Imperfect Past: Globalization, Nationalism, and the Vanishing Intellectual

Imperfect Past: Globalization, Nationalism, and the Vanishing Intellectual Angel G. Loureiro teaches Spanüh literature, film, and critical theory at Princeton University. He is the editor of El gran desafÃ-o: feminismos, autobiografÃ-a, postmodernidad (1994), a selection of feminist texts on theory of autobiography. His most recent book is The Ethics of Autobiography. Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain. Currently, he is doing research on affections. One of the most obvious effects of globalization has been the creation of nets of interdependence at an unprecedented scale, with the global economy leading the way, and with the support of new forms of nearly instantaneous communication. In many ways, globalization has produced standardization , but it has also generated or exacerbated previously existing differences. Although the global scale of the economy and communications has modified, undermined or even eliminated the geographical borders of the nation-state, it has not necessarily produced a linguistic or cultural homogeneity. This is due to the status of the past, to national memories, to the overlapping and differing discourses about the nation, and to the coexistence of different temporalities. In a way, globalization consists of what one wants or is impelled to see in it. Like any new, unstable concept , globalization lends itself to the projection of personal anxieties, and one's view of it is inextricably linked to a "personal" way of thinking, to a way of thinking with which one identifies and that, conversely, shapes one's identity. Globalization is a personal question, it is a matter of one's thinking and affects, of one's ideology and affective links. Fredric Jameson's reflections on globalization show to what degree that phenomenon is a matter of ideology and affective investments. For Jameson, globalization is primarily a "communicational concept" but, he warns, such primacy should not veil its culArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 162 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies tural and economic dimensions. Jameson's view of globalization is ultimately pessimistic . In contrast with those who see globalization as a tolerant celebration of a plurality of cultures and forms of identities previously marginalized, Jameson argues that such plurality is just the other, dark side of the wealth and variety of economic alternatives offered by the free market economy: the multiplicity of cultures and identities would only be one more aspect oÃ- such an economy. Similarly, Jameson adds, the standardization of all countries forced to integrate into the global market has its dark side in the Americanization of all cultures and in the concomitant destruction of local differences. The English language, as "lingua franca of money and power," and American mass culture would be examples of the threat hovering over local forms of cultural production (Jameson 56-57, 59). The dangers Jameson sees in globalization can be condensed into a phenomenon that for him typifies postmodernity: "[t]he becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural" (60). Such complete overlapping between economy and culture means that "today no enclaves—aesthetic or other—are left in which the commodity form does not reign supreme" (70). According to that logic, Jameson's ideas would not escape the thorough commodification of culture that he perceives. And yet, that economicist logic, based on equivalences, coexists in Jameson's essay with another, different type of logic, a Hegelian one, centered around contradiction . These two logics rest on contrary premises and arrive at dissimilar results. Following Hegelian dialectics, Jameson's view of globalization as "unification and standardization" appears to be in conflict with his perception of the global as proliferation of cultural differences (64). Within the logic of proliferation of cultural commodities, the plurality offered by the free market can actually be a form of resistance to a state which is identified as "a malign and standardizing or despotic identity" (74). However, within another, higher form of reasoning, the enemy turns out to be transnational capitalism, Americanization and standardization. From this perspective, the nation-state and national culture are sites of resistance to the global market (74-75). By showing these contradictory positions, Jameson puts into practice Hegel's lesson according to which categories that are initially based on identity and difference turn out...