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In the Fall of 1995, the Critical Theory Institute began its project devoted
to the general topic of “globalization” and a critical analysis
of just what forces constitute “globalization” as the term and its
related concepts are used today. Like other idioms of the intellectual community,
such as “culture” in our previous research project (“‘Culture’
and the Problem of the Disciplines”), “globalization” is used
with great frequency to describe complex processes and yet these uses are
often uncritical of their ideological and methodological assumptions. In the
tradition of our previous projects, we read critically the multiple assumptions
behind the term, in order better to theorize the range of meanings associated
with “globalization” today.
We understand “globalization” in terms of communications’ models,
which we term “networks” to distinguish these signifying practices
from those governed by more narrowly conceived linguistic and semiotic models
that were developed before the advent of the technologies partially responsible
for the new globalization. One of the subtexts of this project is an investigation
of similarities and differences between “modern internationalism”
and “postmodern globalization.” By the same token, the “networks”
we analyze are not utterly distinct from the older semiotic models; each network
suggests a coherent discursive community, not unlike the unified field model
of some semiotic systems, that transcends specific national and regional boundaries.
Implicit in many of these new discursive communities are new theories of social
organization that follow from the communications’ protocols of these
networks. In many cases, these social organizations include reconceptualizations
of traditional categories of social division and identification, such as race,
ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity.
Although the four networks of globalization we study critically are intended
to provide an approximate mapping or topography of the new transnational terrain,
they are not intended to constitute the total scheme of cultural expressions
and social behaviors in what some have termed the “new global order.”
Just what this expression means cannot be answered even by a manifold project
like this one, but will in large part be determined by historical events.
Academic research projects such as this should not attempt to predict or anticipate
those events; instead, such research can read critically what is already operative
within the several different networks of transnational practice.
We analyze the forces of globalization into four dominant networks, each of
which is immediately recognizable by a term or concept used today as one conventional
sign for the new “global” situation. These networks are:
Corporate
Cultural
Technological
Environmental
These networks of globalization intersect in many crucial ways, and we analyze
their respective predicates in approximately analogous terms. It should be
noted, however, that the analogies between the subdivisions of these different
networks do not presume homologies that we expect to “find” in our
research. We merely aim to organize the different areas investigated in ways
that would make productive comparisons and contrasts more likely.
In order to foreground possible overlaps between different global networks
and thus articulate better what we mean by “global forces,” we apply
three different methodological criteria to each of our four transnational
networks. We ask to what extent each of these global networks contributes
to: decentering or recentering of the customary modes of scientific knowledge;
new hierarchies and processes of hierarchization, such as class, gender, race,
and such formulations as “first,” “second,” and “third
world”; diasporas, nationalism, local, and regionalism as metaphors for
new social organizations.
