Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational

What can one say about transnational, citizenship, and humanities? The three key terms, combined in this fashion, probably sound novel, but do they bring anything new? Each of the contributors to this issue has proceeded with some degree of caution. We simply put three terms on the table, fully aware that each is fraught, that each can be ironized, and that their intimated directionality might be no more than an illusion. Rather than acting as a spur, three arrows pointing toward a brave new future, transnational, citizenship, and humanities might look like the latest symptoms of a world spinning out of control, occasioned on the one hand by the diminished sovereignty of the nation-state and on the other hand by the diminished value of our own work, both unstoppable, it seems, a downward spiral.

As the bombings in New York, Madrid, and London make abundantly clear, the continued existence of national borders only highlights the shared hazard of those inside those borders. And the continued existence of English departments only highlights the across-the-board decline of the discipline, the sense that innovation is now coming from fields other than our own. It is in this context, as we are being lumped again and again into corporate units—often with a less-than-happy profile—that aggregation becomes a pressing issue. Aggregation: not only as it produces random and nonrandom sets of casualties, but also as it generates different kinds of filiations on different scales, opening up the question of what counts as an entity, the platform on which it emerges, the agency available to it, and the pressure that this scalar variety exerts on more conventional forms, such as the form of the nation.

The work of Aihwa Ong is exemplary here. As an anthropologist, Ong tends to aggregate down rather than up, towards fairly small, empirically-constrained units; her goal is to test grand concepts against the delimited data of ethnographic fieldwork. On what scale should we study the transnational? How does it mesh with the scale of the nation-state? How does it act upon the latter—and how is it in turn acted upon—as a competing as well as a complementary regime of regulation? What is the relation between the general term and subsets of the term? In her Flexible Citizenship (1999), Ong disaggregates the transnational, breaking it down into one particular sampling population: the Asian business elite. Among this group, globe-trotting is nothing special. It is routinely done, raising no eyebrows, but also raising no hope in those who witness it. The cross-border activities that Ong documents are "Mandarin" circuits, the privilege of those holding multiple passports, combining migration with capital accumulation.

Transnationality of this sort points not to the emergence of a new collective unit—a global civil society, as Michael Walzer, Mary Kaldor, and John Keane have variously theorized that term¹ —but to the persistence of an old logic, the logic of capitalism. Market born and market driven, it is infinite in its geographical extension but all too finite in its aspirations. It offers no alternative politics, poses no threat to the sovereignty of the state.

This does not mean, however, that the state is an aggregate whose force is experienced by everyone in the same way, with equal benefit or equal opprobrium. In fact, what is interesting about Ong's work is that even as transnationality ceases to be a generalizable claim when broken down into one sampling unit, nationality, its symmetrical opposite, also suffers the same fate when the same sampling applies. Citizenship—the prime bearer of nationality—turns out not to be generalizable at all. When it is not inborn but granted through an application process—mediated by a bureaucracy, by paperwork, by testing—it is most often granted through a subtractive aggregation, in the sense that the new citizens are admitted only on reduced terms, unbundled and rebundled, into less than what they were. Ong's work here brings to mind the powerful argument by Etienne Balibar that nationalism is not incidentally but constitutively racist and that the nation-form might...