inescapably tropological character of language. Through the metaphorical extension and effacement of NAFTA, Orme figures an atmospheric vantage above the “new North America” that disguises a particular neoliberal position within the U.S.—a position that is revealed through an analysis of the “literary” aspects of his language. Literary critics emerge, then, particularly well-poised to intervene in debates about NAFTA specifically, and, as I will suggest, globalization more generally, insofar as we use the protocols of the profession to contribute self-conscious, careful discourse analyses. My aim here is not to decide, therefore, whether NAFTA is a metaphor, but rather to investigate how the tracking of metaphor can be a political intervention in the discourses on globalization produced in the United States.

As Orme’s simile indicates, NAFTA—as a particular trade agreement between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico—inevitably raises the larger phenomenon of globalization, the prevailing “wind” (to extend the metaphor) that makes NAFTA appear inevitable. Indeed, NAFTA, as a mechanism in the larger process of globalization, is usefully viewed as a metaphor even as it is also inescapably material: whether it is understood as a purely regional agreement, or as a prelude to a global free trade zone, NAFTA cannot be conceived outside of the larger questions of the globalization of capitalism and of culture. ² Thus, as Frederick Mayer argues, “we need to consider NAFTA not as the 2000-page legal document it was to the technical experts, but as a symbol standing for much larger issues” (258).

Indeed, the specificity of NAFTA may furnish a useful corrective to much of the globalization theory produced in the U.S. which, as Alys Eve Weinbaum and Brent Hayes Edwards suggest, tends not to be attentive to the site of its own production, and, thus, often either effaces the U.S. altogether, or decenters it only to recenter it. Weinbaum and Edwards’ countermeasure, a self-reflexive hermeneutic they dub “critical globality,” offers a suggestive new reading practice for U.S. critics in an era of globalization. Targeting particularly the falsely universalizing notion of “global culture,” Weinbaum and Edwards point out that “globalization” is constituted in particular discursive contexts, and, as a U.S. scholar, one must become “conscious of the place...