Dreaming on the Pyramid: Responses to Globalism in Mexican Visual Culture

The term "globalization" was coined at the beginning of the 1980s in the management schools of Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. It soon spread quickly, initially popularized in a series of articles on marketing strategies designed to rescue the world's advanced economies from the stagnation still lingering from the oil crisis of the mid-seventies—a crisis that had interrupted the pattern of post-war growth in the North American economy, the longest in history up to that time. Initially an economic concept, the word "globalism" would soon come into a dazzling critical fortune outside the marketing sphere upon being appropriated by neoliberal political discourse in the definition of a "new" capitalism. The term very soon penetrated the languages of sociology and anthropology as well, particularly in their application to the cultural field, where the concept of globalism threatened structures and mechanisms of social insertion and the very ideas of the world itself.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Latin languages had had their own term for globalization in French, mondialisation; in Spanish, mundialización. As globalization—came into linguistic currency in the 1980s, the Anglo Saxon word was at first paired with its Latin counterpart, which seemed to translate it perfectly. However, mundialización, as it had been understood up to that point, had never implied a diminishing of direct planning and control over national economiesa—concept introduced by the new theorists of globalization—nor the disappearance of borders, customs bureaucracies, and import taxes which, as Japanese scholar Kenichi Ohmae of Harvard University argued in his 1990 study of globalism, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, was necessary for the fluidification of the world economy. As the Marxist economist François Chesnais explains,

. . . the term mondialisation has the "unfortunate" effect of distilling the conceptual imprecision of the terms "global" and "globalization." More effectively than the word "global," the word mondial allows the introduction of the idea that, ifthe economy is mondialisé, it will soon be necessary to construct world-wide political institutions capable of intervening in its movements. That is precisely what the forces currently ruling the world's commerce react against so violently.

(15, translated from the French)

By their own analysis, the theorists of globalism of the early 1980s sought only to reactivate economies by increasing the demand for manufactured goods. Such a possibility required the development of new clients in peripheral countries which had not yet joined the consensus of global integration due to geographical isolation, slow economic growth—or, as in the case of Mexico and other Latin American nations, internal politics that upheld highly protectionist economic structures. But the proposals of globalism were in fact nothing new. They simply reformulated the basic mechanisms of a nineteenth-century imperialism now divested (at least in appearance) of its intrinsic aggression thanks to the integral involvement of national partners in its programs, from local companies to government agencies by means of incorporations, mergers and franchises. Such a globalization implied the relinquishment of certain key decision-making mechanisms—previously held firmly under the control of company boards of directors in the advanced economies—to a multiplicity of international agents in a system which now defined itself as a-centric, thereby doing away with the very notion of the periphery. The preeminent metaphor and mechanism of this process, already well established by the 1990s, was the Internet. It was the Internet's lack of conceptual precision, but also its promise as a utopia of flow , a cybernetic space without apparent rules or bureaucratic impediments—lacking both center and periphery—that assured the political fortunes of globalism and dismissed any dynamic possibilities that the termmundialización might have otherwise represented.

Coming at the end of the Cold War, globalism thus made it possible to imagine a homogeneous planet ruled by a general consensus, freed from the dampers that had held world economies in check since the nineteenth century because of the paranoia of nation-states over threats to their territorial or teleological integrity. In addition to promising the elimination...