Globalization without Environmental Crisis: The Divorce of Two Discourses in U.S. Culture

One

Today, most people in the U.S. would accept that globalization is one of the key features of our era—and that the world has been compressed and grown smaller, that contemporary travel and communications have put distant cultures in relationship with each other, that economic relationships are now global, that significant events and conditions in one location of the globe affect events and conditions in other others. Most, I believe, would go so far as to accept that there is, these days, no “outside” to this system of global relationships—that there is, at last a comprehensive and inclusive world system in place.

Some aspects of what students of globalization have asserted for several decades has, in short, become mainstream common knowledge. Serious globalization theory further seeks to conceptualize these relationships. It sees the global system alternatively, I believe, through the lens of narratives of expansion (as a new phase of capitalism or neo-imperialism now incorporating the whole world) and the elaboration of an ever more complexly relational system (as in the application of complexity theory to global relationships and exchanges).

As a narrative of expansion, globalization represents, for many, a further stage in the domination of the world by capitalism, or by neo-imperial Americanization, depending on one’s viewpoint. This is a state in which organized capitalism has given way to disorganized or late capitalism, and/or one in which transnational corporations have risen to global power and are rapidly imposing American-style capitalism and consumerism on even resistant local communities around the globe—a process has been popularly described as McDonaldization vs. McJihad. The process may upgrade and rapidly postmodernize some parts of the world; other parts, it may downgrade, even plunge into chaos. But versions of this chaos often also have a kind of postmodern façade, in their representation in the first world; Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy represents contemporary Africa and elsewhere as a postmodern heart of darkness of ethnic strife and environmental deterioration. According to this view, we are now in a time when the last local places have been, to use Fredric Jameson’s term, “penetrated” and hooked up to the global system (Jameson 49).

As a narrative of complexification or intensification, globalization also means that the world has increasingly constructed itself as a complex system—one in which the identities of the parts and the shape of the whole are continuously constructed and restructured in dynamic relationship with each other. From this viewpoint, globalization is a complex process that goes on within societies at a vast number of specific sites, even more than it is imposed by a monolithic force from without, as identities, attitudes, and events in different parts of the world are continuously formed and reformed in relationship to each other. Specific practices helping to globalize societies from within come on all scales and are dazzlingly various. A large variety of social practices, from accounting systems to conventions of popular photography and popular fiction change in response to each other; subnational entities like individuals, cities, and locally based NGOs establish global relationships, yoking them to faraway places sometimes as significantly as to their next door neighbors; and cultural identities are more and more formed with reference to global polyculturalism, and less in relation to centered local identities. Contemporary globalization is, in this reading, a new phase in a system that has bootstrapped itself into existence over time—something that has attracted a number of analysts, from Wallerstein to Appadurai, to catastrophe, chaos, and complexity theories. We’re now in a phase where global interactiveness has become more significantly decentered and much more overt than before, no longer managed so restrictively and ideologically obscured by bordered nation-states and national economies.

Most scholarly conceptualizations of globalization today weave these two models together in some way, and they also share an additional feature. The more sophisticated they are, the more they make it clear that contemporary globalization is not a qualitatively new era, but a continuation of a process of globalization that goes back centuries—either to older...