Revisiting the Global Imaginary: Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities: Essays in Honor of Manfred Steger 3030149102, 9783030149109

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REVISITING THE GLOBAL IMAGINARY Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities: Essays in Honor of Manfred Steger

Edited by Chris Hudson and Erin K. Wilson

Revisiting the Global Imaginary

Chris Hudson  •  Erin K. Wilson Editors

Revisiting the Global Imaginary Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities: Essays in Honor of Manfred Steger

Editors Chris Hudson School of Media and Communication RMIT University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Erin K. Wilson Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalisation University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-030-14910-9    ISBN 978-3-030-14911-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934200 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Shanghai Bull, designed by sculptor Arturo Di Modica, 2010. Photo taken by Tommaso Durante Cover design by Ran Shauli This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

In the last few decades Global Studies has emerged as an important field of inquiry. It has generated a great deal of academic interest and insight as well as a huge volume of publications. While there have been a number of distinguished academics and scholars who have deepened our understanding, enlarged the body of knowledge, and helped disseminate ideas about our changed consciousness in the global era, Manfred Steger’s extensive body of work has made him one of the most significant and influential scholars working in this field today. As an eminent global intellectual, he has been instrumental in shaping the consciousness of a generation of scholars and students and orienting them toward critical thinking on questions of globalization and what it means for social life in the twenty-first century. As a polymath, Steger has absorbed influences from a wide range of sources. Notable among them are Roland Robertson’s assertion that globalization is a revolution in consciousness, and Charles Taylor’s study of social imaginaries. Steger’s account of the rise of the global imaginary is a masterpiece of original thinking that has enriched intellectual lives across all continents. As a seminal work, it is an essential reading for any student of globalization, globalism, or the global era. Steger’s contribution to the humanities and social sciences should not be underestimated. To mark his 30-year career as a teacher, researcher, and mentor, and to celebrate his instrumental role in the development of Global Studies as a field of academic inquiry, we offer these essays as a festschrift. The essays demonstrate through subject matter, methodology or epistemological foundations, their debt to Manfred Steger’s research or v

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acknowledgment of his influence. They investigate the theoretical implications of Steger’s work using a variety of approaches, and, by locating sites where the global imaginary might be observed, examine the manifestations of a global consciousness in mediated and actual spaces, symbolic regimes, political action, and ideologies. The volume begins with an introduction by Daniel E. Esser and James H.  Mittelman outlining the transition from International Studies to Global Studies and ends with an Afterword by Terrell Carver that provides a summary of Steger’s contribution to the field in light of the essays presented. The volume is divided into two parts: Part I: Manfred Steger and the Theorizing of Globalization introduces the theoretical framework of Global Studies and positions Steger’s global imaginary in the field by considering its evolution, ontological foundations and significance, global methodologies, and its transdisciplinary framework. Part II: Manfred Steger’s Global Imaginary and Everyday Life locates the global imaginary in specific spaces where the global and the local may be observed in a complex arrangement of layering. It offers an investigation of the practices associated with the reproduction of the global imaginary in such diverse sites as mobile money, Irish pubs, cyber-capitalism, the globalization of urban space, music in post-apartheid South Africa, global political movements, and national histories, among others. Melbourne, VIC, Australia Groningen, The Netherlands

Chris Hudson Erin K. Wilson

Contents

Part I Manfred Steger and the Theorizing of Globalization   1 1 Blazing Scholarly Ground: From International Studies to Global Studies  3 Daniel E. Esser and James H. Mittelman 2 Evolving Global Studies 17 Mark Juergensmeyer 3 The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice 33 Paul James 4 Global Studies: Contested Fields, One Domain? 49 James Goodman Part II Manfred Steger’s Global Imaginary and Everyday Life  65 5  Searching for Sugar Man: Thinking on the Border of the Global/Apartheid Imaginary 67 Isaac Kamola

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Contents

6 Global Imaginaries Beyond Markets: The Globalization of Money, Family, and Financial Inclusion 85 Supriya Singh 7 Into the Glorious Future: The Utopia of Cybernetic Capitalism According to Google’s Ideologues105 Timothy Erik Ström 8 Imagining Global Non-violent Consciousness123 Amentahru Wahlrab 9 The Symbolic Power of the Global: Interpreting Cultural and Ideological Change in Melbourne, Australia141 Tommaso Durante 10 The ‘Craic’ Goes Global: Irish Pubs and the Global Imaginary155 Chris Hudson 11 Afterword175 Terrell Carver Index183

Notes on Contributors

Terrell Carver  is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK, and a graduate of Columbia University, USA, and the University of Oxford, UK.  He has published widely on Marx, Engels and Marxism, and on sex/gender/sexuality studies. Together with Manfred B.  Steger he co-edits the book series Globalization. His latest book is Marx (2017), taking political activism as the focus. He will be the author of ‘Interpretive Methods’ in the Sage Handbook of Political Science, and his current project is a student book on masculinities and international relations. Tommaso Durante  is Lecturer in Global Studies in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the RMIT University, Australia, and Instructor in International Relations at the Center for Global Politics at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. He is the author, designer, and administrator of The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary and of Global Visual Politics. He is Honorary Urban Scholar with the UN Global Compact—Cities Programme (UNGCCP), the urban arm of the United Nations Global Compact. He is also an award-winning visual artist. His latest published work is ‘Visual Ideology and Social Imaginary: A New Approach to the Aesthetics of Globalization’ in Spaces & Flows: An International Journal of Urban & Extra Urban Studies. (2018) Vol. 9 Issue 1, pp. 15–34. Daniel  E.  Esser  is Associate Professor  in the School of International Service and a member of the Honors Faculty at American University, USA. His research focuses on understanding and comparing social processes that forge legitimate representation where democratic institutions ix

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are fractured or absent. He also continues to pursue scholarly interests in  local elites, subnational governance, and communities’ responses to repression and terror. His research takes him frequently to Latin America and South Asia, and his findings have been published in leading international journals, such as World Development, Global Public Health, the Journal of Social Policy, and Communication Theory. James Goodman  researches social movements, climate change, and globalization at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, where he leads the Climate Justice Research Centre. He has edited or co-authored more than 12 books, and edited several journal special issues. Books include Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy, co-authored with Manfred Steger and Erin Wilson in 2012. Since then his work has centered on climate movements and changing energy and climate policies, including the co-authored Climate Upsurge and edited Special Issues with Energy Policy and Energy Research and Social Sciences. Chris Hudson  is Associate Professor of Asian Media and Culture in the School of Media and Communication at the RMIT University, Australia. She has published widely on cultural politics in Asia, including Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore (2013), a study of the politics of fertility, narrative control, and resistance in Singapore. She is a co-author of Theatre and Performance in the Asia-­ Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era with Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, and Barbara Hatley. Funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Scheme, this book examines the diverse theater and performance traditions in the Asia-Pacific region. She is coeditor (with Bart Barendregt) of Globalization and Modernity in Asia: Performative Moments (2018). Paul  James  is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity at the Western Sydney University, Australia, where he is Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. He is Scientific Advisor to the Mayor of Berlin, and a Metropolis Ambassador of Urban Innovation. He is an editor of Arena Journal and author or editor of 35 books including Nation Formation and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism. Other recent books include a 16-volume collection mapping the field of globalization. The collection is the most comprehensive and systematic ­representation of the field of globalization studies, comprising 7000 pages or 3.5 million words.

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Mark Juergensmeyer  is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies and Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair of Global and Sikh Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, where he was Founding Director of the Global Studies Department and Founding Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is author or editor of over 20 books, including Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, and the award-winning Terror in the Mind of God. He has also edited Thinking Globally, and co-edited The Encyclopedia of Global Studies (with Helmut Anheier) and The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (with Manfred Steger and Saskia Sassen). Isaac Kamola  is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, USA.  His research examines critical globalization studies, the political economy of higher education, and African anticolonial theory. He is author of Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (forthcoming) and editor of Politics of African Anticolonial Archive (2017) and The Transnational Politics of Higher Education (2016). James H. Mittelman  is Distinguished Research Professor and University Professor Emeritus in the School of International Service, American University, USA. He held the Pok Rafeah Chair at the National University of Malaysia, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, USA, and is Honorary Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Mittelman is author of several books, including Ideology and Politics in Uganda: From Obote to Amin, The Globalization Syndrome, Hyperconflict: Globalization and Insecurity, and Implausible Dream: The World Class University and Repurposing Higher Education. Supriya Singh  is a writer and sociologist. She is Professor of Sociology of Communication at the RMIT University, Australia. Her research centers around money as a social phenomenon that shapes and is shaped by social relationships and cultural norms. Singh has written of the gender and morality of money across cultures, and money as a medium of care and abuse. Her books include Money, Migration and Family: India to Australia (2016), Globalization and Money: A Global South Perspective (2013), and Marriage Money: The Social Shaping of Money in Marriage and Banking (1997).

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Timothy Erik Ström  works as a researcher for Western Sydney University, Australia’s Institute for Culture and Society, and teaches Global Political Economy at the RMIT University, Australia. Manfred Steger was a supervisor of his recently completed PhD thesis. He is the author of the forthcoming Globalization and Surveillance and lives in Melbourne where he is a regular contributor to Arena and writes science fiction. Amentahru  Wahlrab is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and History at The University of Texas at Tyler, USA. His research interests lie at the intersection of globalization, political economy, political violence, and political social theory. He is co-author, with Manfred B. Steger, of What Is Global Studies? Theory and Practice (2017) and co-editor, with Michael J.  McNeal, of US Approaches to the Arab Uprisings: International Relations and Democracy Promotion (2018). He is also the book review editor for the journal Populism. Erin  K.  Wilson  is Associate Professor of Politics and Religion at the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalisation, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen, Netherlands. Her research focuses broadly on religion, secularism, and global justice, with particular interest in the politics of forced migration, human rights, gender, and climate change. Her books include After Secularism (Palgrave, 2012), Justice Globalism (with Manfred Steger and James Goodman, 2013), and The Refugee Crisis and Religion (co-edited with Luca Mavelli, 2016).

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 9.1

Levels of social meaning in relation to levels of the social 43 “Balanced Global Living, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, Australia”. Digital image. Tommaso Durante/The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary. January 2016 147 Fig. 10.1 The Man in the Moon Irish pub, Kyoto, Japan. (Photo by Chris Hudson)167

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PART I

Manfred Steger and the Theorizing of Globalization

CHAPTER 1

Blazing Scholarly Ground: From International Studies to Global Studies Daniel E. Esser and James H. Mittelman

Containing multiple perspectives and methodological approaches, GS [global studies] both draws on and departs from traditional International Relations (IR) analysis of the post-World War II period, which was largely organized around the two opposing ‘schools’ of realism and idealism. Still, the differences between IR and GS clearly outweigh their similarities. (Steger 2015, 4)

Manfred Steger has become one of the leading scholars of globalization research and helped shape the field of global studies. His métier is defining the nexus of ideas and politics in a turbulent era. Steger dares his audiences to contemplate the construct of the world as bounded into discrete compartments of sovereign nation-states aspiring for modernity and development. He asks, ‘Why view them through disciplinary and interdisciplinary prisms?’ Better, Steger postulates, to reimagine multiple categories and modes of analysis. He lays the groundwork by probing two imaginaries. One celebrates the virtues of positivism, which purports to offer value-free inquiry and universal propositions. Another proclaims the virtues of a liberal, capitalist order—a hegemonic system rather than myriad hierarchies of power and wealth. Unlike this West-driven, liberal internationalism D. E. Esser (*) • J. H. Mittelman School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_1

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characteristic of certain currents in the revival of Kantian reformism (e.g., Held 2005), Steger refocuses the lens to allow for epistemologies and cosmologies from below. Going further, Steger also explores how these imaginaries are objectified as popular narratives. Rich in insights, his work is an important corrective to practices that silence the exclusion of dissident voices and marginalization of subaltern peoples. He calls for reexamining the fundamental assumptions of the global knowledge structure, especially at universities, and decentering thinking. As the above quotation illustrates, Steger’s scope is vast: the canvas encompasses theory and methodology, which, in turn, beg deep ontological and epistemological issues. To trace how Steger has blazed this trail, this introductory essay is intended as a baseline for mapping his analyses of the global. It is also an overview of the chapters that follow, each one interrogating his conceptualization of ‘the global.’ First, we will mine features of Steger’s biography. The second section delimits major themes in his corpus of publications. The third task is to identify strengths in the ways in which he reframes our field. Four, we note the challenges he presents to other thinkers. Lastly, our synopsis of the chapters ahead looks at how contributors to this volume attempt to meet them, pose related questions, and formulate their propositions. We close with suggestions on how to continue the quest for global studies in ways that build on Steger’s work.

Gaining Cosmopolitan Perspective What sparked Steger’s creativity and prompted him to tilt against the mainstream, albeit without discarding standard concerns such as the need for methodological rigor? What are the hallmarks of his intellectual formation? Although there is no pat formula for how to develop a cosmopolitan perspective and become a global citizen, much can be derived from an individual’s story. An important tool, bio-ethnographies of reflexive scholars cast light on the ways that a researcher works and seeks nuanced understanding (see, e.g., Geertz 1995). While entanglement between the self and our calling in the academy is intricate and cannot be cleanly divided, a bio-ethnography offers a window on innovation and potential for parametric transformation. Hardly anecdotal or matters of curiosity, the personal story is melded to professional changes in international studies and, at the same time, reveals the sources of sensibilities.

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Years of study and experience outside the university led to Steger’s pioneering scholarship. For him, this early period as a practitioner in the Austrian banking system is marked by breadth of learning, ways of knowing the inner self, and empathy for the plight of others. In his country of origin, Steger earned a graduate certificate in banking and finance at the First Austrian Bank Business College, Vienna, Austria. Subsequently, he worked for six years as an investment and loan officer at the First Austrian Bank in Vienna. From that standpoint, Steger observed the ideas in action and policy framework of national and global capitalism. He learned how money culture, with its rationalist thinking, can erode other forms of reasoning, as in the fine arts, music, and philosophy, not only in Austria but also the European region of the global arena. (This is not to overlook corporate funding for museums, symphonies, and humanistic studies— market-state hybrids in philanthropic capitalism that effectively shrink the public sphere.) Eventually, Steger chose to become a refugee from the world of investment and finance, where he had a bird’s-eye view of the dynamics of financial globalization. Steeped in an intellectual environment of European philosophy and social theory, he turned to theorists cognizant of the power of intersubjectivity. The oeuvres of Friedrich Nietzsche (1964, 20–21; 1968, 156–63) maintain that social institutions gravitate toward isomorphism and lament that education can breed an unhealthy conformism. Karl Mannheim (1936) chronicles the history of the term ideology and argues that ideologies afford insight into the basis of societies. Moreover, Carl Schmitt (1932, 1950) attracts attention from the intellectual left and the right for his distinction between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies,’ his concept of the sovereign, and the ‘state of exception,’ as today when laws are suspended for the treatment of suspected terrorists and for certain groups of immigrants. These thinkers threw light on the power of ideas. And Steger pursued this avenue of inquiry by tracking the role of the knowing class, those who produce ideologies, disseminate them, and objectify them. He found this route largely through self-reflectivity. While searching for transcendent meaning in his own life and various belief systems, Steger explored myriad cultural forms and religions. After training in Zen Buddhism, he taught Zen in Honolulu and Princeton. With his wife, the popular writer Perle Besserman, he co-authored books on how to make this spiritual practice accessible in the Western world (Besserman and Steger 1991; Steger and Besserman 2001). These texts

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reflect Steger’s inquisitive habits of mind and an appreciation for the value of tolerance. Other long-term interests are the writings of early socialist thinkers, resulting in volumes in German and English on Engels, Marx, and Eduard Bernstein (Steger and Carver 1999; Steger 1996). Meanwhile, Steger’s range spanned studies of violence and non-violence, especially Gandhian ethics (Steger and Lind 1999, plus several journal articles on this philosophy), as well as indigenous knowledge and local experiences. Steger is also a seasoned university administrator, an inspiring teacher admired by droves of pupils, and an esteemed colleague. He has logged time as dean (head) of the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, as well as director of its Globalism Research Centre, and as senior advisor on international education and globalization in the College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa. The recipient of excellence in teaching awards, he has distinguished himself in the classroom. Chapters in this volume authored by his former students, some of them his coauthors, attest to how Steger’s pedagogical skills have opened the gates of learning. He has equipped these cosmopolitan citizens with the abilities to make a better world. So, too, Steger is known for his generous ways of relating to colleagues, such as writing numerous letters of recommendation, drafting copious comments on papers and dissertations, and refereeing for several journals. In outreach to the general public, Steger has been a consultant to a PBS television series and for government. His many books, some in the Rowman & Littlefield book series he co-edits with Terrell Carver, have won plaudits from reviewers, are written lucidly, and sell widely. They consistently challenge master narratives, everyday representations of a commodified and messy world, and taken-for-granted protocols in the academy. Inasmuch as ideas are powerful engines of historical transformation, as in the French, American, and Bolshevik revolutions, and with various nationalisms, he wades into controversies: among them, that the human condition may be understood in terms of the end of ideology, the end of history, and/or a flat world. Steger’s mentoring and writing awaken an awareness that subnational, national, and regional identities can be complementary to solidarities at a planetary level. Holding that compartmentalizing membership groups into ‘we’ and ‘they,’ ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ can be used as a form of domination masking multiple self-identities, he views

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othering as a form of social control. Relatedly, Steger highlights the fluidity, uncertainty, and insecurity in daily life, and explicates the driving forces of modernity, mobility, and interconnectedness. In a word: globalization is understood as ‘the expansion and intensification of social relations across world-space and world-time’ (Steger 2008, 246).

Themes The persistent, most recurrent themes in Steger’s work are fourfold: identifying the limitations of disciplinary social science, rethinking the knowledge structure through transdisciplinarity, developing globalization research and global studies, and translating ideational constructs into action in the form of ‘justice globalism.’ Let us now consider each of these interconnected moves, beginning with how the Americanized disciplines emerged. Disciplinary knowledge materialized at different times in multiple locations. Whereas Germany preceded the United States and the United Kingdom on this path, American higher education—to have worldwide influence—originated mainly as a hybrid of English and German forms, and gradually developed its own national features. From the 1870s, disciplinary specializations and new graduate programs were established. During the 1890–1910 period, disciplines, in the contemporary sense of academic units, demarcated the organization of knowledge in American universities. Departmental lines were constructed, though the timing of when they were drawn varied by discipline. The growth of universities and career mobility among them meant that the knowledge structure required internal order. Disciplinary networks were channeled according to a division of labor. The market supplied jobs for academics whose intellectual life was arranged in units of concentrated learning (passage adapted from Mittelman 2018, 101, which builds on Abbott 2001, 131–36). It is important to note that this shift was from general education to a disciplinary system. In the American knowledge structure, it blended the English residential college and Germany’s Humboldtian emphasis on research and graduate study (Mittelman 2018, 101). The trouble is that broad world issues, such as climate change, criminal networks, migration, and pandemics, do not fit tidily within the boundaries dividing disciplines. Alert to the barriers between branches of knowledge, as well as ways in which the notion of territoriality can deflect attention from novel agglomerations of space and time spurred by

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c­ ross-­border flows and extraterritoriality, Steger piloted a transdisciplinary perspective on globalizing processes. Skeptical of institutionalized disciplines and overspecialization, he recognized knowledge hegemonies, ways of policing in the academy, and forms of gatekeeping in the professoriate. Preferring pluralism, he was ever alert to Euro-centric, top-down thinking. In that, departmental structures favor ideational cohesion, and transdisciplinarity offers a more variegated way to build theory and solve problems. Succinctly stated, it may be grasped as ‘that which is at once between disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline’ (Nicolescu 2010, 22). Rather than adopting a relativist view that anything goes in social research, transdisciplinarity calls for relaxing disciplinary borders and integrating knowledge sets. It conjoins cognate disciplines without dissolving them. In addition, transdisciplinarity can be deployed to encourage scholars to keep their sights on both rigor and creativity (see Esser and Mittelman, forthcoming). Beyond underscoring the drawbacks to a territorial preoccupation embedded in state-centric thinking and methodological nationalism, Steger contends that global studies promises an opportunity to reframe ‘the national.’ Pulling together themes throughout his career, he designs a latticework of global studies that consists of four elements: globalization, transdisciplinarity, space and time, and critical thinking. His book with Amentahru Wahlrab (2017) examines each one of these mainstays and, then, the integrative knowledge structure. The two authors detail the composition of these constitutive themes and what links them. Prior investigation is incorporated in their explanatory chapters. Especially important to this effort, Paul James and Steger’s exposition of the conceptual origins and genealogical lineages of ‘globalization’ is a building block (2015). Their empirical digging taps interviews with 12 pioneers of global studies. The diggers’ findings are imbued in the normative implications of Steger’s scholarship as it relates to political practice. Steger and his collaborators home in on the intersection of ethics and policy. They posit that ‘market globalism’ dominates the political sphere, yet is subject to multiple crises, as in the realms of finance, food, and climate. Organic intellectuals, some of them scholar-activists, dialogically engage this process. Steger et al. (2013) point to ‘justice globalism’ as an alternative. As they demonstrate in theoretical terms and empirically, this imaginary connects global governance, specific sites, and social movements. It counters market ideology and projects visions. Neither utopian

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nor elegiac in their outlook, the co-authors and their interviewees deliver a sober appraisal of possibilities in our chaotic era. It is a grounded imaginary, which the trio of researchers accesses by relying on historicism, discourse analysis, and several interviews with members of resistance groups. They spell out strategies and tactics already being employed in attempts to steer history toward social justice.

Chapter Overview Tracing the emergence of global studies in Chap. 2 of this book, Mark Juergensmeyer registers the intrepidness of Steger’s scholarly vision. While to some extent standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, Steger was among a small group of geographically dispersed scholars who, at least initially, were writing into (and onto, one might argue) an epistemological structure that showed little tolerance for heterodox thinking on ‘the global.’ Only for the past decade has Steger’s notion of a ‘global imaginary’ seemed not only compelling, but in fact selfevident. Focusing on transnationality, interdisciplinarity, trans-­temporality, and critical perspectives, Juergensmeyer introduces the main pillars of Steger’s notion of globalization as space-time transcendence—or distanciation, as Anthony Giddens (1990) would have it. Juergensmeyer stresses the centrality of problem-focused approaches and historicity in global studies and credits Steger with a distinctly critical reading of globalization. He then turns to the global study of religion as an example of global studies and shows how the Lacanian concept of a ‘social imaginary’ has been recast by Steger in global terms. Yet he also emphasizes that ‘the global’ is not an end point; there remains work to be done. In particular, Juergensmeyer points to several ‘creative tensions’ within the emerging field as potentially constructive disequilibria that allow its participants to turn disputes into new insights. Whether the global scale is merely a theme, or in fact the field’s primary focus is one persistent axis of debate; the relationship between global theory and praxis is another. The latter, Juergensmeyer argues, contextualizes the role of individual scholars within the global imaginary, and he concludes by affirming the need for critical inquiry in conjunction with a principled embrace of a pluralist epistemology. For Paul James, Steger’s reformulation of the imaginary of a worldwide social collective ‘as a patterned convocation of the [global] social whole’ captures the zeitgeist of contemporary humanity. In Chap. 3, Paul James

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raises theoretical questions that interrogate the theoretical tensions between a global imaginary and other ontological formations such as modernity. In particular, he wonders how the global imaginary becomes lived reality. Furthermore, James distinguishes the ‘spirit of an age’ as an imagined essence from a global imaginary as the contemporary ‘spirit of humanity,’ which he argues is rooted in social practice. Tracing the concept of an imaginary from Voltaire and G.W.F. Hegel to Martin Heidegger and Jean-­Paul Sartre to Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger, James shows that ‘an imaginary is not the particular ideas or beliefs held by people, but the collation of those ideas in a larger social frame.’ In other words, it is about practice as much as about ideas. Steger’s contribution, James then postulates, is singular to the extent that it helps clarify and simplify the concept of a social imaginary amid globalization as practice. In Chap. 4, James Goodman takes up Juergensmeyer’s observation concerning ongoing debates within global studies. Working through Steger’s taxonomy of ‘mavericks,’ ‘insurgents,’ and ‘nomads,’ Goodman suggests that the ‘oxymoron of a trans-disciplinary discipline’ has produced a variety of approaches to institutionalization from within. Goodman then explores how global studies continues to debate ‘the proper or primary units of analysis’ and its related methodological implications for addressing the ‘levels of analysis’ problem. He posits that tensions in the ontology of international studies date back to the field’s inception. What one of us has called ‘the fourth debate’ (Mittelman 2002, 12) in international studies, namely on its place in the social sciences amid globalization, thus marked a continuation of intellectual contention rather than merely a moment of crisis. Indeed, Goodman demonstrates how global studies as a field is saturated with fierce disagreements over the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the role of culture in the analysis of either one. In particular, Goodman shows how ‘flows’ have emerged as the field’s principal data points. Through Steger’s trademark ‘intellectual giddiness’ (rather than ontological determinism), Goodman sees how global studies avoids the dual pitfalls of methodological state-ism and nationalism. If it continues on this path, Goodman argues, global studies might well be a harbinger of a ‘post-revolutionary science’ that eschews ideological ontologies. Isaac Kamola’s chapter focuses on a specific type of flows: the vibes of music. Reflecting on the Swedish–British–Finnish documentary film Searching for Sugar Man (2012), which chronicles the transnational flow of culture amid (one might even argue in spite of) global commodification

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and cultural convergence, Kamola argues that global flows can, in fact, serve as conduits for political and social emancipation. This is even more striking considering that Sixto Rodriguez’s music rose to fame in South Africa during the apartheid era. ‘The story is of a once isolated world expanding outward,’ Kamola argues, and his case of Rodriguez’s music is a powerful illustration of Steger’s work. But Kamola also reminds readers that ‘growing interconnection existed alongside, and parallel to, unexplored and underappreciated stories of exclusions and marginalizations,’ not only during apartheid but also in the experiences of Rodriguez and his immediate family. In conclusion, Kamola contends that ‘the redemption narrative that makes the movie so compelling is only possible because it ignores the very complex realities of political and economic struggle that shape both Detroit and Cape Town’ and provides an alternative reading of the global imaginary. It engages Walter Mignolo’s (2000) notion of a ‘modern/colonial’ duality of the flipsides and fault lines of global progress. Rather than substantiating an uncontested rise of ‘the global,’ Searching for Sugar Man exemplifies, in Kamola’s formulation, moments ‘when the linear narrative of globalization begins to crack.’ It is in these moments, he submits, that global studies generates new insights. In contrast, Supriya Singh’s research on financial inclusion and international migrant remittances highlights the gendered dimension of global monetary flows, a facet of socioeconomic globalization that has thus far received relatively less attention in Steger’s work. Written from a global South perspective, Singh’s chapter illustrates powerfully how a cross-scalar analysis of global flows is inconceivable without a shared idea of what constitutes (in)justice, despite the persistent plurality of culturally bound moralities. By revisiting microfinance and remittances, Singh counsels that ‘the gender of money, that is, the way men and women perceive, own, manage and control money in the household and family’ deserves more attention in global studies. At the same time, her work also illustrates how analyses of the social functions of money as well as of the practices of financial institutions require fine-grained empirical research at multiple levels. Paralleling Kamola’s call for multi-sited analysis, Timothy Erik Ström’s chapter then offers an incisive critique of deterministic elite visions of global capitalism. Drawing on arguments first developed by Steger (2009), Ström presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of public statements by senior managers at Google between 1998 and 2017. Cutting against the privilege of technology over politics under neoliberal practices of modernity, Ström suggests that contemporary cyber-capitalism is predicated on an

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overconfidence in scientism while turning a blind eye to the inequalities it produces. He finds that ‘members of the Google elite are of the opinion that a good dose of technologically-augmented consumerism will cure the world’s ills,’ a view that negates the persistence of structurally rooted injustice. Ström cautions against such a ‘utopian future of total automation’ by arguing that it both legitimizes and depoliticizes ‘the inequalities, exploitation and domination of the present’ while at the same time precluding alternative approaches to global social practices. Ultimately, Ström’s chapter notes that the ‘global imaginary’ is always plural, and therefore always political, a condition that might explain the tenacity of ontological debates that other contributors to this collection highlight as well. In the next chapter, Amentahru Wahlrab posits that the global imaginary—while certainly not a recent phenomenon—reached a pivot during the 2010 Arab Spring when hundreds of thousands acted on a global recognition of the injustices of illiberal capitalism. Against this backdrop, he proposes that ‘globalization helped to shift consciousness insofar as our ability to find out what is happening all over the world at near instantaneous rates means that territorial limits become differently meaningful, not meaningless.’ Wahlrab then asks whether and how such transnational movements can sustain a non-violent consciousness—a timely question given the rise of national populisms and the resurgence of authoritarian governance. Moreover, as Wahlrab also mentions, Steger (2000) himself has sensitized analysts to Mahatma Gandhi’s practical limitations in his quest for non-violence. At the same time, Wahlrab maintains that non-­ violence must not be regarded as an ideology, but rather as ‘concerned with the success or failure of nonviolent practice.’ Like James (Chap. 3 in this book), he distinguishes between theory and praxis and, on this basis, urges global studies to adopt a consequentialist approach. Although global media serve as a potent conduit, enabling technologies and human consciousness alone do not suffice: ‘cries for liberation and emancipation do not always achieve their lofty goals in the short term.’ Only global social practices—as opposed to shared moralities—can create lasting change toward greater justice. In this vein, Tommaso Durante reemploys Arjun Appadurai’s (2005, 31) notion of ‘the imagination as social practice’ to trace globalization as both a material process and an imaginary. Focusing on promotional imagery produced by the largest serviced residence owner-operator in the Asia-­Pacific and displayed prominently in Melbourne, Australia, Durante argues that its visual and textual content constitute an elite representation of ‘globality.’

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He subsequently unpacks the intended and actual meanings of the company’s slogan of ‘Balanced Global Living’ by juxtaposing ‘an interconnected-­global-world with the added value of a life-balanced environment’ on the one hand with ‘ever-increasing inequalities and poverty’ globally as well as locally on the other. Durante’s case study thus raises the class question inherent in the conceptualization of ‘imagination as social practice,’ especially since alternative practices of globality exist in Melbourne (e.g., Martin and Rizvi 2014; Henderson 2017) and elsewhere. Although Durante posits convincingly that market globalism has become ‘deeply embedded in our collective consciousness,’ his example of a transnational corporate imaginary could also be read as a call to explore further the plurality of global practices, with a view to highlighting how different visions of ‘the global’ are constituted through lived experience. Chris Hudson’s concluding chapter examines the worldwide proliferation of Irish pubs as an immanence of the global in local space and as a fossilization of culture ‘in an imagined past.’ Investigating how the invocation of Irishness in faraway places serves as a conduit for global consumerism and cultural commodification, she stresses the centrality of affect and emotional engagement as ‘integral features of socio-economic life in the post-industrial economy in which the market must continually reinvent itself and generate novelty in order to entice consumers.’ Here again, complications arise at the intersection of structure and agency. Assuming that Irish pub owners voluntarily opt into the global imaginary of pubs as a quintessentially Irish experience, do they automatically become complicit in the process of cultural trivialization? What if their choice to tap into the global Irish imaginary is, in fact, an expression of their own emotional engagement, however individualistic, with what they hold true about Ireland? Hudson’s observations on the Irish Pub Company’s franchise arrangements and the rise of replica versus ‘real’ and ‘actual’ Irish pubs suggest that the question of authentic representation looms large amid cultural globalization.

Global Questions Remain Our overview of the chapters ahead attests to the impact of Steger’s multifaceted contributions to the study of ‘the global.’ His unorthodox course between and beyond disciplines has inspired many of colleagues and students to take a hard look at conventional ways of thinking. Intellectually versatile, Steger lays claim to a holistic approach to understanding what

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drives history and the directions in which it is unfolding. His objective is to enable social forces to dial into the beneficial aspects of globalization and curb its pernicious tendencies. This innovative endeavor escapes narrow policy debates, paints a big picture, and etches programmatic initiatives. Rather than merely ignoring or dismissing opposing views, Steger mounts cross-paradigm debate for generating productive conversation in social scientific research. This festschrift suggests that Steger’s job remains unfinished. Further discussion should give more attention to issues that, to be sure, appear in Steger’s matrix. Picking up on the argument made by Singh, our list includes the nexus of gender and the geo-economy; resistance to global studies—how the mainstream fights back, adapts, and thus seeks to reproduce itself; and given the complexity of a disorderly world, whether it would in fact be possible to establish a general globalization theory (singular), which Steger and Wahlrab (2017, 101) deem a ‘possibility,’ or, whether the goal should instead be to maintain a scholarly conversation between different globalization theories (plural), along the lines of what Ström and Durante suggest in their chapters. That said, Steger’s conduct models how to constitute the academic habitus, the structured dispositions learned by administrators, faculty, and graduate students (see Bourdieu 1990, 66–67). One basic lesson from his comportment is to use a style of prose that is graceful and exacting. However baffling the problem being examined, analysis of it must be logically argued, carefully presented for weighing rival contentions, and aimed at conjuring more refined interpretations. A second lesson is to allow for both privileged positions and underdogs’ standpoints. This is a matter of representation. The third lesson is to express appreciation for colleagues, prize their achievements, and support early-career scholars. Many of them are contingent intellectual workers, members of the precariat class, which lacks job security and faces lives of uncertainty. Trying to relieve this condition in his milieu, Steger has inspired scores of mentees and co-workers, inviting some to serve as collaborators on innovative projects. In short, Steger has blazed a distinctive trail, with the potential to serve as a cathartic way to paradigmatic transformation. Our script for this festschrift is offered in admiration of this spirit.

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References Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2005. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Besserman, Perle, and Manfred B.  Steger. 1991. Crazy Clouds: Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers. Boston: Shambhala. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Esser, Daniel E., and James H.  Mittelman. forthcoming. Transdisciplinarity. In Oxford Handbook of Global Studies, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer et al. Houndmills/ New York: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1995. After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity, 1990. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Held, David. 2005. The Global Crossroads: The End of the Washington Consensus and the Rise of Global Social Democracy. Globalizations 2 (1): 95–113. Henderson, Steven. 2017. Competitive Sub-metropolitan Regionalism: Local Government Collaboration and Advocacy in Northern Melbourne, Australia. Urban Studies. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017726737. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. New  York: Harcourt & World, Inc. Martin, Fran, and Fazal Rizvi. 2014. Making Melbourne: Digital Connectivity and International Students’ Experience of Locality. Media, Culture and Society 36 (7): 1016–1031. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mittelman, James H. 2002. Globalisation: An Ascendant Paradigm. International Studies Perspectives 3 (1): 1–14. ———. 2018. Implausible Dream: The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2010. Methodology of Transdisciplinarity: Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity. Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science 1 (1): 19–38. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1964. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Helen Zimmern. New York: Russell and Russell. ———. 1968. The Will to Power. Trans. and Ed. Walter Kaufmann and R.  J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Schmitt, Carl. [1932] 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. [1950] 2003. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicium Europaeum. Trans. and annotated G.  L. Ulmen. New  York: Telos Press. Steger, Manfred B., ed. and trans. 1996. Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900–1921. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities International Press. ———. 2000. Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2015. Introduction: What Is Global Studies? In The Global Studies Reader, ed. Manfred B. Steger, 2nd rev ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Perle Besserman. 2001. Grassroots Zen. North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing. Steger, Manfred B., and Terrell Carver, eds. 1999. Engels After Marx. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Paul James, eds. 2015. Globalization: The Career of a Concept. London: Routledge. Steger, Manfred, and Nancy S. Lind, eds. 1999. Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2017. What Is Global Studies? Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Steger, Manfred B., Paul James, and Erin K. Wilson, eds. 2013. Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy. Los Angeles: Sage.

CHAPTER 2

Evolving Global Studies Mark Juergensmeyer

When Manfred Steger startled the academic world by declaring that a new way of observing the world’s dynamic interchanges had emerged—a ‘global imaginary’—he was not alone in suggesting that a new field of studies had entered the academic community. Global studies has had several prophetic forebears. At the end of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, scholars were beginning to move away from the nation-state sphere of reference. The sociologist Roland Robertson introduced the term globalization into academic discourse, and focused on its general and specific manifestations: glocalization. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai turned attention away from geographic landscapes to a variety of social ‘scapes,’ culturally shaped understandings of the world. David Held pioneered in the field of global politics, and Mary Kaldor examined an emerging global civil society. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ulrich Beck described what appeared to be a cosmopolitan strand of public civility in the new global order. Saskia Sassen observed the rise of the global city; Dominic Sachsenmaier, A.G. Hopkins, and Pamela Kyle Crossley explored new ways of thinking about global history; Thomas Pogge and Giles Gunn explored the possibility of a global ethics; I wrote about global religion; and Jan Nederveen Pieterse showed how hybridity

M. Juergensmeyer (*) University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_2

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theory was essential for understanding the cultural aspects of globalization. Even earlier in the twentieth century, some scholars were sweeping in their scope, anticipating global studies by embracing a planetary perspective. In the humanities, historians such as Arnold Toynbee surveyed the world’s civilizations, and William McNeill placed ‘the rise of the West’ in global context. The Harvard pioneer in comparative religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith understood religion as a changing feature of the world’s cultural interactions. Edward Said showed how colonial mentalities infected the perspective of Western scholarship on non-Western subjects. In the social sciences, Talcott Parsons showed the relevance of culture to all social structures, and his disciple, Robert Bellah, explored the significance of these implications from Tokugawa-era Japan to Muslim societies to modern America. Immanuel Wallerstein, in examining what he called world systems of economic and political interdependence, foreshadowed the development of the field of global political economy. In a sense, however, global studies has been around for a long time, if one means by that term the study of human activity on a broad conceptual scale, and generalizations about that activity that are deemed to be universally applicable. The towering figures in the birth of the social sciences, Max Weber (1864–1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), were pioneers in this kind of global studies. Weber tried to make sense of what was distinctive and what was similar among the cultural patterns of India, China, Judaism, and Protestant Christianity. He also showed that rational-­ legal authority and its associated bureaucratization was a globalizing process. Durkheim analyzed from a global perspective the rise of organic solidarity, based on functional interdependence. The great social theorist, Karl Marx (1818–1883), likewise assumed that his theories were universal, arguing that capitalism was a globalizing force, one in which both production systems and markets would eventually expand to encompass the entire world. In this sense of grand theorizing, Plato’s Republic was an innovation in global studies. And so were the Analects of Kung Fu Tse and the Arthashastra of Kautilya. So global studies has had a long ancestry. Yet as a modern field of studies, its institutional history is fairly recent. It was not until 1995 that California State University at Monterey began a global studies undergraduate program. In the same year, the University of California at Santa Barbara created an academic unit that led to an undergraduate major two years later and then to graduate programs on both the MA and PhD levels.

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The first MA program in global studies was established in 1997 at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of undergraduate majors and dozens of graduate programs in global studies around the world, including in Shanghai, Melbourne, Moscow, Leipzig, Cairo, London, Los Angeles, and New York City. The field of global studies had arrived.

Emergence of a New Field Though the field of global studies had become an established feature of academia by the first decade of the twenty-first century, debates have persisted about what it is and what constitutes its central principles. The institutional development of the field and the early questions that were encountered are amply covered in the book What Is Global Studies? by Manfred Steger and Amentahru Wahlrab (Steger and Wahlrab 2017). The way that the varied interests in globalization and the global dimension of societies and cultures have coalesced into teaching and research programs is an interesting story. In the late 1990s and the first decade in the twenty-­ first century, scholars and teachers in academic settings around the world were coming together to consider ways of conceiving global studies as a field to be taught and an arena in which to do credible research. They were convinced that globalization was one of the critical features of their time, and to study it was to focus on the central feature of life in the twenty-first century. But how does one go about doing this? Is it really possible to study the whole world? Doesn’t this mean studying almost everything? And if so, where does one begin? These were the questions in the minds of a group of scholars from around the world who met in Tokyo in 2008. They had met the year before in Santa Barbara, California, with the idea of exploring the creation of a new international organization for representatives of graduate programs called global studies that were just then emerging in various universities around the world. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars were creating global studies programs in dozens of universities in Asia, Europe, and North America, including Japan, South Korea, China, India, Germany, Denmark, Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. When the scholars came together in Tokyo in 2008, their first task was to answer the question of what global studies was, and to define the major features of the field.

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They came expecting to disagree. After all, each of these programs had developed independently from the others. One would think that the field of global studies would be defined vastly differently in Tokyo, Leipzig, and Melbourne. But as it turned out, this was not the case. Happily, there was a great deal of agreement at the outset regarding what the field of global studies contained and how to go about studying it. The main characteristics of global studies that they agreed on at that founding meeting of the international Global Studies Consortium in Tokyo are similar to what Manfred Steger in his essay ‘What is Global Studies’ in the Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (Steger in Juergensmeyer, Steger and Sassen 2018) and in his book with Wahlrab with a similar title (Steger and Wahlrab 2017) has called the central pillars of the field. They include the following features: Transnationality The Global Studies Consortium’s founding members agreed that the field of global studies is broader than the nation-state. In its broadest sense, it focuses on globalization—the events, activities, ideas, trends, processes, and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions and touch on all regions of the world. These include activities such as economic distribution systems, and ideologies like nationalism or religious beliefs. Steger puts all of these forms of emerging new transnationality into the category of ‘globalization,’ though as he discusses in his essays on the topic, globalization can mean different things in different contexts. In addition to those phenomena that are truly global in their scope— global warming and climate change, for example—the field of global studies also includes the study of transnational activities and processes that may not affect everyone on the planet but have a significant impact beyond a single nation or cultural region. The use of the Internet, for instance, has not yet caught on in every undeveloped corner of the world but is a transnational phenomenon on a far-reaching scale. Certain pandemics, for example, may affect primarily one region of the world but have the potential of becoming global. Hence, global studies looks at transnational activities and processes that expand beyond particular nations and cultural regions. This brings up one problem with the use of the term ‘transnational’ to refer to widespread though not completely global phenomena, since some

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of these flows of activity and ideas transcend the limitations of regions even when they are not the same as national boundaries. Historically much of the activity that we call transnational might more properly be called transregional, since it occurred before the concept of nation was applied to states. So Steger’s choice of calling all of these phenomena as variations in globalization may be a happy solution after all. Either way, the terms ‘transnationality’ and ‘globalization’ point to similar forms of widespread and potentially planetary phenomena that are larger than the limitations of nation-states. Interdisciplinarity The second area of agreement is that the study of these global and transnational phenomena cannot be analyzed through a single analytic or methodological lens. Since transnational phenomena are complex, they are examined from many disciplinary points of view. In general, global studies does not keep strict disciplinary divisions among, for instance, sociological, historical, political, literary, or other academic fields. Rather, it takes a problem-focused approach, looking at situations such as global warming or the rise of new religiopolitical ideologies as specific cases. Each of these problem areas requires multiple perspectives to make sense of them—perspectives that may be economic, political, social, cultural, religious, ideological, or environmental. Scholars involved in global studies often work in interdisciplinary teams, or freely borrow from one field to another. They come from all fields of the social sciences (especially from sociology, economics, political science, geography, and anthropology). And many are also related to the humanities, including particularly the fields of history, literature, religious studies, and the arts. Some have expertise in areas of science, such as environmental studies and public health, or in professional fields such as law, public policy, and medicine. At the innovative edge of interdisciplinarity is thinking that is transdisciplinary. These are attempts to develop theoretical models and conceptual tools to explore aspects of transnational and global phenomena that do not rely on any specific disciplinary field. While in its infancy, these attempts to theoretically examine global ‘scapes,’ ‘flows,’ and ‘processes’ may be important aspects of future attempts to ground the research agenda of the field of global studies.

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Trans-temporality Steger describes this pillar of global studies as globalized ways of understanding time and space (Steger and Wahlrab 2017; Steger 2018). One of the things that is meant by these trans-temporal and trans-local frames of reference is that the focus on globalization is not solely contemporary, nor solely limited to European and American forms of globalized phenomena. Global studies as a field takes seriously historical precedents for global phenomena as well as their contemporary and timeless manifestations. Globalization has a history and a diverse geography. Though the pace and intensity of globalization have increased enormously in the post-Cold War period of the twentieth century and even more so in the twenty-first century, transnational activities have had historical antecedents throughout the world. There are moments in history—such as the development of the Silk Road between East Asia and the Middle East during the Han Dynasty in the third century BCE and the rich culture of the ancient Mediterranean world during the Roman and Greek Empires that was developing at the same time—when there was a great deal of transnational activity and interchange on economic, cultural, and political levels. The global reach of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and of European colonialism from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries provides other examples of the global strata of culture, education, technology, and economic activity upon which are based many aspects of the globalization of the twenty-first century. Thus to understand fully the patterns of globalization today, it is necessary to probe their historical precedents. It also means moving beyond the limitations of space and time to consider, as Roland Robertson has said, the compression of the world in a single space (Robertson 1992), or as Manfred Steger has put it, the transcendence of space and time in a globalized world (Steger and Wahlrab 2017; Steger 2018). Perhaps nothing illustrates this space-time transcendence more than the Internet, which has become one of the primary means of communicating and accessing knowledge. The Internet resides in cyberspace rather than physical space, and its information storage is timeless. These aspects of the digital age require new ways of considering space/time dimensions and the phenomena of trans-temporality.

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Critical Perspectives The scholars who came together to define the field of global studies also agreed that global studies itself should be global in perspective. By that they meant that the dominant American and European views of globalization are not the only ones. Although many aspects of contemporary globalization are based on European colonial precedents, most global studies scholars do not accept uncritically the notion that people in the West should be the only ones to benefit from economic, political, and cultural globalization. Some global studies scholars avoid using the term ‘globalization’ to describe their subject of study, since the term sometimes is interpreted to imply the promotion of a Western-dominated hegemonic project aimed at spreading the acceptance of laissez-faire liberal economics throughout the world. Rather, they may say that they study transnational or global issues. Other scholars use the term ‘globalization,’ but qualify it; they describe their approach as ‘critical globalization studies,’ implying that their examination of globalization is not intended to promote or privilege Western economic models of globalization, but to understand it (Appelbaum and Robinson 2005). Behind this hesitation to uncritically adopt the term ‘globalization’ is the notion that one should not uncritically analyze any of the global phenomena. Rather, the scholar is required to view them from many cultural perspectives, and from perspectives that may be outside the mainstream in scholarly fields. Scholars of global studies acknowledge that globalization and other global issues, activities, and trends can be viewed differently from different parts of the world, and from different racial, gendered, and socioeconomic positions within each locality. For that reason, scholars of global studies sometimes speak of ‘many globalizations,’ ‘critical globalization studies,’ or ‘multiple perspectives on global studies.’ This position acknowledges that there is no dominant paradigm or perspective in global studies that is valued over others. These four features of global studies—transnationality, interdisciplinarity, trans-temporality, and critical perspectives—are principles embraced by representatives of all the founding programs in the international Global Studies Consortium that met on that fateful occasion at Sophia University in Tokyo in 2008, and affirmed in a slightly different wording by Manfred Steger in his book and essay on What Is Global Studies? (Steger and Wahlrab 2017; Steger 2018). To one degree or another, these elements are found in most programs of study and research that call themselves global studies wherever they have been established around the world.

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What is remarkable is how consistent these principles are even within far-­ flung places that have developed global studies on their own without using any other program as a model. Curiously from Cairo to Copenhagen, from Melbourne to Leipzig, and from Shanghai to Santa Barbara, the field of global studies has developed with these four principles as prominent features of their programs.

The Global Study of Religion as an Example of Global Studies As we have observed, the task of studying transnational phenomena in a global world requires a global stretch of imagination, since it implies not only the study of ideas and communities wherever in the world they might be but also an understanding of how the world is viewed from multiple perspectives. One example of how global studies transforms traditional ways of looking at subject matter is the global study of religion. Religious traditions and communities have always been global in the sense that they have spread throughout the world, often (though not always) beyond the control of local political authorities. Hence, one way of studying religion in its global contexts is to study these far-flung aspects of religiosity: the study of religious diasporas, the global spread of religious ideas, and the emerging spiritual and moral sensibilities of globalized, multicultural societies. We can regard these analyses as the study of global religion, studies that have proliferated in the global era when everyone can live everywhere and multicultural religious and ethnic communities have become the norm, especially in the world’s great global urban centers, such as London or Los Angeles (Juergensmeyer 2006). But there is another way of thinking globally about religion, and this is the global study of religion. This global approach to studying religion can affect all dimensions of religious and ideological studies—it involves taking a perceptual stance that is relevant to every aspect of the study of religion, whether the subject matter is local or far away, historical or contemporary, textual or social. The global perceptual stance is one that attempts to see all religious phenomena as part of a global drama, and to understand it through many eyes, from multiple frames of reference. To borrow an idea from Jacques Lacan that has been reshaped by Charles Taylor, the ‘social imaginary’ of our contemporary world—the sense of how individuals relate to the social whole—is increasingly what

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Manfred Steger has called a ‘global imaginary’ (Taylor 2003; Steger 2008). In this sense, even studies of local religion can be ways of studying religion globally, whether it is a study of evangelical Christians responding angrily to a perception that the world has gone awry or a study of expatriate Muslims who feel alienated from the global ummah of Islam. Scholars’ immediate analyses of what is going on in these situations may be only one part of the story. To understand them within a global imaginary, scholars need multiple lenses, and need to challenge their own assumptions and their own language of investigation. One of the tasks of global studies is to see one’s own contexts of intellectual discourse within a global frame, to understand, for instance, the secularity of post-Enlightenment modernity within a global context, to see it as a worldview that has been shaped by its spiritual and moral past. As Talal Asad reminds us, the very categories of ‘secular’ and ‘religion’ are attempts to wrestle with the way that worldviews shape social realities (Asad 2003). Part of the challenge of studying religion in a post-secular age is to rethink what religion is in a world where our understanding of secularism is also seen as a fluid social construction (Calhoun et al. 2011). The challenge is to locate the secular worldview of the West within a broader understanding, to discover how one’s own views are seen by people in other parts of the world, and in that sense to view all persons as players upon a global stage. From this perspective, it appears that religious belief systems and secular ideologies are able to provide similar roles. They both provide worldviews, angles of reference that are personal and moral but also social and organizational, and they both locate the individual within a larger framework of social and existential meaning. Within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secular nationalism appeared in many parts of the world with such a xenophobic fervor that the French social theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville, described it as a ‘strange religion’ that was sweeping the globe (Tocqueville 1856). World Wars I and II were both fought—and won—in support of the idea of free and separate nationalisms in the face of old empires and new imperial constructs, such as ‘National Socialism’— the Nazism of Adolph Hitler. The latter was a form of another globalizing ideology, fascism, for which Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Spain’s Francisco Franco were also leading exponents. The latter half of the twentieth century was a global contest between two great ideological constructs—the state socialism of communism, and the democratic capitalism of the West. At the end of the twentieth century and the rise of the twenty-first ­century,

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globalization took on the aura of ideology in some quarters, while in others, aggressive new forms of religious political ideologies surfaced, some with global aspirations. The global study of religion is therefore the study of cultural change and interaction. It is not always a positive interaction, even though the twentieth-century scholarship on comparative religion saw the encounter among the world’s religions in a basically positive light. By the twenty-first century, however, this optimism had faded. The rise of a strident new form of religious violence appearing in virtually every religious tradition indicated that the encounter of the world’s religious traditions in the global arena would not necessarily be a harmonious event. Samuel Huntington sounded this discordant note in his influential essay in Foreign Affairs where he questioned whether the link between politics and religion in the post-Cold World War period was creating a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996). Ten years later, in a book of essays co-edited with Peter Berger, they speculated that there were ‘many globalizations’ and that the diversity of the world’s religions need not result in a ‘clash.’ Still the emphasis was on difference rather than harmony (Huntington and Berger 2002). A few scholars, however, have been more positive—even in a time of religious violence and conflict in the first decade of the twenty-first century. But their positive attitude retains a postmodern sensibility that does not return to the Western biases of twentieth-century comparative scholarship. For example, in the same year that she became president of the American Political Science Association, Susanne Rudolph was also imagining new cultural forms in a world of ‘transnational religion and fading states’ that would require new ways of understanding (Rudolph 2005). In the global age, almost all studies of religion have to take account of the global context of religious phenomena, and the necessity of complementing the study of religion with scholarly approaches in the field of global studies, especially those approaches that take seriously the differing cultural perspectives on the world. For this reason, the study of religion will increasingly become even more varied and multidisciplinary as it undertakes not only the study of global religion but also the global study of religion.

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Emerging Issues in Global Studies Similar global approaches are being made to other fields of study besides religion. Global sociology, for instance, is one of the fastest growing subfields within that standard social science discipline. All of these new developments in global studies around the world give the impression of a field that has arrived. But no academic field has really ‘arrived,’ in the sense of reaching a point of stasis and forever staying the same. No doubt that the subject matter of global studies will change considerably from year to year as new developments appear on the scene that deserve attention. There will also be changes in the way that global studies is conducted as an academic enterprise. During the initial years in which programs of global studies were being developed, the scholars involved in them usually had a high degree of unanimity of purpose and a strong collegial spirit that masked any internal differences in the way they conceptualized the field and its role within the larger academic community. As time went on, however, and programs ripened into maturity, fissures have developed, and differences of opinion have led to creative tensions. I call these tensions ‘creative,’ since I think that it is unlikely that they will cause programs to dissolve or break apart, and they will likely produce creative attempts to resolve the differences in agreeable ways, either as syntheses or as compatible accommodations. Until they are resolved, however, they will continue to be points of difference and dispute among scholars involved in helping to develop and sustain the emerging field. Among these tensions are the following: Global as Theme Versus Primary Focus When many programs of global studies began, they were promoted by scholars who saw the global aspect of their work as one theme in their commitment to a discipline. The European Union Consortium based in Leipzig, Germany, for instance, was established by scholars who were historians, and dedicated to developing global history as a credible subfield within that discipline. As the program has developed, however, increasingly students and other faculty involved have pressured the program to expand to a wide range of topics and methodologies in global studies, which the program has done. Still, it took some growing pains. At Santa Barbara, the core faculty in the global studies program all retained at least half of their positions in the departments from which they

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came, including sociology, history, religious studies, and literature. One of the initial ideas for the Santa Barbara global studies program was that it would service the whole of the liberal arts with introductory courses that students from any major could take, and that all of the faculty would retain partial membership in their original departments. As the program developed and the number of undergraduate majors rose to nearly a thousand and new graduate programs were created, courses became restricted to global studies majors and new faculty were tied exclusively to global studies as their academic home. Debates emerged within the department about the degree to which it should be concerned about helping develop the global dimension of other departments versus strengthening the core faculty and curriculum of its own department. The stories from Leipzig and Santa Barbara can be replicated in many other places around the world where global studies has become institutionalized. In these places, the demands of servicing undergraduate and graduate students who identify solely with the field have challenged the idea that the mission of global studies should be to ‘globalize the whole curriculum’ of the university, as one of the early mission statements of a global studies program put it. There is virtue to both approaches, and something is lost either way. If global studies only serves its own students and faculty, it fails to serve the wider academic community. And if it devotes too much energy into the broader mission of globalizing the liberal arts, it may fail to develop a substantial core faculty and curriculum at a crucial moment of development for an embryonic field. Global Theory Versus Practice Within departments of global studies there is another tension emerging that relates in part to what the intellectual core of the field should be about, and in part to the matter of what its mission should be. One way of describing this tension is theory versus practice. Many global studies programs have had a practical problem-solving side from the beginning, including the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, where an existing master’s program in development was incorporated into the School. At the American University in Cairo, where the president of the university had formerly been the dean of international affairs at Columbia University, the idea of the School of Global Affairs was to create practical, career-oriented curricula to prepare s­ tudents

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for leadership roles in international and transnational organizations. Their mission was clear. In other universities, however, the matter was less certain. At Shanghai University and the universities associated with the consortia based at Freiborg, Humboldt, and Leipzig Universities in Germany, the approach to global studies has tended to be much more theoretical. The emphasis has been on historical antecedents to, and social theories about, the emergence of globalization in the twenty-first century. Many of the students taking the courses may plan on professional non-academic careers after graduation, but the curricula definitely have a theoretical, non-issue-­ oriented tenor to them. In the global studies graduate programs at Roskilde University in Denmark, and at Sophia University in Japan, the programs try to strike a happy medium. The debate continues, however, whether graduate studies in the field of global studies should be more practical or theoretical. Global Scholar as Academic Insider Versus Outsider To some extent, the ‘theoretical versus practical’ tension is parallel to another, one that relates to the institutional stance of the field. Should global studies strive to take its role as a standard field of studies in lock step with other disciplines in the university? Or should it stay partially as an outsider, a gadfly raising critical issues at the edge of academia’s establishment? In some ways, this dilemma is one that is faced by other newly created fields, such as ethnic studies, feminist studies, and queer studies, where many of the founders were scholars who saw the role of their intellectual activity to be one that challenged the established norms rather than fitting comfortably in them. Scholars in global studies who see it playing a prophetic role are those who are most in favor of the principle of ‘taking a critical perspective,’ a position with which most global studies scholars agree, at least to some extent. The question is how far to take that critical posture. Those who take a ‘critical globalization’ approach to global studies are sometimes accused of adopting an anti-business leftist agenda. Those who adopt a more conservative approach are also accused of bias, of favoring the status quo and abandoning a central principle of the field, to see globalization from multiple perspectives. Often these internal debates about the stance of global studies carry a political edge to it, and sometimes the tone is one of the global South versus the established West.

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Most scholars of global studies welcome this conversation, however, since it strikes at the heart of what global studies is as an intellectual enterprise. Many of those scholars who have been attracted to it have done so for just this reason—they appreciate the conceptual challenges of trying to see the world as a whole, not just from one perspective on the planet, but from multiple perspectives. They want to be challenged by the points of view of different regions, different voices, and different races and genders and sexualities. They want to take seriously the perspectives of both the established hegemonic core and the aggrieved alternative outliers. For this reason, global studies as a field is likely to be enhanced by the vitality of the conversation related to this tension between insider and outsider, as will be with the other tensions as well. All of them are bound to increasingly engage the adherents of global studies in intellectually productive ways as the field continues to evolve in the future.

References Appelbaum, Richard P., and William Robinson, eds. 2005. Critical Globalization Studies. New York: Routledge. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds. 2011. Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Huntington, Samuel, and Peter Berger, eds. 2002. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World. New York: Oxford University Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark, ed. 2006. The Oxford Handbook of Global Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Rudolph, Susanne. 2005. Religious Transnationalism. In Religion in Global Civil Society, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer. New York: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Typologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. What Is Global Studies? In The Oxford Handbook of Global Studies, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Manfred B.  Steger, and Saskia Sassen, 2018. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2017. What Is Global Studies? Theory & Practice. London/New York: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 2003. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1856. Ancien Regime and the French Revolution. London: Penguin Classics. (New English edition, 2008).

CHAPTER 3

The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice Paul James

Over the last couple of centuries, numerous writers have sought to generalize an encompassing spirit that characterizes a period or a people. From Voltaire’s monumental Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations (1756), this line of analysis has broadened to Martin Heidegger’s The Age of the World Picture (1938) and Karl Jasper’s The Spiritual Situation of the Age (1951).1 Over the last century, it coalesced around the idea that our time, like so many others, can be critically understood in terms of a dominant spirit or zeitgeist. Prior meanings of the concept of ‘spirit’ give us a clue as to the genealogy of the term. The meaning of spirit of the times has changed dramatically across the period that saw the emerging dominance of the modern—a formation that included the making of the modern interpretative disciplines of history, sociology, and social theory, disciplines that sought to describe that spirit. I am probably being too literal here, but in the first stage of this transformation, European philosophers and historians, in effect, half turned Christianity’s Holy Spirit into a social category: the spirit in and of humanity (an uncomfortable tension). In a further move, social theorists averted the previously dedicated gaze on a Spirit that moves among us in mysterious ways, and sought to shift our attention from a universalizing cosmology to a globalizing horizon where humans P. James (*) Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_3

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make that spirit. This can be described as a shift from cosmology to constructivism. By the early twentieth century, the Spirit in humanity had largely given way to the spirit of humanity. This evocation of ‘spirit’ to describe a social sensibility was prone to many problems—at least in terms of secular enquiry—not the least being the lingering cosmological sense that such a spirit is also metaphysical. It is bigger than all of us. It is singular. It is the essence of the age. Thus, across the mid-twentieth century to the present, this quest changed in epistemological form, shifting from an emphasis on the couplet of national spirit and world-spirit2 to a secular conception of the social imaginary. And here a very different ontological orientation entered the fray. Cosmology slowly learned to live under the dominance of a constructivist frame. Different questions were being asked. If humans construct and imagine their worlds, what then is the common grounding condition of that construction? Or, more prosaically, what are the dominant social imaginaries, local and global, through which we as humans live in these worlds? These questions suggested the emerging dominance of a modern constructivist orientation. Even if not under conditions of our choosing or understanding, we act in the world to make that world. The first variation of this orientation was psychoanalytic tending toward the psychosocial—from Jacques Lacan and Jean-Paul Sartre to writers as diverse as Cornelius Castoriadis and Kathleen Lennon. The second variation was constitutively social, and here the key figures are Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger. This essay lays out the case for the approach developed by Manfred Steger (2008). It suggests that his definition of the social imaginary as a patterned convocation of the social whole through which people express their social existence—for example in the figure of the globe, of the nation, or even of the abstracted order (or disorder) of our time—provides a point of departure for handing the complexities that have inevitably arisen with using a far-ranging term, especially one that carries so much baggage. Here a number of key questions need to be answered: 1. If a social imaginary is defined as an evocation of the social whole, how can we relate this definition to the tendency to turn the imaginary into one of the following: (1) the basic process by which each human being comes to know him or herself as a whole being in relation to others (Lacan’s layering of the imaginary with the symbolic); (2) the constitutive basis of everything social (Castoriadis’s

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­ ver-­ o reach); or (3) the singular defining condition of an epoch (Albrow’s category error)? 2. What is the relationship between a social imaginary as a relatively taken-for-granted way of framing meaning and the cacophony of discourses contesting social meaning that we call ‘ideologies’? 3. What is the relationship between a social imaginary and an ontological formation such as modernity (that treats concepts such as spirit of the times as largely immanent notions made by social practice)? 4. How can the practical dynamics that determine the lived reality of an ontological formation (such as modernity) be elaborated without simply adding factor to factor in a flat descriptive elaboration? This essay will track some of the background to these questions, and set up an alternative model based upon the work of Manfred Steger. Any adequate alternative approach needs to be able to deal with these questions. However, in order to understand the origins of current problems concerning the social imaginary, we need first to go back briefly to the notion of ‘the spirit of the age’ and the process by which its philosophical and analytical use shifted from a cosmological-metaphorical or traditional frame to a modern frame. Many of the contemporary problems with the concept of the ‘imaginary’ arise from a tendency to conflate these two orientations.

The Spirit of the Age and the Spirit of Humanity Voltaire’s was perhaps the first expression of the clash of the (continuing) traditional and (unresolved) modern formulation of the spirit of the age—l’esprit du temps. In his 1751 volume of the essay, The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire sets out to discern not only the spirit of Louis XIV, but ‘the spirit of mankind in general’ (1751, 7). Here his concern is explicitly to ­celebrate the last and finest of the four eras in which humanity achieved greatness of mind. Voltaire’s work is thus a progress-framed adoration of the Enlightenment. In other words, his was an attempt to write a universal history of his global present as if it is everything— namely, eighteenth-­century Europe in the context of the universalizing world that made it. Certainly, as the classically modern historian Friedrich Meinecke puts it, with this move, Voltaire’s quest plunged history into ‘the stream of the present’:

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This meant that history was set permanently on the move and given new topicality. Henceforth, the battle about the interpretation of universal history in the past would always go hand in hand with all the controversies about the shape of things to come (1959, 62).

However, despite his constructivist innovation, Voltaire assumes a generalizing and abiding essence of what it is to partake of this spirit. And this ­re-­renders his description of the world he loves in a way that the classical modern social theorists—Marx, Durkheim, or Weber—would not recognize except as ideological projection. Consequentially, Voltaire does not get close to accurately describing the dominant social imaginary of his time, except as a reflection of his own hopes. As a methodological aside relevant to developing an alternative, we can note that when the contemporary writer Martin Albrow suggests that his claim that the modern age has given way to the ‘Global Age’ (1996, 4) is made in the tradition of Voltaire’s mapping of successive ages (Albrow 2007), the basis of such a deeply problematic proposition begins to become explicable. There are numerous problems with Albrow’s argument that we do not have time to go into—the main issue is his conflation of an ontological formation-in-dominance, modernity, with a spatial process, globalization. Albrow, in aligning his approach with Voltaire’s, sets himself up to fail because he takes an epochal approach—the current period, he suggests, is now the Global Age—to what would be better called a dominant (subjective) imaginary linked to a set of contradictory (objective) processes—globalization. In Steger’s terms, this is the period in which the global imaginary has emerged into dominance. Returning to our historical narration, Hegel’s concept of world-spirit has much the same problems as Voltaire’s. He holds onto the Holy Spirit with more tenacity, while at the same using the concept to show the variable shapes taken by the spirit at different times within an overall world-­ historical purpose: ‘the World-Spirit itself, has had the patience to pass through these shapes over the long passage of time, and to take upon itself the enormous labour of world-history’ (1807, 17). If we can understand this, he adds, the spirit is now ‘recollected in-itself, ready for conversion into the form of being-for-self’ (1807, 17). And this stretches to individuals. For Hegel, as much as for Voltaire, single individuals can carry this spirit. Despite himself, Hegel names, for example, the destructive imperialist Napoleon Bonaparte as the embodiment of the world-spirit— famously Hegel’s world-soul on horseback, die Weltseele zu Pferde.3

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In summary, two problems are evident here: firstly, that the ‘spirit of the times’ is stretched between a traditional metaphysical conception and a modern, embodied, and enacted conception; and secondly, that the lived imaginary is individualized in a heroic (or tragic) figure who stands for the whole (thus carrying forward the tensions of Kantorowicz’s traditional conception of the king’s two bodies: the ontic or lived body and the representational enduring body [1957]). This becomes unsustainable as the different ontological perspectives clash without attentive analytical resolution. Even for the early twentieth-century writer, Martin Heidegger, the clash is only resolved in a return to the metaphysical as the ground of being: ‘Metaphysics grounds an age,’ Heidegger suggests, ‘in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed’ (1938, 115). Here again is a case of the conception of the ‘spirit of the times’ being given a categorical or ontological status: ‘This basis,’ Heidegger says, ‘holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age’ (1938, 115). It is the phrase ‘complete dominion’ that also causes the problem here. Unlike Steger (2008) who recognizes the co-existent possibility of dominant, residual, and emergent imaginaries, Heidegger, in seeking to maintain a prior grounding condition, sets up the kind of epochalism that does not allow us to understand tensions and contradictions in the patterned meanings of a period or people. To anticipate a more general point made later, he conflates imaginaries with the ontological ground of those imaginaries.

A Brief Genealogy of the Concept of ‘the Imaginary’ By the early twentieth century, the ‘spirit of the times’ or zeitgeist had tended to give way to a new conception of the imaginary, including the social imaginary. In common use, the concept of ‘the imaginary’ came to refer to something invented or not real, something projected into the future, imagined beyond itself. However, for many writers from philosophers to psychoanalysts (including for the present author), even this imaginary projection of invented possibilities has to have a place to stand, a place from which to project imaginations. We do not imagine out of nothing. And, therefore, the imaginary provides one locus to begin to understand complexity of the human being. This is precisely where Jacques Lacan begins his psychoanalysis, though he initially makes it the locus. In his early writing, Lacan uses the notion of the imaginary (and the imago) to describe the basis for relating an organ-

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ism, that is, the unresolved human, to her or his reality (1949). The imaginary in this approach is established most firmly through the mirror stage as a child comes to see themselves as a whole person—perhaps prompted by the physical act of looking in a mirror. In other words, in Lacan’s early ruminations, the imaginary is that which makes us human. However, treating the imaginary as the basis of everything is as theoretically unsustainable as simultaneously grounding the human in the metaphysical and saying that humans make their worlds. This later became clear to Lacan. Decades on in his thinking, the imaginary was thus integrated into a threefold conceptual deck: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, with the imaginary ‘bound’ and ‘oriented’ by the symbolic—that is, by the signifying chains of meaning in the social world (1966, 12, 720, and 729ff). Thus, we arrive at a social imaginary, albeit with the Lacanian injunction that the structures of the human psyche cannot be reduced to that social world. All that is fine, but it does little to help us understand the dominant convocations of the social whole, the subject of this essay. Written at the same time as the early lectures of Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary (1940) comes out of a completely different theoretical lineage with a stronger emphasis on the social. Sartre similarly distinguishes between the imaginary and the real. However, while these categories are usually seen as only two analytical sides of an integrated subjective-objective world, in Sartre’s existentialist program, they come together only across an abyss of tension as the antithetical expressions of feeling and conduct. This brings us to a complete dead-end. Sartre’s approach on the face of it seems to be more akin to the common-sense usage of the term ‘imaginary’ than Lacan’s; however, this similarity drops away quickly. For Sartre, there is no possibility of projecting hopes through the imaginary. In the imaginary world, he says, ‘there is no dream of possibilities since possibilities require a real world, starting from which they are thought as possibilities’ (1940, 169). The imaginary is thus for him a world without freedom. ‘It is fatal.’ Though other writers in the psychosocial lineage have since tried to lift the imaginary out of this existentialist morass, they have not been able to do so in a way that proves to be very helpful to an adequate social account of the imaginary. Kathleen Lennon (2015), for example, treats the imaginary as the affective screen of images through which the real is experienced and made available to us. It is the texture of the real.4 This move is notionally fine. It gets us out of the existentialist morass, but it offers little

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more than metaphors and analogies to help us understand the process of how we as humans understand our social worlds. Lennon’s strength is in bringing together the imagination and emotion, not understanding the structures or patterns of social meaning. It is out of this background that Cornelius Castoriadis is adamantly clear that the social imaginary cannot be confined to the psychoanalytic or the shallow psychosocial (and of course he is right): The imaginary does not come from the image in the mirror or from the gaze of the other. Instead, the ‘mirror’ itself and its possibility, and the other as mirror, are the works of the imaginary, which is creation ex nihilo. Those who speak of ‘imaginary’, understanding by this the ‘specular’, the reflection of the ‘Active’, do no more than repeat, usually without realizing it, the affirmation which has for all time chained them to the underground of the famous cave: it is necessary that this world be an image of something. The imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of ‘something’. What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works (1975, 3 emphasis added).

Castoriadis thus embarks upon a constitutive argument about the imaginary. This is a journey upon which Steger also sets off, though without following Castoriadis to the overgeneralizing conclusion that the imaginary is the basis of what makes us. (Recall that Lacan had previously rejected this conclusion.) In Castoriadis’s approach, every culture, but more evidently in those cultures that are substantially and structurally integrated, there is the development of an encompassing social imaginary. This imaginary, he says, ‘gives a specific orientation to every institutional system, which overdetermines the choice and the connections of symbolic networks, which is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world’ (1975, 145). The trouble with this formulation is that it effectively becomes the new generalizing base of the social. It replaces Marx’s mode of production and Heidegger’s metaphysical base with a depthlessness of human creativity. Castoriadis’s approach thus raises more questions than it answers. How, if this is social account, can the imaginary be ‘essentially undetermined’? And equally, if reality and rationality are formed through the imaginary, how can we understand irrationality? Do they sit outside the imaginary?

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As his narrative proceeds, Castoriadis moves from the defensible position that a generalizing social imaginary develops in Western capitalist society, to suggesting that, because it occurs alongside the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and ‘the destruction of previous forms of the imaginary,’ it ‘has, paradoxically, gone hand in hand with the constitution of a new imaginary, centred around the “pseudo rational”’ (1975, 130–31). This  introduction of the pseudo-rational just leads to more questions. Why does his characterization of the present depend upon the formation of a pseudo-rationality? And then, if we provisionally accept this notion, how can we analytically stand outside the imaginary in order to understand a phenomenon that encompasses us completely in all its pseudo-­ rationality? Where then is Castoriadis standing to make the rational claims that he does about the possibility of a revolutionary overhaul of the pseudo-rational? His answer to these implied questions does not help: It is precisely because the modern social imaginary has no flesh of its own, it is because it borrows its substance from the rational, from one moment of the rational which it thus transforms into a pseudo-rational, that it is doomed to crisis and to erosion and that modern society contains within it the ­‘objective’ possibility of a transformation of what up to now has been the role of the imaginary in history (1975, 160).

The problems with his approach roll on. With this formulation, the imaginary becomes everything and nothing. In the contemporary modern West, it is the basis for the capitalist market, the cleaving to freedom, the belief in the rationality, the new pseudo-rationality, science and bureaucratic management, the excitement about progress or economic growth, and the fact that class division has not led to a complete social breakdown, but it has no flesh of its own. How can this be? How can it have no flesh of its own?

Toward a Working Conception of the Social Imaginary as Constituting and Constituted We need a much more direct formulation of the social imaginary, and it is here that Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger make pivotal contributions. Charles Taylor initiates what begins as the simplest way forward. He defines the social imaginary as ‘the ways we are able to think or imagine the whole of society’ (2007, 156). This is similar to the constrained way in which

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Steger uses the concept. Steger directly draws upon this primary formulation. For both writers, an imaginary is not the particular ideas or beliefs held by people, but the collation of those ideas in a larger social frame. Secondly, for both writers, while an imaginary can be informed by theoretical developments and it can be analyzed by theorists, it is not primarily an intellectual schema (unlike Lacan’s conceptions of the imagery, symbolic, and real). Rather it is a lived and generalizing sensibility held by the many— from those who do not have the words to articulate its meaning to those who seek to analyze its condensing discourses.5 ‘What I’m trying to get at with this term,’ says Taylor, ‘is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode’ (2007, 171). Thirdly, for both writers, a social imaginary is determined by current ideas and practices constituted in relation to meanings and practices of the past. This, for example, avoids the common misinterpretation of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) conception of nations as imagined communities, which put the emphasis on the ideas and images that people hold in their minds. And fourthly, an imaginary is not totalizing, but rather a cultural dominant, layered across prior and emerging imaginaries. These points taken together with the previous discussion begin to provide an answer to Question 1. An imaginary is not the basic process by which each human infant comes to know him or herself as a whole being in relation to others (Lacan). Rather it is one layer of the manifold and constitutive processes of meaning-formation and person-making that is lifelong and always in process. An imaginary is not the constitutive basis of everything social (Castoriadis). Rather, it is both constitutive of and constituted by patterns of practice through which it is enacted. An imaginary is not the singular defining condition of an epoch (Albrow). Rather it is a dominant way of framing meaning among others. Taylor helps with establishing all of this. However, as he elaborates his position, he broadens his conception of the social imaginary to encompass loosely three different elements that Steger carefully treats as analytically separate: the complex layering of imaginaries (i.e., Steger’s convocations of the social whole); the practices associated with and (re)producing those imaginings; and the lived categories of existence such as time which in Steger’s terms can sometimes reach across different social imaginaries (e.g., modern time frames both nineteenth-century national and contemporary global imaginaries).

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In Taylor’s writing, the social imaginary unfortunately becomes everything to do with the social meaning of people as they relate to each other: [It is] the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations. (2007, 171; 2004, 23)

This conflation is fine as description, but analytically it leads to confusions. A social imaginary is described sometimes as the framing base of meaning, and sometimes as one of a number of frames of meaning. For example, Taylor also uses the notions of ‘moral order’ and ‘cosmic imaginary’ alongside ‘social imaginary,’ as if our normative claims, or understanding of our place in a (traditional) cosmology or modern (universe), are not social. He writes: And just as the social imaginary consists of the understandings which make sense of our social practices, so the ‘cosmic imaginary’ makes sense of the ways in which the surrounding world figures in our lives: the ways, for instance, that it figures in our religious images and practices, including explicit cosmological doctrines; in the stories we tell about other lands and other ages; in our ways of marking the seasons and the passage of time; in the place of ‘nature’ in our moral and/or aesthetic sensibility; and in our attempts to develop a ‘scientific’ cosmology, if any (2007, 323). Here Steger’s layering of ideas, ideologies, and imaginaries works much more elegantly both in relation to each other and as an integrated set of levels of social engagement with meaning: ideas are beliefs expressed by individuals; ideologies collate ideas as ‘comprehensive belief systems composed of patterned ideas and claims to truth’ (2008, 5); and imaginaries are convocations of the social whole that frame different ideological contestations. Here the concept of ‘convocation’ refers to the calling together of an assemblage of ideas, explicit and tacit, that are taken to be self-­ evidently connected (akin to Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ [1971]). It does not entail the self-consciously defending or actively naturalizing activity associated with ideologies. The associated concept of ‘the social whole’ points to the way in which certain apparently simple terms such as ‘our world,’ ‘us and them,’ and ‘the market’ carry taken-for-­ granted and interconnected meanings. In these examples, the terms of connection could be framed by a national imaginary or a global imaginary, or a tension between both.

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This layering provides a response to Question 2: What is the relationship between a social imaginary as a relatively taken-for-granted way of framing meaning and ‘ideologies’ as the cacophony of discourses contesting social meaning?6 In Steger’s terms, social imaginaries name constellations of different ideologies that are otherwise lived as competing, complementary, or disconnected regimes of meaning. For example, market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalisms may all have competing normative orientations to the world, but at the same time they all depend upon a global imaginary for their discursive power. To the first three layers of ideas, ideologies, and imaginaries, we can add a fourth layer of analysis: the level of ontologies. This level names categories of existence or being-in-the-world, historically constituted through the structures of human interrelations: temporality, spatiality, corporeality, epistemology, and so on (see Fig. 3.1 below). Adding this layer allows us to talk about ontological formations—the customary, the traditional, the modern, and the postmodern—where these formations are defined in terms of their orientations to those existential categories such as time and space. This provides us with a framework for answering Question 3: What is the relationship between a social imaginary and an ontological formation such as modernity? And, related to this, it also allows us to track the existential meaning of what Taylor calls the transition from the dominance of a cosmological (traditional) imaginary to a universalizing (modernizing) imaginary. In Taylor’s exposition, the modern social imaginary has been built by three dynamics. The first is the separating out of the economy as a distinct domain, treated as an objectified reality. The second is the simultaneous emergence of the public sphere as the place of increasingly mediated interchange and (counter-posed to) the intimate or private sphere in which ‘ordinary life’ is affirmed. The third is the sovereignty of the people,

Fig. 3.1  Levels of social meaning in relation to levels of the social

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treated as a new collective agency even as it is made up of individuals who see self-affirmation in the other spheres (2004). The problem with this argument is not that it is wrong, but that is has no conceptual frame to make sense of the different dynamics, and relatedly that it is just a set of factors without having a way of working through their interrelationship except by rubbing them together in long historical narratives. We might ask why these dynamics rather than many others. Taylor’s three historical developments, among others, are certainly relevant to what might be called the modern ontological formation that has seen the shift from a national to a global imaginary, but so are many other developments. One important modern remaking of social life is: the transformation in the dominant mode of organization from patrimonial engagement to the abstraction of bureaucratic governance that began to name those collective categories of ‘people’ and ‘citizens’ which he talks about. A second is: the rise to dominance of capitalist production systems that reconstituted the meaning of ‘the economy’ and opened both codified time-discipline and time-choice for people who had previously lived in the frame of cosmological time and value. A third is: the change in the dominant mode of communication from script to print (the basis of Anderson’s theory of the nation as an imagined community [1983]) and then digital interchange that gave us the contemporary emphasis on global connectivity through social media. And a fourth is: the emergence of analytical science as the dominant mode of enquiry that in its most recent phase has given us both techno-science and the technical realization that we live in the global Anthropocene. Each of these shifts in modes of practice—organization, production, communication, and enquiry—is critical to understanding what we call ‘modernity’, the dominance of the modern. Listing dynamics in the way that Taylor does neither helps us to define a social imaginary in general nor  to understand what Steger calls the ‘national imaginary’ and the ‘global imaginary’ in particular. Nor does it give us an answer to Question 4. How can the dynamics of practice that determine the lived reality of an ontological formation such as modernity be elaborated without simply adding factor to factor in a flat descriptive elaboration? While there is not the space here to more than point to an alternative, it is hinted at in our listing of additional dynamics. They have been listed here not as factors, but as fundamental changes in the dominant modes of practice: organization, production, communication, enquiry, and so on. In summary, such an approach—working systematically across the conjunctures of various modes of practice—would bring together questions of meaning and practice into a single methodological framework that goes beyond adding factor to factor.

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Conclusion The concept of the social imaginary is a critical concept in the long and difficult development of an understanding of the how we are best to understand the layers of social meaning in the world. This can only be done by bringing together different epistemological standpoints into an integrated method: that is, from empirical analysis which focuses on the circulation of ideas to categorical analysis that explores the meaning of basic categories of existence such as time and space. Many authors have contributed to the difficult passage from the singular and often essentializing spirit of our times to the development of a workable conception of the social imaginary, but no writer has done more to clarify and simplify how this conception can give us insights into contemporary meaning than Manfred Steger. This essay has tracked both the history of the concept and the analytical problems with its varying use. In summary, it has argued that a social imaginary is one useful and elegant way of entering into the analysis of the social meaning (i.e., at an integrational level of analysis) that best works in relation to and across an integrated set of levels of analysis focusing on ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies. At the same time, it has suggested that understanding social meaning should always occur in relation to practice, itself also understood through layered analysis. Without such a method, we are left gasping for air as different contemporary voices tell us that meaning is anyway we want to say that it is—as long as we agree with them.

Notes 1. Here I am reading Jaspers through Jürgen Habermas’s volume Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age (1985). Jaspers (1951, p. 98) developed the concept of the Axial Age to encompass the period 800–200 BCE, variously an interregnum between empires in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece, when in different places at the same time, ‘the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid.’ 2. The distinction between Volksgeist or national spirit and Weltgeist or worldspirit is associated with Hegel. 3. See Lutz Niethammer (1992) on the way in which such a heroic or monstrous embodiment of the world-spirit took a series of writers from Hegel and Alexander Kojève to Michel Serres and Francis Fukuyama to an end-ofhistory position.

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4. This was one of the animating bases of the formation of Imago: A Journal of the Social Imaginary, to contest the separation of the imaginary and the real. 5. This makes the path taken by the rise of the global imaginary unprecedented. As Steger documents, rather than becoming public predominantly through intellectual projection, philosophical debate, and avant-garde activism, as was the case with a national imaginary, the global imaginary begins to emerge before its cognoscenti have time to name the processes of globalization as ‘globalization.’ That is, the concept only receives marginal analytical purchase prior to the 1980s, and then explodes into common usage in the 1990s at the same time as the cognoscenti are grappling with its meaning and debating with each other over how to understand its various dimensions. 6. Earlier I called this Louis Althusser’s unspoken issue because in his famous ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) essay, he seeks a theory of ideology in general through the following thesis: ‘ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1971, 162).

References Albrow, Martin. 1996. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2007. A New Decade of the Global Age, 1996–2006. Globality Studies Journal 8: 1–17. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections upon the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 (1975). The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen, ed. 1985. Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977 (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977 (1938). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1949. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, a lecture delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 17 July, 1949. ———. 2006 (1966). Ecrits. New York: WW Norton and Company. Lennon, Kathleen. 2015. The Imagination and the Imaginary. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Meinecke, Friedrich. 1972 (1959). Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Niethammer, Lutz. 1992. Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End. London: Verso. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004 (1940). The Imaginary. London: Routledge. Steger, Manfred B. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Voltaire. 1901 (1751). The Age of Louis XIV. New York: E.R. DuMont. ———. 1756. Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations). London: J. Nourse (1759 edition).

CHAPTER 4

Global Studies: Contested Fields, One Domain? James Goodman

In the tenth anniversary issue of Globalizations journal, in 2014, Paul James and Manfred Steger sought to understand the ‘career’ of globalization as a concept, through interviews with 12 leading thinkers on globalization. In doing so, they created something of a milestone in the field. Their opening article discussed ‘the way in which the concept emerged to mean what it now does,’ and thereby shed light on the ‘epistemological foundations of the field of global studies.’ On this basis, they explored how their interviewees had engaged with the concept, exploring ‘the patterns of its formation and how it became intertwined with [their] lives and careers’ (James and Steger 2014, 421, 423). The narrative shows the idea of globalization moving into political ideologies, social imaginaries, and ontologies, shaping broad structures of meaning. State-centrism was a key early fulcrum: across ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies, the idea of the global both reflected and led to a ‘destabilization of the national imaginary’ (2014, 424). At the core of their explanation is the argument that globalization became a key stake in contestation, between variants of political ideology. Steger’s 2016 textbook, with Amentahru Wahlrab, also emphasized this J. Goodman (*) University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_4

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logic of ideological contestation in advancing globalizing claims, initially under neoliberalism, as ‘market globalism,’ and latterly through other multiplying forms, of justice globalism and communal or religious globalism (Steger and Wahlrab 2016). Political projects are seen as articulated with a growing global imaginary, beyond ideology. These reflect wider ‘material processes [which] became stronger and mutually reinforcing’ and generated new spatial ontologies and identifications; the concept then gained a life of its own, used to gain purchase on ‘the world of material practices and lived meanings,’ in the process ‘challenging and changing those very practices and meanings’ (2014, 432). In related work, Manfred Steger has focused on origins and dynamics in global studies, as a field of ‘theory and practice.’ His 2015 Introduction to the ‘Global Studies Reader’ charts the nexus between globalized interconnection on the one hand, and the ‘problems’ this generates. In this context, the idea of globalization is heavily contested, creating a spectrum of debates from hyper-globalists to skeptical globalists (a characterization from Held et al. 1999). This reflects the focus in its early development on the national-global antinomy, and the ongoing dispute over state centrality and methodological nationalism. Increasingly, though, these debates have turned on the character of globalizing forces, rather than on national-­global question per se. With this, global studies has gained its own momentum, as an approach able to offer greater intellectual purchase on the emergent globalizing forces, rather than simply a mirror-image of state-centrism. In the 2015 Reader, four ‘prisms’ or ‘framings’ were identified. Three of these are ontological and overlapping: first, to focus on flows and networks rather than fixity; second, to privilege spatial reordering; and third, to critique singularities in favor of multiplicity or multipolarity, expressing a normative commitment to global citizenship. The fourth ‘prism’ is transdisciplinarity and is less clear-cut as the commitment to inter-mixing disciplines comes into direct tension with the aspiration, for some in global studies, to discipline status. The oxymoron of a transdisciplinary discipline produces unsettled identifications. Steger identifies three typical identifications—‘mavericks’ seeking a new global studies discipline, ‘insurgents’ who seek to change existing disciplines from within, and ‘nomads’ who combine fields of knowledge in new ways to address concrete globalization themes or problems (Steger 2015, 5–6). Among academics, the desire to escape the confines of disciplinary knowledges is perhaps the key factor, and is expressed in regular appeals for globalized interdisciplinarity, often cited as a key defining aspect of

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global studies. In the magisterial four-volume Encyclopedia of Global Studies, for instance, Mark Juergensmeyer draws on a definition produced by the Global Studies Consortium, a grouping of programs in the field, listing interdisciplinarity as one of the four defining characteristics of the field (2012, 729). The Global Studies Association (GSA), created in the United Kingdom in 2000, has as its first ‘aim’ to promote ‘multi- and interdisciplinary knowledge in the social and human sciences concerning global affairs, problems and changes,’ asserting that ‘commitment to multidisciplinarity and to the global context make the GSA unique in its aims and scope’ (Global  Studies  Association 2017b). The related US-based GSA, created in 2002, puts multi- and interdisciplinarity at the center of the field: it describes itself as ‘championing a multidisciplinary approach,’ emphasizing the need for ‘multidimensional’ and ‘thematic’ investigations (Global Studies Association 2017a). This chapter debates these interdisciplinary intellectual drivers for global studies, and its counterpoint, expressed in efforts at confining global contexts into international frameworks. From the earliest days, advocates of state-centric analysis have actively policed boundaries between ‘domestic’ and international, and asserted states as the key actors in international contexts. The two claims are critical to the state-centric tradition of international relations as, crucially, they consign non-state actors to domestic society, or to relative irrelevance in the international ‘society of states’ (Bull 1977). The two founding precepts for state-centrism have been asserted and reasserted against more interdisciplinary fluidity. But both were increasingly overwhelmed by the disciplinary transformations that came with the study of globalization from the 1980s. As multiple disciplines internationalized, they challenged the domestic/international dichotomy and asserted the legitimacy for new actors in the newly globalized realms. This interdisciplinary challenge produced new fields of research into transnationalized and global relations: it disrupted national/international divides, pluralized actors, and relativized state power. This chapter explores the interdisciplinary aspect of global studies from this key vantage point of ‘actors’ and ‘levels.’ First, it explores the debate about the proper, or primary, units of analysis for the study of international phenomena and in particular, whether states should be privileged. The assertion of a cascading range of global actors, explored in a widening range of internationalizing social science and humanities disciplines, has profoundly displaced this claim.

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Second, it discusses the related ‘levels of analysis’ problem, where the assumed distinctiveness of the international field was challenged by disciplines that rejected the assumption that international fields are by definition qualitatively distinct from domestic contexts. The chapter ends by echoing Manfred Steger’s work, elaborating with some reflections on the importance of interdisciplinarity for the development of global studies, and the dilemmas that result. By way of scene-setting, the discussion begins with an outline of some historical interdisciplinary skirmishing at the heart of international relations and latterly international studies.

A Short Archive: Policing ‘The International’ In 1920, the UK-based Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, Chatham House) was established to ‘encourage and facilitate the scientific study of international affairs.’ Its journal, the Review of International Affairs,’ launched in 1921, described itself simply as an ‘organ of discussion and research on international affairs.’ In post-World War I Europe, the RIIA was focused on ‘political science in its application to international relations, with special reference to the best means of promoting peace between nations’ (Reynolds 1975, 1–2). A broader agenda emerged with the US-based ‘international studies’ from the 1960s. In 1962, the US International Studies Association (US ISA) was established and took over editorialship of the journal Background on World Politics, renaming the journal International Studies Quarterly (ISQ). The US ISA defined international studies as ‘knowledge concerning the impact of nation upon nation,’ asserting the ‘international scene’ as an ‘inevitable and proper subject for integrated inquiry requiring special data and techniques’ (ISA 1962). The purpose, it seems, was to define a field of knowledge that was broader than international relations. Interestingly, though, the US ISA’s journal, the ISQ, had a narrower remit. In 1962, it was launched as ‘a journal of the highest quality carrying articles from various disciplines and perspectives bearing on international relations’ (Editors 1962). The focus was explicitly on enriching international relations by bringing it into interaction with other disciplines, rather than presenting international studies itself as an interdisciplinary field. The British International Studies Association, created in 1974, had an early aspiration to inclusiveness and interdisciplinarity, and sought a wider definition of ‘international studies’ than its US-based counterpart. The editors of the British Journal of International Studies (BJIS), launched in

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1975, hoped the journal would ‘reflect a diversity of scholarly argument as this finds expression in a variety of disciplines’; it aimed to ‘cross the traditional boundaries of academic enquiry, utilising skills of one discipline to illuminate the scope, method, and argument of another’ (Spence 1975, np). International studies was not defined as a complement to international relations: it was, instead, a field constituted by its interdisciplinarity. The journal would seek articles and reviews of literature aimed at ‘analysing its contribution to a general understanding of international society… at various levels of analysis—economic, historical, legal or political.’ Ultimately, though, the British ISA was enmeshed in international relations. Even the journal’s opening article argued for a narrower remit. International studies would only draw on other studies insofar as they ‘illuminate or have a bearing on’ international relations and international politics: international studies was (still), for this observer, a ‘field enabling associations between international relations and other disciplines’ (Reynolds 1975, 18). In 1995, Susan Strange reflected on her role in creating the BISA, in 1974, as ‘a game anyone—economists, lawyers, historians, sociologists—could join’; in 1995, she regretted that the ‘IR community has come to be dominant—perhaps over-dominant.’ For her, the BISA was ‘set up as an international studies association not an international relations association’ (Strange 1995, 290). The mid-1990s were something of a turning point though. In the aftermath of the Cold War, and the advent of ‘high’ neoliberalism, including the creation of World Trade Organization in 1994, the world landscape was changing. In the 75th anniversary issue of International Affairs, also in 1995, the RIIA reflected on its original purpose, acknowledging that ‘substantively… we must and do respond to the revolution in world affairs,’ adding ‘perhaps “international” is no longer the best word, “foreign” certainly is not’ (Martin 1995, 702). One particularly revealing intervention came in 1998, with a Special Issue of BJIS, titled ‘The 80 Years Crisis,’ primarily concerned with charting the trajectory of international relations since its ‘birth’ in 1918 at the end of World War I (Dunne et al. 1998). The journal issue deliberately echoed E.H.  Carr’s ‘Twenty Years Crisis’ and drew a parallel between, on the one hand, the post-World War I to post-World War II period of interstate institution-building, and the post-Cold War period of globalization. Just as the first period brought a crisis in international relations thought, so the second was generating a new crisis, disembedding earlier assumptions. One key assumption was the assumption of the national unit of analysis. Kratochwil, for instance, spoke of ‘the

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­ bliviousness of a discipline which in the one hand calls for “international o relations” or “international politics” but on the other hand fails to theorise the national’ (Kratochwil 1998, 216). Globalizing agendas multiplied into the early twentieth century, forcing a major rethink in some circles (see Brecher 1999; Drainville 2003). Debates about the scope of international studies—turning on its relationship with international relations—forced a widening remit, with a multiplication of disciplinary fields of investigation and approaches (George and Campbell 1990; Caporaso 1997). A strong critique and desire for an openness to the world and to other disciplines, for instance, was expressed in the US ISA Editors’ opening article in 2000, for the first issue of International Studies Perspectives, where they declared they would ‘strive explicitly to cultivate… diversity to encourage dialogue and publishing across intellectual communities that are separated ideologically, methodologically and geographically’ (Boyer et al. 2000, 3). Proposals for a much more creative role for international studies were reflected in Murphy’s 2001 comment that ‘the ISA may be unique among peak social science associations in its continued commitment to the progressive ideals of the social movements that institutionalized modern social sciences a little more than a century ago’ (Murphy 2001, 347). His appeal for international studies to focus on global inequalities, connecting with lived experiences, expresses this ideal. Yet, by then, international studies had, as Mittelman argues, moved to a fourth ‘great debate’—the first being focused on ontology, the second on methodology, the third on epistemology. This time the debate was between international relations as a discipline, and the broad range of internationalized social science, what he characterizes as ‘globalisation studies,’ forcing international studies into an ‘interregnum between the old and the new’ (Mittelman 2002, 12). As the various fields of ‘globalization studies’ marked out new terrains, under the banner of ‘Global Studies,’ disciplinary trench warfare became increasingly anachronistic. In a very revealing article published in 2001, titled ‘Why international relations has failed as an intellectual project, and what to do about it,’ two of the discipline’s leading lights sought to reinstate it as a ‘meta-discipline, systematically linking together the meta-sides of social science and history’: international relations had to be saved from becoming ‘simply one sectional perspective among several,’ it had to engage with grand theory and become a ‘holistic theoretical framework’ (Buzan and Little 2001, 22). Appropriately deploying militarist m ­ etaphors, the authors argued for international relations to ‘move into a ­position

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from which it can play its proper role as a meta-discipline,’ cautioning ‘if it does not do so it risks being outflanked on its own terrain by intellectual expeditions from other disciplines’ (2001, 38). By 2001 though, the horse had already bolted. In 1999, the US ISA conference theme ‘One field, many perspectives’ already seemed anachronistic and looked more like a defensive rearguard action rather than a new inclusivity (see Herman 1998). Interactions and conflicts between various internationalized social science disciplines had already superseded the ISA ‘field’ creating a domain of many fields, with various internal fences that, as Mittelman puts it, ‘hold back the strays’ (2002, 111). With the widening scope of newly globalizing disciplines, a transdisciplinary perspective was required. International studies had been established as a prop, to enrich international relations, by engagement with other fields of social science. Ironically, international studies had become a platform for those other disciplines, which then mounted a decisive challenge to the dominance of international relations. With disciplinary battles intensifying within international studies, an increasing number and range of participants in debates about globalization found a new home in the global studies associations, from 2000, and in a proliferation of related academic journals—as discussed below. There were further institutional and intellectual benefits. As Rosow noted, a wide range of established social science disciplines, not just international relations, were challenged by the advent of an interdisciplinary global studies: by creating ‘fluidity across the established borders of knowledge,’ it ‘threaten[ed] the secure identities of academic disciplines’ (Rosow 2003, 2). The benefit of an interdisciplinary global studies, that offers a critical counterpoint to disciplinarity, is thus not primarily (or at all) for international relations or international studies, but for the wide variety of internationalizing social science disciplines. The early 2000s may be seen as a critical juncture, where global studies takes shape within and beyond international studies and international relations. As argued, its existence owed much to the internationalization of social science and humanities disciplines, and the resulting creation of globalized interdisciplinary fields of knowledge. The following two sections, first on debates about the ‘units of analysis’ and second on the ‘levels of analysis’ debate, aim to deepen this account, outlining interdisciplinary challenges to the two key foundational claims of statist international relations and international studies.

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Units of Analysis In recent decades there has been a dramatic breakdown in the national containment of social science disciplines. As disciplines that were once largely domesticated have been internationalized, there has been a pluralization of approaches to international research. With pluralization, interdisciplinary contest has focused especially on the units of analysis question. Here, the debate is sampled using a four-part typology—political structures, ideational frames, material flows, and social forces (and the disciplinary ‘cake’ may be cut in other ways, with larger or smaller slices). The first and perhaps largest disciplinary slice is centered on the development of political institutions. Here there is intense disagreement as to which political institutions are dominant, often masking an underlying consensus that such institutions, whatever they happen to be, are the key players. In international relations, state-centric approaches have traditionally confronted approaches that stress the role of international organizations. The two are locked into an intellectual tango, seemingly oblivious of other concerns: Walker described the mutually constitutive discourses as profoundly deadening, blinding analysis to other agents of change. The preoccupations are quite different within political science, where the focus is on issues of ‘domestic’ society transposed to the international level. Hence, international political science journals may debate the redefinition of national forms such as the role of civil society, citizenship, or democracy, in an internationalizing or globalizing context, often taking a comparative approach. International political geography offers a counterpoint. The emphasis is often on the spatial and territorial logic of political institutions. In being agnostic about which political institutions hold sway, political geographers can escape some of the false dichotomies of international relations; at the same time, there is often an important skepticism and reflexivity about spatial determinism. A second field centers on ideas and their expression in international cultural practices. These approaches offer a contrast to institution-­centered approaches. The most established disciplinary field centering on the role of ideas is, of course, the field of international law. While the existence of international law hinges on mutual observance, the focus is primarily on the emergence of international norms, producing the subfield of normative international relations. Allied with these approaches, but quite distinct from them, is the emergence of an explicitly transnational cultural studies. As an outgrowth of

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‘domestic’ or comparative cultural studies, this centers on interactions across national formations. As with international law, the stress is on modes of being, understood as normative frameworks, in a cross-national context. Unlike international law, transnational cultural studies often takes a self-consciously grounded approach to investigate how cultural norms and practices may emerge and interact across national contexts. Allied to this is the emergence of a focus on ‘transnational communities’ and diaspora, which may emerge as important players in international contexts. Often assumed or implied in such studies is that globalization forces a move away from national identifications, toward hybridized transnational cultures. As an important by-product, a series of debates have erupted on the future of cultural identification, with a lively debate about cosmopolitanism. Parallel with the thriving interest in cultural formations is a voluminous literature on transnational history, comparative civilizational analysis, and global religious studies. A third disciplinary theme in international studies privileges material flows as key units for analysis. Flows of goods, services, and finance capital, for instance, are the focus for international economics and business studies, and also for mainstream international political economy. For these approaches, economic flows are generally interpreted independently of the social forces that engage with them. These are perhaps the fields of study that have had the greatest growth, in terms of student intake and the bulk of research, reflecting the phenomenal growth of cross-national economic flows in recent years. Emerging from the process of de-colonization and predating global political economy, the field of international development studies is also focused on material flows. Historically, the focus of development studies has been on cross-national flows of resources from and to postcolonial countries, and on resulting changes in the distribution of economic power. Variants of modernization theory, and its alter-ego, dependency theory, and subsequent ‘alternative development’ models, all offer internationalized accounts of the development problematic. Development studies, focused on underdevelopment in the global South, is paralleled by the emergence of international environmental studies, focused in large part on overdevelopment in the global North. Again the units of analysis center material flows—in this case environmental resources—on a world scale. Issues such as global climate change, resource exhaustion, and biodiversity protection are all positioned as in the first instance international concerns. As with development studies there is a key

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concern with distributional effects, posing issues of social equity as well as global ecological survival. A fourth general approach is to center analysis on social forces reflecting the Marxist and latterly neo-Marxist strand of international studies. World System theory, for instance, offers an explanatory framework for the states system in terms of ruling class interests. Likewise, neo-Gramscian international relations give an analysis of international formations in terms of class hegemonies. The Marxist-influenced tradition overlaps with the rich analytical field of historical sociology, which similarly focuses on social forces. In this tradition, Marxists and non-Marxists analyze international spheres as social formations. Also, in the mainstream of sociology, there has been a dramatic internationalization in recent years. Here the analysis is not so much rooted in the historical sweep of social change, but rather in contemporary social formations and their role in constituting international contexts. Many other fields of sociological analysis have internationalized. One example is internationalized gender studies, which emerged from ‘third wave’ feminist debates, centered on the role of internationalization in transforming of gender orders. Another example is the sociological field of social movement studies, which has a new terminology of ‘transnational advocacy networks,’ and ‘global social movements.’ These different disciplinary fields foster different conceptualizations of the units of analysis. Reflecting which unit of analysis is emphasized, the logic and trajectory of change can be wildly at variance. Differing measurements of change produce differing expectations. Institutional change may be measured in the logic of bureaucratic formations, their reach, and practices. Ideational change may require analysis of normative assumptions and prejudices, measured in cultural constructs and representations. Analysis of material flows may center on quantitative measurements of cross-border activity. Analysis of social formations may require measurement of modes of stratification, group formation, and collective consciousness. Interdisciplinary disagreement over the units of study, and how to research them, creates a fragmented landscape. Each of the four broad emphases discussed here—a focus on political structures, ideational frames, material flows, or social forces—is patterned by intra-disciplinary disagreement. Perhaps the most intense of these is the disagreement within international relations between neorealists and liberal-internationalists. Another

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example is the sharp disagreement between hybridity theorists and civilizational approaches within cross-national cultural studies. The internal disagreements, buttressed by disciplinary practices, can preoccupy to the exclusion of the wider picture. Internationalized variants of disciplines may more often engage in disciplinary monologues than interdisciplinary dialogues. This is one of main benefits of global studies as an interdisciplinary field, where the different internationalized flanks of mainstream social science disciplines can come into interaction with each other.

Levels of Analysis ‘International studies’ may simply be defined as the study of international phenomena, thus encompassing all studies engaged with international research. Immediately, though, there are problems. The term ‘international’ carries with it the intellectual baggage of the international system, a system that is institutionally and conceptually arranged into levels. The hierarchic ordering of society, from the personal to the global, places international phenomena at one ‘level.’ Theory of globalization opens up this levels game, like a Pandora’s box. There are several dimensions—here discussed across national, global, regional, local, and transnational fields. Not surprisingly, levels debates are defined with and against national frameworks. As noted, the discipline of international relations is historically patterned by disputes over the centrality of interstate relations, and the degree of autonomy that should be accorded to international organizations. While that debate continues, it is no longer central, having been overwhelmed by a conceptually different debate, about the extent to which phenomena are nationally bounded. Unlike international relations, other disciplines that inhabit the realm of international studies are not in the first instance focused on international spheres. Their origins are in ‘domestic’ contexts, and their preoccupation is with globalization beyond these confines. Perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that all disciplines deploy statist assumptions of varying sorts. The ubiquitous approach of national comparison, of evaluating economic performance, or social division, or environmental degradation, for instance, that uses national aggregates or other indicators, falls under this category. Dependency theory, for instance, has been a theory for national societies caught in the logic of neocolonialism. Neoclassical trade theory, within mainstream political

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economy, similarly takes the national unit as a given, centering arguments about trade distortion on state policy rather than, for instance, on the restrictive practices of transnational corporations. Nationally centered approaches to understanding international social forces may similarly take national-level analysis for granted, and its legitimacy may be deliberately asserted and reclaimed. The ‘global’ frame offers an alternative to methodological nationalism. Globalism has a long tradition within international relations, in the form of liberal-internationalism, characterized by realists as ‘idealist.’ For liberal-­ internationalists, political structures—including at the national level— have a universalizing logic, developing toward deeper global governance, if not global government. The expectation of globalist institutionalists, for instance, was that shared vulnerability to global problems would force the creation of cross-national institutions, which in turn would spill over to constitute supra-national sources of authority. Similarly, globalist ideational analysis is conducted in the first instance at the level of humanity, rather than nationality. National norms and citizenship thus prefigure global norms and global citizenship. Cultural theorists then debate how to characterize the resulting cosmopolitanism. Material flows, not surprisingly, are often understood by neoclassical economists as creating a seamless global market, in the first instance in the sphere of financial flows. For many environmentalists, the cross-border logic of ecological degradation is producing global environmental change and forcing the emergence of global regulatory frameworks. And for those analyzing social forces, there is often a focus on the globalization of stratification, in relation to classes or gender for instance. The global feminization of poverty, noted by many observers, points to a global reordering of gender hierarchy, foregrounding questions of cross-cultural ­feminist agency. An important counterpoint to the sharp dichotomy between national-­ statist and globalist perspectives is the vast range of ‘macro’ regionalist approaches, ‘macro’ in being cross-national rather than subnational. These can take the form of area studies, exploring the distinctiveness of macro-­ regional entities, such as the Asia-Pacific, European Union, and Latin America. The emphasis of such studies is sometimes on regionalization processes, whereby the region acquires a new or altered coherence, perhaps with a process of institution-building. The cross-national interactions, perhaps overseen or managed by such institutions, are privileged as formative or constitutive of regional identity. Some approaches discuss

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regionalism as a step on the way to global formations, others focused on the interstate logic of regionalism or on the specifics of regionality. The European Union is perhaps the clearest example of a region that has stimulated its own body of regional integration theory, an entire subdiscipline in its own right. A second alternative to the national-global dichotomy is to focus analysis ‘below’ the national state, at the local, the lowest ‘level’ of analysis. Formally contained within the national state and subject to national sovereignty, studies of ‘the local’ may be defined as by definition a matter for domestic society. Localities, though, can have a defining effect on international contexts. For many, these effects are multiplying as cross-national flows and modes of governance offer new sources of local autonomy. Where interstate institutions are created to manage and foster cross-­ national flows, localities can become increasingly exposed. Sometimes, pressures are manifested in a renewal or emergence of separatism or irredentism. In other contexts, especially for instance where indigenous sovereignty claims are pursued within the national framework, they can give rise to demands for a thorough-going transformation of state power. Equally powerful may be the growing autonomy of local authorities, especially municipal authorities, as they actively exploit or shield themselves from cross-national flows and national states respond whether by devolving and federalizing, or by reasserting national unity. The resulting invigoration of local governance structures, whether in the form of ‘micro-regions’ in the EU, indigenous domain within settler societies, the assertion of substate nationalities, or indeed the emergence of semi-autonomous ‘global cities’ and industrial regions, opens up avenues for reconfigured locality. Researchers have responded with localized investigations of international studies, mapping international themes through the reconstitution of locality. Comparative frames have opened up across a number of areas, but perhaps most enthusiastically in the field of ‘global cities’ research. This was preceded in large part by debate about the political economy of ‘industrial regions,’ and a parallel embracing of locality by the field of ‘alternative’ development studies, and by variants of ‘post-colonial’ studies. Finally, and in most contrast with the ‘levels’ approach, a range of perspectives have sought to focus on transnational contexts. Transnational relations are relations across national contexts, rather than between them. From this perspective, there is no necessary leap from the national into global frameworks, nor a foregrounding of regionality or locality. Instead

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of privileging one level of analysis, the emphasis is more on the relations between levels, and on the flows across them. Rejecting ‘levels’ thinking, transnational studies can assume a radically deconstructive logic. Discursive efforts that bind flows to levels, thereby creating a spatial fix of one form or another, can be seen as reflecting the imperatives of power rather than any logic of internationality. Deconstructive approaches can draw attention to the process of transnational framing, where modes of conceptualization facilitate various forms of domination. The rhetoric of ‘terror’ is one example, emphasizing the enabling of various forms of militarist interventionism. From international sociology, a range of more structuralist approaches analyze globalizing class formations. A related focus on networked transnationalism allows a focus on webs of informational power, flowing from node to node across national contexts. Likewise, from the perspective of cultural theory, there are research transnational cultural flows, including media and entertainment, that interpenetrate and pattern national contexts. Transnational frameworks are often conceptualized as forcing a melding of levels. For some, the outcome is a process of glocalization, unevenly patterned between dominant modes of globalized localism, and subordinated zones, patterned by the process of localizing globalism. Likewise, debates among political scientists about the effect of European integration have led to ‘multilevel’ conceptualizations of political identity. Others suggest the shift is more to a ‘multi-perspectival’ condition, where differently constituted power sources pattern identification. In many respects, national sovereignty is said to be increasingly relativized, as cultural, normative, and institutional ‘levels’ are brought into play with one another. From this perspective, power can no longer be said to be concentrated at one ‘level’: territorial sovereignty is defined by its relational context, rather than by any absolute claim.

Conclusions Clearly, international relations and international studies, as disciplines dedicated to monopolizing ‘the international,’ are increasingly displaced. Global studies, as a paradoxically emergent interdisciplinary meta-­ discipline, is characterized by fluidity across key assumptions rather than fixity. There are no settled understandings of the units and levels, and thus of the questions to be asked and how to go about answering them. The differing perspectives do not produce internally coherent paradigms:

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unlike the previously dominant inter-paradigm debate in international relations, debates between perspectives in international studies are cross-­ cutting and overlapping. Within global studies, there is no one dominant paradigm, but equally there are no clearly distinguishable conflicting paradigms. We might, then, want to think of a third scenario. This could be understood as ‘post-revolutionary science’ (see Kuhn 1970), in the sense that the formerly relatively routinized inter-paradigmatic debate in international relations has substantially dissolved. Over time, a new discipline may emerge from the wreckage, with its own distinctive inter-paradigm conflicts. In the meantime, the sense of intellectual giddiness that Steger addresses is likely to be maintained. Its cross-disciplinary fluidity, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disorientating, will, no doubt, maintain its intellectual vigor as an interdisciplinary home for assorted ‘mavericks, ‘insurgents’ and ‘nomads,’ and remain a key site for reflecting on, critiquing, and transforming the globalizing contexts we are encountering.

References Boyer, Mark, Mary Caprioli, Robert A. Denemark, Elizabeth Hanson, and Stepehn Lamy. 2000. Visions of international studies in a new millennium. International Studies Perspectives 1: 1–9. Brecher, Michael. 1999. International Studies in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Flawed Dichotomies, Synthesis, Cumulation. International Studies Quarterly 43: 213–264. Buzan, Barry, and Little Richard. 2001. Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do About It. Millennium 30 (1): 19–39. Bull, Hedley. 1977. The Anarchical Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Caporaso, James. 1997. Across the Great Divide: Integrating Comparative and International Politics. International Studies Quarterly 41: 563–592. Drainville, André C. 2003. Critical Pedagogy for the Present Moment: Learning from the Avant-garde to Teach Globalisation from Experiences. International Studies Perspectives 4: 231–249. Dunne, Tim, Michael Cox, and Ken Booth. 1998. Introduction: The 80 Years Crisis. (Special Issue: The Eighty Years Crisis 1919–1989). Review of International Studies 24 (5): v–xii. Editors. 1962. Editorial. International Studies Quarterly 1, 1. George, Jim, and David Campbell. 1990. Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations. International Studies Quarterly 34: 269–293.

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Global Studies Association. 2017a. About the GSA. https://globalstudiesassoc. wordpress.com/about/. Accessed 27 Dec 2017. ———. 2017b. Our Rationale for Founding the GSA. http://www.net4dem. org/mayglobal/mission.html. Accessed 27 Dec 2017. Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. 1999. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Oxford: Polity. Herman, Margaret G. 1998. One Field, Many Perspectives: Building the Foundations for Dialogue. International Studies Quarterly 42: 605–624. International Studies Association. 1962. ISA Purpose. International Studies Quarterly 1, 1. James, Paul, and Manfred B. Steger. 2014. A Genealogy of “Globalization”: The Career of a Concept. Globalizations 11 (4): 417–434. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2012. Global Studies. In Encyclopedia of Global Studies, ed. M. Mark Juergensmeyer and Helmut K. Anheier, 728–737. London: Sage. Kratochwil, Friedrich. 1998. Politics, Norms and Peaceful Change (Special Issue: The Eighty Years Crisis 1919-1989). Review of International Studies 24 (5): 193–218. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Martin, Laurence. 1995. Chatham House at 75: The Past and the Future. International Affairs 71 (4): 697–703. Mittelman, James. 2002. Globalisation: An Ascendant Paradigm. International Studies Perspectives 3: 1–14. Murphy, Craig N. 2001. Political Consequences of the New Inequality. International Studies Quarterly 45: 347–356. Reynolds, P.A. 1975. International Studies: Retrospect and Prospect. British Journal of International Studies 1 (1): 1–20. Rosow, Stepehn J. 2003. Toward an Inter-disciplinary Global Studies. International Studies Perspectives 4: 1–14. Spence, J. E. 1975. Editorial. British Journal of International Studies 1, 1. np. Steger, Manfred B., ed. 2015. The Global Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2016. What Is Global Studies: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Strange, Susan. 1995. 1995 Presidential Address: ISA as a Microcosm. International Studies Quarterly 39: 289–295.

PART II

Manfred Steger’s Global Imaginary and Everyday Life

CHAPTER 5

Searching for Sugar Man: Thinking on the Border of the Global/Apartheid Imaginary Isaac Kamola

Over drinks at the 2013 International Studies Association meeting in San Francisco, Manfred Steger made a comment along the lines of: ‘If you want to great movie on globalization, you should really watch Searching for Sugar Man.’ As an undergraduate at Whitman College, the year Manfred taught on a visiting assistant professorship, I had learned that when Manfred suggests you do something, it is usually in your best interest to do so. I remember watching the movie with amazement, seeing very clearly its encapsulation of ‘globality,’ namely that ‘social condition characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural, and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the currently existing border and boundaries irrelevant’ (Steger 2003, 7). The 2012 documentary by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul examines the unlikely reception of Detroit blues musician Sixto Rodriguez in South Africa. Despite being unknown in the United States, Rodriguez’s albums Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971)—unbeknownst to the

I. Kamola (*) Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_5

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a­rtist—enjoyed immense popularity in apartheid South Africa, and the song ‘Sugar Man’ became an anthem of an anti-establishment youth ­counterculture. The movie documents two South African music fans— Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman and Craig Bartholomew-Strydom—who, in the years immediately following the end of apartheid, set out to confirm the strange rumors of Rodriguez’s dramatic on-stage suicide, only to discover him living in obscurity as a manual laborer in Detroit. Moving back and forth between Detroit and Cape Town, the movie culminates with the triumphant 1998 ‘return’ of Rodriguez, where he played a series of sold out concerts in South Africa—emerging from anonymity to receive a hero’s welcome. The movie clearly captures a sense of rapture that comes with seeing the closed-off world of apartheid connecting with the rest of the world, as once impermeable borders become irrelevant within a new global reality. South African music fans attest to growing up in a ‘pariah state,’ isolated behind ‘closed doors,’ without any sense of the world beyond. And, in this context, Rodriguez’s music contained, quoting Bartholomew-­ Strydom, ‘lyrics that almost set us free as an oppressed people’ (Bendjelloul 2012). The movie then pivots into a thrilling detective story in which Segerman and Bartholomew-Strydom create an early 1990s webpage—‘The Great Rodriguez Hunt’—and comb through song lyrics for clues, eventually leading them to a long-distance phone call with Rodriguez’s former producer, then his daughter, and eventually Rodriguez himself. A once-isolated world expands outward, becoming more transparent, interconnected, and vibrant. The following year in Toronto, Manfred and I had a long discussion about Searching for Sugar Man, and the issues it raises for thinking about globalization and the rise of the global imaginary (Steger 2008). Even after our conversation, however, I remained troubled by the noticeable absence of black and colored South Africans throughout the movie as well as a nagging skepticism about the clear parsimony drawn between Rodriguez’s personal redemption and (white) South African national redemption. I rewatched the movie, this time paying careful attention to the descriptions of grinding poverty retold by Rodriquez’s grown children; to music executives pocketing royalties; and to urban landscapes still defined by racial segregation and deindustrialization. These moments, rather than the exuberant narrative of personal and national redemption, recast globality and apartheid not as existing in a linear progression (i.e., apartheid giving way to globalization) but rather as two deeply entwined realities. I came to see how globalization and apartheid exist not as a

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homology—for example, that ‘global society is a mirror reflection of South African society’ (Köhler 1978, 264; see also: Köhler 1995; Mazrui 1994)—but rather constitutive conditions for the other. Global interconnection, and the flow of cultural across borders, depends upon continued exclusion and marginalization. However, rather than explore the global/ apartheid imaginary, Searching for Sugar Man presents Rodriquez as personifying a meta-narrative of redemption in which apartheid gives way to the triumph of ‘the global.’ Rather than a story about the rise of the global imaginary, this chapter suggests that the complex relationships between Detroit and Cape Town, between Rodriquez and his South African fans, between transcontinental culture and global capital, could instead be the template from which to articulate the intersection of the modern and the colonial, or more specifically to demonstrate the global/apartheid imaginary. If one searches out this narrative—a story in which the drawing together of globalization exists in relationship to the policing of division—then apartheid does not simply give way to redemptive globality. Rather, we come to find out that, at the center of this narrative, Rodriquez himself provides the key insights into what it might mean to think at the border of this global/apartheid imaginary.

From Social Imaginary to Modern/Colonial Imaginary Steger’s book The Rise of the Global Imaginary (2008) argues that since World War II national imaginaries have been subsumed by a global imaginary. I argue, however, that rather than articulating the global imaginary as an emergent social imaginary, it is more useful to situate both the national and global imaginaries as embedded within the same modern/ colonial imaginary. The first half of Steger’s book offers a historical account of how the ‘social imaginary’ of the nation provided the ‘implicit “background”’ upon which the ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were grounded (Steger 2008, 6), documenting how the ideologies from the nineteenth century (British Liberalism, French Conservatism, and German Socialism) and the twentieth century (Russian Communism and German Nazism) were undergirded by a national imaginary. The book’s second half examines how this national imaginary became punctuated by the rise of a global imaginary. World War II, Steger demonstrates, unsettled the

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nation imaginary, causing a great movement of people, cultivated new technologies of communications and transportation, and, in Nazism, provided evidence of the extreme violence of nationalism. In this context, the ‘new ideas, theories, and practices [that were] produced in the public ­consciousness’ created a ‘sense of rupture’ that ‘facilitated the speed and intensity with which these ideas and practices infiltrated the national imaginary’ (Steger 2008, 10). As ‘[i]mages, people, and materials circulated more freely across national boundaries,’ a ‘new sense of “the global” that erupted within and onto the national began to undermine the normality and self-contained coziness of the modern nation-state’ (Steger 2008, 10–11). Within this context, ‘deeply engrained notions of community,’ historically moored to ‘sovereign and clearly demarcated territory’ and ‘relatively homogenous populations,’ gave way to the global imaginary (Steger 2008, 11). I have argued elsewhere, however, that Steger’s analysis of the global imaginary remains overly reliant on the European experience, not only in terms of the empirical evidence but also the theorists Steger uses to develop his conception of the global imaginary (Kamola 2014, 521–524). Steger does, however, take Third World anticolonialism very seriously in his analysis; the fourth chapter of Rise of the Global Imaginary—and the first in the section on the global imaginary—focuses on the important role ‘Third-World Liberationism’ played in the emergence of a global imaginary. Here Steger argues that Third-World intellectuals occupied a space where the Cold War pitted two national ideologies—‘American liberalism’ and ‘Russian Communism’—against each other. The result was ‘both the globalization of European idea of sovereign nation-states’ as well as ‘the affirmation of a postwar conceptual and geographical order’ that did not respect national borders but rather ‘divided the globe’ into First, Second, and Third worlds (Steger 2008, 135–36). This shift opened the possibility of beginning to imagine non-national communities organized around ‘[t]erms like “democracy,” “capitalism,” “communism,” and “socialism”’ and making it increasingly possible to inhabit communities that ‘converge[d] around a common set of ideological claims regardless of national differences’ (Steger 2008, 136). Steger then reads the work of Mahatma Ghandi and Frantz Fanon as ‘two of the most influential codifiers of Third-World Liberationism,’ identifying in each a strategy of liberation that starts with national liberation but becomes ‘increasingly oriented towards a global frame of reference’ (Steger 2008, 139 and 144).

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One might ask, however, if Fanon, Gandhi, and other Third-World intellectuals were merely fellow travelers in an already unfolding global imaginary? Stein and Andreotti (2017) convincingly argue that both national and global imaginaries actually remain firmly rooted within the same modern/colonial imaginary. Drawing upon Walter Mignolo, they argue that the modern/colonial imaginary, understood in the longue durée, is an imaginary that ‘has naturalized Western/European domination and capitalist, racial/colonial social relations and institutions, and projected the Western/European perspective as a universal blueprint for global designs’ (Stein and Andreotti 2017, 173). Mignolo developed the concept of ‘the modern/colonial’ as a strategy for thinking modernity and colonialism together, rather than assuming they are ‘two different phenomena’ (Mignolo 2000, 30). There is no modernity without its ‘dark side,’ no industrial revolution without its vast resources and labor reserves, and no globality without particularity and alterity. Mignolo suggests that ‘border thinking’—that is, drawing upon non-academic and alternative intellectual traditions, languages, and forms of thought operating outside the terms offered by the modern/colonial imaginary—makes it possible to identify ‘moments in which the imaginary of the modern world system cracks’ (Mignolo 2000, 23). This analysis makes it possible to reread Searching for Sugar Man not as a triumphal modernist narrative—a closed, apartheid national imaginary giving way to a triumphant global imaginary—but rather as a rearticulation of the modern/colonial imaginary. Within the context of late 1990s South Africa, the relationship between modern and colonial appears within the specific contours of ‘global’ and ‘apartheid.’ The Global/Apartheid Imaginary In terms very similar to Steger’s, Aletta Norval argues that apartheid1 should be understood not as an ideology but rather an imaginary. She argues that apartheid proved so durable not because it operated as an ideology radiating out from a centralized state, but rather because it ‘instituted imaginary horizons which structured all social relations’—and, in doing so, ‘served to delimit the sphere of the thinkable’ (Norval 1996, 27). As an imaginary, apartheid ‘did not operate either through logics of exclusion, nor simply through differential forms of inclusion,’ but rather ‘through the simultaneous retention of both those logics’ (Norval 1996, 10). In other words, apartheid not only imagined the world as separated

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along racial and ethnic lines, but also actively constituted an inclusive Afrikaner national identity. In this way, apartheid simultaneously imagined ‘the volk’ as a community under siege from ‘foreigners’—Jews, English-­ speakers, and black South Africans. The apartheid imaginary did not, therefore, constitute a national community of citizens who were ‘willing to die’ for the nation (Anderson 2002, 7) but rather imagined South Africa as a nation that was simultaneously both inclusive and exclusive— drawing commonalities among whites and proliferating (and policing) difference among blacks. In 1996, Norval was optimistic that the apartheid imaginary was being replaced by a ‘discourse of non-racialism’ that was in ‘the process of becoming a new imaginary’ (Norval 1996, 11). This imaginary not only ‘managed to weld together a united front out of the inchoate forms of resistance of the early 1980s,’ but was also proving capable of ‘constructing a form of unity across existing divisions’ (Norval 1996, 11). In concluding the movie with Rodriquez’s 1998 concerts, Searching for Sugar Man captures the euphoria of this time. However, unlike Norval’s account, the movie assumes global interconnection and simply replaces the histories of apartheid and racialized exclusion. Rather than a story about the political and economic struggles to construct new ‘non-racial’ imaginaries, the movie instead narrates the rise of a global imaginary as personal and national redemption. It circumvents the realities of apartheid, choosing to imagine a modernity without coloniality, and a globality without apartheid. Many critics point out that the movie veers into escapist fantasy, presenting the global imaginary without acknowledging the durability of apartheid.

Searching for Sugar Man and the Global/Apartheid Imaginary Since its 2012 release, Searching for Sugar Man won an Oscar for best documentary as well as awards at film festivals in Amsterdam, Athens, Durban, Göteborg, Melbourne, Moscow, Oslo, and elsewhere. It was nominated for nearly four dozen critics’ awards, winning nearly half of them (including the prestigious British Academy of Film and Television Arts). It took home the coveted audience award at Sundance, as well as awards for best documentary screenplay and outstanding directorial achievement from the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild of America.2

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In addition to dominating the awards ceremonies, the movie became a Cinderella story as it became widely known that Bendjelloul produced the movie on a shoestring budget and, after spending through his life savings, shot the last scenes using the iPhone app 8 mm Vintage Camera (Perrone 2014, 8). There was continued public praise and celebration of the movie in the months following Bendjelloul’s tragic suicide in May 2014. While the critical acclaim has been unambiguously laudatory, the academic response has been much more mixed. In particular, a number of authors have argued, in various ways, that the redemption narrative is only possible by flattening the true complexity of apartheid. A 2013 roundtable in Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, for example, offers a vibrant collection of pieces written by scholars in South Africa, Canada, the United States, and Sweden—including a number of whom grew up immersed within the white South African counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s. Together, these commentaries offer the overarching criticism that, put most critically, the film offers a ‘false moral economy’ possible because of a glaring ‘narrative scam’ (Titlestad 2013, 467–68). In short, the movie ignores the political struggles over apartheid, offering instead a ‘sugar coated’ narrative of personal transcendence and redemption as personified in Rodriguez. This general argument plays out in a number of ways. First of all, contributors point to factual errors and omissions concerning Rodriguez’s biography. For example, while the movie portrays Rodriguez as a musician largely ignored outside the South African market, in actuality he was quite popular in New Zealand and Australia, even touring Australia in 1979 and 1981 and headlining for the popular Australian band Midnight Oil (Rommen 2013, 471; Watson 2013, 485). Furthermore, he enjoyed a considerable revival during the decade and a half between the movie’s final scenes in 1998 and the movie’s release 14 years later. For example, in addition to the 1998 South Africa concerts, Rodriguez also toured in Australia and Sweden, enjoyed the rerelease and covers of his music, and a 2006 tour headlining for Animal Collective (Watson 2013, 485). Furthermore, the narrative of Rodriguez as a genius, only fully appreciated by South Africans, understates the ways in which Rodriguez’s limited commercial success in the United States was probably more likely due to declining popularity of ‘protest and folk music’ during the 1970s, poor marketing and distribution decisions, racism within the American music industry, and a personal performance style that made marketing his music extremely difficult (Watson 2013, 485;

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Rommen 2013, 472). The fact that Searching for Sugar Man is ‘uninterested…in these details,’ in addition to peddling ‘unsubstantiated rumors about how his albums came to South Africa’ in the luggage of an American student, cultivates a ‘straightforward’ and ‘charming’ story that ‘juxtapose[es] Rodriguez’s neglect in the USA to his mysterious popularity in South Africa’ (Watson 2013, 485). This sets the stage, Simon Lewsen argues, for a ‘resurrection narrative’ premised on a ‘manipulative trick’—Rodriguez’s supposed death and rediscovery becomes ‘a metaphor’ that ‘allegorizes what it feels like when the unimaginable becomes real’ (Lewsen 2013, 464). A number of contributors also argue that Searching for Sugar Man depends upon a dramatic overstatement of Rodriguez’s influence on the anti-apartheid music scene. The focus on two Afrikaner fans—Segerman and Bartholomew-Strydom—allows the movie to traffic in anecdotal evidence that Rodriguez introduced ‘the word anti-establishment’ to white South African youth and gave them ‘permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently’ (quoted in: Lewsen 2013, 461). Segerman even credits Rodriguez’s album Cold Fact as being ‘the first opposition to apartheid…within the Afrikaans community’ (quoted in: Lewsen 2013, 461). In doing so, the movie ‘overstates the importance’ of the Afrikaner youth counterculture known as Voëlvry to ‘the broader South African narrative’ (Lewsen 2013, 461).3 Titlestad also refutes Bendjelloul’s ‘assertion’ that Rodriguez fans were necessarily ‘anti-establishment and opposed to apartheid,’ noting the musician’s appeal was widespread and, ‘in musically progressive circles, a marker of conservative, stymied tastes’ (Titlestad 2013, 467). He bemoans the memory of how, while serving in the South African Defense Force, ‘every ghastly compulsory braai [barbecue], Rodriguez would ring out, or even worse, a drunk soldier would fetch his guitar and eviscerate “Sugar Man”’ (Titlestad 2013, 467). This is especially problematic given that Searching for Sugar Man does not even acknowledge the more historically significant musical movements within the anti-apartheid struggle, most of which originated within black communities (Lewsen 2013, 462). Overstating the role of Voëlvry in the anti-apartheid struggle results in a ‘confused and insensitive’ political ‘juxtaposition’: while the film focuses on state censorship of music within a relatively minor white music scene, the documentary’s ‘five-minute history lesson on apartheid’ features mostly ‘black bodies lying in the street’ (Lewsen 2013, 462).

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This overstated narration of white resistance, retold from the perspective of Afrikaner youth culture, is further complicated when it becomes evident that the vast majority of the audience at Rodriguez’s 1998 South African concerts were white (Lewsen 2013, 458). This racial division within the audience is further confirmed by one scholar who, attending a 2013 Rodriguez’s concert, noted that ‘out of 5,500 people, there was one black and one Indian couple (both of whom seemed to be on involuntary work outings)’ (Titlestad 2013, 469). Rather than reimagining South Africa beyond racialized whiteness and blackness, which Norval argued is needed to combat the apartheid imaginary, Rodriguez’s reception in South Africa reproduced of a ‘simulacrum of community,’ enabled by the consumption of a ‘fungible and marketable white South African nostalgia’ through a ‘performance of redemption by an audience escaping the realities of post-apartheid South Africa’ by congregating in the presence of ‘a fragile, gentle freedom fighter’ (Titlestad 2013, 470). For some contributors, the reception of Rodriguez in South Africa is further complicated by the fact that the movie’s narrative arc  depends upon the selective, and highly seductive, dislocation of Detroit and Cape Town. On the one hand, Detroit is continually portrayed as a ‘stormy, cold, dark, rainy, icy, snowy, desolate, blight-stricken’ city, the perfect ‘antipode of Cape Town, where sun, health, bright prospects, and beauty abound’ (Titlestad 2013, 471; also: Cole 2013, 476). The movie offers only a caricatured depiction of Detroit: a place without musical history or political history. While the movie focused on the gritty neighborhoods and street corners, Rodriguez’s Detroit of the late 1960s and early 1970s was also the heart of a great, largely black, American music scene as well as a strong unionized middle class. In the 1960s, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, the Motor City 5, Alice Cooper, and other prominent musicians called Detroit home. By the 1970s, building on the success of Motown Records, Detroit was also home to The Temptations, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and The Jackson 5 (Cole 2013, 479). This musical context is largely missing from the movie, which often simply transposes the contemporary postindustrial city back in time. In addition to ignoring the music of Detroit, the movie also fails to explore the considerable exploitation of black and Latino musicians within the music industry. At one point, it becomes evident that Rodriguez’s record label, Sussex Records, had been  stealing from him for decades. Bartholomew-Strydom describes his efforts to ‘follow the money’ during

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the 1990s and how he came up against a labyrinthine maze of contracts, labels, and disconnected phone lines. When Bendjelloul interviews the owner of Sussex Records a decade and a half later, Clarence Avant responds to the insinuation that he pocketed Rodriguez’s royalties, saying: ‘Which is important? Rodriguez’s story, or you worrying about the money?...You think I’m going to worry about a 1970 contract? If you do, you’re out of your god-damned mind’ (quoted in: Rommen 2013, 473). Rommen argues that at this moment in the film Bendjelloul stops pushing the question and gives the music industry ‘a free pass,’ choosing instead to ‘move [ ] on’ to the ‘“main” story’ about the redemption of Rodriguez and, by extension, South Africa (Rommen 2013, 473). Rommen suggests that the film might have instead offered ‘a clear-eyed exploration’ of the profound exploitation that runs through the music industry in the United States as well as South Africa, while acknowledging that such a story would necessarily ‘detract from the directness of the film’s main story (the rebirth narrative)’ (Rommen 2013, 473). This story about the exploitation within the music industry is compounded by the fact that the movie also ignores the political context within which Rodriguez circulated, including the fact that Rodriguez worked in two automobile factories organized by the ‘most radical group of African American unionists in the entire nation’—the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and the Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement (ELRUM) (Cole 2013, 478). This political milieu helps explain the ‘radical politics’ a number of interviewees attribute to Rodriguez’s music (Cole 2013, 479). This history could help explain Rodriguez’s quixotic run for city council and mayor, the protests he brought his children to, and the various examples of his participation in class politics. The movie might have discussed Rodriguez’s youth, growing up in a union family, living in Detroit’s highly politicized Mexicantown, and profoundly influenced by the civil right movement and Martin Luther King (who appears in his song ‘Inner City Blues’) (DeWitt 2015, 14–17). The dehistoricization and depoliticization of Detroit, however, is not coincidental because it makes possible a narrative of desperation that gives rise to ‘rebirth’ (Titlestad 2013, 471). In fact, ‘the Detroit streetscape’ only becomes ‘depicted in daylight’ at the moment ‘Rodriguez’s hometown becomes an identifiable place in the minds of the South African characters’—which is, after all, the ‘development that the film allegorizes and celebrates’ (Lewsen 2013, 463–64). In this way, both cities—Detroit and Cape Town—are presented not as ‘active sites of inspiration, struggle,

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and social complexity,’ but rather as ‘soundless, windowless caricatures of the two cities, which serve only as a static backdrop to the film’s narrative of rebirth’ (Titlestad 2013, 471–72). Taken together, the critics of Searching for Sugar Man argue that the redemption narrative that makes the movie so compelling is only possible because it ignores the realities of political and economic exploitation (and struggle) that shape both Detroit and Cape Town. It imagines an emergent globality, but without space from which to understand the durability of the apartheid imaginary (and its many resistances) in both Cape Town and Detroit. Following Mignolo, engaging with this story from the border of the modern/colonial imaginary requires being attentive to how both locations are similarly marked by the logic of apartheid—how the global/ apartheid imaginary simultaneously proliferates lines of transnational inclusion as well as exclusion. A decade and a half after the concerts that conclude the movie, the general optimism for a transition from apartheid to globality has also waned. Just as Rodriguez’s 1998 concerts were ‘a nostalgic reconstruction of the grand nostalgic moment’ (Titlestad 2013, 468), the movie-going audience of Searching for Sugar Man experiences a similar nostalgia, a yearning for a time when it was still possible to believe in globalization as that force that was inevitably moving humanity beyond the persistent realities of the nation-state, settler colonialism, and apartheid. While Bendjelloul’s story cannot help us better understand the global/apartheid, the movie’s protagonist—Rodriquez himself—continually rejects being situated within a narrative of global redemption. In doing so, he gives an example of thinking at the border of the global/apartheid imaginary. Border Thinking and the Global/Apartheid Imaginary A number of contributors to the Safundi roundtable acknowledge that—despite its flaws—Searching for Sugar Man still captures something very powerful about the late 1990s in South Africa, namely the thrilling and miraculous sense of opening toward the rest of the world that occurred with the end of apartheid. In the movie, Rodriguez’s triumphalist return personifies that very real feeling. Despite his reservations, Simon Lewsen nonetheless acknowledges that Searching for Sugar Man ­successfully employs

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the Rodriguez narrative to dramatize the moment at which, for the film’s South African participants, the unknowable world became knowable. This is a moment when transnational boundaries have been loosened, state censorship is over, international artists can be flown across the ocean and their performances celebrated publically, dispersed fan communities can be united, and dead heroes can (at least metaphorically) be brought back to life. (Lewsen 2013, 465)

Jonathan Hyslop similarly acknowledges that although he felt ‘manipulated,’ he nonetheless acknowledged that the movie raised a number of ‘analytical issues which ought not to be dismissed’ (Hyslop 2013, 491). Acknowledging that the documentary overstates Rodriguez’s role in the Afrikaner anti-apartheid youth culture, Hyslop nonetheless recognizes that the movie still captures ‘the feelings of those who started to perceive that the paradise in which they were living was a mirage,’ and for whom music was ‘one of the very, very few areas where they could explore the world across apartheid boundaries’ (Hyslop 2013, 499). Stefan Helgesson makes a similar argument, not about Rodriguez’s South African reception but rather about the movie’s international reception. He argues that the movie speaks to a profound desire—a ‘yearning’—for ‘our politically jaded contemporary moment’ to have a ‘narrative of working-class experience, of artistic integrity, of perseverance, and of forging connections across continents and communities’ (Helgesson 2013). If Rodriguez’s story is routinely described as ‘unbelievable,’ the story of Solomon Linda is much more believable. Linda was the ‘black migrant worker living in a squalid Johannesburg hostel in 1939’ who wrote ‘a song based on his own childhood experience protecting cattle from lions in the jungle.’ The song borrowed the syncopation of American jazz from across the Atlantic and mixed it with an a cappella melody to create what would become Africa’s first recorded pop hit. Linda’s song soon crossed the Atlantic and was reborn, first as ‘Wimoweh’ and later as ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight.’ It would go on to be recorded over 170 times, eventually finding its way into Disney’s immensely popular film and Broadway production The Lion King. But while the song eventually produced millions of dollars for Disney and others, Linda died destitute, suffering from a curable kidney disease at the age of fifty-three. One of Linda’s children died of malnutrition and another died of AIDS. (Sunder 2012, 2)

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Like Rodriguez, Linda’s story is one of dense and vast circuits of exchange and circulation: the lived South African experience, blending with American musical influences to became an African musical sensation, before traveling to the United States, and eventually entering ‘global’ culture as the cornerstone to a movie yielding $987 million at the box office, on its way to becoming the highest grossing musical of all time (at $6.2 billion).4 Given this more believable story of ‘global’ cultural circulation, the critics of Searching for Sugar Man are rightly skeptical of Rodriquez’s redemption story—especially as it seems constructed through a series of narrative slights-of-hand. However, in criticizing the redemption narrative, most commentators miss the fact that, even as the movie paints a picture of rebirth around him, Rodriguez continually pushes back against this very premise. Throughout the movie Rodriguez is portrayed by others as a neglected ‘mystic,’ a ‘wandering spirit,’ and a ‘poet of the streets’ who finally finds redemption in South Africa. But what if we pay attention what Rodriguez (not Bendjelloul) is saying? In listening to Sixto Rodriguez, it becomes possible to find—in the middle of a movie organized around the transcendent redemption of globality—an intellectual whose ‘local history’ speaks back to the ‘global design’ (Mignolo 2000). First of all, it is not clear that Rodriguez sees his trip to South Africa in terms of personal redemption, or his life of hard labor as somehow lacking. Take, for example, the interview conducted on a snowy day in Rodriguez’s Detroit home: Bendjelloul: How does that feel? You weren’t aware of something that would have changed your life completely? I mean, probably to the better. Rodriguez: Well, I don’t know if it would have been for the better, but it’s certainly a thought, you know. Bendjelloul: But wouldn’t it have been nice to know that you were a superstar? Rodriguez: Uh, well…I don’t know how to respond to that. Bendjelloul: After Coming From Reality, did you wanna continue making albums? Rodriguez: I would have liked to have continued but nothing beats reality.5 So I pretty much went back to work. Bendjelloul: What did you do?

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Rodriguez:

I…Well I do hard labor. Demolition. Renovation of building, of homes, you know. Restoration. Bendjelloul: Did you enjoy that? Rodriguez: I do. It keeps the blood circulation, keeps you fit, yeah. (Bendjelloul 2012) Rather than expressing resentment about his deprivation from stardom, he seems to express an unexpected contentment with ‘reality.’ Almost in disbelief, Bendjelloul ask Rodriquez what ‘did’ he do (in the past tense). In each case, Rodriquez replies in the present tense. Throughout the film, others also attempt to fit Rodriguez into a narrative of rebirth through his global reconnection to South Africa. While Rodriguez does acknowledge that South Africa treated him like a ‘prince,’ he never describes the experience as magical, overwhelming, expected, or even deserved. In the hotel, he sleeps on the couch rather than the king-­ sized bed, not wanting to inconvenience the housekeepers with another bed to make. In describing the 1998 concerts, Segerman mentions expecting Rodriguez to seem ‘bewildered’ with the large crowds, but instead saw ‘serenity’ on his face. He attributes this to Rodriguez having come ‘home’ to South Africa. Segerman continues: ‘Home is acceptance. Here’s a guy who’d lived somewhere else, on the other side of the earth, and it was almost as if he had found his home.’ However, while Rodriguez seems perfectly at home in Cape Town, he never seems not-at-home in the Detroit house he bought 40 years earlier for $50 (Bendjelloul 2012; Malan 2013). Following a montage of rapturous and adoring crowds, journalist Rian Malan similarly describes the story as one of mythic redemption, but seems puzzled when Rodriquez remains unwilling to accept this premise: Well, isn’t this all our great fate. Your dreams of yourself, the higher forms of yourself is that one day you will be recognized and that your talents and everything else, will certainly become visible to the world. I mean, most of us die without coming anywhere close to that sort of magic. I tried to get him to talk about that when I interviewed him, about how strange it was, and I got absolutely nothing back. Absolutely nothing back. And I couldn’t tell whether he was sort of cripplingly shy or whether I was asking the wrong questions or there was a language barrier or whatever. He just … Maybe that was okay as well because he preserved his mystery. I walked away from that

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interview saying, ‘This is all too strange to be true. It remains too strange to be true. These are the days of miracles and wonder.’ (Bendjelloul 2012)

Rodriguez remains unwilling to claim that South Africa brought out his ‘real self,’ as if to say: that man on stage is who I’ve always been, every day of my life. In another scene, narrated over footage of Rodriguez lighting a piece of cardboard in the fireplace to heat his visibly drafty house, Regan Rodriguez tells us how her father ‘lives a very, very, very modest life… There’s definitely no excess, and he definitely still works hard in order to make ends meet. And there’s no glamour to his life in that sense.’ Following up with an air of disbelief, Bendjelloul asks: ‘But he must be a rich man today?’ She responds: ‘Rich in a lot of things but perhaps not material things.’ In an air of righteous indignation, Bendjelloul asks about the hundreds of thousands of records he sold in South Africa, to which she replies: ‘Perhaps other people are rich’ because of his music. The next scene shows Rodriguez walking past abandoned lots in Detroit with a track from his unfinished 1973 album playing. The lyrics read: ‘And you can keep your symbols of success. Then I’ll pursue my own happiness. And you can keep your clocks and routines … And I’ll slip away.’ In the credit sequence, we learn that Rodriguez returned to South Africa four times and performed more than 30 concerts there, but ‘has given away most of the money earned from these tours to his family and friends.’ In these moments, despite both the director’s and the critics’ insistences, Rodriguez seems to be saying: This is not a story of redemption, nor a story of a racist music industry, nor worker exploitation. Rather my life is a story about a different way of being in the world, a different relationship to labor, and to ­politics, to music, and to love. Rather than a narrative of global redemption, Rodriguez insists upon presenting us with a form of ‘border thinking’—a local knowledge, rooted in radical politics, poetics, and music; one that continues to circulate at the border of the global/apartheid imaginary. Rommen concludes his piece wondering: ‘what might have been if the film’s “search” had been just a bit more urgent—if the search for Sugar Man had also involved a search for Detroit, a search for Cape Town, a search for the musical and cultural circuits that have bound South African and the USA since at least the nineteenth century, and, more pressingly, a search for the money’ (Rommen 2013, 475). We might follow up and ask what might have been if the movie also searched for apartheid, and for coloniality. Maybe one place to start would be to ask the man at the center

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of the story, a man confidently articulating a knowledge, history, and subjectivity that—despite the movie’s best efforts—continues to dwell on the border of the global/apartheid imaginary.

Notes 1. Apartheid is a term generally used to describe the practices of racial and ethnic segregation organizing South African society from 1948 to 1994. 2. Searching for Sugar Man (2012), IMDB. http://tinyurl.com/hwoftdp [accessed October 2016]. 3. For academic articles covering a more complicated account of Voëlvry political origin, reception, and influence, see (Ballantine 2004; Grundingh 2004; Van Der Merwe 2014). 4. ‘The Lion King (1994),’ The Numbers. http://tinyurl.com/zq2adou 5. It is unclear whether Rodriguez means ‘nothing beats [the album Coming From] Reality’ or, more likely, ‘nothing beats [the] reality [of the situation].’

References Anderson, Benedict. 2002. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso. Ballantine, Christopher. 2004. Re-Thinking ‘Whiteness’? Identity, Change, and ‘White’ Popular Music in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Popular Music 23 (2): 105–131. Bendjelloul, Malik. 2012. Searching for Sugar Man. Sony Pictures Classics. Sweden, UK, Finland. Cole, Peter. 2013. Searching for Detroit. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 476–481. DeWitt, Howard A. 2015. Searching for Sugar Man: Sixto Rodriguez’ Mythical Climb to Rock N Roll Fame and Fortune. Scottsdale: Horizon Books. Grundingh, Albert. 2004. ‘Rocking the Boat’ in South Africa?: Voëlvry Music and Afrikaans Anti-Apartheid Social Protests in the 1980s. International Journal of African Historical Studies 37 (3): 483–514. Helgesson, Stefan. 2013. Sugar Man and Anglo-Sweden. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 481–484. Hyslop, Jonathan. 2013. ‘Days of Miracle and Wonder’? Conformity and Revolt in Searching for Sugar Man. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 490–501. Kamola, Isaac. 2014. US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16 (3): 515–533.

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Köhler, Gernot. 1978. Global Apartheid. Alternatives: Global, Local, Politics 4: 263–275. ———. 1995. The Three Meanings of Global Apartheid: Empirical, Normative, Existential. Alternatives: Global, Local, Politics 20 (3): 403–413. Lewsen, Simon. 2013. On Music, Censorship, and Globalization. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 455–466. Malan, Rian. 2013. Discovering Hippies and Teen Rebellion When ‘Searching for Sugar Man.’ Mail & Guardian, 8 February. Mazrui, Ali. 1994. Global Apartheid: Structural and Overt. Alternatives 19: 185–193. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Norval, Aletta J.  1996. Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse. London/New York: Verso. Perrone, Pierre. 2014. Inspired Filmaker Brought Rodriguez’s SA Connection to Life. Pretoria News, May 19, 8. Rommen, Timothy. 2013. Some Cold Facts About Circuits and Circuit Breakers. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 471–475. Steger, Manfred B. 2003. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, Sharon, and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. 2017. Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 17 (3): 173–181. Sunder, Madhavi. 2012. From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Titlestad, Michael. 2013. Searching for the Sugar-Coated Man. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 466–470. Van Der Merwe, Schalk D. 2014. ‘Radio Apartheid’: Investigating a History of Compliance and Resistance in Popular Afrikaans Music, 1956–1979. South African Historical Journal 66 (2): 349–370. Watson, David. 2013. Letting Go of the Cold Facts. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 14 (4): 485–490.

CHAPTER 6

Global Imaginaries Beyond Markets: The Globalization of Money, Family, and Financial Inclusion Supriya Singh

A New Perspective on Money in Personal Lives in the Global South Manfred Steger’s view of globalization—as an imaginary, as more than a recent Western economic phenomenon, as linked to justice—opens up the discussion of globalization beyond markets and the West (Steger 2008, 2009; Steger et al. 2012). As Manfred Steger (2009) says, most discussions of globalization focus on ‘one aspect of globalization – usually the emerging global economic system, its history, structure, and supposed benefits and failings’ (2009, ix). This focus helps explain the complexities of ‘international trade policy, global financial markets, worldwide flow of goods, services, and labour, transnational corporations, offshore financial centres, foreign direct investment, and the new international economic institutions’ (2009, ix). But these accounts are narrow in that they treat globalization as ‘primarily an economic phenomenon mediated by new S. Singh (*) Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_6

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technologies’ (2009, ix). Steger argues that ‘globalization is best thought of as a multidimensional set of social processes…Indeed, the transformative powers of globalization reach deeply into the economic, political, cultural, technological, and ecological dimensions of contemporary social life’ (2009, ix–x). Steger (2009) recognizes the importance of interconnected markets, the global flows of ideas and commodities, and the development of new technologies. He, however, wants to go beyond the dominant ideology of ‘market globalism’ to ‘justice globalism’ to investigate how these developments ‘go hand in hand with greater forms of freedom and equality for all people, especially those living in the global South’ (2009, xi). Moving the emphasis of globalization beyond markets and to the global South means new questions and perspectives come to the fore. Some of the most important global issues of our time are those encompassing financial exclusion and gender. Nearly half the people in the world are unbanked, that is, they have no account or other dealings with a financial institution or a mobile money account. People in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America are more unbanked than people in high-income countries in the West. Women are more excluded than men from financial institutions. For these reasons, discussions of globalization should move beyond markets to questions of social justice. This is why central bankers from the global South discuss how financial technologies (fintech) can contribute to equity through financial inclusion. When they exchange views on microfinance, mobile money, branchless banking, different banking structures, identity systems, and ways of using blockchain and cryptocurrencies to decrease the cost of remittances, they are engaging with issues of justice globalism. The shift from markets to money embraces the social and cultural shaping of money in personal lives as well as markets in a global world. As money shapes and is shaped by social relations and cultural values (Bandelj et al. 2017a; Zelizer 1994, 2011), the emphasis moves to the melding of personal and market money. The management and control of money in the home connects to different banking patterns, services, and products across cultures. International remittances, that is, money sent home by migrants, emerge as one of the largest international flows of funds. These remittances are distinctive to the global South. They relate to a different morality and intergenerational reciprocity of money in the family which is characteristic of much of the global South. The story of global markets

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thus includes the story of remittances which in turn relates to the way money is used in the family in the global South. Seeing money and globalization from a global South perspective reveals money in the future is more likely to be family centered and marked by intergenerational reciprocity. It will include the transformative effect of ‘fintech’ on financial inclusion and women’s empowerment. The gender and morality of money in the family is further discussed in later sections of the chapter by focusing on the way money is managed and controlled and by illustrating how money is the medium of relationship defining roles and expectations.

Financial Inclusion Half the people in the world (49 percent) were unbanked in 2011 (Demirgüç-Kunt and Klapper 2012). It demonstrated the paucity of the view that associates globalization with global financial markets for it excluded 2.5 billion people who may be engaged in circuits of exchange at other levels, such as local markets. Women and the poor were more likely to be unbanked than the rest. In 2017, about 1.7 billion persons over 15 years of age, that is 31 percent of the global adult population, remained financially excluded. Mobile money, that is, money sent from one mobile phone to another, with or without a bank account in the middle, was largely responsible for the increase in financial inclusion, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Women however remained the largest excluded group, numbering 980 million. Sixty-five percent of women were banked compared with men at 72 percent. The gender gap remained nearly constant at 7 percent between 2011 and 2018 (Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2018; Graham 2018). Disparities persist in the developing world. In East Asia and the Pacific, 71 percent were financially included in 2017 compared to 32 percent in South Asia and 33 percent in the Middle East and North Africa (Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2018). Financial inclusion is important for the poor. One of the myths is that the poor have no money to save or manage. The unbanked actively manage their money by saving where they can, borrowing from friends and family or moneylenders, paying by cash, and sending money home. They are usually part of the informal economy with an unstable and precarious cash flow. Not being banked means they do not have a safe way of saving small amounts of money on a daily basis. They also cannot borrow in an affordable and speedy manner for emergencies and for evening out cash

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flows of a precarious living. More than others, they need insurance as they do not have a buffer to cope with emergencies. Their need is to have reliable financial services that will suit their needs (Collins et al. 2009). One of the human faces of the financially excluded is Irene, 30 years old and a casual teacher. I met her in 2010 in the Morobe province of Papua New Guinea. Her story shows the mix of ways she manages her money, saves, and borrows to achieve her goals for her family’s well-being. She saves her money in the walls of her pandanus hut or in a hole in the ground. Her family of six has an income of US$2.79 a day. Her husband controls the money from their coffee crop. She only controls the money she makes from selling taro, fruit, and greens every fortnight at the market, half an hour’s walk from her village. From the 40 kina1 she gets, she buys oil and salt, tops up her husband’s mobile phone for 20 minutes talk time, pays for a visit to the health clinic, and gives a bit to her husband to pay off his gambling debts. She herself does not own a mobile phone. Her dream is to educate her four boys. She saves what she can. Her father and two brothers send her money. There is no bank branch within easy reach so that she can keep her savings separate from everyday needs and prevent her husband using the money for gambling. She hopes to open a mobile bank account in Lae, a six-hour ride one way, when she has 100 kina to spare for the return trip and can buy a mobile phone. For Irene, getting a bank account will not be the whole answer to saving for her sons’ education, but it will be a first step (Singh 2013). It will enable her to have the ‘freedoms’ and ‘capabilities’ of moving toward the kind of life she desires (Nussbaum 2011; Sen 1999). A World Bank survey showed that 67 percent of the regulators in 143 countries have a mandate to promote financial inclusion (Demirgüç-Kunt et  al. 2015). Globally, financial inclusion is included in the targets for achieving 6 of the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) for attaining economic, social, and environmental development by 2030. Financial inclusion is important for achieving the goals of no poverty, zero hunger, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and entrepreneurship, and reduced inequalities. When Central Bank governors of the global South meet—that is Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Pacific—they share their experiences around financial exclusion. The most innovative solutions to enabling financial inclusion have come from the global South. They talk to each other to see how they can replicate and modify these solutions, accompanied by enabling regulations and consumer protection.

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Central Bank governors learn how microfinance—which began in Bangladesh in 1976—has changed its model from lending for entrepreneurship to including savings and borrowing for all purposes. Mobile money, particularly M-PESA—a system of transferring money via mobile phones without a bank in the middle—that was introduced in Kenya in 2007 is being modified in Kenya and across borders to enable interoperability and international remittances (Collins et  al. 2009; Camner et  al. 2009; Mark 2015). Banking agents used for an increasing diversity of banking tasks in Brazil have been introduced in India with limited success (Banerjee 2012; Ghosh 2013). The Philippines has followed Mexico and Brazil’s lead in conditional cash transfers (Alampay and Cabotaje 2013). The travails and advantages of Aadhaar in India, the world’s largest biometric identity database (Hindustan Times 2017; The Economic Times 2017), and India’s contentious demonetization in November 2016 which removed large bank notes—that is 86 percent of the currency in circulation (The Economist 2017; Bhattacharya 2017; Khan 2017; Masiero 2016)—are being judged in the global South. So is India’s stellar success in increasing the number of the financially included. India’s National Mission on Financial Inclusion the ‘Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY)’ scheme, which became the focus of national policy in August 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has led to the increase of the financial inclusion index from 53 percent in 2014 to 80 percent between 2014 and 2017. It has not been without its stumbles, for nearly half the accounts (48 percent) are dormant, that is there has been no withdrawal or deposit in the past year, even though more of the poor and women now have an account (Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2018). It is no longer possible to speak of financial inclusion without talking of the inclusion of women. Women’s use of banks is affected by broader issues of gender inequality. Globally, women still earn less than men and they own less property. Land in the global South is mainly inherited by men, despite legislation giving women the right to inherit. Money in the household is most often controlled by men in the global South. In India for instance, a majority of the women do not have money of their own (Kishor and Gupta 2009). Less than half (45.9 percent) the women in India own a mobile phone they can use. Less than two-fifths (38.4 percent) of women in India own a house/land jointly or on their own (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2017b). Microfinance and mobile money have raised hopes of women being able to control their own money.

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Microfinance Microfinance was first introduced to the world by Grameen Bank in 1976. Its primary aim was to empower women and alleviate poverty through credit for new enterprises. It lent money to groups of women for business at a time when women, particularly poor women, were unable to get a loan from commercial banks. Grameen Bank and its founder, Mohamad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for humanitarian work. After more than 40 years, the euphoria around microfinance has lessened. It is no longer seen as a guaranteed route to women’s entrepreneurship or to the alleviation of poverty. Evidence of success has been mixed. Anthropological studies showed the majority of women gave the loans to their husbands to control. These loans also led to increased possibility of domestic violence against the women because of changes in intra-­ household relationships (Johnson 2004). A World Bank study based on household survey data over 20  years in 87 villages in rural Bangladesh found that lending specifically to women has reduced poverty as originally envisaged by Grameen Bank (Khandker and Samad 2014). But randomized controlled trials (RCTs) from 2003 to 2012 that covered microcredit expansions by seven different lenders in Bosnia, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Morocco, and Mongolia found there was no clear evidence that microcredit reduced poverty or improved living standards. It however did increase freedom of choice relating to occupations, business scale, consumption, female decision-making power, and improved risk management (Banerjee et al. 2015). Despite these shortcomings, microfinance is still widely used. The model has changed many times to include savings, credit for all purposes, insurance, and pensions. This wider offering has been more favorably judged (Singh 2013; Ehrbeck 2014). In 2012, there were 91.4 million borrowers with US$81.5 billion in loans (‘Microfinance Key Figures,’ 2014). Its focus on women has meant that at least some women, particularly in self-help groups, have gained agency and become part of the formal financial system (Kumari 2016; Maity and Sarania 2017; Sanyal 2009). Microfinance, despite its often high interest rates, offers more affordable credit to the poor, compared with other informal credit sources, such as money lenders. When microfinance was prohibited in Andhra Pradesh (India) in 2010 after it was linked to a spate of suicides, a group of policy leaders and academics persuasively argued that the absence of microfinance would be disastrous. It would leave no alternative to usurious money lenders (Banerjee et al. 2010).

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Microfinance has reached sectors of society where banks cannot. This is one of the reasons that in India’s restructure of banking and regulation of microfinance, a large microfinance institution (MFI), Bandhan, was given a full commercial banking license and began operating as Bandhan Bank in August 2015. Eight MFIs were given a license to operate as Small Finance Banks in September 2015. These are designed to increase the reach of banking and lend to unserved or underserved sections of the society (Bandyopadhyay 2017). Samit Ghosh, Founder and Managing Director of Ujjivan Financial Services, says the ability to take in deposits will allow the MFIs to lower their deposit costs and thus decrease their lending interest rates. It will also allow them to offer working capital loans to micro-entrepreneurs and expand lending to small business (Mint Asia 2015).

Mobile Money M-PESA, Kenya’s mobile money, was introduced in 2007 by Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile network operator. In this system, money is sent from one basic mobile phone to the other, most often with a mobile phone agent at the sending and receiving ends. The sender gives cash to the agent. He or she then uses the Safaricom network to send the money to the given mobile phone number. Instantly they receive an SMS confirming receipt. The recipient then goes to the nearest mobile phone agent to receive the cash. This is ‘mobile money,’ a particular kind of money that can be sent from one mobile phone to another. A person can have a mobile money account without having a bank account. It is this characteristic which makes it important for financial inclusion. Mobile money is different from mobile banking, or the ability to send money across markets, for that assumes having a bank account. M-PESA has transformed the way men and women in Kenya pay, send money to family and friends, and increasingly save. It has separated the gift of money from physical presence. M-PESA’s partnership with banks offers the unbanked a pathway to banking with convenient savings, speedy credit, and insurance. Mobile money changed the definition of financial inclusion in 2014. People who were financially included had a mobile money account, a bank account, or both. As M-PESA’s reach and profits grew, banks saw the poor and the unbanked as a desirable market (Singh 2013). M-PESA is now used by 90 percent of adult Kenyans (GSMA 2017), including the poor. Seventy-eight percent of poor men and women have used the mobile phone to send and receive

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money (Crandall et  al. 2012). This is partly because mobile phones became cheaper in 2009 when the Kenyan government removed valueadded tax (VAT) from them. Mobile money, most notably M-PESA in Kenya, has allowed women the privacy of receiving and sending money to kin and friends. This money is often gifted to women and evens out precarious cash flows, giving women more agency and privacy relating to money. Women use M-PESA to receive money from their children and friends and also from a range of matrikin. In a patrilineal kinship system where men control the land and most of the household resources, M-PESA augments a woman’s ability to manage a separate pool of money (Kusimba et al. 2015). Evidence shows that M-PESA also alleviates poverty, giving women the option to go into business. Data from comparing surveys in 2011 and 2014 show that M-PESA has lifted some 2 percent of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty. This effect is particularly true of women as an estimated 186,000 switched from farming to business and retail (Suri 2017). The model is modified in different countries by incorporating the lessons learnt in Kenya, and the demands of each country’s banking structures and style of regulation. In 2016, mobile money was available in two-thirds of low- and middle-income countries. There were 277 live mobile money services across 92 countries with 556 million registered accounts. In 2016, active mobile money accounts numbered 174 million. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the largest number of registered accounts. But the fastest growth in mobile money is taking place in South Asia. Mobile money is used in international migrant remittances by 53 mobile money providers across 21 countries. With interoperability in 15 markets, money can be sent on different networks (GSMA 2017).

The Gender of Money Gender is now an essential measure in the study of financial inclusion, credit, and ownership of the mobile phones that are necessary for having a mobile money account. Discussions of gender and empowerment also take into account male entitlement because of the significance of its impact on women’s lower income, inheritance, and wealth. There is however only limited discussion around the gender of money, that is, the way men and women perceive, own, manage, and control money in the household and family.

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A focus on the gender of money is important for an investigation into money and the empowerment of women. Women’s participation in the management and control of money and ownership of resources such as land and property are important enablers of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Women’s ownership and control of money and resources are inhibitors of family violence, for they give women the freedom to escape financial abuse, a key component of family violence. Family violence is a global problem with one in three (30 percent) women who have been in a relationship suffering physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner (World Health Organization [WHO] 2017). Money management is widely interpreted as the day-to-day organization of money in the household. The control of money is linked to the power to make or prevent discussion on major financial decisions (Lukes 1974; Pahl 1989; Vogler and Pahl 1993; Vogler 1998; Vogler et al. 2008). Jan Pahl’s work in the United Kingdom distinguished between the whole wage system, the housekeeping system, and the pooled systems which assume some measure of joint decision-making (Pahl 1989). More recently more attention has been paid to de facto and blended families, where there is a tension between the desire for equality and equity (Singh and Lindsay 1996; Elizabeth 2001; Vogler 2005; Vogler et al. 2008). This typology of money management and control has generated valuable work in the West. But in the global South, it is important to go beyond the couple because the nuclear or extended family marks the boundary of domestic money. It then becomes important to take into account the management and control of money across generations in nuclear, extended and joint families, polygamous, and transnational families. The context of the family and household clusters is essential for the study of Aboriginal money in Australia (Senior et  al. 2002; Godinho 2014), among the Maori in New Zealand (Taiapa 1994), in Somalia (Lindley 2009), and among the Dinka of Southern Sudan (Akuei 2005). The management of money can also have a more limited meaning in the global South. In the West, it means managing the bills, banking, and savings as well as the purchase of everyday household goods and clothes. In India, for example, money management often translates to women managing the kitchen, while men look after the purchase of household goods and the payment and recording of bills. There is the additional ‘dole’ method of managing and controlling money where the wife has to ask for money and it is then doled out to her. This marks a greater level of male management and control than the housekeeping method (Singh and Bhandari 2012).

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Separate purses can also have different implications for the empowerment of women. In Australia in 2006–2007, 85 percent of de facto (cohabiting) couples had separate accounts with or without joint accounts (Singh and Morley 2011). This separateness of finances is associated with the aspiration to equality in de facto relationships, even though the woman’s lesser income can translate to fewer options for discretionary expenditure (Elizabeth 2001; Singh and Lindsay 1996). Separate finances are also common among couples with a high income. In such cases, separate finances mean a certain amount of financial independence (Pahl 1989). In the global South, separate finances can mean the woman’s access to money is limited to a smaller portion of household income. In Papua New Guinea, for example, women control the money they make by selling vegetables in the market or buying goods at a lower price in larger markets and selling them for a profit locally. The larger portion of household income that comes from mining and coffee is controlled by men. Husbands and wives often keep their money apart and secret from each other (Macintyre 2011; Singh and Nadarajah 2011). In Kenya, men and women also keep their money separate. Men control the land which is the most significant economic resource (Johnson 2012). Mobile money like M-PESA has proved particularly important for women because it is private and not available to others. Even small sums of money can make a difference to a woman’s sense of financial agency (Singh 2013). The separation of household money, however, is irrelevant for the majority of women in India. The National Family and Health Survey 2005–2006 (NFHS-3) (Kishor and Gupta 2009) found that the ‘majority of women do not have any money of their own that they can use as they wish’ (Kishor and Gupta 2009, 61). Detailed data from the latest NFHS-4 survey 2015–2016 have yet to be analyzed. But initial data suggest that the percentage of women who worked in the past 12 months and were paid in cash fell from 28.6 percent in 2005–2006 to 24.6 percent in 2015–2016 (Ministry of Health and Family Welfare 2017a).

The Morality of Global Migrant Money The intergenerational reciprocity of money in families in the global South has strong moral, emotional, and relational dimensions (Zelizer 2012; Bandelj et  al. 2017b). Parents give money to their children, including adult children. They can then feel they are being ‘responsible’ parents. They are helping their children when the money is needed most. Children

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sending or giving money to their parents see themselves and are seen by others as fulfilling filial obligations (Singh and Bhandari 2012). The moral, emotional, and relational nature of money (Singh 2017b; Wherry 2017) has resulted in international migrant remittances becoming one of the largest international flows of funds. A large part of these remittances is sent to family members. International migrant remittances sent through formal channels are three times the size of official development aid and more than foreign direct investment in developing countries (excluding China). In 2017, worldwide remittances were expected to be US$596 billion. Of this, US$450 billion went to the lower- and middle-­ income countries (Ratha et al. 2015, 2017). The moral dimension of money and its role as a medium of care and relationship can become burdensome at the sending and receiving levels (Singh 2017b; Wherry 2017). The tensions in the senders’ and recipient households result from the different priorities and understandings of money at the local and global levels of remittances. There is a tension in senders’ households, for the obligations to the transnational family take away from the migrant family’s ability to sustain settlement expenses and spend money for the welfare of their nuclear family. This tension becomes intense when the family in the source country has unrealistic ideas of the wealth and discretionary income of the migrant family (Singh 2016). At times the only action available to the migrant is to cut off communication. The migrant is then at risk of not being seen as a ‘moral’ person (Akuei 2005; Lindley 2009). There is also a difference in the valuation of the money sent and received. Migrants send money home as a way of ‘caring for’ their transnational family. However in the home country, siblings often value their hands on ‘caregiving’ more highly than the money received. So the migrant family then feels that the dollar received is valued less than the dollar sent. This is particularly true when affordability and distance make it difficult for family members to appreciate the migrant’s economic frameworks (Singh 2016).

The Future of Money The global South presents a picture of a future in which money will be even more mobile, virtual, and personal. The challenge will be to achieve a more inclusive and empowering distribution of money along gender lines.

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Mobile money, microfinance, banking agents, conditional cash transfers, national biometric identity systems, and ‘fintech’ are already leading to new modes of financial inclusion. They show how people are using the new technologies to save, spend, transact, borrow, insure, and send money home. Money in sub-Saharan Africa is more mobile than in any other part of the globe. India has the largest biometric identity database. Unlike the United States, people in Kenya and India are more likely to use mobile money than write a check (Singh 2013). Initial steps in the development of blockchain for bank transfers are taking place in the context of international remittances in the global South (AlphaPoint 2015; Millward 2017; Moyo 2017). Blockchain developments are being linked with mobile money and payment systems to further reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the transfer (IBM 2017). Mobile money is also connecting with online transfers, global networks of mobile network operators, and back-­ end processing by card companies (Peyton 2016). In West Africa and sub-­ Saharan Africa, mobile money is found at both ends of the international transaction (Farooq et al. 2016; Scharwatt and Sanin 2017). The moral dimensions and intergenerational sharing of money have already led to international remittances becoming one of the largest international flows of funds. The hope is that lower fees for remittances made possible by the new technologies and perhaps blockchain will mean that some of the 50–80 percent of money that is sent informally will come through formal financial channels. This will increase the amount of money being remitted internationally through formal channels. It will mean that countries in the global South will be able to use larger amounts of remittances for securitization of borrowings. It will also mean that migrants’ families will have greater sums of money to use for family well-being. These changes underpin some of the sustainable development goals to achieve greater equality across gender and regions. New global imaginaries will emerge, centered on intergenerational and transnational familial relations. In the global North, couples own the money in the household. Money is private to the couple. It is the couple that holds joint accounts rather than parents and children or siblings. In Australia, this narrow family boundary of money is gradually being ­widened as parents help their children with increasing costs of home ownership (Olsberg and Winters 2005). In the global South, intergenerational reciprocity of money lies behind domestic and international remittances.

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This is connected to money being seen as a personal and preferred gift at weddings and birthdays. Money has always been both personal and impersonal in different spheres of life, but the personal and gift aspects of money will be more obvious in future. The international remittance infrastructure already links with this personal, moral, and relational view of money. The personal and market dimensions of globalization through money are already intertwined (Singh 2017a). The increasing economic power of countries in the global South is gradually changing what is ‘mainstream.’ This is true in the case of international and domestic remittances. It will also challenge economic policy, banking practices, and theories of money management and control based on the Anglo-American pattern of money management in the neolocal nuclear family. The principles of financial literacy and resilience will focus on balancing the well-being of larger family units and the localized household as already happens in the global South and among indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand. The challenge will be to ensure that money empowers women and men to choose their own lives on a more equal basis than at present. Despite the gains in financial inclusion, many women still remain unbanked. Some of these challenges are as basic as women’s ability to engage with public spaces. The National Family and Health Survey 2005–2006 (the latest where the data are available for analysis) found that only one in three women is allowed to go alone to the market, the health center, and to venture outside their local community (Kishor and Gupta 2009). Fewer women own mobile phones. Money and wealth remain largely in the hands of men, despite legislative entitlement for women in many countries. The greater financial inclusion and empowerment of women is one of the key elements of Steger’s work on justice globalism. Manfred Steger’s work on the global imaginary, on globalization being wider than the markets, and on globalization being linked to social justice opens a new perspective on globalization and money. It broadens our gaze to issues of financial exclusion, gender, empowerment, and the personal dimensions of money. As we chart the intertwining of the personal and global dimensions of markets and families, and the use of financial technologies, we see globalization in terms of the individual, family, and the wider economy. The test and value of globalization lies in its potential for empowerment at all these levels.

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Note 1. 3 kina was roughly equal to 1 Australian dollar in November 2017.

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Taiapa, Julia TeUrikore Turupa. 1994. “Ta Te Whanau Ohanga”: The economics of the whanau – The Maori component of the Intra Family Income Study. Palmerston North: Department of Maori Studies, Massey University. The Economic Times. 2017. Objective of Aadhaar Is to Include, Not Exclude: Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO, UIDAI.  June 11. https://economictimes.indiatimes. com/opinion/interviews/objective-of-aadhaar-is-to-include-not-exclude-ajaybhushan-pandey-ceouidai/articleshow/59087404.cms. Accessed 26 June 2018. The Economist. 2017. The High Economic Costs of India’s Demonetisation. January 7. https://www.economist.com/finance-andeconomics/2017/01/ 07/the-high-economic-costs-of-indias-demonetisation. Accessed 26 June 2018. Vogler, Carolyn. 1998. Money in the Household: Some Underlying Issues of Power. The Sociological Review 46 (4): 687–713. ———. 2005. Cohabiting Couples: Rethinking Money in the Household at the Beginning of the Twenty First Century. The Sociological Review: 1–29. Vogler, Carolyn, and Jan Pahl. 1993. Social and Economic Change and the Organisation of Money Within Marriage. Work, Employment and Society 7 (1): 71–95. Vogler, Carolyn, Clare Lyonette, and Richard D. Wiggins. 2008. Money, Power and Spending Decisions in Intimate Relationships. The Sociological Review 56 (1): 117–143. Wherry, Frederick F. 2017. How Relational Accounting Matters. In Money Talks: Explaining How Money really Works, ed. Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry, and Viviana Zelizer, 57–69. Princeton: Princeton University Press. World Health Organization (WHO). 2017. Violence Against Women: Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Against Women. World Health Organization, Last Modified November. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/. Accessed 25 November 2017. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. ———. 2011. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean? Politics and Society 40 (2): 145–174. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0032329212441591.

CHAPTER 7

Into the Glorious Future: The Utopia of Cybernetic Capitalism According to Google’s Ideologues Timothy Erik Ström

Introduction you hit a button and within seconds a self-driving car pulls up outside your apartment. You both get in, say your destination, and are whisked away. On your journey, you talk, play games, and catch up on news, while the car effortlessly navigates the roads. It merges onto a freeway and gets into a high-speed lane where self-driving cars flow faster, more smoothly and use less of the road (Page and Brin 2012).

This is how Larry Page, co-founder of Google and CEO of its parent company Alphabet, opened his 2012 letter to investors. Characters like Page are fond of inviting us to imagine various futuristic fantasies, typically ones where carefree people enjoy a privileged life of technologically augmented leisure. These fantasies are usually peppered with capitalist watchwords: productivity, efficiency, innovation, as well as a futurist fetishization of

T. E. Ström (*) School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, Carlton South, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_7

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speed. This chapter is interested in the ideological function of ‘the future’ when uttered by elite members of Google, one of the world’s most powerful high-tech firms. I am interested in how they ideologically formulate and frame their conception of ‘the future’; the cultural myths that they draw on. I argue that these visions have an ideological function in the present, serving to legitimize, naturalize, and decontest the status quo of the present. This chapter draws on and extends the work that Manfred Steger presented in his book Globalisms (2009). There, Steger critically analyzed several competing ideological frameworks for interpreting the multidimensional processes of globalization, putting a focus on the dominant frame, what he calls ‘market globalism.’ This ideological formation bears a certain ‘family resemblance’ to the discussion in this chapter, which puts less focus on globalization per se, and more on ‘the future’ and technology more broadly. Following Steger, I use a similar methodology, with the below research drawing from a large body of public statements issued by elite members of Google between 1998 and 2017. These statements were drawn from letters to shareholders, books, official blog posts, and media statements. Anytime one of the Google’s elite (founders, top executives, spokespeople, etc.) spoke about ‘the future,’ I saved the relevant quote and context in an archive. Later, I went over this coded archive and subjected the material to a critical discourse analysis that embeds the language into a ‘cultural political economy,’ which provides a practical context while emphasizing the socially constructed nature of economies, states, and other social institutions (Fairclough 2006, 27). This work is done in order to tease out the ideological work performed in the practices of elite members of Google. This ideology serves to naturalize global capitalism, the dominant and dominating mode of social practice. It is characterized by world-wide regimes of extraction and production, connected by heterogeneous supply chains and subsumed by layers of financialization; all featuring a deeply uneven distribution of wealth and power. In this context, the ideology of ‘the future’ serves a political function in the present. As I show in the below chapter, this capitalist ideology of the future serves to legitimize problematic practices in the present by projecting a glorious future.

New Old Futures When cyber-capitalists evoke a radiant future, they draw on a long historical legacy that goes back to Christian millennialism and its dreams of redeeming humanity; of elevating us from our fallen state into the divine.

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Historian of technology David Noble has shown how today’s technologists, in their ‘sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit,’ are driven by ‘an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation’ (1999, 3). Noble looks at the religious and mythological motivations that have been intimately bound-up with technological and scientific developments. Instead of using the simplistic and misleading science-versus-religion framework, he looks at the ideological narratives to see how dreams of salvation have been secularized and maintain a key place in meaning-­ making of contemporary technologists. With the rise of capitalist modernity, technology became privileged as the worldly means to achieve these other-worldly goals. Certain thinkers began to imagine humanity as outside and above nature, made in the image of God, and destined to have dominion over the earth. This vision was most concisely captured by Descartes who proclaimed that humanity must become ‘masters and possessors of nature’ (2008). Crucially, scientific knowledge and technology were considered to be the best means to achieve this goal, with empire and capitalism functioning as an implicit and unquestioned background. This culminated in the peculiar cultural assumption of ‘Progress’ with a capital ‘P.’ The idea that the future will be better than the present first came to prominence in Europe when Enlightenment thinking became entangled with imperial expansion, industrial production, scientific abstractions, utilitarian ethics, instrumental reason, technological developments, and capital accumulation (Mumford 1963). All of this amounted to a major ontological mutation, as the historic experience creating a social imaginary where ‘the future’ became an ideological projection; a linear, masterable extension of the present moving ever upward in an infinite expansion (Berardi 2015, 199). More recently, these long-term trajectories took a different inflection with the rise of computing machines during World War II. Fred Turner has described how cybernetics emerged in military-industrial research labs, before some of its ideas merged with a depoliticized segment of the counter-­ cultural movement that arose in the USA during the 1960s (2006). Departing from the New Left, this depoliticized strand of the counter-culture chose not to directly confront injustice, inequality, or war, and it neglected questions of gender, race, and class. Rather, they believed that through individual empowerment, ‘free markets,’ and technological solutions they could change the world for the better (Turner 2006). Much of this thinking went into the budding high-tech sector that rose to prominence in the 1990s. It has cumulated in Silicon Valley elite articulating a

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world-view ‘inspired by an X-Men reading of Atlas Shrugged,’ to use Benjamin Bratton’s colorful phrase (2014). The long-term dynamics of capitalism as a world-historic system combine with these technological and cultural developments to create the increasingly dominant social formation that I call ‘cybernetic capitalism.’ I use the concept of cyber-capitalism as an analytical category; it can be imagined as a kind of layer enabled by the abstracting power of computing machines that is spread unevenly across the capitalist world-system, a layer that bleeds through and changes patterns of social practice (Ström 2017, 2018). This formation is centralized on a cluster of massive monopolistic communications technology companies which currently occupy the ‘commanding heights of world capitalism’ (McChesney 2013, 131). These tech-giants have tremendous power. One indication of this can be gauged via the metric of market capitalization. In October of 2017, five of the top six corporations by market capitalization are tech-giants— namely 1. Apple, 2. Alphabet, 3. Microsoft, 4. Amazon, and (after 5. Berkshire Hathaway) 6. Facebook. The total market capitalization of these five tech-giants comes to $2674 trillion, which if placed in the ranks of nation-state GDP, would push the United Kingdom out of the number five slot and sit below Germany. Market capitalization, which measures the value of shares on the stock market, gives an idea of how valued these firms are by financial investors, and serves to demonstrate how entangled these tech-giants are with processes of financialization. This is significant to discussions of the future, for as Cédric Durand notes, financialization is ‘above all distinguished by the accumulation of drawing rights over values yet to be produced’ (Durand 2017, 4). Hence, when Wall Street invests massively in cyber-capitalist firms, they are betting on even bigger returns, thus hoping to appropriate future wealth. While this process transcends any one firm, Google are a useful model in so much as they are considered an exemplar of cybernetic capitalism. Not only do they have a market capitalization of US$668 billion—about the same as the GDP of Saudi Arabia or Switzerland—but they have literally billions of people engaging with their technology in their everyday life. The company is so normalized that they have become a verb. As a result, many other companies, start-ups and other organizations aspire to be like Google, thus making them a privileged actor and articulator of the cybernetic capitalist social formation. The dynamic mix of cybernetics, counter-culture, and religions of technology come together in the ideology of cyber-capitalism. This is where

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meaning-making happens, where values, myths, and narratives are intertwined with these social practices—legitimizing, naturalizing, and extending them via cultural webs of meaning. In a subjective material way, myths and matter, ideas and infrastructure, and symbols and systems are interwoven, mutually determining one another. With this in mind, I am not interested in individual moral make-up of the Google elite, but rather how they ideologically interpret the world and how this is operationalized to defend and extend cybernetic capitalism as a dominant and dominating social formation.

‘The Future’s So Bright…’ Many a cybernetic capitalist claim begins with the line: ‘In the future…’ This is generally followed by a bright fantasy which stems from, in Page’s words, ‘a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to improve people’s lives, and the world’ (Page 2013). Ignoring the profound ambivalences immanent in technology, cyber-capitalists staunchly remain a vanguard of their own brand of bright futurism. Google’s CEO-­ for-­ a-decade Eric Schmidt teamed up with Page’s advisor, Jonathan Rosenberg, to write a best-selling book called How Google Works (2014). In this, the authors affirm beyond any shadow of a doubt, that: things will get better. We are technology optimists. We believe in the power of technology to make the world a better place […] We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved. We think computers will serve at the behest of people—all people— to make their lives better and easier. (2014, 255–6)

This glorious vision rests on the belief that they possess a neat answer to all questions: technology, or more specifically, elite-led, profit-maximizing technology. Google’s rhetoric of ‘inclusion,’ ‘cooperation,’ and ‘equality’ (2014, 155) cannot dodge the fact that the co-founder and Schmidt control 66 percent of voting power for the entire corporation, a massive centralization of decision-making power under the reign of three white, male billionaires (Goodman 2012). Furthermore, any decision they make is fundamentally constrained by the limits of capital accumulation, with the company beholden to its legal responsibility to maximize profits for its external investors. The Google elite skip this drastic shrinking of

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­ ossibilities but claim it to be a virtue: as Schmidt’s ‘aphorism’ states: p ‘Revenue solves all known problems’ (2014, 153). Believing they possess the patented cure-all, the authors claim: ‘It is hard for us to look at an industry or field and not see a bright future’ (2014, 258). Elsewhere, Schmidt gives an example where he fantasizes that in the future profit-maximizing techno-fixes can solve the problem of terrorism. In the context of suggesting ‘public-private partnerships’ to prevent the ‘radicalization of youth’—hence countering terrorism, cyber-capitalist style—the following argument is made: Technology companies are uniquely positioned to lead this effort internationally. Many of the most prominent ones have all the values of a democratic society with none of the baggage of being a government—they can go where governments can’t, speak to people off the diplomatic radar and operate in the neutral, universal language of technology. Moreover […the tech-industry] has perhaps the best understanding of how to distract young people […] These companies may not understand the nuances of radicalization or the differences between specific populations in key theaters like Yemen, Iraq and Somalia, but they do understand young people and the toys they like to play with. Only once we have their attention can we hope to win their hearts and minds. (Schmidt and Cohen 2013, 180–1)

So, rather than considering systemic problems—such as gaping inequality, environmental degradation, colonial legacies, US military aggression, or the lack of meaningful democracy—these members of the Google elite are of the opinion that a good dose of technologically augmented consumerism will cure the world’s ills. Seeking to get attention through distraction, these cyber-capitalists seem to be suggesting that people in ‘key theaters’ should not be concerned with the drones that buzz overhead; rather, focus on the devices that plug them into Google’s circuits of surveillance-­ fueled accumulation. This faith in a technology-enhanced future is overtly—and at times even desperately—optimistic. Hence Schmidt and Rosenberg repeating variations on the theme: at Google ‘we are all technology optimists: We believe technology and the Internet have the power to change the world for the better’ (2014, 185). Not even serious threats to the structure of global capitalism have succeeded in denting Google’s glorious vision. Writing in the bowels of the global financial crisis, co-founder Sergey Brin said to investors:

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I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge. While much smaller in scale than today’s global collapse, the dot-com bust of 2000–2002 pushed Google and others in the industry to take some tough decisions—and we all emerged stronger as a result. (Page and Brin 2008)

One may pause to ask: scarcity for whom? The multi-billionaire was hardly in danger of having any of his private jets repossessed. Indeed, the co-­ founders, Page and Brin, have exorbitant wealth, around US$45 billion each, putting them in 12th and 13th place on Forbes’ world’s richest list. By my calculations they are many orders of magnitude above ‘the 1%,’ to use the phrase popularized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Rather, they are ‘the 0.00,000,001%.’ This is a symptom of the extreme concentration of wealth in the capitalist world-system, a phenomenon captured in many popular facts, such as the recent Oxfam report that noted that eight men (purposeful gendering) own the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity (Hardoon 2017). Importantly, four of this eight are from the tech sector: (1. Bill Gates, Microsoft), 3. Jeff Bezos, Amazon, 5. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, 7. Larry Ellison, Oracle. As Page and Brin had to divide their wealth between them, they sit just outside the top eight at numbers 12 and 13 respectively. Twenty years ago, Barbrook and Cameron wrote that cyber-­capitalism’s upbeat optimism depended on ‘a wilful blindness toward the other much less positive-features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty, and environmental degradation’ (1996, 45). Observations like this now need to be extended onto a global level, with this ‘wilful blindness’ extending around the world, often cascading down outsourced supply lines and seeping through food chains. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that the cyber-capitalist elite live in extreme privilege. In late 2011 Schmidt said to BusinessWeek: We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world… And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality. (cited in Stone 2011)

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The only threat that the Google elite worry may dare throw shadows onto their glorious future is the creeping scourge of government regulation. Page bemoans that regulations are ‘preventing real technological progress,’ arguing that government institutions are too old and slow to deal with what is unfolding. Demonstrating the full force of his historical sensibility, Page said: ‘Law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet’ (2013). According to Page, society needs ‘mechanisms to allow [for] experimentation. There’s many, many exciting and important things you could do that you just can’t do ’cause they’re illegal or they’re not allowed by regulation’ (2013). He proposes the creation of a Jurassic Park style enclave: a lawless, techno-utopian colony surrendered to the utterly unregulated dominion of cyber-capitalists. Something like a Congo Free State for the twenty-first century. This frightful proposal would, in Page’s view, create the conditions for making ‘real technological progress.’ This ‘regulation-is-bad’ thinking is locked firmly in the cyber-capitalist belief that the global integration of profit-driven, ‘free’ markets will allow avarice to be transmuted by the ‘invisible hand’ into a virtuous ‘rising tide that lifts all boats.’ This draws legitimacy from the long history of market utopianism, with its ideals of incentives, efficiency, and competition. This powerful ideological background is implicit when, for example, Schmidt admits that he subscribes to the ‘trickle-down’ school of economics (Goodman 2012). Outside the rhetoric of power, such claims are increasingly difficult to substantiate in the age of austerity, monopoly capital, and rapidly intensifying inequality. As Arundhati Roy noted, while ‘trickle-­ down’ has unambiguously failed for the vast majority of the Earth’s population, ‘gush-up’ clearly functions splendidly for the elite (2015, 8). Even if we put aside this vision of the future’s dependence on willful blindness, on closer inquiry, the Google elite’s staunch optimism seems kind of perverse. As Jason Moore noted, perhaps the most pessimistic view is one that hopes for the survival of capitalist modernity in something like its present form (2015, 87).

Determinism as Depoliticization Schmidt regularly receives the invite-only summons to attend the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Before an elite audience of politicians, corporate executives, lobbyists, and well-behaved journalists, Schmidt delivered a keynote where he lathered praise upon capitalism’s

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‘creative destruction,’ describing it as a fundamental force for good in the world. He claimed that waves of job losses resulting from computerized automation ‘is no different from the loom when it was invented, and I don’t think any one of us would want to eliminate the loom […] This is how the world gets better. This is how the GDP grows. This is how we leave a better world for our children’ (cited in Goodman 2012). Page eagerly agrees with this assessment, painting the future with thick strokes of techno-determinist inevitability: You can’t wish away these things from happening, they are going to happen […] You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away. (cited in Waters 2014)

Determinism is a philosophical theory based on the assumption that all events can be usefully described in terms of causes and effects connected by specific causal chains, contexts, or frames. Across history, various cultural manifestations of determinism have appeared: from an omnipotent God to scientific materialism. Theories of determinism have been simultaneously strengthened and weakened in the twentieth century. They have been actively rejected and seriously qualified in many natural sciences, such as in physics with, for example, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle blurring the borders between phenomena and perception. Yet, at the same time in the social sphere, a misplaced physic envy has led to many approaches, such as behavioral economics, increasingly incorporating determinism into their analytic frameworks. Following Raymond Williams’ conception of determinism, the problem is not that things may be determined to various extents—because such limits are a constitutive part of subjective material reality—but rather the problem is based on specific epistemological claims made for determinative relations. Techno-determinists tend problematically to assert one-to-­ one relations with ascribed outcomes in a one-dimensional manner. Admittedly, ‘techno-determinism’ is a highly complex phenomenon, with various interpretations of it. In this chapter, I am not interest in how Marx, McLuhan, or any other philosopher conceptualized the problem; rather I seek to investigate the influential doctrine of techno-determinism to note its political function in cybernetic capitalism (Steger 2009, 68–75).

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When a small group of powerful people frame their political decisions as ‘inevitable’ it has a strong ideological function. For example, in the above quotes, Schmidt and Page claim that the large-scale destruction of jobs is not motivated by capital’s need to save labor, maximize profits, control workers, and monopolize markets; rather it is the technology itself that determines these changes. This formulation has an important ideological function, for one cannot challenge what is determined, one cannot contest what is inevitable: ‘there is no alternative,’ to use Thatcher’s grim slogan. In this, they are going far beyond determinism as a theoretical description of how the universe supposedly functions. As Berardi noted, determinism is also a political project (2015, 323). Framed in this way, the political project of cyber-capitalism is actively advanced by weaving techno-­ determinism into its ideological vision of the future. This has the effect of projecting an imaginary of ‘depoliticization.’ Discussing the dangers of this, Ingerid Straume has argued that to change existing institutions and creatively imagine new social meanings and formations, ‘it is necessary to realise that all things could be otherwise.’ She notes that if this is not properly understood or instituted, then determinism results; society is imagined as controlled by forces beyond its influence and hence a social practice like capital accumulation may be conceived of as a law-like force which cannot be questioned (Straume and Humphrey 2011, 47). Such determinism is incompatible with democracy, and can be mobilized to serve powerful interests. What is more, this determinism conflicts with the freedom loving rhetoric of ‘free choice,’ ‘free markets,’ ‘free speech,’ and ‘free trade’; for human agency seems to play no role under techno-determinism. This contradiction in cyber-capitalism was noted two decades ago by Barbrook and Cameron who wrote that the ideology was a ‘contradictory mix of technological determinism and libertarian individualism’ (1996, 49), concealing the contradictions that flow from this unstable union by accepting ‘both visions at the same time and by not criticising either of them’ (52). Projecting ‘the future’ as techno-determined is thus a powerful depoliticizing tactic used to advance the cyber-capitalist vision. This ideological function serves up the future as determined, thus inevitable and incontestable; this serves to insulate today’s hegemons from alternatives. The futurist rhetoric can be seen as being less about ‘the future’ and more about control in the present. The Google elite tap into this when they claim that we are moving toward a utopian future of total automation. This has been a capitalist

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fantasy for centuries—a world without workers. Curiously, the same fantasy exists in many radical writings, albeit for inverted ideological reasons. For example, Marx emphasized in the Grundrisse that automation could lead to a situation in which the worker could be transformed into a ‘watchman and regulator’ of machines, leaving them much more non-work time where they would be free to engage in meaningful and creative activities (1973, 705). Crucially, this vision is fundamentally incompatible with the doctrine of infinite accumulation and exploitation which lies at the heart of capitalism. The capitalist version of this fantasy serves an ideological function in the present, where by it can downplay growing unemployment and spiraling inequality in the present, because in the glorious future, technology will fix everything. Yet, as the push to total automation is being designed and implemented unilaterally by cyber-capitalist corporations—who must systematically put maximizing shareholder returns über alles—this raises many questions. Following Brecht, we may ask: Who is to maintain this automated utopia? Who will cook and clean, and under what labor standards? Then, we may go further and ask how will the legions of newly unemployed be able to partake in the endless consumerism necessary to drive this endless economic growth? How can states deprived of tax revenue deal with the mounting ‘externalities’? And last, but not least, how is this infinite growth even possible within finite nature, including finite human nature? Within the confines of cyber-capitalism, the circular answer-to-all-questions is simply: elite-led, for-profit technology. As feminist scholar Maria Mies has noted a generation ago, the utopia of total automation is rooted in the continued exploitation and domination of people who are pushed into increasingly precarious situations. She sees this fantasy as ‘the last desperate effort of White Man to realise his technocratic utopia, based on the domination of nature, women and colonies’ (2014, 215–6). The dynamic that she confronted is powerfully evident in the present, with significant increases in the exploitation of the precarious and peripheral. An example can be seen with the material production of the infrastructure of computers. These devices are the product of a specific reorganization of nature, intimately entangled with social relations and labor. Yet, despite the huge amount of work that goes into producing, organizing, and maintaining these computing machines, the process is painted as ‘automatic,’ a product of the technology itself. This deeply alienating process is intensified by patterns of supply chains—outsourcing and offshoring—which serve to multiply and divide global labor (Mezzadra

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and Neilson 2013; Tsing 2009). Cyber-capitalist companies work with material mined and recombined by a diverse array of workers, with high levels of exploitation unevenly scattered across the chains (Fuchs 2014). In short, many precarious laborers toil in grueling conditions to make the machines that we ‘just can’t live without.’ Through the image of ‘total automation,’ the embodied labor and reorganized nature embedded in technology is alienated, thus obscuring the real relations of power in the present. In this way, techno-determinism has a powerful depoliticizing function that serves to ideologically legitimize and naturalize the hegemony of cybernetic capitalism.

The New Dismal Age The futuristic rhetoric of cyber-capitalists at times appears not to need to provide any specifics. For instance, the team at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) are fond of whispering sweet futuristic nothings into high-definition video cameras: ‘The future is what we choose to make. We make what we believe in’; or ‘The future is awesome. We can build it faster together’ (Google 2014). Another example of this came from Rosenberg who came out with the following waves of vacuous soundbites: ‘The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation’ (2009). Thus spoke Rosenberg. Ignoring these dim evocations, it is worth looking through the rhetoric and consider what exactly this ‘awesome’ future may look like. One of the most detailed descriptions of the glorious future of cybernetic capitalism began in occupied Baghdad. It was there that Eric Schmidt met Jared Cohen and the two soon began to collaborate. Cohen then worked in the US State Department, under both Bush and Obama, as an advisor respectively to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. After leaving the State Department, he continued through the ‘revolving door’ to head up Jigsaw, Google’s ‘think-do tank’ slash political technology incubator. It is worth noting that revolving door movements between governments and corporations is very common. Campaign for Accountability and The Intercept teamed up and studied Google’s relationship with the Obama regime, discovering almost 250 cases of people moving from positions in the US federal government to positions within Google and vice versa. The authors argue that the vertical integration that Google has

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achieved with the US government can be regarded as a ‘true public-­private partnership,’ stating: ‘Google doesn’t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations in the digital era’ (Dayen 2016). This is another instance where Google can be seen as an exemplar of a larger tendency within late capitalism, with much of the global governing apparatus being composed of a clockwork of revolving doors, all spinning to keep the cycles of accumulation suitably greased. Cohen and Schmidt teamed up to write a best-selling book called The New Digital Age (2013). This book can be read in part as a futurist fantasy about the magnificent prospects of unfettered cybernetic capitalism. Significantly, the book received advance praise from Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Madeline Albright, Michael Bloomberg, Henry Kissinger, and the former CIA director Michael Hayden. This is an impressive collection of the global power elite, with outstanding neoliberal credentials and more than a few accusations of war crimes. The fact that they publicly endorsed the book tells us something about its content and about its target audience. The future it presents is an extension of the present status quo, a future where American hegemony continues unabated. Schmidt and Cohen begin their book by fabricating exotic examples of people in the global south and picturing how they could benefit from their benevolent vision. This is an example of the global imaginary in action, whereby the entire planet is interpreted as ripe for the business of Silicon Valley tech-titans (Steger 2008, 184–96). The Googlers wheel out a nameless Congolese fisherwoman and a Maasai cattle-herder and imagine how they ‘find ways to use the new tools at their disposal to enlarge their businesses, make them more efficient and maximize their profits’ (Schmidt and Cohen 2013, 15). These obedient and imaginary Others are quickly ushered offstage as the fantasy gets more neurotic. They conjure up a mind-blowing future where ‘haircuts will finally be automated and machine-precise’ and wardrobes can ‘algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user’s daily schedule’ (16). This oppressively banal fantasy climaxes in a no-holds-barred prediction for the dazzling destiny of society’s ‘upper band.’ This is clearly the target audience that the book is seeking to impress. ‘Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more’ (28). It is as Roy puts it; ‘According to the gospel of Gush-up, the more you have, the more you can have’ (2015, 9). The authors then spend a few pages detailing the average morning of a young, urban professional

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living in an American city in a few decades time. Writing in an eerie second-­ person tense, the writers prophesize: Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. (2013, 29)

For all of its triumphant techno-aggrandizing, there is something pathetic about their vision. Schmidt and Cohen—and cyber-capitalists more generally—take a privileged and sterilized present and impose it on the future by simply adding more and better high-tech toys. Their future can be read as an unmitigated control fantasy—with all of the repressed anxiety that this entails. Indeed, it probably says more about the authors’ fears and limitations than it does about any possible future. Despite having a privileged grip on the popular imagination of ‘the future,’ cybernetic capitalist’s vision of the world-to-come is, when subject to critical inquiry, rather dismal. Infinite capital accumulation and techno-determinism come together in this ideological interpretation of ‘the future’ to serve as a way to depoliticize the present. Ultimately, their creatively bankrupt vision forecasts a purified world scrubbed clean of surprises, unknowns, and alternatives. To hazard a speculative theory: if one profits massively from what is, then perhaps they are poorly placed to imagine what might be.

Conclusion ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ This line was spoken by the character Prince Tancredi in the famous Italian historical novel The Leopard (Lampedusa 2007, 21). To work that quote into the terms of this chapter: if everything is to remain as it is—if Google is to keep its monopoly power, if the regime of cybernetic capitalism is to remain its hegemonic control—then it is necessary that everything must change—cars will have to become self-driving, accumulation will have to become cybernetic, and suit selection will have to be algorithmically automated. In this way, Google’s futurism is essentially about reproducing and augmenting the status quo of cybernetic capitalism.

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Rooted in the harmful control fantasy of endless expansion and mastery, this vision of a ‘glorious future’ of cybernetic capitalism is bringing about an increasingly precarious world of intensifying inequalities and ecological catastrophes. Indeed, perhaps a more compelling argument can be made that cybernetic capitalism is headed on a trajectory toward ‘artificial life on a dead planet,’ to use Charles Thorpe’s phrase (2013). Despite having a privileged grip on the popular imagination of ‘the future,’ cyber-­ capitalist’s vision of the world-to-come is, when subject to critical inquiry, rather dismal. Capital accumulation, instrumental rationality and techno-­ determinism come together in elite-led, for-profit technology as the ­panacea—the cure-all long sought by alchemists. This ideological interpretation of the future serves to legitimize and depoliticize the inequalities, exploitation, and domination of the present, and to insulate it from any alternatives. If we strip the B-grade sci-fi marketing spin from Google’s articulations, the glorious future of cybernetic capitalism is a dim augmentation of the status quo.

References Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture 6 (1): 44–72. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2015. And: Phenomenology of the End: Sensibility and Connective Mutation. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Bratton, Benjamin H. 2014. The Black Stack. e-flux No. 53. https://www.e-flux. com/journal/53/59883/the-black-stack/ Dayen, David. 2016. The Android Administration. https://theintercept. com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obamawhitehouse-in-two-charts/. Accessed 25 April 2016. Descartes, René. 2008. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Research and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf. Accessed 18 Oct 2016. Durand, Cédric. 2017. Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future. Trans. David Broder. London: Verso. Fairclough, Norman. 2006. Language and Globalization. Abingdon: Routledge. Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Digital Labour and Karl Marx: London: Routledge. Goodman, Peter S. 2012. Eric Schmidt at Davos Praises Globalization, Dismisses Jobs Crisis. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/eric-schmidtdavos_n_1237142.html. Accessed 24 Jan 2015. Google. 2014. Say Hello to Project Tango! Youtube.com. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk. Accessed 24 Feb 2015.

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Hardoon, Deborah. 2017. An Economy for the 99%: It’s Time to Build a Human Economy That Benefits Everyone, Not Just the Privileged Few. Oxfam. http:// hdl.handle.net/10546/620170. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. 2007. The Leopard: A Novel. New York: Pantheon. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. M. Nicolaus. Baltimore: Penguin Books. McChesney, Robert W. 2013. Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. New York: The New Press. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Mies, Maria. 2014. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Change, Influence, Critique. London: Zed Books. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Mumford, Lewis. 1963. Technics and Civilization. Harbinger Books. Original edition, 1934. Noble, David F. 1999. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin Books. Page, Larry. 2013. Google I/O Keynote. TechHive, http://www.techhive.com/ article/2038841/hello-larry-googles-page-on-negativity-laws-and-competitors.html. Accessed 24 Jan 2015. Page, Larry, and Sergey Brin. 2008. Founders’ Letter. https://abc.xyz/investor/ founders-letters/2008/. Accessed 23 Aug 2016. ———. 2012. Founders’ Letter. Alphabet. https://abc.xyz/investor/foundersletters/2012/. Accessed 23 Aug 2016. Rosenberg, Jonathan. 2009. The Meaning of Open. http://googleblog.blogspot. com.au/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html. Accessed 6 Feb 2015. Roy, Arundhati. 2015. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. London: Verso. Schmidt, Eric, and Jared Cohen. 2013. The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schmidt, Eric, and Jonathan Rosenberg. 2014. How Google Works. London: John Murry. Steger, Manfred B. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-­ First Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Stone, Brad. 2011. It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley. Business Week. http://www. businessweek.com/magazine/its-always-sunny-in-silicon-valley-12222011. html. Accessed 17 July 2014. Straume, Ingerid S., and J.F. Humphrey, eds. 2011. Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism. Malmö: NSU Press.

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Ström, Timothy Erik. 2017. Abstraction and Production in Google Maps: The Reorganisation of Subjectivity, Materiality and Labour. Arena Journal 47 (48): 143–171. ———. 2018. The Road Map to Brave New World: Cartography and Capitalism from Gulf Oil to Google. Culture Unbound 9: 307–334. Thorpe, Charles. 2013. Artificial Life on a Dead Planet. In The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, ed. Kelly Gates. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing. Tsing, Anna. 2009. Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Rethinking Marxism 21 (2): 148–176. Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Waters, Richard. 2014. FT Interview with Google Co-Founder and CEO Larry Page. FT Magazine. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3173f19e-5fbc-11e48c27-00144feabdc0.html. Accessed 26 Nov 2014.

CHAPTER 8

Imagining Global Non-violent Consciousness Amentahru Wahlrab

The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a system that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. ‘Egyptian activists to Occupy Wall Street protestors’ (Opinion 2011)

Introduction Assertions of the existence of a global consciousness have increased within academic circles over the centuries, and this notion has recently been invigorated by a wide range of politicians, activists, technologists, and academics who have described it in speech and in text as partially caused by globalization (Pollack 2011; Chen 2012; Marzouki and Oullier 2012; Darian-Smith and McCarty 2017). Academic writers have long considered the sense of an ‘us’ or ‘we’ shared between individuals (Bourdieu 1990; Anderson 1991; Taylor 2004). Empirical references dramatically increased, however, during the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010 as activists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) first identified A. Wahlrab (*) Department of Political Science and History, The University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_8

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with similarly oppressed and resisting people in their region and then, later, in far flung places like Wall Street and Madison, Wisconsin. Such empirical examples illustrate the existence of a rising global consciousness and beg the question of which comes first, the global consciousness or the actions that illustrate it. While mutually reinforcing, this ambiguity poses certain political challenges. Specifically, should our energy be spent on consciousness raising in order to promote more political action? Or, should it be spent on supporting non-violent movements wherever they crop up? Consciousness raising offers certain challenges because shared consciousness has not always served emancipatory and egalitarian ends— instead it has been used as a mechanism to manipulate one group into a life or death battle with another (Campbell 1998; Appadurai 2006; Engels 2010). The rise or return of authoritarianism speaks volumes about the power of collective consciousness to be directed by fear rather than hope. Authoritarianism and right-wing populism, and the consciousness that they produce, is dominated by invidious comparisons that seeks to divide people (Finchelstein 2017). Whereas the right-wing populists of the twenty-first century appear as reactions to what Manfred B.  Steger describes as the global imaginary, left-wing populism has grown less out of a reaction to globalization and the global imaginary and more as a co-­ evolutionary phenomenon that sees the unity of humankind and therefore encourages change through non-violent means. Political energy, therefore, should be spent supporting these groups instead of propping up dictators (Diamond et al. 2016; Klaas 2016). This chapter explores the understudied question of the function of the global imaginary to facilitate the rise of a global non-violent consciousness. This is especially timely given the recent global return of authoritarianism and populism. It also suggests that a rising global imaginary helps to produce a less violent world by promoting the necessary consciousness needed for regional and global non-violent uprisings.

Social Imaginaries According to Manfred B. Steger the world is currently witnessing a transition from ‘the national imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary.’ Following the insights of Charles Taylor, Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Arjun Appadurai, Steger employs the category of ‘social imaginary’ to demonstrate how globalization is transforming the ‘background’ that makes

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possible communal practices and a widely shared sense of their legitimacy’ (Steger 2008, 6). In this reasoning, family, tribe, clan, city, national, and global are all social imaginaries. These groupings each require shared understandings in order to spell out who belongs in each of them. Further, each of these specific social imaginaries occupied places of predominance at specific times in the past. Their continued presence today indicates their ability to overlap, though not always harmoniously. Over time, tribe and city were overwhelmed if not completely replaced by the nation. As Steger notes, ‘the modern concept of a nation based on popular sovereignty proved its powers of social mobilization and political legitimation for the first time in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century’ (Steger 2008, 20). The wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped to solidify the nation because of its victories over monarchical, tribal, clan, and city imaginaries: universal membership in the nation meant more soldiers, more destructive weapons, and more efficient political institutions (Creveld 1999; Spruyt 1994; Philpott 2001). While the global may theoretically reach universal membership, the battle is currently being fought and, on balance, the nation remains the primary instrument for protecting human rights as well as a powerful social imaginary that still attracts new members (Goldfarb 2017). It is unclear what would qualify as a sufficient litmus test for qualitative change from the national to the global—though global membership in something comparable to the nation might help. Each social imaginary of the past has manifested some entity to exert the will of the people and thus it remains to be seen in what way the global imaginary will facilitate this expression of will. For its part, ‘the “national imaginary” refers to the taken-for-­ granted understanding in which the nation-plus its affiliated or to-be-­ affiliated state—serves the framework of the political’ (Patomäki and Steger 2010, 1058). Unlike the global, the national imaginary facilitated the conception of group consciousness that was centered in a territory and promoted specific conceptual, practical, and geographical limits. Globalization’s built-in rejection of these limits, as well as its processes that collapse time and space, challenge the category of nation. In this way, globalization promotes the rise of a new social imaginary limited only by the boundaries of the planet Earth. As Patomäki and Steger remind their readers, natural scientists like Giordano Bruno and Christiaan Huygens, not to mention Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Immanuel Kant, ‘envisaged intelligent life on other worlds, either similar or much more developed than that of their own society’ (Patomäki and Steger

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2010, 1059). Such examples were exceptions, of course, but they did foreshadow the rise of broader social imaginaries that would increase the circle of humanity (Weinert 2015). It is with these ideas in mind that Steger illustrates how the processes of globalization increased human interaction and turned the otherwise esoteric theories of a few philosophers into globally shared understandings which limited the power of the national imaginary. The forces of globalization, characterized by ‘the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space’ (Steger 2017, 17), lead to increasing awareness of a globally connected and interdependent humanity (Chanda 2007). However, as Steger and Wahlrab elaborate, ‘the national and local remain important arenas but are changing their appearance, functions, and character as a result of increasing global connectivity’ (Steger and Wahlrab 2017, 55). It is precisely this sophisticated reading and description of globalization’s role in transforming the background imaginary that is necessary and timely in understanding the wave of protests that began in 2010 in the MENA. The crises that arose there were part of a broad range of movements for economic, political, and civil rights which have significantly benefited from the prototypes, metaphors, and framings of the global imaginary (see Mason 2013; Fattor 2018). The processes of globalization helped to shift consciousness insofar as our ability to find out what is happening all over the world at near instantaneous rates means that territorial limits become differently meaningful, not meaningless. Again, this is not exactly new conceptually; the American and French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century articulated their ideas of political legitimacy in terms of a general ‘we the people’ instead of the more narrowly construed family, tribe, clan, city, or kingdom and thus enlarged the circle around who was considered human or rights bearing. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels articulated a more universal call to arms with their well-known ‘workers of the world, unite!’ And, in the twentieth century, numerous political activists, academics, and politicians have articulated the view that justice cannot be achieved without international cooperation and subsequently produced bodies such as the International Court of Arbitration, the League of Nations, and the Permanent Court of International Justice (which became the International Court of Justice after 1945). But it was the processes of globalization that operated as force multipliers for such ideas. As the ­political philosopher Karl Jaspers noted, technology helps produce in us ‘a new consciousness of the world. Since the inception of the modern system

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of communications and news-distribution, the feeling that we have of the spaces of the earth has come to take in the whole planet. We visualise the globe and it is filled with the daily news that comes to us from all parts of it’ (Jaspers 1953, 117; italics in the original). That we are regularly presented with images of people throughout the world has only multiplied with the advent of the internet. Though those images are often comprised of violence and other forms of destruction, there are also inspiring ones of non-violent political change. While this chapter’s focus is on the function of the global imaginary to facilitate the rise of a global non-violent consciousness, it should be noted that just like any other social imaginary, the global imaginary does not favor a particular ideological viewpoint. As Steger has shown, market, justice, and religious globalisms reframed the background social imaginary to fit specific views and explain arguments for global free markets, global justice, or a global Caliphate (Steger 2005a, 2008, see Part II; 2009, 2017). Differences in ideological filtering do not, however, diminish the fact of the rising global imaginary. For instance, this mentalité that Steger calls the ‘global imaginary’ refers to a recognition of our interconnectivity limited only by the boundaries of the planet earth and shaped by the forces of globalization. From a market globalist perspective, this means interconnection largely in terms of the liberalization and global integration of markets backed by U.S. military force (Steger 2005a, b). Similarly, justice globalists imagine a future shaped by globalization and ‘project alternative visions of a global future based on values of ‘social justice’ and ‘solidarity with the global South’ (Steger et al. 2013, 2). While the third ideological constellation, which Steger refers to variously as ‘religious’ or ‘Jihadist’ globalism, disagrees with the market and justice globalists, it still views the future as inevitably shaped by the powerful forces of globalization. Jihadist globalism imagines a future that unites the global Muslim community and thus recognizes the deterritorialized state of Islam today (Steger 2008, Chap. 6). Steger’s discussion of religious globalism points to the inherently transgressive nature of all world religions which reject, at their core, the limiting nature of the nation-state (Steger 2017, 123–128). Steger’s insights into the ideological aspects of globalization include both the observation that market globalism is dominant and that justice and religious globalism pose significant challenges to market globalism’s dominance. Unlike national populists like Donald Trump in the USA and Marine Le Pen in France, each of these three different ideological

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dispositions orient their believers to act in ways that shape globalization and thus adopt a global rather than a national imaginary when thinking politically.

Civil Resistance and Non-violence In his earliest work on globalism, Steger mapped out several possible future responses to market globalism: reform in rhetoric but business as usual, violent backlash, and a global new deal (Steger 2002, 135–150). There is considerable evidence of a violent backlash to market fundamentalism and talk of reform. But the power of reform is measured in part by grassroots effort, democracy in the streets and non-violent protest. However, not all conceptions of non-violence are the same, and within the vast literature on non-violence and social protest, there are two dominant schools of thought. The first is often referred to as ‘Gandhian’ or ‘principled’ non-violence because it defines non-violence broadly in terms of thought, word, and deed. Gandhi himself explained that to be non-violent it was necessary to remove even thoughts of violence from oneself. Though often applied by Gandhi and his followers to achieve political ends, the theory espoused a cosmology that defined all of life as connected to and a part of a higher power or God. Violence was proscribed as a result of this conception of the world. After all, if all life is, in essence, God, then killing or harming anything is the same as killing or harming God. Such a cosmology speaks to the possibilities contained within the rising global imaginary because of the overlapping conceptions of a shared humanity. In terms of practice, this means that practitioners of a Gandhian non-­ violence are stringently limited in their range of political action. In a rigorous imminent critique of Gandhi’s theory and practice, Steger argues that Gandhi never achieved the level of principled non-violence that he espoused (Steger 2000). Coming to this same conclusion, Gene Sharp, considered by some to be the Machiavelli of non-violence, decided to distill the theory and practice of non-violence into purely political terms by theorizing what he referred to as ‘strategic non-violence.’ This mainstreaming of non-violence has had far reaching effects (Wahlrab 2014a). Advocates of strategic non-violence or ‘civil resistance’ do not discount moral norms proscribing violence (Ackerman 2017). Rather they simply ignore them in favor of an analysis of differing strategies of resistance. In this sense, Gene Sharp writes that ‘the use of nonviolent means against violent repression creates a special, asymmetrical, conflict situation … the

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actionists will then be able to apply something like jiu-jitsu to their opponent, throwing him off balance politically, causing his repression to rebound against his position, and weakening his power’ (Sharp 1973, 109–110). Sharp means that a tyrant who uses violence to control a population, when facing non-violent resistance, is put in an awkward position: violently crushing people who are singing songs of love and solidarity or chanting hymns of peace illustrates the fact that he has already lost power. Indeed, Sharp goes so far as to say that once the tyrant has used violence to subdue a population, he has nothing left (Sharp 1973, 111). Sharp and his supporters embrace non-violence for strategic reasons: non-violence is better than violence for achieving political goals. Whereas principled non-violence is almost everywhere impossible to achieve, strategic non-violence is practical and requires no specific spiritual or even ethical motivation (Sharp 1979). Furthering this cost-benefit analysis, several scholars advanced the quantitative study of non-violence by creating a database that compares the successes and failures of violent and non-­ violent movements over time. Their work reveals that in a significant majority of cases, non-violence is more effective than violence at achieving political goals. After compiling all violent and non-violent resistance campaigns, coding them into three categories of success, partial success, and failure, the authors discovered that ‘the most striking finding is that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts’ (Stephan and Chenoweth 2008b; Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, 7). In essence, strategic non-violence is a good idea for strategic reasons not just for moral reasons. The mainstreaming of non-violence reached its apex when it was enshrined in the 2002 and 2006 United States National Security Strategy (USNSS) (Wahlrab 2017a). Sharp’s analysis of the power political actions of Mahatma Gandhi best explain this evolution of non-violence to civil resistance. He came to the conclusion that what made Gandhi effective was not the spiritual or religious components of his conception of non-­violence (ahimsa) or his moral understanding of civil resistance (satyagraha). Rather, Gandhi was effective because he understood strategy and power. Sharp’s detailed study of non-violent action revealed that in all the cases of successful non-violent resistance power was employed in a very specific sense: ‘it is control of the ruler’s power by withdrawal of consent. [...] This is resistance by noncooperation and disobedience’ (Sharp 1973, 47).

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Rather than an ethical position, strategic non-violence is concerned with the success or failure of non-violent practice. Those who are  involved  in non-cooperation and disobedience  are concerned with results, with the outcomes that non-violence produces. It is goal oriented and based on instrumental rationality, or ‘consequentialism.’ Strategic non-violence approaches conflict from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. Certain conflicts are inevitable, perhaps structurally assured (e.g., the American Civil War). The point of strategic non-violence is therefore to weigh the costs and benefits of the means of waging conflict, especially when conflict is understood to be inevitable. Instead of ‘nonviolence,’ Sharp promoted ‘civil resistance’ as a means of denying power to a ruler or ruling group (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Engler and Engler 2016; Stephan and Chenoweth 2008a). Thus, it makes sense that US foreign policy elites and strategic studies experts would readily include support for civil resistance in foreign policy recommendations. While Gandhi and others have helped to spread non-violence around the world as a morally just means, it is also fair to say that the US support for strategic non-violence has significantly added to the globalization of non-violence because it works. Given the centrality of the moral dimension of human existence, however, expunging non-violence from civil resistance would appear to leave it without a compass. The remainder of the chapter connects the global imaginary to non-violence by showing how principled non-violence has a similar logic to the global imaginary. Specifically, they both function as unifying rather than dividing forces.

The Function of the Global Imaginary Though it has grown to become a global media powerhouse, Al-Jazeera’s reporting on the Arab uprisings covered the events as they unfolded in the region and gave people in the MENA up-to-date details of activists’ demands for freedom and democracy in  locations that were essentially next door to its viewers. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube added their own force multiplier effects and thus mutually constituted the global imaginary by broadening the possibilities of local and national political action. Thus, the spread of the uprisings from Tunisia to the rest of the MENA is best understood as an example of the rising global imaginary and the conception of a shared humanity facilitated in part by these information and communications technologies (ICT). Eric Lynch described how an Al-Jazeera news network facilitated an ‘empowered public sphere’ wherein protestors linked the revolutions together virtually even as they

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acted in their local settings (Lynch 2012, 25). This new public sphere brought the Arab masses into conversations about the role of non-­violence in recent history. For example, the success of the 1979 Iranian revolution is largely attributed to non-violence (Abrahamian 2009; Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). The first Intifada, starting in 1987, was largely if not purely non-violent (King 2007). The Damascus Spring was the new millennium’s first instance of civil resistance in the Middle East (Lesch 2011; Wieland 2012). The Cedar Revolution was also overwhelmingly non-­ violent if not exactly successful (Mallat 2007; Morley 2005). In the summer of 2009, Iran’s Green Revolution shook the world as citizens protesting the allegedly rigged election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went out into the streets. In all cases the forces of national reaction were rampant (Wahlrab 2018). The world watched as the first decade of the new millennium saw the repeated eruption of non-violent protest in what they had been told was the unlikeliest of regions for a  democratic, let alone non-violent, movement to arise. The lessons learned by the Arab public were complex. First and foremost, citizens learned that they had more power to affect change when they acted together. The media, and especially the Arab media’s telling of these events meant that Arabs were creating their own history. Further, they were doing it in open defiance of their authoritarian rulers. The global imaginary functions to empower this public sphere, where citizens share with each other a collective understanding and consciousness of their place in the world. The force multiplier effect of globalization can also be witnessed in the role played by the global religions that originated in the MENA. As the one-time leader of Lebanon’s ‘Cedar Revolution’ and presidential candidate (Chibli Mallat) and his co-author, the former speechwriter for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (Edward Mortimer), write, the roots of non-violence run deep in the MENA. Noting that ‘Islam is by definition “entering into peace”, Jesus willfully died on the cross, forbidding his followers to resist by violence, and salam/shalom is the greeting accolade of all Middle Easterners, rooted—like the word Islam—in the Semitic stem/ s/l/m/, which means peace’ (Mallat and Mortimer 2016, 20). Their observations offer a response to those who argue for a purely strategic or civil resistance. The ethical component of non-violence is seen, if not always practiced, by the followers of nearly all major religions. If most of the planet is populated by believers, then moral arguments are likely to resonate with people for precisely those ethical reasons.1 Though it might seem strange for those fed on a steady diet of violence in the MENA,

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people in the region were not surprised that non-violent uprisings shook it again in 2010 and early 2011 or that writers were using the Arabic term ‘la’unf’ (non-violence) and that protesters chanted ‘silmiyya, silmiyya’ (peaceful, peaceful) in the streets. Religion challenges political, social, and economic practices because it is a part of a social imaginary that is not limited by manmade boundaries. As Steger focuses on the rise of the global imaginary, Daniel Philpott illustrates how religion has helped to spur a revolution away from national sovereignty. Specifically, this revolution ‘progresses away from sovereignty, toward the circumscription of the sovereign state, and it gives constitutional authority to institutions other than the state, and enables states to have oversight into one another’s affairs’ (Philpott 2001, 260). In the salient example of the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims by the Burmese Buddhist military regime, one can see the dual demand for the protection of universal human rights by international organizations made up of citizens of national sovereign states. The dual demand for the transgression of national boundaries by citizens of those very nations is also witnessed by nearly every human rights organization in existence and is somewhat contradictorily enshrined in the United Nation’s Responsibility to Protect. Those demands are grounded within a universal conception of humanity and a simultaneous recognition that other states might be able to help stop human rights violations. The UN’s own description includes this tension noting that: Ultimately, the Responsibility to Protect principle reinforces sovereignty by helping states to meet their existing responsibilities. It offers fresh programmatic opportunities for the United Nations system to assist states in preventing the listed crimes and violations and in protecting affected populations through capacity building, early warning, and other preventive and protective measures, rather than simply waiting to respond if they fail (2017).

The national imaginary is simultaneously being blown apart and remade in this view. While Philpott’s conception of revolution stems from an analysis of the power of ideas, he makes no claim that those revolutions have been non-violent. His analysis finds that citizen demands for freedom initially lead to the consolidation of the national imaginary. However, he also finds that those same demands are now moving toward what Steger calls the global imaginary. Complex as they are, humans also can and do hold both national and global imaginaries simultaneously. But, as this chapter’s

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discussion of non-violence indicates, the combination of demands for freedom (equality, emancipation, justice) and a growing awareness of our shared human family unite in ways that justify the view shared by Gandhi and Martin Luther King that the universe bends toward justice. As King himself said in his Nobel acceptance speech, ‘I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant’ (King 1991, 226). Indeed, the overwhelming evidence from firsthand accounts is that the revolutions in the MENA that began in Tunisia all began as non-violent revolutions (Al-Zubaidi et  al. 2013; Roberts et  al. 2016; Smith 2016; Wahlrab 2014b). The triumphs include the overthrow of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak regimes and the general proof of the contradiction of the view that Muslims could not be non-violent. Indeed, the speed of the journalistic and academic publications which have flourished in the wake of the uprisings is revelatory in this regard. Numerous observers were able to repackage previously written accounts of general protest in the region to show that dissent, civil resistance, labor union organizing, and demands for political, social, economic, and human rights had long been on the table (Beinin and Vairel 2011; Gardner 2011; Gause 2011; Beinin 2012; Fendius Elman 2012; Gelvin 2012; Haas and Lesch 2012; Haddad et al. 2012; Noueihed and Warren 2012; Achcar 2013). In other words, the research had already been conducted and published in some cases, but it garnered a new and larger audience after the uprisings occurred. In contrast, standard accounts of the cultural deficiencies of the region that included the view that Islam and democracy were incompatible were swept under the rug as it became ‘obvious’ that freedom and democracy were universal needs (Costa 2011; Howard and Hussain 2013; Hinnebusch 2015). Ultimately, the global imaginary functioned to motivate non-violent resisters across national boundaries, but it also brought violent jihadis together from around the world to create or assert a new global state in the form of ISIS (Bonney 2004; Stephan 2009). Shock, however, best characterized the jihadi response to the Arab uprisings. Organized non-­ violent resistance directly contradicted the position of al Qaeda’s leaders who said that ‘there is no solution except through jihad, all other solutions are futile. Rather, other solutions would only worsen the state of dilapidation and submissiveness in which we live; [purported solutions that exclude jihad] are equivalent to treating cancer with aspirin’ (Lahoud 2013). The eventual coup in Egypt dashed the immediate hopes of democratic

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transitions there and momentarily tilted the argument over means toward the side of the violent jihadis. Further, the decision, in spite of initial successes, by Syrian activists to give up on non-violent resistance also seemed to support the Jihadi position. Moreover, the violent crackdown on protestors in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere may have helped to recruit people to join the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL). The policy responses of the USA to the uprisings have been fraught with unintended consequences (Wahlrab and McNeal 2018). Thus, the function of the global imaginary competes with that of the national as oppressed people search for the means to achieve security and freedom.

Consciousness Is Not Enough The tension over the rise of the global imaginary means that more battle lines are being drawn: immigration, national sovereignty, human rights; free trade, fair trade, and the looming environmental crisis above everything. Political protest movements of the past often articulated universal demands in terms of the national imaginary; more specifically ‘the ‘voluntary’ character of a broad-based collective, though it may have been formed in response to economic injustice, presses its demands within the framework of citizenship rather than class’ (Price 2015, 13). Steger has convincingly shown that the national imaginary is not static and that it will continue to overlap with the global. It is with this in mind that Price’s example illustrates the tension between the national and the global imaginary when he says, in effect, that protestors will settle for any port in a storm. But the larger point here is that cries for liberation and emancipation do not always achieve their lofty goals in the short term. Walter Benjamin, echoing Immanuel Kant, said that the history of progress is basically a train wreck (Benjamin and Arendt 1986, 257–258). Karl Polanyi also showed how the double movement led to the rise of fascism and World War II as millions of people were set adrift by the ­disembedding of the society from the economy (Polanyi 2001). Nevertheless, in each case the point is also made that progress does seem to occur over the longer view, as for example when Micheline Ishay reminds her readers that out of these last two catastrophes, we also get the anti-genocide convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Ishay 2004, 199–228). It is with this sense of history in mind that we must consider the function of the global imaginary to serve a range of potentially positive and negative outcomes. In a context of global dislocation and disruption

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characterized by Schumpeter as ‘creative destruction’ it makes sense that students, workers, slum dwellers, and other protestors suffering from dislocations caused by global forces will appeal to and accept help from whoever offers (Taub 2016). The question that arises today is whether these demands for help will be answered by the forces of nativism and reaction or by a global new deal. Citizens who are not protected by their states have sought protection beyond the boundaries of their home nations and from the arms of other nation-states and international organizations (Philpott 2001; Wahlrab 2017b). The rise of a global non-violent consciousness is occurring amidst a range of competing interpretations of the global imaginary as market, religious, and justice globalists employ ideas, claims, slogans, metaphors, and symbols to win over the hearts and minds of a global audience (Steger 2009). The evidence presented in this chapter has shown that the globalization of non-violence is a byproduct of the global imaginary insofar as it facilitates the spread of the view that all humans are members of a single family. As shown, the overlap between this view and the one presented by advocates of a principled non-violence, that all of life is interconnected, means that while the global imaginary can be used to transcend national boundaries, it is not agnostic regarding means. If we are all connected, then injustice to one is injustice to all. This is true even as Steger himself explains that ‘[t]he national is slowly losing its grip on people’s minds, but the global has not yet ascended to the commanding heights once occupied by its predecessor. It erupts in fits and false starts, offering observers confusing spectacles of social fragmentation and integration that cut across old geographical hierarchies in unpredictable patterns’ (Steger 2008, 247). The rise of a global non-violent consciousness does not mean that violence will disappear, rather it means that increasingly we find that non-­ violent political activists from across the globe acknowledge their kindred relationship with each other and endeavor to support the flourishing of local and global social justice.

Note 1. Religion also allows for incredible violence but the point here is that how it is employed matters. Shared belief in non-violence across religions means that while religion may serve as justification for mass murder of Rohingya in the case of the ‘peaceful Buddhists of Myanmar’ it also can and has been used to rally non-violent movements and thus links non-violence across religious and national boundaries.

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References Abrahamian, Ervand. 2009. Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution, 1977–1979. In Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, ed. Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, 162–178. New York: Oxford University Press. Achcar, Gilbert. 2013. The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ackerman, Peter. 2017. Strategic Nonviolence Is not Civil Resistance. International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, 21 September. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/blog_post/strategic-nonviolence-not-civil-resistance/ Al-Zubaidi, Layla, Matthew Cassel, and Nemonie Craven Roderick, eds. 2013. Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution: Voices from Tunis to Damascus. New York: Penguin Books. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. and extended ed. London/New York: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press. Beinin, Joel. 2012. Egyptian Workers and January 25th: A Social Movement in Historical Context. Social Research 79 (2): 323–348. Beinin, Joel, and Frédéric Vairel. 2011. Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. 1986. Illuminations. New  York: Schocken Books. Bonney, Richard. 2004. Jihād: From Qur’ān to bin Lāden. New York: Palgrave. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Campbell, David. 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Revised ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Original edition, 1992. Chanda, Nayan. 2007. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chen, Adrian. 2012. Mark Zuckerberg Takes Credit for Populist Revolutions Now That Facebook’s Gone Public. Gawker, 2 February. http://gawker. com/5881657/facebook-takes-credit-for-populist-revolutions-now-that-itsgone-public. Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press. Costa, Rebecca D. 2011. Acclaimed Political Scientist, Francis Fukuyama, Forecasted Arab Uprising During Clinton Years. rebeccacosta.com, 5 May. http://www.rebeccacosta.com/press-room-francis-fukuyama-18.htm.

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Creveld, Martin Van. 1999. The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Darian-Smith, Eve, and Philip C.  McCarty. 2017. The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies. Oakland: University of California Press. Diamond, Larry Jay, Marc F.  Plattner, and Christopher Walker. 2016. Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Engels, Jeremy. 2010. Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Engler, Mark, and Paul Engler. 2016. This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century. New York: Nation Books. Fattor, Eric M. 2018. The Arab Uprisings and Twenty-First Century Global Crises: Is There an Emerging Network of Global Dissent? In U.S. Approaches to the Arab Uprisings: International Relations and Democracy Promotion, ed. Amentahru Wahlrab and Michael J. McNeal. London/New York: I. B. Tauris. Fendius Elman, Miriam. 2012. The Arab Spring and the Future of Democracy in the Middle East: Rethinking Middle Eastern Studies. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics & Culture 18 (1): 98–105. Finchelstein, Federico. 2017. From Fascism to Populism in History. Oakland: University of California Press. Gardner, Lloyd C. 2011. The Road to Tahrir Square: Egypt and the United States From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak. New York: New Press. Distributed by Perseus Distribution. Gause, F. Gregory. 2011. Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability. Foreign Affairs 90 (4): 81–90. Gelvin, James L. 2012. The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldfarb, Michael. 2017. What Is a Nation in the 21st Century? New York Times, 27 October. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/cataloniaeuropean-union-independence.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickS ource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-ccol-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region. Haas, Mark L., and David W. Lesch. 2012. The Arab Spring: Change and Resistance in the Middle East. Boulder: Westview Press. Haddad, Bassam, Rosie Bsheer, and Ziad Abu-Rish. 2012. The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? London/New York: Pluto Press. Hinnebusch, Raymond. 2015. Introduction: Understanding the Consequences of the Arab Uprisings – Starting Points and Divergent Trajectories. Democratization 22 (2): 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2015.1010807. Howard, Philip N., and Muzammil M. Hussain. 2013. Democracy’s Fourth Wave?: Digital Media and the Arab Spring. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

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Ishay, Micheline R. 2004. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The origin and goal of history. New Haven: Yale University Press. King, Mary Elizabeth. 2007. A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. New York: Nation Books. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1991. In A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of  Martin Luther King, Jr, ed. James M.  Washington. New  York: HarperSanFrancisco. Klaas, Brian P. 2016. The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy. London: Hurst & Company. Lahoud, Nelly. 2013. Jihadi Discourse in the Wake of the Arab Spring.  United States Military Academy West Point: The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Lesch, David W. 2011. The Arab Spring—and Winter—in Syria. Global Change, Peace & Security 23 (3): 421–426. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158. 2011.601859. Lynch, Marc. 2012. The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East. 1st ed. New York: PublicAffairs. Mallat, Chibli. 2007. March 2221: Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution: An Essay on Nonviolence and Justice. Beirut: LiR. Mallat, Chibli, and Edward Mortimer. 2016. The Background to Civil Resistance in the Middle East. In Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters, ed. Adam Roberts, Michael J. Willis, Rory McCarthy, and Timothy Garton Ash, 1–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marzouki, Yousri, and Olivier Oullier. 2012. Revolutionizing Revolutions: Virtual Collective Consciousness and the Arab Spring. Huffington Post, 17 July. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/yousri-marzouki/revolutionizingrevolutio_b_1679181.html. Mason, Paul. 2013. Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. Rev. and updated 2nd ed. London/New York: Verso. Morley, Jefferson. 2005. The Branding of Lebanon’s Revolution. Washington Post, 3 March. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19112005Mar2.html. Noueihed, Lin, and Alex Warren. 2012. The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the Making of a New Era. New Haven: Yale University Press. Opinion. 2011. To the Occupy movement—The Occupiers of Tahrir Square are with you Comrades from Cairo. Guardian, 25 October. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/25/occupy-movement-tahrirsquare-cairo.

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Patomäki, Heikki, and Manfred B.  Steger. 2010. Social Imaginaries and Big History: Towards a New Planetary Consciousness? Futures: A Journal of Policy, Planning, and Futures Studies 42: 1056–1063. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. futures.2010.08.004. Philpott, Daniel. 2001. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Pollack, Kenneth M. 2011. The Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East, Saban Center at the Brookings Institution book. Washington: Brookings Institution. Price, Stuart. 2015. The Legacy of Dissent: Class, Gender and Austerity. In Contemporary Protest and the Legacy of Dissent, ed. Stuart Price and Ruth Sanz Sabido, 11–27. London/New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Roberts, Adam, Michael J. Willis, Rory McCarthy, and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. 2016. Civil Resistance in the Arab Spring: Triumphs and Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharp, Gene. 1973. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: P. Sargent Publisher. ———. 1979. Gandhi as a Political Strategist: With Essays on Ethics and Politics. Boston: P. Sargent Publishers. Smith, Lydia. 2016. Arab Spring 5 Years on: Timeline of the Major Events and Uprisings in the Middle East. International Business Times, 25 January. http:// www.ibtimes.co.uk/arab-spring-5-years-timeline-major-events-uprisings-middle-east-1539085. Spruyt, Hendrik. 1994. The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steger, Manfred B. 2000. Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 2002. Globalism: The New Market Ideology. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2005a. From Market Globalism to Imperial Globalism: Ideology and American Power After 9/11. Globalizations 2 (1): 31–46. ———. 2005b. Imperial Globalism, Democracy, and the ‘Political Turn’. Political Theory 20 (10): 1–11. ———. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-first Century. 3rd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ———. 2017. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2017. What Is Global Studies? Theory & Practice. London and New York: Routledge.

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Steger, Manfred B., James Goodman, and Erin K. Wilson. 2013. Justice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy. London: SAGE. Stephan, Maria J.  2009. Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stephan, Maria J., and Erica Chenoweth. 2008a. Why Civil Resistance Works. International Security 33 (1): 7–44. ———. 2008b. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. International Security 33 (1): 7–44. Taub, Amanda. 2016. A Central Conflict of 21st-Century Politics: Who Belongs? New York Times, 8 July. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/world/ europe/a-central-conflict-of-21st-century-politics-who-belongs.html?_r=1. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. 2017. Responsibility to Protect. United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/ genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.html. Accessed 18 Dec 2017. Wahlrab, Amentahru. 2014a. Nonviolence and Globalization. In The Sage Handbook of Globalization, ed. Manfred B. Steger, Paul Battersby, and Joseph M. Siracusa, 727–738. Los Angeles: SAGE. ———. 2014b. Speaking Truth to Power: Hip Hop and the African Awakening. In Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati, ed. Msia Kibona Clark and Mickie Mwanzia Koster, 49–63. New York: Lexington Books. ———. 2017a. Fostering Global Security. In Rethinking Security in the Twentieth Century, ed. Edwin Daniel Jacob, 127–141. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2017b. Imagining Global Nonviolence. Perspectives on Global Development & Technology 16 (1–2): 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569149712341429. ———. 2018. Making Revolutionaries Out of ‘Safe Citizens’: Sovereignty, Political Violence, And the Arab Uprisings. In U.S.  Approaches to the Arab Uprisings: International Relations and Democracy Promotion, ed. Amentahru Wahlrab and Michael J. McNeal. London: I. B. Tauris. Wahlrab, Amentahru, and Michael J. McNeal, eds. 2018. U.S. Approaches to the Arab Uprisings: International Relations and Democracy Promotion. London: I. B. Tauris. Weinert, Matthew S. 2015. Making Human: World Order and the Global Governance of Human Dignity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wieland, Carsten. 2012. Syria–A Decade of Lost Chances: Repression and Revolution from Damascus Spring to Arab Spring. Seattle: Cune Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Symbolic Power of the Global: Interpreting Cultural and Ideological Change in Melbourne, Australia Tommaso Durante

Globalization and the Social Imaginary Globalization is a highly contested concept that sometimes refers to a set of contradictory social processes and it is understood differently in different places. However, it is often used in academic as well as in media discourses as a shorthand way to describe the increasing economic integration of local markets, technologies, and transnational cultural flows. As a result, globalization is largely investigated as an economy-driven process and at the levels of its objective dynamics. In this study, by giving its objective and subjective aspects equal consideration, I investigate globalization in line with Manfred Steger’s argument that a broader approach is needed (Steger 2008) if we are to grasp the nature of the imaginative aspects of globalization. Steger defines the ‘global imaginary’ as the rise of a ‘new sense of “the global”’ emerging at the end of the World War II and shaped by the forces of globalization. The changing imaginary has destabilized the grand political ideologies codified during the national age and is T. Durante (*) School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_9

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mostly articulated through the political ideology of ‘market globalism’ (2008, 10–15). ‘Market globalism’ provides globalization with free-­ market norms and neoliberal meanings (Steger 2009, 2014). In interrogating the presuppositions of cultural ontologies of the global and instituted configurations such as the global imaginary and market globalism, I am making use of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic power’ (1982). Bourdieu sees ‘symbolic power’ as a kind of ‘worldmaking power’ that involves the ability to construct and impose a vision of the social world (1989, 14–25). However, I am expanding it to address the visual-­ discursive narratives of globalization. This assists in exploring cultural globalization as a condition where new forms of subjectivity are shaped (Foucault 1980) in dialectic interplay with major global processes (Mittelman 2002). Examples of these processes are economics, science, technologies, mobility of individuals and organizations, fashion, art, tourism, and food. They are largely the product of local strategies that have become globalized through an ongoing interplay between the local and the global. In that sense, I understand the local-global articulation as mutually constitutive of globalization and the phenomenon itself as a global imaginary. From this perspective, I recognize the power of imagination that, situated between theory and practice, informs our sense of the real in the construction of self-identity. According to Arjun Appadurai, [t]he image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice (2005, 31). Thus, addressing globalization as a social imaginary means dealing with core concepts in the theoretical debates over the role of the imagination in the construction of subjective and collective identities. Given that that the self is socially constructed in the imaginary through the workings of ideology (see also Nichols 1981, 34–42), in this chapter I examine how the symbolic and social construction of global subjectivity comes into being in a highly mediatized and increasingly ‘globalizing’ world. I do this by using the thinking tool of the ‘visual ideological marker of globality’ and by focusing on Melbourne, one of Australia’s major cities, through a transdisciplinary approach and a practice-based research that uses photographic images to advance knowledge partly by means of the practice of photography as a method. In this study the term ‘globalizing’ applies to the ever-increasing processes of globalization enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, as a consequence of economic deregulation, the spread of new technologies, and of

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transnational cultural flows. This notion supports the idea of a globalizing society through the growth of a single world market dominated by global corporations that contribute to the power decline of national societies. At a subjective level the term ‘globalizing’ refers to people’s deepening global consciousness. I think it useful to clarify that I consider global processes even when they are incomplete. Despite the challenges this presents, in this study I am driven by a desire to understand whether, and if so how, global subjectivities are produced through cultural and ideological change generated by the symbolic order at the local scale (Mittelman 2004, 3–11). Specifically, this investigation explores subjectivities shaped by market globalism— neoliberal consumption practices in the context of ‘deep mediatization’— located in the interplay between media, culture, and society (Couldry and Hepp 2017). To that end, I address the visual-ideological dimension of globalization. Individual and collective processes of imagination are deep social phenomena that take shape in the conceptual link between the social imaginary and ideology (Thompson 1982; Steger 2008). As intimately intertwined domains, they are both forms of creation of recognition, which is the basis of the lived relationship (Eagleton 2013). The question that motivates this study is: Do the ‘visual ideological markers of globality’ affect local-national meaning in Melbourne? I also question some theoretical and methodological approaches to global processes, while offering new resources for the study of globalization and further reflections on the notion of the global imaginary to encompass its visual-ideological dimension.

Market Globalism: The Dominant Ideology of Globalization In his analysis of the emerging political ideologies of the twenty-first century, Steger argues that market globalism concerns itself with economic growth, liberalization of trade, and integration of markets (2009). That is enough, Steger argues, to define the free-market ideology as a coherent political ideology that provides a conceptual frame for the underlying global imaginary: [i]deology provides society with stability as it creates, preserves, and protects the social identity of persons and groups. Performing a constructive function, ideology supplies the symbols, norms, and images that go into the

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process of assembling and holding together individual and collective identity. (Steger 2009, 8)

Following Steger’s observation, this means that the systems of values, beliefs, and arguments—the ideational dimension—of globalization are inextricably linked to the material process itself. Steger clearly states that we cannot understand the material process of globalization without a proper recognition of its system of beliefs or the ideologies of globalism (2001, 42). In a context in which the media frame and shape processes and discourses of globalization, to investigate the system of beliefs—ideologies— and values embedded within the production and consumption of media representations, I need to define a tailored methodology. Such a methodology, if it is to encompass the theoretical and empirical nature of this study, requires combining tasks such as photographic fieldwork and definitions of new thinking around tools for understanding figures of knowledge with different methods of critical analyses and interpretation. For this reason, and with Steger’s work in mind, I introduce the figure of knowledge of the ‘visual ideological marker of globality.’ In the next section of this chapter I will illustrate the defined boundaries for this new thinking tool.

A New Approach to the Aesthetics of Globalization Informed by theory, the first stage of this investigation relies on fieldwork dedicated to the collection of images, while the second stage is dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of selected visual evidence carried out to form a case study that will be viewed through the lenses of socio-political theory. The selected ‘visual ideological marker of globality’ that I will analyze in the following section is drawn from my research project, ‘The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary,’ that collects still images in digital files spanning a decade across the planet (2007–present). The main aim of this research project, which includes a dedicated web site (Durante 2009–ongoing), is to better understand the phenomenon of globalization and how the global imaginary is symbolically and socially produced in the stage of analysis and interpretation, to address the complex nature of the ‘visual ideological markers of globality’ To  grasp its socio-political and cultural implications, I use a combination of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2011) and ‘iconology’ (Argan and West 1975;

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Mitchell 1987; Panofsky 1962). Iconology, in combination with other methods of textual interpretation, facilitates analysis of the complexity of visual constructs. I draw on the methods of ‘iconology’ commonly employed in the study of art history to uncover the socio-historical, cultural, and ideological background of themes and subjects in the works of art. However, to analyze the selected evidence, I expanded this method to cover the production of complex commercial constructs produced, circulated, and consumed under present conditions of globalization and produced through forms of deep mediatization. In expanding the historical method of iconology to approach highly mediatized and urbanized societies, I have also refocused it as ‘urban iconology’ or ‘global urban iconology’ (Durante 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). The term ‘urban iconology’ assists in moving from the analysis and interpretation of the work of art to considering the saturation of the urban public sphere by global visual culture. It shifts our focus from the individual artist’s imaginary, to a focus on collective imaginaries. Arguing specifically for the importance of global visual imagery, ideological representations and the ways in which this new class of images can be mapped and analyzed, my intention is to expand our knowledge and understanding of globalization as both a material process and an imaginary. As previously acknowledged, I draw on the concept of symbolic power from Bourdieu. However, while he focused on language as a key symbolic system of political values, this study expands it to cover the visual-discursive narratives of globalization with regards to image consumption. Here, the globalized visual-discursive field is understood as a mode of ideological domination over conscious subjects.

Mediating Practices: Spaces, Images, and Ideologies As acknowledged in the introduction, both in academic and popular discourses, the debates on globalization have mostly focused on the nature and major dynamics of the multidimensional process, such as the economic, technological, and socio-political transformations and their impact on nation-state systems. In the last two decades the forces of globalization have caused most cities across the globe, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, to undergo major urban transformations. Consequently, local-­ national meanings have been deeply affected by engagement with the global, while the continuous spread of transnational cultural flows has

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changed and shaped individual experience of space. What is more, global commercial images provided by transnational photo banks such as Getty Images, Stock Photos, and the most recent Visual China Group (VCG) are leading forces in changing the world’s visual language and values, driven by the needs of global corporate capitalism to sustain the rise of a global visual culture. The images are somehow ‘decontextualized’  or unmoored from previously accepted meanings. This decontextualization is achieved through the production of visual images that make use of generic models and settings (see Machin and van Leeuwen 2007, 150–168). This process of decontextualization appears quite clearly in an image I took in the Melbourne Commercial Business District on the January 23, 2016. The advertisement offers accommodation that promises ‘Balanced Global Living’ (Fig. 9.1). The decontextualization of images is a key characteristic for understanding how ideology works at a meta-ideological level in constructing people’s global mind-set through particular types of images. Here, the term meta-ideological applies to globalism understood as an overarching ideology describing general globalization trends that organize other ideologies of globalization such as, but not limited to, market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalism, rather than a proper ideology (Steger 2013, 241–31). By decontextualization I mean the possibility offered by an image produced in a ‘neutral,’ nearly abstract context, to communicate a message by being easily re-located within any place across the globe. This is possible because commercial images are usually combined with a text or a catchphrase that connects the image with a place or product. By means of decontextualization, people, settings, and objects can be turned into visual stereotypes. As Kress and van Leeuwen observe: decontextualisation is one of the hallmarks of the ‘abstract coding orientation’, an approach to image production in which validity of images lies not in their resemblance to visible reality, but in their adequacy with respect to the essential or general nature of things depicted, and this means reducing the individual to the general, and the concrete to its essential quality. (1996, 170)

Through the production of decontextualized images and abstract coding, global corporations can adapt them to different socio-historical defined contexts, such as Melbourne in Australia, Shanghai in China or New York

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Fig. 9.1  “Balanced Global Living, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, Australia”. Digital image. Tommaso Durante/The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary. January 2016

in the United States. However, beyond the production of decontextualized images there is also the imperative to maximize the profits of global photo banks. In that sense, an understanding of image decontextualization is useful especially when, as it happens in this study, we want to investigate the realm of image consumption.

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The Visual Ideological Markers of Globality Aiming to grasp how global subjectivities are symbolically and socially constructed at the local scale, this study examines the emergence of a new visual regime of representation and signification in Melbourne. I am looking in particular to urban settings, since cities are the engines of globalization (Sassen 2001, 2007). With the term ‘visual ideological marker of globality’ I refer to a particular type of cultural object which actively references the global, such as images of world maps, globe maps, photographs of the Planet Earth, and other symbols of the global and/or words such as global, globality, worldly, etcetera. The term ‘globality’ applies to a social condition in which the intensification of connectivity (Tomlinson 2000) and the growing people’s consciousness of the world-as-a-whole (Robertson 1992) are widely recognized. In that sense, I do not understand ‘globality’ as a single global society that already exists, but potentially as the end-point of globalization (Wilson 2012). Visual ideological markers of globality are particular visual-discursive formations suggesting, supporting, and sustaining the processes of globalization. In other words, with the term ideological marker of globality I refer to the symbolic power of a visual object denoting the idea of the ‘global’—globalization—in a single event, place, or image through ‘symbolic representations.’ The term ‘visual object’ is understood as the ideological-­hierarchical organization of the visual construct in which the image plays a dominant role and not merely the physical properties of a media representation (Feldman 2003). In this study the concept of ‘symbolic representation’ applies to images like the world globe, to words like ‘global,’ or the combination of text and images together. One peculiar characteristic of these new visual formations is that they are ideologically charged constructs. The production of ideologically charged visual representations may happen even if it is not deliberately desired, since ‘[w]e produce, disseminate and consume ideologies all our lives, whether we are aware of it or not.’ (Freeden 2003, 1) I privilege symbolic representations, since the human mind stores all memories and experiences in the form of images and symbols (Green and Piel 2016). Consequently, symbolic forms are able to affect people’s mind both in a conscious and in an unconscious way (Jung 2012).

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The City and the Self: The Emergence of Global Subjectivity in Melbourne In this study, I am using the concepts of visual ideological marker of globality and market globalism to approach the complex phenomenon of globalization as a social imaginary and the construction of global subjectivities in the defined socio-historical context of Melbourne, Australia. I chose Melbourne, the city in which I live, because it is one of the fastest-­ growing large cities in the developed world (ABS 2017; UN-Habitat 2016). As an example of how the free-market ideology can be visualized, consider the use of the word ‘global’ in the construction of the slogan ‘Balanced Global Living’ (Fig. 9.1). Somerset Serviced Residence is owned by The Ascott Limited, a member of CapitaLand Limited, the largest international serviced residence owner-operator in the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Gulf region, headquartered in Shanghai and listed in Singapore (The Ascott 2010). Although lacking any iconic architectural appeal, the building is strategically located at the corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale Streets in the heart of Melbourne’s Central Business District. Somerset on Elizabeth presents comfortable living ideally located to cater for the business and leisure traveler. Travelers will enjoy the convenience of the location surrounded by the highlights of the city’s food, shopping, arts, and entertainment culture (Somerset 2016), which are part of Melbourne’s promotional narrative as the world’s most livable city. The large sign, covering the whole right side of the main entrance of the building, is designed to target prospective customers who look for global lifestyle accommodation in Melbourne. Indeed, the symbolic power of this representation relies on its ability to create a particular version of the global imaginary in a single place. The picture is dominated by a Caucasian couple, dressed in Western style, looking each other in the eyes and smiling while dancing. It confirms that the right choice has been made, in a vague undefined setting that could be anywhere in the world. It is decontextualized by appearing unrelated to any particular geographical location. If we remove the sign from its location in the Melbourne Central Business District, the picture of the happy couple could be representative of almost any urban place in the world. Indeed, it can be observed that, while the couple’s happiness springs from the right choice to book a Somerset Serviced Apartment for the stay in Melbourne, the ‘Balanced Global Living’ slogan works as an

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ideological marker that frames the whole meaning of the media representation at the site of the reception—the viewer/consumer. While commercial images in the recent past used to be more descriptive, outlining places, people, and activities, their role has now changed. Supplied mainly by world image banks’ stock photos, pictures are mostly constructed and used ‘symbolically.’ This means, such as in the case of the ‘Balanced Global Living’ sign, that this visual image must represent the essential message of a commercial advertisement that can be used alternatively and almost everywhere. What is more, the meaning of the sign under investigation does not lie exclusively with the photograph but also with the text that accompanies it. In this case, the slogan (‘Balanced Global Living’) seems to fix—to codify—the ‘dominant meaning’ of the sign that also appears to be ‘natural’ and ‘transparent.’ It appears ‘natural’ and ‘transparent’ when the viewer/consumer shares the ideological position encoded in the visual formation. This means that the dominant reading of this sign (Hall 2006, 228–30) allows for uncritical acceptance, as happens almost all the time amongst the general public in their everyday life. The dominant ideology conveyed by this advertisement is accepted as natural. Through the production of this sign, Ascott Limited rearticulates local-­ national meanings of Melbourne and Australia as global by offering ‘sophisticated, high-rise Serviced Residence that includes an exclusive room, a sauna and a hot tub’… ‘Because Life is worth living’ (the-ascott. com 2016). How should we understand this in the context of an overall regime of representation? In this case, the global dimension of the sign and its decontextualized quality is reinforced by the slogan ‘Balanced Global Living’ so that it works at the site of the reception as a cultural-­ ideological constraint. From this perspective, the apparently ingenuous commercial media representation unveils all its symbolic power. With this advertisement Ascott Limited takes advantage of the emotional cues embedded within the ‘Balanced Global Living’ communication suggesting that a stay at their apartments will make you part of an interconnected global world with the added value of a life-balanced environment in a world of ever-increasing inequality and poverty. Through the interplay of texts, images, and slogans, the product on offer can be turned from a local service, accommodation, into an agent of socio-historical change. The ideologically charged nature of this symbolic form has the power, at a conscious and unconscious level, to contribute to reshaping people’s mind-set. It does so by suggesting the link between the local (Melbourne) and the global (the whole world) and by contributing in this

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way to shape people’s perception and common sense of the world as a whole. This can be easily achieved by localizing the global lifestyle through the booking of a room at the Somerset Serviced Apartment in Melbourne. The main role this commercial image plays is catching people’s attention through a persuasive and seductive approach that appeals to a global lifestyle. However, the proposed global lifestyle and the exclusive suggested accommodation experience pushes people toward a consumerist worldview linked to an individualistic, neoliberal system of values that is at the core of the free-market ideology, Steger et al.’s market globalism. The symbolic power of this visual construct relies predominantly on conveying emotion through a story—what Aristotle defined as pathos—in our case the tale of a balanced global living that can be made real if you stay at the Somerset on Elizabeth in Melbourne. The analysis of this ideological marker shows how the rearticulated neoliberal (global) capitalism achieves its goal through the transformation of humans into a product and audience by selling us the images of our lives (Castells 2011, 773–787). As a result, it can be argued that the dominant political ideology of our time—market globalism—and the connected neoliberal system of values have become deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. Furthermore, it can be also argued that while media are reshaping the fabric of cities through the symbolic power of an emerging global aesthetics, at the same time they are reshaping people’s perception of the world, cognitive processes, narrative strategies, and, at a deeper level, social imaginaries and ideologies. In this respect, let me observe that the combination of glossy and symbolic decontextualized images with catchphrases is able to affect people’s mind at both a conscious and unconscious level. Thus, it can be asserted that through their symbolic power visual ideological markers of globality are able to impose a particular vision of the world and a (global) lifestyle by rearranging local meanings (Melbourne) around the global (the whole world).

Concluding Remarks Through an exploration of cultural and ideological changes occurring in Melbourne under present conditions of globalization, I approached the emergence of the symbolic power of a new visual regime of representation and signification by mapping and analyzing how the phenomenon, as a symbolic and social process, is affecting the urban fabric of the capital city

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of Victoria in Australia. I tried to highlight the crucial role played by a shared imaginary in the social construction of the self in Melbourne through the emergence of a new class of images. In doing so, I showed how the ‘Balanced Global Living’ advertisement, regardless of its appearances, does not exist on its own by also explaining how the symbolic capital, through socio-cultural processes of deep mediatization, is turned into economic capital. However, according to Roland Barthes (1997, 38–39), images are ‘polysemous’ cultural objects. This means that the underlying signifiers work as ‘floating chains’ of signifiers (1997, 38–39). In other words, every single image has a set of many potential meanings. Thus, to what extent the symbolic power of the free-market ideology—market globalism—reshapes subjectivities through the consumption of particular global visual imagery remains a critical question, since how and to what degree these images of the global affect people’s imagination, and hence identities, is difficult to determine. Yet the plethora of such imagery in multiple urban contexts suggests that there are indeed phenomena and processes here to be observed. As a matter of fact, although limited and not unproblematic, visual ideological markers of globality constitute, without any doubt, an emerging form of social global imagination, a new vocabulary, a pervasive visual language, and a practice that needs to be further critically investigated.

References ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics). 2017. Regional Population Growth, Australia, 2016. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/MediaRealesesBy Catalogue/28F51C010D29BFC9CA2575A0002126CC. Accessed 29 May 2017. Appadurai, Arjun. 2005. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Argan, Giulio Carlo and Rebecca West. 1975. Ideology and Iconology. Critical Inquiry 2 (2): 297–305. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342905. Barthes, Roland. 1997. The Rhetoric of the Image. In Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory 7: 14–25. Castells, Manuel. 2011. A Network Theory of Power. International Journal of Communication 5: 773–787.

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Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Durante, Tommaso. 2009–ongoing. The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary. http://www.the-visual-archive-project-of-the-global-imaginary.com/ visual-global-imaginary/. Accessed 17 Jan 2017. ———. 2014, June 1. Visual Culture and Globalization: The Visual Archive Project of the Global Imaginary. Global-E Journal 8 (4). http://www.21global. ucsb.edu/global-e/june-2014/visual-culture-and-globalization-visualarchive-project-global-imaginary. Accessed 27 Jan 2016. ———. 2015. On the Global Imaginary: Visualizing and Interpreting Aesthetics of Global Change in Melbourne, Australia and Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. The Global Studies Journal 8 (4): 19–33. ———. 2016. On the Global Image: Globalisation as Visual-Ideological Phenomenon. In Narratives of Globalisation: Reflections on the Global Condition, ed. J.C.H. Lee, 51–62. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. ———. 2017. A Visual Ideology of Globalization? Global-E Journal 10 (4). http://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/january-2017/visual-ideology-globalization. Accessed 19 Jan 2017. Eagleton, Terry. 2013. Ideology. New York: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman. 2011. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York: Routledge. Feldman, Jacob. 2003. What Is a Visual Object? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (6): 252–256. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00111-6. Accessed 27 July 2014. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Green, Michael G., and John A. Piel. 2016. Theories of Human Development: A Comparative Development. New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 2006. Encoding/Decoding. In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Douglas M.  Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Jung, Carl Gustav. 2012. Man and His Symbols. New  York: Random House Publishing Group. Kress, Gunther R., and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London/New York: Routledge. Machin, David, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2007. Global Media Discourse. Oxon/ New York: Routledge. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1987. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. London/Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Mittelman, James H. 2002. Globalization: An Ascendant Paradigm. International Studies Association 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.00075. Accessed 17 Jan 2017. ———. 2004. Whither Globalization?: The Vortex of Knowledge and Ideology (Rethinking Globalizations). London/New York: Routledge. Nichols, Bill. 1981. Ideology and the image: Social representations in the cinema and other media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Panofsky, Erwin. 1962. Studies in Iconology. New York: Harper & Row. Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage Publications. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New  York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. Introduction: Deciphering the Global. In Deciphering the Global, ed. Saskia Sassen. New York: Routledge. Somerset. 2016. Somerset on Elizabeth Melbourne. https://www.somerset.com/ en/australia/melbourne/somerset-on-elizabeth-melbourne/index.html?gclid =CIi0gqeNmNkCFQrivAodWCkF8w&gclsrc=ds. Accessed 27 Jan 2016. Steger, Manfred B. 2001. Globalism: The New Market Ideology. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield. ———. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-first Century. Malden: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2013. Political Ideologies in the Age of Globalization. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden, Marc Stears, and Lyman Tower Sargent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Market Globalism. In The SAGE Handbook of Globalization, ed. Manfred B. Steger, Paul Battersby, and Joseph Siracusa, 25–38. London: Sage Publications. The Ascot. 2016. Ascott Lifestyle. The Ascott. https://www.the-ascott.com/en/ ascott-lifestyle/index.html. Accessed 27 Jan 2017. The Ascott. 2010. Ascott Opens Its First Citadines Serviced Residence in Australia. https://www.the ascott.com/en/4ascott_opens_its_first_citadines_serviced_ residence_in_australia.html. Accessed 27 Jan 2016. Thompson, John B. 1982. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Berkley: University of California Press. Tomlinson, John. 2000. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). 2016. World Cities Report 2016. http://wcr.unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ WCR-2016-Full-Report.pdf. Accessed 27 June 2017. Wilson, Erin K. 2012. Globality. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog249. Accessed 17 Jan 2018.

CHAPTER 10

The ‘Craic’ Goes Global: Irish Pubs and the Global Imaginary Chris Hudson

Dublin doesn’t feel so far away … —Lonely Planet, The Dublin Irish Pub in Ushuaia, 2017

Subjective Globalization and Affect The well-traveled would probably not be surprised to come across the ‘Grand Khaan Irish Pub’ in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, or the Tir Na Nóg1 bar and restaurant serving fish and chips and Guinness in Gili Trawangan, a tiny island in the northwest of Lombok, Indonesia, also known as ‘The Turtle Capital of the World.’ It is said that ‘The Irish Pub’ in Namche Bazaar, Nepal—the last stop before Everest Base Camp—is ‘probably the highest Irish pub in the world, definitely the planet’s least accessible Irish pub, and almost certainly the only Irish pub with yak on the menu’ (Haddad 2014). An Irish pub, even in the most remote locations, can produce an imagined Ireland in spaces which are anchored in the immediacy of the local, but are also constituted through global connection. C. Hudson (*) School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_10

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While some people think of the town of Ushuaia in Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip Argentina as the end of the world, even there an Irish pub can collapse distance to create an imaginary where ‘Dublin doesn’t feel so far away’ (Lonely Planet 2017). We are indebted to Manfred Steger for the development of the concept of the global imaginary as an expanded imaginary of social life that goes beyond Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Charles Taylor’s social imaginary. Acknowledging Roland Robertson’s early description of globalization as a ‘revolution in consciousness’ (see Steger 2008, 274), Steger extends this to conceptualize the global imaginary as a ‘thickening of a global consciousness’ (2008, 179). While it is now well understood that this consciousness is fundamentally constituted by an ‘awareness of deepening connections between the local and distant’ (Steger 2004, 2), how this awareness is generated in specific contexts and sites of cultural activity requires further consideration. Steger and Paul James explain the imperative to examine the subjective dimensions of a global consciousness: ‘globalization involves both the objective spread and intensification of social relations across world space, and the subjective meanings, ideas, sensibilities, and understandings associated with those material processes of extension. Moreover, objective and subjective relations and meanings are bound up with each other’ (Steger and James 2013, 19; original emphasis). The economic and material aspects of globalization have been extensively explored but a deeper understanding of the global imaginary can be found by looking beyond these aspects to the imaginative and affective dimensions of social reality. A night in an Irish pub in Tokyo or Moscow or Kampala is an encounter with the global in its intersection with the local that can stimulate a sense of global connection, or an ‘imagined presence’ (Elliott and Urry 2010, 15) of the global. This can be achieved through the deployment of certain kinds of affect that are instrumental to what Steger identifies as the necessity for the (re)construction of social space and the repetitive performance of certain communal qualities if social imaginaries are to acquire solidity—a sense of the ‘real’ (2008, 7). This reconstruction of social space in an Irish pub outside Ireland can be constituted as a moment of immanence of the global achieved through the appropriation of the signifiers of Irish identity—or what are universally received as such—and the production of Irishness as a global commodity. Affect is a mode of perception, and an indispensable aspect of the pre-­ reflexive parameters within which, following Steger and James (2013, 23), people imagine their social existence. As Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg define it: ‘affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body …

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affect … is the name we give to those visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing’ and may be likened to the forces of encounter (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1–2; original emphases). This chapter will focus on material and semiotic practices in Irish pubs outside Ireland that can generate affective forces of encounter with the global. An underlying presupposition is that affect and forms of emotional engagement are integral features of socio-economic life in the post-­industrial economy in which the market must continually reinvent itself and generate novelty in order to entice consumers. This chapter will, therefore, also consider the ways in which the global imaginary is closely linked to consumerism and the importance of the commodification of culture for the global economy. While the existence of Irish pubs outside Ireland dates back until at least the eighteenth century in major cities such as London and New York, recent decades have seen a marked increase in numbers across the world. Now, as Conor Pope puts it, ‘it is virtually impossible to visit any city of any size without stumbling into … a Molly Malone or Wild Rover, or whatever you’re having yourself’ (Pope 2016). The Molly Malone of the fishmonger myth so often referred to in song has given her name to pubs in Bangkok, Phuket, Singapore, Jakarta, Beijing, and Hiroshima, amongst others. Bordering on the ubiquitous, Irish pubs now rival the global reach of the truly global food chains such as McDonalds and Starbucks. If the marketing genius of McDonald’s and Starbucks has contributed to their prodigious success globally, so too have the qualities that endear them to the consumer. Along with the obvious elements of consistency and predictability of the culinary offerings—albeit with the odd variation and domestication to take account of local dietary restrictions and culinary penchants—they provide a recognizable environment, with few variations from place to place. James Watson’s (2006) study of the proliferation of the Golden Arches in Asia shows the extent of their geographical presence and the penetration of local cultures. Even with aggressive marketing, their success in cultures without coffee-drinking or burger-eating traditions is all the more remarkable. Similarly, the success of Irish pubs seems not to be circumscribed by their location in cultures with no tradition of beer drinking; nor does it seem to be constrained by the fact that most of the countries where Irish pubs have appeared have not been influenced to any great degree by the Irish diaspora that has been so significant a factor in the development of the demographic and cultural profile of immigrant societies such as Australia, Canada, and the USA. There is no established cultural memory of Ireland in Nepal or Uganda.

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Irish pubs lend themselves to classification as ‘themed’ environments in the manner of, for example, the restaurant chains Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Company or the Hard Rock Café. These are sites of intensified aestheticization designed to beguile and bedazzle consumers in order to sell products by offering not only the product, but also the experience as a commodity (see Pine and Gilmore 1999 on the ‘experience economy’). The sensory regimes at work in such spaces of enchantment (see Ritzer 2010), of magic and imagination illustrate the relationship between aesthetics and affect. Virginia Postrel explains it this way: Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses. It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look and feel of people, places and things … aesthetics shows rather than tells, delights rather than instructs. The effects are immediate, perceptual and emotional’ (Postrel 2003, 6)

Looking for Scruffy Murphy: Globalizing Identity Fetishism Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented in 1991 (Kelley 2006).The establishment of Irish pubs all over the world, and the marketing of the pub in Ireland as a quintessentially Irish experience that no tourist should miss, have been key factors in the construction of an Irish identity as a global consumer product. So much research on Irish identity in tourism studies and popular culture highlights the forms of commodification of Irish identity (see, e.g., Graham 2001; McGovern 2003; Mays 2005; Nagle 2005). Ireland was ‘invented,’ according to Austin Kelley, in 1991 when the Irish Pub Company decided to colonize the world with pubs (Kelley 2006). The Irish Pub Company had been established in 1990 by businessman Mel McNally in partnership with the Guinness Irish Pub Concept to design and export Irish pubs across the globe. Both Guinness and the newly formed company recognized the opportunities for monetizing Irish identity and history and exploiting a putatively quintessential Irishness through its association with Guinness’ stout. The Irish Pub website states: In 1990, Guinness and Mel were of the same mind that these Irish pubs were of historical value and presented a great Global Business Opportunity. The Ambition and Focus: To use our creations and research to expand the Guinness Alignment with Irishness through the Irish pub (The Irish Pub Company 2016).

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Stephen Brown and Anthony Patterson note that Irish theme pubs have been staggeringly successful, so much so that replica ‘Irish’ pubs were already displacing ‘“real” Irish pubs, “actual” Irish pubs, and “genuine” Irish pubs in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Eniskillen and elsewhere by 2000 (Brown and Patterson 2000, 648). It seems that even in Ireland itself, locals were able to access a revived cultural identity and tourists were able to find the ‘authentic’ Ireland they were looking for through renewed aestheticization and ‘authentic’ experience. Irishness is a racialized ontological category with a long history. Stereotypes of the Irish, personified in what is commonly known as ‘stage-­ Irish’ have been reinforced in popular culture since the seventeenth century. Robert Welch explains that the stage-Irish stereotype first emerged after the Restoration of the English monarchy with Teg in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee; Or, The Faithful Irishman (1665). The caricature was a product of colonialism and the desire to stigmatize the Irish to exaggerate the superiority of the English. Welch outlines the common forms of mockery. The stage Irishman was generally: ‘garrulous, boastful, unreliable, hard-drinking, belligerent (though cowardly) and chronically impecunious. His chief identifying marks were disorderly manners and insalubrious habits’ (Welch 1996, 533). The ‘chronic deprecation’ of the Irish that Welch notes was also manifest in stage-Irish names that continued the tradition of ridicule. Examples include: MacBuffle, Mactawdry, Mackafartey, Phaelim O’Blunder, and Bet Botheram O’Balderdash (Welch 1996). The penchant for silly names to carry on the convention of associating Irishness with intemperance and insalubrious habits might have largely disappeared from the theater, but has emerged in pubs around the world. ‘Durty Nelly’s’ can be found across the globe, along with Muddy Murphy’s in various locations, Tipsy McStaggers (Michigan), Tipsy McSway (Georgia), and an erstwhile chain of Scruffy Murphy’s stretching from Tokyo to Singapore, and further. The contemporary commercial properties of Irishness have become more obvious in recent years with the emergence of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations outside Ireland. London’s first major ‘St Paddy’s’ was in 2002 (see Nagle 2005). While the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New  York has been held since 1762, for many cities around the world that were important points of destination for the Irish diaspora (such as Boston, Sydney, Melbourne, and so on), March 17 has been a fixture on the calendar since the nineteenth century. More recently, St. Patrick’s Day parades have

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sprung up in unexpected places, most notably in Tokyo. Established in 1992 by the Irish Network Japan, and supported by the Irish embassy, on March 20, 2016, a sizable crowd of Irish expats and local Japanese staged a parade down Omotesando in Harajuku—a district celebrated more for its teen fashion and subculture style than its devotion to the primary patron saint of Ireland. The Irish Network Japan promoted the standard signifiers of Ireland and linked them to a global network of Irishness when its website declared: Cities like New York and Boston will have large parades in which shamrocks, leprechauns and the colour green will predominate. Chicago will even dye its river green. No matter where you are on St. Patty’s [sic] Day you will see the colour green worn more than on any other day of the year. The ‘wearing of the green,’ the national colour of Ireland, has become a way for people anywhere in the world to connect with Ireland. (Irish Network Japan 2016)

John Nagle has summed up St Patrick’s Days around the world as: ‘providing a cohesive ritual through which ontological and fetishized Irishness can be utilized to acquire surplus value’ (Nagle 2005, 568). Indeed, St. Patrick’s Day is a truly global phenomenon as Skinner and Bryan’s (2015) volume has shown. It is a day on which ‘everyone is Irish’ when the parade provides a carnivalesque liminal space in which people can momentarily try on another culture, without renouncing their own. Advertising posters, marketing campaigns of all sorts, T-shirts, buttons, flags, and the internet abound with declarations of ‘Irish for a Day’; I will be Irish in a few beers; Everyone’s Irish tonight; Kiss me, I’m Irish. These are accompanied by the standard cultural clichés and references to the luck of the Irish, green clothing, silly hats, blarney, leprechauns, shamrocks, and ‘350 things to love about being Irish.’ Moscow offers a St. Patrick’s Week (March 16–27, 2016), which, in 2016, featured 120 themed events, including a parade, promoted as an experience that would create so much affect that participants might be ‘overwhelmed by a green wave’ (St. Patrick’s Day and Night 2016. http://irishweek.ru/day-night/?lang=en). Irishness is apparently so malleable and transferable as a global identity that anyone can become Irish. St Patrick’s Day has been conclusively appropriated for commercial purposes, so much so that Guinness renamed St. Patrick’s Day ‘St Who’s Day.’ Journalist and social critic Brendan O’Neill described the shifting and fluid images of Irishness that have appeared in posters and television commercials featuring a Chinese Elvis,

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a Jewish folk singer and a black rapper all singing interpretations of that ‘homesick Irish ballad Danny Boy.’ He refers to a chain of Irish pubs in London as ‘about as Irish as Starbucks’ (O’Neill 2001). In this framework, Irish identity is an exchangeable commodity, that, according to Michael Mays, is remarkably portable, and ‘far and away Ireland’s most valuable, and at times its only, marketable export’ (Mays 2005, 9). This description also recalls Aoife Monks’ examination of the performance of St. Patrick’s Days. The Dublin parade became a celebration of multiculturalism as part of a week-long festival where, as she puts it, Irishness operated as a rubric under which other identities could be ‘produced, configured and performed’ (Monks 2005, 122). Parades in Dublin and elsewhere are sites where a number of tensions can be played out—including between the local and the global—and where a stable Irish identity is also in contestation with its inherent instability (Monks 2005, 122) of the sort highlighted by O’Neill. It should be noted that since Monks and O’Neill were writing, Ireland has become a great deal more ethnically and racially diverse and experiences the same porousness of geographical borders as other European Union member states. The corollary of the diversification of populations is an unsettling of traditional ethnic and national identities and the emergence of hybrids, facilitated by the appropriation of certain elements that are considered attractive. So many famous figures—even Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—have claimed that they ‘feel’ Irish or are Irish that O’Neill has remarked drolly that ‘some are born Irish, some achieve Irishness and the rest of us have Irishness thrust upon us’ (O’Neill 2001). Two predominant features of an imagined Irish identity are the centrality of alcohol and a mode of affect known as the craic (pronounced ‘crack’). Craic is widely understood, at least across the Anglophone world, as having a good time, but it goes deeper than that to encompass a mode of affective sociality that has also been described as ‘the irrepressible spirit of Irishness’ (Kelley 2006). Alcohol is more often than not involved in the generation of these affective associations. Alcohol companies such as those selling beer and whiskey exploit this alliance by, not surprisingly, linking the human connection with essentialized Irishness and alcohol. Decades of marketing by Guinness have ensured that Guinness and craic are almost universally conflated. Guinness for the Irish, like wine for the French, is what Barthes has called a ‘totem-drink’ and a national possession (2000, 58–64). By the same ‘universality principle’ that implies that for the French to believe in wine is a coercive collective act (2000, 59) a pint of Guinness, accompanied by the requisite craic—both imbibed in an

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Irish pub somewhere in the world—can enter the mythology of globalization as a totem-drink relying on a global scale collective coercive act. Such a collective act might explain why drinking Guinness can render anyone ‘Irish for the day.’ If alcohol and the craic are essential to the ‘irrepressible spirit of the Irish,’ perhaps reaching its apotheosis in St Patrick’s Day celebrations, this has not been without attempts to unsettle the stereotypes, if not deflate the whole structure of the Irish imaginary. Popular media has seen the emergence of cynicism about the association of Guinness with the Irish spirit, and even dismissal of the myths of St Patrick’s Day and craic as ‘humbuggery’ (see, e.g., Hoey and Shaw 2016). If St. Patrick’s Day was once a quiet day in Ireland, by the 1990s, Kelley reports, that his friends who grew up in Dublin would go to a hotel on St. Patrick’s to watch the American tourists sing Irish drinking songs and celebrate excess (Kelley 2006). Perhaps the most problematic issue for the purveyors of the irrepressible Irish spirit is the word ‘craic’ itself. Donald Clarke, columnist for The Irish Times has condemned it not only as a bogus word, but as the culprit in the invention of bogus Irishness. Citing academic and lexicographer, Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, Clarke tells readers—some of whom were quite shocked at the debunking of one of the central myths of contemporary identity—that craic is not an Irish word at all, but is actually ‘crack’ a word from the Scottish and English lexicon that has undergone a Gaelicization. Clarke reports that it first appeared in English, was translated into Irish and then reintroduced to its parent language as ‘a bogus conduit to Celtic authenticity’ (Clarke 2013, 16). Kevin Myers illuminates the fraudulence of what is essentially a marketing maneuver to promote an idealized, commodified Ireland: ‘For changing the spelling from “crack” to “craic” coincided with the moment that Irishness became self-conscious, winsome, stylised, conceited, boastful … and most of all, everything became phoney, phoney, phoney’ (Myers 2010).

The Best Irish Pub in the World (Outside Ireland): Affective Spaces of Global Irishness One of the oldest traditional Irish pubs in Singapore, Muddy Murphy’s 1840’s country cottage themed pub is so authentic you would be forgiven for momentarily thinking you’re no longer in Singapore. (Lifestyle Asia 2011)

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The Irish Times reported in 2015 that the best Irish pub in the world (outside Ireland) is Healy Mac’s in Kuala Lumpur. There were 1500 nominations in ‘The Best Irish Pub competition.’ On the short list were ‘The Auld Shillelagh in London’ named the ‘most authentic’ Irish pub abroad; ‘The Irish Pub’ in Koblenz, Germany, the ‘best ambassador,’ for its role in introducing Germans to Ireland; ‘Bubbles O’Leary’s’ in Kampala, Uganda, was judged to have the ‘best backstory’ for dismantling a bar in Drogheda, County Louth and reassembling it in Africa (Goodman 2015). Since the Irish expatriate population of Kuala Lumpur is substantial, the success of Healy Mac’s is contingent to a significant extent on people seeking nostalgic reminders of home. While the conviviality associated with Irish pubs (or any other sort of public drinking establishments for that matter) has always been a feature of the tradition, the amplification of the affective appeal of its renewed commercialization accompanied the rise of other forms of commodification of the ‘Irish experience.’ Clarke not only decries the use of the word ‘craic’ as bogus, but also historicizes the rise of erstwhile, glamorized versions of the Irish pub as bogus spaces of affect: The change is a relic of the peculiar surge of confidence that energised the Irish experience in the 1990s. That World Cup success was a harbinger. The rise of Riverdance was another … To this point, you could scarcely imagine a less trendy entity than the Irish pub. Sticky carpets, curled ham sandwiches, Margo2on the jukebox: out-of-town carpet warehouses offered more temptations to the urban hipster. All of a sudden, people in good shoes were voluntarily entering hostelries bedecked with copper kettles, battered road signs and broken bicycle wheels. (Clarke 2013)

Pete McCarthy investigates what Irish pubs are selling and what people are really consuming. Along with the ‘sociability and warmth,’ people are buying into the concept of ‘sitting down and talking to someone you haven’t met before’ (McCarthy 2003, 329). While ‘warmth’ here may be understood, like craic, as a form of affective human interaction, in thermal terms it is not a commodity in short supply in Kuala Lumpur, or any of the other tropical locations where Irish pubs have sprung up; and it is hard to think of a society anywhere in the world where ‘sitting down and talking to people’ is not a banal and unremarkable activity. While exploiting craic and other bogus Irishisms, marketing strategists can turn bizarre contradictions into selling points. One company selling ‘a major investment

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opportunity’ in the form of a global chain of Irish pubs advertises with ‘a picture of a smiling barman serving a pint, and people playing flutes and bodhráns3 in front of a roaring log fire in Bangkok’ (McCarthy 2003, 329). The financial advantage of using the standard semiotics of Irishness is not constrained by the incongruity of a roaring fire in the tropics. Here, however, everyday activity has been re-enchanted through the use of affective prompts to provide a context that is out of the ordinary. An Irish pub operator in Tennessee identifies the seductive qualities of Irish pubs: ‘An Irish Pub’s strength has always been taking care of people—giving them an escape from the real world’ (The Irish Pub Concept 2017). A North Carolina pub manager held out the promise of existential security when he said that an Irish pub is ‘a place of friendliness and comfort. Sometimes that is what people need when times are tough’ (The Irish Pub Concept 2017). Notwithstanding cultural peculiarities and contingencies of locations in which Irish pubs can be found, there is, in fact, a standard sensory regime of Irishness. The task of assemblages of quintessentially Irish accessories is to create what Nigel Thrift has called ‘affective alliances’ (Thrift 2010, 292) that will captivate customers through an imagined presence of Ireland. Like Jonathan Culler’s tourists in France ‘looking for signs of Frenchness’ (Culler 1981) customers enter an Irish pub looking for signs of Irishness. The Irish Pub Company outlines the critical success factors. Pubs must: offer involvement and entertainment; offer multiple experiences based on products; tell the story of new and old Ireland; [be] rooted in heritage. Perhaps most important of all for this discussion is that one aspect of their ‘innovative concept’ is that they offer the ‘local and global side by side’ (The Irish Pub Company 2016) (emphasis added). The Irish Pub Company franchise arrangements offer several styles of pub décor designed to provide an ‘authentic’ Irish experience and merge the global with the local. In the Gastro Style consumers can expect ‘an upmarket venue’ and ‘trendy eating and drinking’ where ‘revelers are invited to explore the intersection between drink and food’; the Victorian Style features beveled mirrors, stained glass, elaborate tiling, highly polished hardwood and rich, dark timber paneling that ‘harks back to the good old days of comfort, hospitality and enjoyment’; the Brewery Style simulates the St. James’ Gate Brewery in Dublin and incorporates brick walls, cobbled stone effects, vaulted ceilings, and brewery decorations and memorabilia. The essence of the Brewery Style is manifested in illustra-

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tions of the process of brewing Guinness in Dublin; the Country Style is designed to look like a country pub with white-washed plaster walls, timber beams, dressers stacked with tankards and crockery; the Shop Style resembles a grocery or hardware store replete with old-fashioned advertising signs; finally, the Celtic Style ‘captures the style of the Gaelic people, well known for their dedication to merry-making, music and craftsmanship through the centuries’ with rough-hewn doors, furniture and metalwork fixtures. It is ‘the ideal backdrop for modern day musicians and storytellers to recreate the Gaelic way of enjoying life, or “craic”’ (The Irish Pub Company 2016). Each of these possible styles offers a way of commodifying or monetizing real or mythologized aspects of Irish culture. The Irish Pub Company sees no irony in their claim to authenticity in a world of replica antiques and reconstructed pubs shipped around the world when they claim: ‘we specialise in the design, manufacture and installation of authentic Irish and creative commercial concepts worldwide …we invented the genre’ (emphasis added). To enter any of these ‘concept,’ or theme, pubs is to enter a space of theatricality, a stage set complete with props. Pub patrons from Moscow to Patagonia are surrounded by the simulacra of various versions of Ireland. Much of this paraphernalia comprises Baudrillard’s ‘folksy knick-knacks’ that rely on industrial reproduction that finds its inspiration in a disordered excess of ‘ready-made’ signs (Baudrillard 1998, 110). If they cannot escape the accusation of being fakes, they are Umberto Eco’s ‘absolute fakes,’ that is, an artifact that is more real than the original, an improvement on the original (Eco 1986, 7–8). This can hardly be disputed if the comparison is between say, a w ­ ell-­appointed stage-set version of a global Molly Malones somewhere in the world, and Clarke’s unsavory pubs with their sticky carpets and curled ham sandwiches. Singapore has been home to dozens of Irish pubs that have come and gone (Shamus O’Donnell’s, Scruffy Murphy’s, Mulligan’s, and so on), but Molly Malone’s claims to be the first of the Irish pubs in Singapore and was designed and built in Ireland, shipped to Singapore and rebuilt at Boat Quay in 1995. Complete with a larger than life-sized statue of Molly herself outside the pub, it is an authentic absolute fake. One aesthetic requirement of the absolute fake as a better or larger-­ than-­life version of the real, is excess. As Patterson and Brown note in the case of fake Irish pubs: ‘reality is created by means of an attempt to capture “everything” about the theme in question’ (Brown and Patterson 2000, 656). In a desire to enchant consumers with a better than original simula-

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crum, Irish pubs all over the world indulge in atmospheric overkill in their deployment of the anticipated signs of Irishness. The available styles, as offered by the Irish Pub Company, rely on excess to create an extravagance of affect produced by objects, décor, food, and music. Irish pubs are generally characterized by an abundance of signifiers that can create a dazzling sensorium where, as in the case of upturned barrels used as tables to generate nostalgia for some imagined pre-modern Ireland, the use value has been superseded by the sign value. The abundance of signs that is so much a part of the consumer economy is also a key feature in the generation of a global imaginary. The objects commonly found in the various pub concepts—the beveled mirrors, jugs, beer mugs, whiskey and Guinness posters, drinking paraphernalia, beer barrels, Irish bric-a-brac, memorabilia, and gimcrack replicas of all sorts—are nothing so much as kitsch. Figure  10.1 shows the interior of The Man in the Moon Irish Pub in Kyoto (see Fig. 10.1, inside the Man in the Moon Irish Pub, Kyoto) overflowing with such objects. Colin Graham points to the proliferation of kitsch objects as a representation of Irishness for the purposes of selling an identity that anyone can purchase. The kitsch objects, such as leprechaun hats and so on, that appear in such profusion in St. Patrick’s Days across the globe can, as Graham puts it, ‘scatter the remnants of Irish authenticity around the globe, allowing ownership of Irishness to visitors, emigrants and citizens alike’ (Graham 2001, 171–172). Kitsch is an aesthetic category that relies, as Clement Greenberg’s essay on avant-garde and kitsch explains it, on: mechanical reproduction, formulas, vicarious experience and faked sensations (Greenberg [1961] 1989, 10). All these elements are generally present in Irish pubs. Indeed, Greenberg also points to a more profound connection between kitsch and the original culture and the ways in which kitsch distorts and exploits culture: The preconditions for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from its devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws life blood, so to speak, from the reservoir of accumulated experience … Furthermore, kitsch demands nothing of its customers, except their money. (Greenberg [1961] 1989, 10)

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Fig. 10.1  The Man in the Moon Irish pub, Kyoto, Japan. (Photo by Chris Hudson)

With this in mind, it is possible to speculate further on the relationship of kitsch to the global imaginary. Dispersed Irish pubs are contingent on the existence of a prototype in a fully matured cultural tradition, but now rely on kitsch for the generation of affect. As Tomáš Kulka asserts, kitsch is highly intensive, but it is not aesthetic intensity, but emotional intensity, or sentimentality (Kulka 1996: 71, original emphasis) that has the most impact. Brown and Patterson have pointed out that the exaggerated attempt to capture ‘everything’ Irish is a marketing strategy designed to evoke reality, or authenticity, through plenitude (Brown and Patterson 2000, 656). But the sheer extravagance of the representation of Ireland through plenitude goes further than an attempt to create authenticity; the plethora of kitsch produces a relationship to the global—Steger’s global consciousness (2008, 179)—through subjective elements. In this case, kitsch provides an enforced or compulsive association with Irishness— even if jugs, beer mugs and beveled mirrors may originate in any number of cultures in Europe. For the Irish pub, the sentimentality and emotional

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intensity created by manufactured Irishness is not so much nostalgia for a tradition from Ireland’s past, but nostalgia for the global present. It is not only objects and artifacts that can create the ambience and atmosphere—the sensibilities and understandings of the global—but also music. An important marketing strategy is to harness the power of ambient music to generate affect, contrive a comfortable ambiance, and make people feel that Dublin is not so far away. Marketers recognize that for a pub to successfully enchant consumers and help them form affective alliances, music is obligatory. Music is usually programmed in advance regardless of the country in which the pub is located. One marketing specialist sums it up: It’s crucial in controlling people’s moods through the day. So you’d get, say, Planxty at lunchtime, Enya in the afternoon, so they’ll chill out and stay longer. Crank it up a bit in the evening. The Cranberries, maybe, or ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. (cited in McCarthy 2003, 330)

When it is part of a continuous mood-enhancing loop, Planxty, Enya and The Cranberries are Irish clichés that offer little more than the anodyne tones of André Rieu or ‘easy listening’ muzak that invade the supermarket to help you ‘chill out’ and generate pre-conscious impulses to distract you while you spend money. Music in certain contexts, therefore, can be constituted as kitsch if deployed for the specific purpose of mood control and the manipulation of consumer behavior through the exploitation of sentimentality or nostalgia (particularly amongst expatriate customers), since, as Kulka explains, kitsch is highly charged imagery, language, or music that is able to trigger unreflective, emotional reactions (Kulka 1996, 26). Like other forms of kitsch, it demands nothing of its customers except their money.

Concluding Remarks: Ireland and the Global Imaginary Irish pubs are associated with a strand of consumer capitalism that relies on the global commodification of culture, the export of ethnic stereotypes and the production of experiences that can be consumed along with more conventional forms of consumption. Irish pubs across the world are themed environments that deploy, in various aesthetic assemblages, kitsch objects and décor incorporating the standard signifiers of an imagined

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Ireland. The generation of affect through recently manufactured ‘authentic’ antiques and other artifacts and ambience that fit the ‘concept’ help keep alive the fantasy of a traditional Ireland. In Baudrillard’s terms, this is an aesthetics of simulation and acculturation resulting in a subculture of objects (Baudrillard 1998, 111). Some people may agree with his assessment that the proliferation of ‘pseudo-objects’ can be condemned as a ‘cancerous excrescence’ (1998). Irish pubs serve multiple purposes as they reify culture through an overdetermined array of signifiers and fossilize it in an imagined past: they can constitute a place for affirmation of cultural identity for Irish expats; they can generate nostalgia for the descendants of the Irish diaspora for a home they never knew; they are also places where local citizens who have never been to Ireland can ‘experience’ Irishness in one form or another. The fetishization of Irishness and its availability as a global possession of anybody who abandons themselves to the affective sociality of a themed space or the excitement of a St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been taken to excess in an even more extravagant version of the engagement of the local with Global Irishness. In 1996, Dubai opened an entire Irish village. Using ‘Irish craftsmanship’ and materials, such as paving stones from Lisacannor in County Clare that were shipped to Dubai, it created ‘an authentic experience in the heart of the city’ (The Irish Village Dubai 2016). It created its own ‘tradition’ with the employment of Irish staff and the promise that all meals will be served with a ‘friendly Irish smile.’ The most important aspect of this Irish Village-in-the-Gulf is that it is, according to the website, like Irish pubs everywhere, ‘a place where you immediately feel at home’ (The Irish Village Dubai 2016). You can feel ‘at home in the world’ where identifiable signifiers of a familiar culture crowd the space, even if you have no connection with the place itself. If this causes Ireland to become, as Graham expresses it, ‘a plenitude of images, replicating itself for continual consumption’ and available for ‘ceaseless reproduction and commodification’ (Graham 2001, 2), it is also the way Ireland becomes knowable. If the Irish were once knowable through the racist stereotypes described by McClintock (1995, 43, 53), through Irish jokes lampooning the stupid paddy, or through the ‘Irish are the blacks of Europe’ metaphor well known to fans of Alan Parker’s 1991 film The Commitments, they may now be knowable as much for the global reach of the Irish pub with its ability to create a global home. While there may be no single moment of the global imaginary, nor a pervasive sense of the tension between proximity and distance in the mun-

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dane practices of everyday life, there are specific sites in which it can occur, and particular forms of embodiment and experience that can awaken it. Such moments rely on the stimulation of an affective relationship to social reality. In the case of the Irish pub it relies on the production of a certain kind of affective register that can be recognized as Irish, even in places that are not part of the historical diasporic network and which have little cultural or political connection to Ireland itself. We can be grateful for Manfred Steger’s groundbreaking and extensive work on the global imaginary. His emphasis on the importance of the subjective dimensions that are made available through stories and images have provided exciting insights into the forms that this imaginary might take and the ways in which the global ideologies that support the relations of production and economic exchange might reproduce it.

Notes 1. Irish Gaelic: for ‘Land of Youth’. 2. Margo is the stage name of Margaret Catherine O’Donnell an Irish singer and exponent of a hybrid musical genre known as ‘Irish country music’. Common epithets for O’Donnell include ‘The Girl from Donegal’ and ‘The Queen of Irish Country Music’. 3. Bodhrán: Traditional Irish drum

References Barthes, Roland. 2000. Mythologies. London: Vintage. (First published in GB by Jonathan Cape, 1972). Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Brown, Stephen, and Anthony Patterson. 2000. Knick-knack Paddy-whack, Give a Pub a Theme. Journal of Marketing Management 16 (6): 647–662. Clarke, Donald. 2013. Who Will Set Us Free of This Horrible Entity: The Bogus Irishness of Craic? The Irish Times, June 22. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/who-will-set-us-free-of-the-bogus-irishness-of-craic-1.1438746. Accessed 26 Sept 2016. Culler, Jonathan. 1981. Semiotics of Tourism. American Journal of Semiotics 1 (1/2): 127–141. Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Trans: William Weaver. San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Elliott, Anthony, and John Urry. 2010. Mobile Lives. Oxon: Routledge.

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Goodman, Conor. 2015. The Best Irish Pub in the World Outside Ireland Is … Healy Mac’s in Kuala Lumpur Is Named Irish Times ‘Best Irish Pub in the World’ (Outside Ireland). The Irish Times, April 27. https://www.irishtimes. com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/the-best-irish-pub-in-the-worldoutside-ireland-is-1.2189367. Accessed 9 Sept 2017. Graham, Colin. 2001. Deconstructing Ireland. Identity, Theory, Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1989 [1961]. Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Art and Culture. 3–33. Boston: Beacon Press. Haddad, Sam. 2014. The Most Far Flung Irish Pubs in the World. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/dec/15/irish-pubs-around-theworld. Accessed 15 Dec 2016. Hoey, Paddy and David Shaw. 2016. Here’s Why St Patrick’s Day and ‘the craic’ are Two of Ireland’s Greatest Myths. The Conversation, Australia. https://theconversation.com/heres-why-st-patricks-day-and-the-craic-are-two-of-irelands-greatest-myths-55783. Accessed 20 Oct 2016. Irish Network Japan. 2016. The 24th Tokyo St. Patrick’s Day Parade. http:// www.inj.or.jp/en/event/24th-tokyo-st-patricks-day-parade. Accessed 20 Oct 2016. Kelley, Austin. 2006. Ireland’s “Crack” Habit. Explaining the Faux Irish Pub Revolution. Slate, March 16. www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/03/irelands_crack_habit.html. Accessed 23 Sept 2016. Kulka, Tomáš. 1996. Kitsch and Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania University Press. Lifestyle Asia. 2011. Best Irish Pubs in Singapore. https://www.dropbox.com/ ow/msft/edit/home/Irish%20pubs/LIFESTYLE%20ASIA.docx?hpt_click_ ts=1474518673972. Accessed 23 Sept 2016. Lonely Planet. 2017. Dublin Irish Pub. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/argentina/ushuaia/nightlife/dublin-irish-pub/a/poi-dri/1164913/363118. Accessed 28 Sept 2016. Mays, Michael. 2005. Irish Identity in an Age of Globalisation. Irish Studies Review 13 (1): 3–12. McCarthy, Pete. 2003. McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge. McGovern, Mark. 2003. “The Cracked Glass of the Servant”: The Irish Pub, Irish identity and the Tourist Eye. In Irish Tourism. Image, Culture and Identity, ed. Michael Cronin and Barbara O’Connor, 83–104. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Monks, Aoife. 2005. “Everyone Can Be Irish for the Day”: Towards a Theory of Diasporic Performance. New England Theatre Journal 16: 117–129.

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Myers, Kevin. 2010. The Day of Indulgence Is Done—The Time of Duty Has Arrived. Irish Independent, March 24. http://www.independent.ie/opinion/ columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-the-day-of-indulgence-is-done-thetime-of-duty-has-arrived-26643791.html. Accessed 23 Oct 2016. Nagle, John. 2005. ‘“Everybody is Irish on St. Paddy’s”: Ambivalence and Alterity at London’s St. Patrick’s Day 2002. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12 (4): 563–583. O’Neill, Brendan. 2001. We’re All Irish now. Spiked, March 15. http://www.spikedonline.com/newsite/article/11789#.V_xN5uB96M8. Accessed 23 Nov 2016. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pope, Conor. 2016. The Irish Pub Is a Status Symbol. With Unrest in the World, Everything Irish is Seen as Safe. The Irish Times. September 15. https://www. irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/the-irish-pub-is-a-status-symbol-with-unrest-in-the-world-everything-irish-is-seen-as-safe-1.2790913. Accessed 23 Nov 2016. Postrel, Virginia. 2003. The Substance of Style. How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins. Ritzer, George. 2010. Enchanting a Disenchanted World. Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of Consumption. London: Sage. Seigworth, Gregory, and Melissa Gregg. 2010. An Inventory of Shimmers. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.  Seigworth, 1–25. Durham: Duke University Press. Skinner, Jonathan, and Dominic Bryan, eds. 2015. Consuming St. Patrick’s Day. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. St. Patrick’s Day and Night. 2016. Moscow, http://irishweek.ru/day-night/? lang=en. Accessed 19 Oct 2016. Steger, Manfred B. 2004. Introduction: Rethinking Ideological Dimensions of Globalization. In Rethinking Globalism, ed. Manfred Steger, 1–12. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary. Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Paul James. 2013. Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 12: 17–40. The Irish Pub Company. 2016.  http://irishpubcompany.com/the-story-of-theirish-pub-company/. Accessed 20 Oct 2016. The Irish Pub Concept. 2017.  http://irishpubconcept.com/about/overview/ Accessed 20 Oct 2017. The Irish Village Dubai. 2016. https://theirishvillage.com/. Accessed 7 Nov 2016.

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CHAPTER 11

Afterword Terrell Carver

Globalization, as Steger’s own Career of a Concept (with Paul James 2015) lucidly shows, was once a word, an idea, a concept. Rather than debate its referent, as so many academics have been inclined to do, and indeed some dismiss it as merely a ‘buzz word’ (more than once in my hearing), Steger took it seriously in quite an unusual way—interpreting a word, in order to change the world. It is important to reflect on just what he has been able to do, and—the burden of my thoughts here—what he was up against. Celebrating his success in a festschrift is timely and perhaps even overdue, but rather than construct a victor’s history, I am proposing to step back to the world as it was when he embarked on this project. This is because— with all due allowance for Steger’s exceptionalism—it is still very much that way. Or in other words, there is still plenty of work to do, given that exceptions test or ‘prove’ the rule, but rules and rulers remain. The chapters in this volume have given an excellent sense of Steger’s project, in all its ramifications, and they demonstrate the various unifying threads that hold it together. We learn in detail where all that driving energy is coming from. But what of the more-than-equal and determinedly opposite forces that his work encounters? It is obvious, and I know from personal experience, that Steger loves a challenge. But it has been a long T. Carver (*) School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_11

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march, and even with collaborators, edited volumes, reference books, portmanteau readers, and globally significant authorial successes, he has not yet prevailed. At this point we need to consider why not, and how much more effort—over and above Steger’s brilliantly orchestrated campaigns—it will take, and indeed to consider what the goal actually is. Academia and academics are understandably rooted in where they are, which is often where they were as graduate students. Thus, the dead generations of so many teacher-scholars weigh like a nightmare on our living brains today (Marx 1996, 19). These dead generations have bequeathed us—to this day and beyond—the aptly named ‘disciplines’ through which tertiary education operates, from pre-admission testing in school systems up to the rarefied world of distinguished professorships and fellowships, and international prizes and medals. On the one hand Steger blew the worldly wind of ‘globalization’ through all this, but on the other hand he carefully crafted an intricate maze of takeovers, annexations, alliances, Trojan horses, and hybrid studies. Paradoxically, perhaps, this has started to create yet another discipline, but then globalization has already profoundly disturbed the usual intellectual boundaries with a good shake-up. The firing lines here were interesting ones, and Steger’s projects and works can perhaps be understood in yet another way—over and beyond the preceding contributions—by looking at his aim, ammunition and targets. In a sense, Steger’s vision arose with a combination of Friedrich Engels’ experience and acumen in business and finance plus Marx’s rigorously trained but ferociously critical take on academia and academics. In a previous life a Viennese banker and business school graduate, but after-hours turncoat critic of system that skewed wealth toward the wealthy, would have suited Marx and Engels down to the ground, and we would today have a remarkable correspondence to study. Rather less fancifully, and perhaps rather closer to Marx and Engels’s socialist activisms, one of Steger’s first works was a study of Eduard Bernstein’s political thought (which, as a publisher’s reader for Cambridge University Press, is when I first encountered our subject here). The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism (1997)—and its companion reader Selected Writings … 1900–1921 (1996)—announced an effective template and major ambitions. Bernstein is of course an important figure in the Marxist tradition, someone who was a younger associate of both the great men, and very central to the development of socialism in Germany and beyond, and in particular as social democracy. He was active and controversial during the 1890s, the crucial decade for the development and reception of Marxism

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as a political ideology of worldwide engagement. This engagement was with the national/international politics of anti-capitalist thought and action, and local/political movements for popular sovereignty and democratization. In the early twentieth century Bernstein was famously declared apostate within German Marxist circles for departing from newly established orthodoxies of revolutionary necessity rooted in implacable class struggle. However, my point here is not that Steger’s projects roll out from Bernsteinian premises, other than fearless transgression. Rather my point is that his projects roll out from intellectual premises easily located in Marx’s best known works, and hence rooted in (or perhaps rather buried in) the various Marxisms that overtook—and took over—the writings and politics of Marx himself (see Carver 2017; Claeys 2018). Starting points are important, but they do not tell us everything, and Steger set himself— and us—on a journey. Or to put it another way, Steger could have had a wonderful career as a critical Marxist and/or scholar of Marx and his heritage, situating himself in a relatively respectable academic niche and intellectually satisfying comfort zone. But that is not what he did. Picking up the story from this beginning in Marxism studies, Steger then took off from where Marx intended to finish up: ‘World Market’ was to be a final volume in the theoretical section of Marx’s comprehensive critical study of capitalism, as variously planned, replanned, rearranged, and eventually published in a highly truncated and severely compressed format (Carver 1975, 30–1). However, in making this link between Marx and Steger I am making a point about inspiration rather than about intellectual and political genealogy. Marx was taking on capitalism as a historically developing social transformation in production, distribution, consumption, and exchange of goods and services, and in concomitant political and intellectual structures and idea-systems. Quite obviously it was Marx’s fascination with the factual intricacies of this transformation in any number of countries, regions, and continents— about which he could get relevant materials only with difficulty—that held up his publication plans so drastically. These exploratory studies ranged from China to Australia, West Africa to South America, the American South to the North of England, not to mention the British, Russian, and Turkish empires, and associated colonies and vassal states. As if this were not enough, Marx was also composing a devastating critique of political economy, the economics of his day, on its own self-styled scientific terms— just to pull the rug out from under its devotees. But he was also

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s­imultaneously demonstrating the political utility of this ‘science’ as an ideology. Sardonically he detailed how in ongoing class struggles it functioned as an influential way to moralize and rationalize the obvious inequalities of wealth and power that mechanized production and financialized exchange were producing. Since Marx and academia had parted company very early on his activist career, he did not have the access that Steger had, as a career academic, to networks of collaborators, co-authors, co-editors, researchers, commissioned authors, willing publishers, and the like. Many of these confrères brought his vision of globalization to bear on any number of locales, practices, ideologies, religions, histories, movements, and so forth. Looking over some topical highlights from the list of books commissioned in his (and my) ‘Globalization’ series gives you the idea: war, law, American and Asian popular culture, feminist activism, human security, Islamism, urbanization, migration, terrorism, democracy, labor, social movements, and, presciently, international political economy. These scholarly activities have produced huge amounts of factual content—and a wealth of political commentary—that Marx would certainly have envied. The methodological eclecticism that Steger exhibits in his own globalization studies, collections and works of reference chimes well with Marx’s magpie methods and effervescent curiosity. In Steger’s hands globalization is both descriptive and historical, on the one hand, charting the confluence of monetary accumulation with high-productivity manufacture and expanding volumes of trade. But it was also, on the other hand, an ‘imaginary,’ a locus for desire, a subject position, a genuflection to the power of ideas—and not just another buzz word. Steger’s use of ‘imaginary’ here is certainly imaginative, given the normally dismissive role that this term plays in conventional rhetorics that distinguish reality from daydreams. Steger’s unusual usage signals the imbrication of language with practice, of facts with fictions, of science with politics, of evidence with activism, of ‘what is’ as a way station for what could and ought to be. This under-the-radar idealism (in both the philosophical and political senses) is not something that Marx had a problem with. Nor did Steger. However, any number of academics in Steger’s world have problems with all those conjunctions. After an episode of political exclusions Marx was not headed for academia, and academia had not in his lifetime developed so many of the gate-keeping disciplines that academics have to operate within today, whether working inside the given boundaries complacently, or challenging them with a few successes. And to date there has been very little shift from

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the classical orders and hierarchies of the 1950s through which academia operates and by which it is in many instances assessed. Steger, however, was positioned differently from Marx, with greater potential resources available. The downside of course was that academia was more resistant, indeed dismissive, than Steger could suspect, given the liberal arts and sciences veneer of free inquiry, interdisciplinary research, ‘blue-skies’ thinking, or any number of similarly, and often hypocritical, mantras and exhortations. Interestingly one of Steger’s steadiest affiliations—any relative comments on ‘happiest’ or otherwise would have to come from him, not me—was in an institute of technology (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Melbourne) with programs and structures that eschewed, at least outwardly, much of the traditional apparatus of disciplines. These academic ‘homes’ are generally derived more or less from the medieval ‘schools’ and are revered, or at any rate lazily reinscribed, in most other more traditional universities. This is to say that in Steger’s hands globalization both was and was not itself such a discipline. Rather, in my view it has functioned as a lens, always bringing two things into focus: the ongoing history of capitalism as a powerful human practice conjuring ‘whole populations … up from the ground’ and sweeping away pre-existing socioeconomic, legal, and political structures (Marx and Engels 1996, 3–6). Sometimes this transformation takes place with hitches and glitches, always with significant local hybridities and resistances, punctuated by defaults, meltdowns, and crashes. Yet it unfailingly emerges as recognizably itself. In this way globalization also brings into focus an ongoing avenue of anti-capitalist critique, puncturing resilient illusions that current structures, subjectivities, and systems are emanations of human nature, God’s will, historical inevitability, ‘the march of progress,’ or ‘there is no alternative’ factuality. Critique of course proceeds from values, presumptions, knowledge, and curiosity, but—as with Marx— it fights shy of programmatic utopias, and in Steger’s hands, even overtly political self-labeling and obvious hostages to fortune. However, let us be more specific. Globalization falls quite clearly within the Marx/Marxist framing identified above in that—unlike postmodernity as a possible rival concept—it is rooted in the expanding markets for goods and services, speeded up by air freight of ever-newer products and near-­ instantaneous modes of communication, as these have developed, even prior to digitization. However, the concept globalization was not Marx’s, and as with many ideas attributed to him, his connection with globalization as a concept has been distinctly posthumous. Indeed, the usage dates

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pretty much from post-World War II era. Thus, the concept is a strategically ambiguous bridge: both Marxian/Marxist and not Marxian/Marxist, this division of space in the social sciences and humanities having been long established. And that binary is still functioning as existentially divisive in many contexts, both academic and political. Of course, most of this divisiveness is produced through projection: s/he ‘is a Marxist’ is a locution uttered to tell you something about a third party prior to their saying it, or prior to your reading their works. And vice versa as a career-saving denial to reassure institutional gate-keepers. But having disposed of that divide, we are left with an array of others just as contentious, structures of power within and outside academia, that both constrain and enable. Here is where Steger took his subject and where his subject also found him. Perusing the journals in which he published articles on globalization gives us quite a good guide to the tactics of the campaign. Leaving aside the journal Globalizations, where he has necessarily been a consistent contributor, the list of generic disciplines includes: cultural studies, Asia-­ Pacific studies, political science, political theory, sociology, humanities, history of ideas, ideology-studies, democratic theory, political economy, urban planning, international relations, peace studies, security studies, and critical theory. And of course in campaign terms, we are not seeing the ones that got away. Separating Steger’s project from the quantum physics zeitgeist of simultaneous occurrences is not really necessary, since in the real world of academia—and perhaps elsewhere—cause and effect have little purchase. Or rather effects are the issue here, since they clearly function as causes in an ongoing transformation of a world of learning, and academia is not all that small. Globalization is a long way short of full disciplinarity: Steger’s What Is Global Studies? (with Amentahru Wahlrab 2016) identifies it as a ‘field.’ But it clearly has a status and commands a space in any number of disciplinary knowledge structures. Even more specifically the two major targets here in the globalization campaign are international relations (‘IR’ in the trade) and international political economy (known as ‘IPE’). Globalization overlaps the most with the latter by heritage, given the historical narrative of global economic change. And it overlaps with the former by definition, because it transcends the supposed security of ‘the international’ as a subject independent of political science. The often country-based studies in political science generally take—often to their cost—over-the-border issues as easily bracketed off, and anyway already ceded to another discipline, namely IR. As a lens, or supra-disciplinary framework, globalization as a

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s­ ingle-­word idea has gained specificity as a ‘First Pillar’ of global studies, as Steger sees it. Or rather the locution is a performative: making the published statement brings a meaning into existence as a social reality. Having written a ‘Very Short Introduction’ to Neoliberalism (with Ravi K. Roy 2010) Steger has taken on the core of current IPE by rebranding this ‘neo’-concept—overly familiar and somewhat hackneyed in the discipline—as ‘market globalism’ (Steger and Wilson 2012, 439). He then subverts its referential use in the field by demonstrating its political character as an ideology. The next move is to take on IR—at least the more liberal ‘English School’ variants—by tackling core concepts and institutional reference points. These core topics are justice in international relations and universal rights in IGOs (inter-governmental organizations) and NGOs (non-governmental organizations), but Steger treats them as valuebased movements, rather than academic abstractions. Getting this view published in a major journal of the International Studies Association is quite an achievement, costing only an excursus into an empirical version of discourse analysis. But then Steger had been working his way up to these commanding heights for some time. And indeed the global imaginary reigns over the enterprise. This is quite important: what can be imagined can be reimagined. For Steger, concepts are not merely referents for facts ‘out there’ to be discovered, classified, and learned. Concepts are what change is about, because for Steger what ‘is’ is always understood to be already ‘what is becoming,’ given that human social agents conceptualize ideas repetitively as disciplinary ‘knowledges,’ but also reconceptualize ideas innovatively as transformative practices. Steger’s works are not just single books or articles but have their place within the serried ranks of his own publications and similarly from like-minded scholarly cohorts. Steger has thus positioned his concepts at the point where empiricism is not denied as referential to factuality but rather accepted as a locution, so as to speak to discipline-bound audiences. And idealism is not affirmed but rather deployed as a lens, so as to focus in on social transformation, in whatever direction and with whatever results. This is quite an achievement tactically, because it does not engage entrenched disciplines head-on, or reject the synchronic assertions of the empirical social sciences. Marx had much the same strategy in constructing his would-be definitive study of capitalism, treating stock philosophical debates very lightly if at all, and getting on with exploring a world of rapidly increasing—and increasingly violent—socioeconomic, hence political, change. Starting at the other end of Marx’s magnum opus critique with ‘World Market,’ as I have ­suggested,

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Steger has perhaps given us detailed notes toward the missing final volume. Or to put it the other way round, he has provided us with concepts and frameworks that challenge the dead weight not just of academia, but of nation-based ‘international politics’ as a headline practice. Moreover it challenges xenophobic populisms that fail to engage with the productivity-­ driven transformations that globalization highlights. Globalization represents a lens that snaps into focus the profoundly dysfunctional ways in which the now-globalized potential of humanity is currently being squandered and democratic politics subverted by kleptocracies. Achieving disciplinary status would be a huge achievement for globalization, but arriving at that status would be a vast political battle and institutional mega-struggle. That upheaval would certainly have to encompass academia, where— subject to ongoing political threats and economic challenges—interpreting the world must surely contribute to changing it (Marx 1994, 118).

References Carver, Terrell. 1975. Karl Marx: Texts on Method. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2017. Marx. Oxford: Polity. Claeys, Gregory. 2018. Marx and Marxism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl. 1994. On Feuerbach. In Early Political Writings, ed. Karl Marx and Joseph O’Malley, 116–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Ed. and Trans. Terrell Carver, 31–127. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1996. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Later Political Writings. Ed. and Trans. Terrell Carver and Karl Marx, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steger, Manfred B., Ed. and Trans. 1996. Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900–1921. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities. ———. 1997. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Political Democracy. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Paul James, eds. 2015. Globalization: The Career of a Concept. New York/Milton Park: Routledge. Steger, Manfred B., and Ravi K.  Roy. 2010. Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2016. What Is Global Studies? Theory & Practice. New York/Milton Park: Routledge. Steger, Manfred B., and Erin K.  Wilson. 2012. Anti-globalization or Alter-­ globalization: Mapping the Political Ideology of the Global Justice Movement. International Studies Quarterly 56: 439–454.

Index1

A Affect, 13, 20, 24, 131, 143, 148, 151, 152, 155–170 affective spaces, 162–168 Albrow, Martin, 35, 36, 41 Althusser, Louis, 42, 46n6 American liberalism, 70 Analects of Kung Fu Tse, 18 Anderson, Benedict, 41, 44, 72, 123, 124, 156 Animal Collective, 73 Anthropocene, 44 Apartheid, 11, 67–82 Appadurai, Arjun, 12, 17, 124, 142 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 17 Archive of censored material, 106 Arthashastra of Kautilya, 18 Asad, Talal, 25 Authoritarianism, 124 Avant, Clarence, 76 Axial Age, 45n1

B Bartholomew-Strydom, Craig, 68, 74, 75 Beck, Ulrich, 17 Bellah, Robert, 18 Bendjelloul, Malik, 67, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79–81 Berger, Peter, 26 Bernstein, Eduard, 6, 176, 177 Besserman, Perle, 5 Blair, Tony, 117, 161 Blockchain developments, 96 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 123, 124, 142, 145 C Capitalism, 5, 11, 12, 18, 25, 70, 106–110, 112, 113, 115–119, 146, 151, 168, 177, 179, 181 Carver, Terrell, vi, 6, 177

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 C. Hudson, E. K. Wilson (eds.), Revisiting the Global Imaginary, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6

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INDEX

Castoriadis, Cornelius, 34, 39–41 Clarke, Donald, 162, 163, 165 Clinton, Bill, 117, 161 Clinton, Hillary, 116 Cohen, Jared, 110, 116–118 Cold Fact, 67, 74 Coming from Reality, 67, 82n5 Consciousness, v, vi, 12, 13, 58, 70, 123–135, 143, 148, 151, 156, 167 Consumerism, 12, 13, 110, 115, 157 Convocations of the social whole, 41, 42 Cooper, Alice, 75 Cosmic imaginary, 42 Craic, 155–170 Crossley, Pamela Kyle, 17 Cyber-capitalism, vi, 11, 108, 111, 114, 115 D Decontextualization/ decontextualisation, 146, 147 Democracy, 56, 70, 110, 114, 128, 130, 133, 176, 178 Depoliticization/depoliticisation, 76, 112–116 Determinism, 10, 56, 112–116 Die Weltseele zu Pferde, world-soul on horseback, 36 Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), 76 Durkheim, Émile, 9, 18, 36 E Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement (ELRUM), 76 Engels, Friedrich, 6, 126, 176, 179 Enlightenment, 35, 107, 125 Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations, 33

F Fanon, Frantz, 70, 71 Financial inclusion, 11, 85–97 First Austrian Bank in Vienna, 5 Franklin, Aretha, 75 Future, 12, 21, 30, 37, 57, 87, 95–97, 105–119, 127, 128 G Gaelicization, 162 Gandhi, Mahatma, 12, 70, 71, 128–130, 133 Gandhian ethics, 6 Gaye, Marvin, 75 Geertz, Clifford, 4 Global Age, 36 Global as theme vs. primary focus, 27–28 Global imaginary, v, vi, 9–13, 17, 25, 36, 41–44, 46n5, 50, 68–72, 85–97, 117, 124–128, 130–135, 141–144, 149, 155–170, 181 Globality, 12–13, 67–69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 142–144, 148, 149, 151, 152 Globalization aesthetics, 144–145, 151 culture, 79, 86, 143, 145, 146, 157, 178 material process, 12, 50, 144, 145, 156 subjective, 36, 141, 143, 155–170 Global studies, v, vi, 3–14, 17–30, 49–63, 181 Global theory vs. practice, 28–29 Google, 11, 12, 105–119 Gunn, Giles, 17 H Habermas, Jürgen, 45n1 Han Dynasty, 22

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Hegel, G.W.F., 10, 36, 45n2, 45n3 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 33, 37, 39 Heisenberg, Werner, 113 Held, David, 4, 17, 50 Hooker, John Lee, 75 Hopkins, A. G., 17 Huntington, Samuel, 26

L Lacan, Jacques, 24, 34, 37–39, 41 Le Pen, Marine, 127 Lennon, Kathleen, 34, 38, 39 Linda, Solomon, 78, 79 Lion King, The, 78 Lion Sleeps Tonight, The, 78

I Iconology, 144, 145 Idealism, 3, 178, 181 Identity fetishism, 158–162 Imagination, 12, 13, 24, 37, 39, 118, 119, 142, 143, 152, 158 Interdisciplinarity, 9, 21, 23, 50–53 International relations (IR), 3, 51–56, 58–60, 62, 63, 180, 181 Interpellation, 42 Ireland, 13, 155–170 Irishness, 13, 156, 158–169 Islamic State, 134

M Mannheim, Karl, 5 Market globalism, 8, 13, 43, 50, 86, 106, 127, 128, 142–144, 146, 149, 151, 152, 181 Marx, Karl, 6, 18, 36, 39, 113, 115, 126, 176–179, 181, 182 McNeill, William, 18 Methodological nationalism, 8, 50, 60 Microfinance, 11, 86, 89–91, 96 Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 87, 123, 126, 130, 131, 133 Midnight Oil, 73 Mignolo, Walter, 11, 71, 77, 79 Modernity, 3, 7, 10, 11, 25, 35, 36, 43, 44, 71, 72, 107, 112 Modern ontological formation, 44 Modes of practice, 44 Money future of, 95–97 gender of, 11, 92–94 global migrant, 94–95 mobile, 86–89, 91–92, 94, 96 moral dimension of, 95 Mongol Empire, 22 Moral order, 42 Motown Records, 75

J Jackson 5, The, 75 Jaspers, Karl, 33, 45n1, 126, 127 Jihadist globalism, 127 Justice global, 34, 127, 135 local, 34, 135 social, 9, 86, 97, 127, 135 Justice globalism, 7, 8, 43, 50, 86, 97, 146 K Kaldor, Mary, 17 Kantian reformism, 4 Kantorowicz’s traditional conception of the king’s two bodies, 37 King, Martin Luther, 76, 133

N Napoleon Bonaparte, 36 National imaginary, 42, 44, 46n5, 49, 69–71, 124–126, 132, 134

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Nature, 42, 95, 106, 107, 115, 116, 127, 141, 144–146, 150, 179 Neoliberalism, 50, 53 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5 Non-violence, 6, 128–133, 135, 135n1 O Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age, 45n1 Ontic or lived body, 37 P Page, Larry, CEO of Google, 105, 109, 111–114 Parsons, Talcott, 18 Philpott, Daniel, 125, 132, 135 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 17 Plato’s Republic, 18 Pogge, Thomas, 17 Polanyi, Karl, 134 Populism left-wing, 124 right-wing, 124 Positivism, 3 Private sphere, 43 Public sphere, 5, 43, 130, 131, 145 R Religion, 5, 9, 17, 18, 24–27, 108, 127, 131, 132, 135n1, 178 Rice, Condoleezza, 116 Robertson, Roland, v, 17, 22, 148, 156 Rodriguez, Sixto, 11, 67, 68, 73–81, 82n5 Roman and Greek Empires, 22 Ross, Diana, 75 Roy, Arundhati, 112, 117 Rudolph, Susanne, 26 Russian Communism, 69

S Sachsenmaier, Dominic, 17 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 73 Said, Edward, 18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 10, 34, 38 Sassen, Saskia, 17, 20, 148 Schmidt, Eric, 109–112, 114, 116–118 Schmitt, Carl, 5 School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT, 6, 28 Schumpeter, Joseph, 135 Searching for Sugar Man, 10, 11, 67–82 Segerman, Stephen, 68, 74, 80 Sharp, Gene, 128–130 Silk Road, 22 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 18 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 75 Social imaginary, v, 9, 10, 24, 33–45, 49, 69–71, 107, 124–128, 132, 141–143, 149, 151, 156 Spirit of the times, see Zeitgeist Sugar Man, 68, 74, 81 Supremes, The, 75 Sussex Records, 75, 76 Symbolic power, 141–152 T Taylor, Charles, v, 10, 24, 25, 34, 40–44, 123, 124, 156 Temptations, The, 75 Third-World Liberationism, 70 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 25 Toynbee, Arnold, 18 Transdisciplinarity, 7, 8, 50 Transnationality, 9, 20–21, 23 Trans-temporality, 9, 22 Trump, Donald, 127

 INDEX 

U Uncertainty principle, 113 Urban, 24, 68, 117, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 163, 180 Utopia, 105–119, 179 V Visual-discursive, 142, 145, 148 Voltaire, 10, 33, 35, 36, 125

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W Wahlrab, Amentahru, 8, 12, 14, 19, 20, 23, 49, 50, 126, 128, 129, 131, 133–135, 180 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 18 Weber, Max, 9, 18, 36 Williams, Raymond, 113 Z Zeitgeist, 9, 33, 37, 180 Zen Buddhism, 5