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Amresh Sinha

Globalization:“Making Geography Irrelevant”

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, in 1967, declared theadvent of a “new audio-visual age of global Gemeinschaft”:1 “Elec-tric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ andpours upon us incessantly and continually the concerns of allother men. . . . Ours is a brand new world of ‘allatonceness.’ ‘Time’has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global vil-lage.”2 What seems to have vanished from this eclectic scene ofthe global village is none other than the locus of the place, thevery geography within which a community is normally perceivedin its national identity. In essence, without geography, withoutterritorial boundaries, the world ceases to be divided into na-tion-states; instead, it represents the geological properties of theplanet linked by intricate connections and networks of flows andstreams and rhythms and resonances. The time ceases, it stops,and why not? Isn’t this the time of the Second Coming? Theimplications for information technologies with respect to, whatJames Carey has described as, “making geography irrelevant,”have, however, profound consequences.3

What is at stake in the analysis of global versus local thatmust be negotiated through the presence and absence of geogra-phy in the global cultural economy? Do we require geography ofspace? Given the global nature of media technologies with thehelp of satellites and fiber optics, it is quite clear that the geo-graphical boundaries of the nation-state no longer serve as themarker of territorial sovereignty as far as the electronic mediumis concerned.

My strategy for interrogating this rather vexing division of lo-cal versus global will be introduced by a critique of MarshallMcLuhan’s concept of “the global village,” which is experiencingsome kind of a renaissance after the explosion of the Internet inthe global sphere. It will be followed by a brief discussion of

The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 24:181–191, 2002Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis1071-4413/02 $12.00 + .00

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Wallerstein’s World-system theory. Furthermore, the relationshipbetween local and global will be discussed by the writings ofcultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. And lastly, I will focuson Anthony Giddens, who thinks globalization is a process of“intensification” of social connections and awareness, where thelocal and the global are mutually inflected categories that can nolonger remain absolute or constant.

I would begin with clarifying my position, my place of enuncia-tion to the questions asked above, by acknowledging the limitedaspect of my answer. I am concentrating mostly on the issues oflocal versus global, and the electronic media form only a part ofthat analysis. First of all, local versus global can be analyzedfrom a variety of approaches that would include the perspectivesof political economy, sociology, anthropology/ethnography andalso, from within a very broad-based definition, cultural studiesof representation of class, race, gender, nations, ethnicities, andsexualities in the new media.

The purpose is not to engage in the polemics of whetherMcLuhan’s prophesies of the phenomenon of the global villageare now fully realized through the networkings of the global com-puting systems, the world wide web, or any such things, but toassess critically some of the foundational legacies of McLuhan’sthought that the media never forget to spout as part of theirsound-bite philosophy. Because of the limitation of options in ashort, conference length paper, I have decided to address thequestion of geography as the most pivotal and the most seriousquestion implicating the nexus of local versus global. The im-portance of geography in the politics of local versus global canhardly be underestimated. My critique of the problematic of lo-cal–global division (with which I really begin this paper) will bedirected to cultural studies, specifically in the areas of represen-tation of racial and ethnic minorities, feminism, and gay andlesbian issues (but I won’t be able to discuss the issues sepa-rately), as each one of them is visibly and politically engaged incontesting the imposition of the politics of marginalization fromthe center.

It appears, in general, that, in the thinking of transnationalism,or, for that matter, in postcolonial discourse, there is a seriousdesire to shift the discourse from marginalia towards the center.Gayatri Spivak describes this tendentiousness quite succinctly:

Marginalia as a concept in the olden days had considerable meaning.Textual criticism in the pre-modern period is much interested inmarginalia. In the early print culture in the West it was in the marginsthat the so-called argument of the paragraphs was written. I would like to

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take away the current notion of marginality, which implicitly valorizes thecenter. It is, for the critic, a necessarily self-appointed position, which isbasically an accusing position. It seems to me that I would like to re-invent this kind of marginality which I now find: exclusion from variousturfs. I would like to re-invent it as simply a critical moment rather thana de-centered moment. . . . I think of the margin—as not simply opposedto the center but as an accomplice of the center—because I find it verytroubling that I should be defined as a marginal. . . . The authenticity ofthe margins, the defining of me as the spokesperson for ‘the third world,’is undermined by the fact that my own class in India does not particularlylike what I am doing. The concept-metaphor of margins should be thoughtmore and more in terms of the history of margins: the place for the argu-ment, the place for the critical moment, the place of interest for asser-tions rather than a shifting of the center.4

One of the founders of Cultural Studies at Birmingham School,Stuart Hall, also “hate(s)” the term “global postmodernism,” be-cause, as he suggests, “there’s nothing that global postmodernismloves better than a certain kind of difference: a touch of ethnicity,a taste of the exotic, ‘a bit of the other’ (which in the UnitedKingdom has a sexual as well as ethnic connotation).”5 He, too,like Spivak, resists this postmodernist appropriation of globalcultural difference, which in some sense prolongs the continuistproject of the “old centre peripheries” stretched over from thevestiges of high modernism. Yet, he makes concessions in hiscritique of “global postmodernism” by acknowledging the factthat although the “global postmodernism” might only be a recaststreet version of what used to be earlier modernity in a strictlytheoretical sense, the process of globalization has nonethelessshifted the terrain of discourse toward what is now known aspopular culture: “toward popular practices, toward everyday prac-tices, toward local narratives, toward the decentering of old hier-archies and the grand narratives.”6 And like Spivak, he too thinks“this decentering or displacement [marginalization and diaspora]opens up new spaces of contestation and affects momentousshift . . . thus presenting us with a strategic and important op-portunity for intervention. . . . ”7

In media and/or communication theory, the institution of “lo-cal versus global” appears in a much different light. For instance,in the writings of cultural anthroplogist Arjun Appadurai, therelationship between local and global is theorized in terms of the“tension between cultural homogenization and culturalheterogenization.”8 As Appadurai explains, the term culturalhomogenization basically refers to “Americanization” or“commoditization” of global cultural artifacts as a result of theeconomic and cultural domination of American culture in theglobal sphere. As far as cultural heterogenization is concerned,

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Appadurai finds in it a kind of an enculturation process (remi-niscent of the old anthropology) that is brought to bear upon thedynamism of the forces of rapid circulations from the metropo-lises to new emerging and developing societies that do not sim-ply capitulate to the symbolic authority of cultural imperialism.In fact, there are numerous examples both from the third worldand the diasporic communities that exemplify a process of“indegenization”—much like what Jameson has formulated inhis theory of postmodernism as “pastiche” and “parody” else-where,9 whereby a disavowal of cultural signs of the exchangeeconomy of goods is effectuated through the intervention as wellas agency of translation or transformation, or mimicry, in HomiBhabha’s sense, as a sign of resistance, the liminality betweenthe symbolic and the imaginary—of the global cultural commodi-ties within a subversive context of the local cultural practices.Thus you have a fabulous Elvis Presley imitation in The BrighterSummer Day, a Tiawanese film by Edward Yang, whose nostal-gia can only be attributed to its lack of memory associated withthe song, since Elvis remains a distant figure, despite his wide-spread global manifestations in the popular culture of manypostcolonial nations.

Appadurai maintains that the rapid changes that are takingplace in the global cultural economy cannot be properly addressed“in terms of existing center-periphery models,” nor can they bemeasured by the “push” and “pull” theory advocated by migra-tion theory, nor, for that matter, the neo-Marxist theory of pro-duction and consumption, for that, too, fails to do justice to thecomplexity of current global economy, which, for Appadurai, “hasto do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy,culture and politics.”10 Appadurai acknowledges the premise ofthe break, but in the sense of a rupture that takes media andmigration as its two major interconnected concepts and exploresits relation to the work of the imagination as a constitutive fea-ture of modern subjectivity.

Instability is at the heart of the production of modernsubjectivities. Movements, motion, mass migration in juxtaposi-tion with the rapid flow of mass mediated imageries connect thedeterritorialized viewers to their “host” and “home” countries.Unlike critical theory that insists on an intersubjective partici-pation between the individual and the nation-state, thearticulators of the diasporic public sphere assume a discontinu-ity from the nation-state. In other words, the diasporic publicsphere is not limited to the concept of the nation-state. The mo-bile and unforeseeable relationship between mass mediated

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events and migratory audiences define the core of the link be-tween globalization and the modern.

Of course, there are many other important considerations, suchas the issues of institutional and governmental control, owner-ship, private/public, censorship, and power politics, which I amunable to address in a proper and legitimate fashion at this stage.But, nevertheless, they remain very much a concern of mine,albeit in absentia at the moment.

Let me provide a brief analysis of the history of the binarydivision of the local and the global. If we pursue the paternity ofglobalization, we will find two streams of thought preceding it.The concept of globalization, which first took a firm hold inMcLuhan’s philosophy and later in the 1970s manifested againin the diasporic politics of cultural studies of the BirminghamSchool, has received widespread critical attention, particularlyfrom two schools of thought: international relations and world-system theory (Wallerstein). International relations as an aca-demic discipline focused upon the theory of the development ofthe nation-state system, analyzing its origin particularly in Eu-rope and its subsequent unfolding in the international scenario.With the growth of international capital, the sovereign states,which first emerged as separate entities with more or less well-defined boundaries, found themselves increasingly forced intorelationships of mutual interdependence with each other as theEuropean economy grew larger and became more complex. Inthe process, the individual nations did find themselves to be lesssovereign in terms of control over their affairs, but, at the sametime, they also truly found themselves belonging to a “globalnation-state system.”

The theoretical limitations of international relations are notdue to some failure to conceptualize what globalization as suchmeant; instead, its reluctance to examine the social factors ofthe internal nature of the nations made it not only overlook thepreceding stages of the premodern states as a historical refer-ence point, but also to establish globalization as a phenomenonthat has to be treated in and only in an international context.The specificity of the locality has to give way to the relationsamongst the nations on an international scale.

The other model is presented by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, which follows the Marxian paradigm in a funda-mentally consistent manner. For Wallerstein, the emphasis wasalways already global, on world economies—“networks of eco-nomic connections of a geographically extensive sorts.” The resi-due of a Marxian approach is fairly evident in Wallerstein’s treat-

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ment of the theory of world-system as a direct result of economicdevelopment of capitalism rather than a consequence of politicalinstitution as such. According to Wallerstein, “world-economies . . . are divided into core-states and peripheral areas.I do not say peripheral states because one characteristic of aperipheral area is that the indigenous state is weak, ranging fromits nonexistence (that is, a colonial situation) to one with a lowdegree of autonomy (that is, a neo-colonial situation).”11

Wallerstein’s theory of world-system presents its argumentsbased upon the distinction of center-periphery theory and em-pirical analysis. The historical specificity of Wallerstein’s meth-odological approach takes into account the development of pre-capitalist, imperial economy of the last three or four hundredyears and goes on to show how the capitalist economy intro-duces a completely new type of order that is truly global in itsspan. International relations tends to concentrate on the politi-cal side of the relationship between the nations, whereas world-system theory seemed to base its principle on economic grounds.The center-periphery division of Wallerstein consists in the divi-sion between capitalist forces and socialist enclaves in the glo-bal politics. In other words, speaking of Wallerstein, we realizethat the core-periphery dichotomy is fully realized in the pri-macy of the economic in which the political is relegated to theperipheral. The reason I bring Wallerstein into the picture is inorder to show how the model of center-periphery, local-global,still persists and haunts the discourse of political economy, andthere seems to be no getting away from it within the Westernhegemonic discourse of economy, politics, and culture.

MCLUHAN AND “THE GLOBAL VILLAGE”

Now I’d like to move our discussion of local–global toward mediatheory and bring in the issues of sovereignty and national iden-tity to explore the constitutive role of the “global village” in desig-nating geography as “no sense of place.” To me it is becomingincreasingly apparent that any discourse that follows this ideain the wake of the electronic trail of globalization of the entireworld at the expense of geography—as in the work of MarshallMcLuhan and his disciples, especially in the works of Carey andPaul Levinson—is to some extent partially correct, but it is also apolitical obfuscation of sorts, since it fails to effectively engagewith the geopolitics of transnationalism as a phenomenon ofmodernity/postmodernity.

But before I explain the nature of my critique of McLuhan’s

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anthropological glance towards future as a nostalgic, as well asa theological, predilection for the past divested of any social, eco-nomic, and political ramifications of what his theory of globalvillage entails in a complex world in which people and informa-tion move in long-distance cultural traffic, it remains my task toexplicate what McLuhan meant by his enigmatic conclusion thatwe are standing at the threshold, at the portals, of a new revela-tion: the (second) coming (after all, doesn’t the electronic agemirror the tribal age?) of the electronic age. Although the post-McLuhanites, the Batesonians, have with uncanny enthusiasmadopted the Deleuzian and Guattarian model of the “rhizome,”“deterritorialization,” and “glacial/global shifts,” along with theconcept of “nomadism,” from A Thousand Plateau, which play acrucial part in the determination of the global community, stillthey have not yet provided us with a convincing and plausibletheory of local or locality, or neighborhood, for that matter.12

Hence what is at stake in the discourse of global versus localwith regard to geographical boundaries in the global culturalcontext? We might have to interrogate the haunting specter ofErnst Renan for the incantation of the sphere of geography inthe discourse of nation. In “What is a Nation?” Renan explicitlystates that “geography, or what are known as natural frontiers,undoubtedly plays a considerable part in the division of nations.Rivers have led races on; mountains have brought them to ahalt. The former have (sic) favored movements in history, whereasthe latter have restricted it. Can one say, however, that as someparties believe, a nation’s frontiers are written on the map andthat this nation has the right to judge what is necessary to roundoff certain contours . . . which are thereby accorded a kind of apriori limiting faculty.”13 The question that comes to mind afterreading Renan is that why else would he find geography as thefoundational element in the making of the modern-state, unlessit is precisely this which is being threatened in the sense of com-munity of the global village?

Do we really require geography of space? Shall we clamor for aspatial geography that has vanished in the sightings of a newinformation order? The “geographical and spatial imagination”is once again becoming a cherished and privileged trope ofpostmodern media ethnographies. By removing the presence ofgeography from its complicity with the imperialistic and hege-monic discourse—which played a crucial role in defining as wellas establishing the broad range of anthropological and historicalmethodologies as proper instrumentations of control over thecolonized subjects—the adherents of McLuhanisme (the fond ex-pression of the francophones) found in it an excuse for redemp-

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tion from the obligations and the exigencies of the local/national.Given the global nature of media technologies with the help of

satellites and fiber optics, it is quite clear that the geographicalboundaries of the nation-state no longer serve as the marker ofterritorial sovereignty as far the electronic medium is concerned.In spite of some European states’ opposition, also aligned withthe popular intellectual opposition, to what is otherwise knownas “cultural imperialism” of the American ideology, the govern-ments in most democratic countries have failed to keep away theundesirable cultural contaminants surging through the wavesof electronic communication systems.

When I was in Canada a few years ago, (some) people often felthelpless as far as their cultural identity was concerned becauseof their country’s proximity to the vast and powerful United States(and this helplessness and paranoia is part of the theme of Ca-nadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s Videodrome). How doesone maintain a cultural autonomy when all the other sectors ofprivate and public life are completely dominated by and sub-jected to the images of another country? And what about thevast Asian market that has just opened up in the last five yearsor so to the global and transnational satellite and cable busi-nesses? Rupert Murdoch’s Star cable company in Hong Kong isthe biggest media conglomerate of cable transmission in Asiathrough satellite. As a result, the Asian television is glutted withAmerican television reruns and advertisements. On the otherhand, it has also opened up a whole new market for indigenousproducts as well. Thus, the point is how do you stop the flow ofinformation that is inherent to the medium through censoringmechanisms?

We live in a world of free exchange of information. It is notpossible to control the media by sheer force of military interven-tion or through a state of emergency. History proves that suchefforts have always in the end failed. I just recently came acrossan article by Heather Cameron on culture jamming. She dis-cusses the two most controversial and despised towers, not theTwin Towers in New York, mind you, but the towers in the citiesof the then East Berlin and Prague, the latter most ardently de-spised for its monstrous architecture, not the city, of course, butthe ghastly tower. These towers were built with the express pur-pose of blocking the signals, and thus operate as jamming sta-tions, from western TV and radio broadcasts. Cameron definesjamming as follows: “Jamming, despite all the sophisticated elec-tronics, is a crude overpowering. It can take three forms: tuningthe tower to a specific frequency and keying up over weaker sig-nals to broadcast noise, snow, and static; broadcasting compet-

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ing news, sports, and cultural programs on top of the desiredsignal; or flooding the sky with noise, making it impossible forany broadcast to get through. The overwhelming power used toblock the high-flying TV signals results in a deafening whiteout,knocking every signal out of the sky.”14 But it was impossible tocompletely block the signals. People could easily circumvent thenoise factor by simply using directional antennae “by splittingthe jammed signals into parts, thereby unbonding the compet-ing messages.” The same towers are now being used to broad-cast reruns of American television shows and to facilitate cellu-lar phone frequencies. This is something that brings us closer toMcLuhan’s point that “the medium is the message.”

LOCAL VERSUS GLOBAL

According to Anthony Giddens, “globalization can . . . be definedas the intensification of worldwide social relations which linkdistant localities in such a way that local happenings are shapedby events occurring many miles away and vice versa.”15 He claimsthat “modernity is inherently global” and “the most basic char-acteristics of modern institutions” are to be found in their“disembeddedness and reflexivity.” The traditional sociologicalanalyses of the media mostly took into account the workings ofthe industrial mode of production and reception. Such theoreti-cal accounts were still part and parcel of a sociologically “boundsystem” “embedded” within the privileged epistemic valorizationof the idea of society itself. I started this paper by suggestingthat the crisis of modernity is precisely its doing away with thevortex of time-space continuum, the logic inherent in sociologi-cal as well as all subsequent literature. Instead, the processes ofglobalization have effectively managed to destabilize the puta-tive conception of a linear world, of the Newtonian and the Eu-clidean dimensions, by altering the traditional relationship oflocal and global from its mooring in a time-space paradigm. Wemust reconceptualize the different social contexts and connec-tions and networks that the “distanciation of time and space”initiates in the understanding of the local, as that which is presentto itself and the perceiver, and the “interconnection across dis-tance,” which is both present and absent. Giddens finds global-ization as a process in which the local and the global are mutu-ally inflected categories that can no longer remain absolute orconstant.

We should also pay attention to the fact that the audiences ofthe new media are experiencing “reality” in a mediatized form,

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which perpetuates the schizophrenic conditions of thepostmodern world, a la Jameson, in the fragmentation of timeand space. The schizophrenic dissimulation of the phenomeno-logical “here and now,” of the Hegelian sense certainty, by theelectronic media in its virtual/spectral cohesion and dislocationof the local-global, the impossible and the irreducible scenariosof presence/absence, creates a moment otherwise known in mediatheory as the cultural production of homogenization of “here andthere.” The electronic media undermine the traditional frame-works of physical settings and social environments of the viewerby implicating the viewer in the presence of the others while con-cealing his or her own presence. But since the other is merelyproduced as the object of the image or as a scintilla of informa-tion, as statistical aggregate, as mere presence, then the act ofinitiating the process of watching as outsiders from the means ofproduction, a fate shared in its global dimension by all thosewho watch the proceedings of programs on the new media, canbe inferred as a common bond between the viewers of a globallyvoyeuristic and incestuous community. Think of the finale epi-sode of Seinfeld which generated an unprecedented communityat both local and global levels: bars and other public places ad-vertised for mass participation, families and friends gatheredtogether around in the living room in front of the television set topay their last homage to America’s favorite comedy show, anevent that took on the character of becoming one of the mostimportant events in the history of television of this country, prov-ing that people have more in common with those with whomthey have never interacted than with the face-to-face encounterof which Levinas speaks in volumes as the mark of an ethicalrelationship between the self and the other.

More people share the experience of watching television as acommon frame of reference than anything else in terms of hu-man interaction, and more and more participate in whatMeyrowitz defines as “the metaphysical arena:” “to watch televi-sion is to look into . . . the [common] experience . . . to see whatothers are watching.”16 For Meyrowitz, this virtual global spacesans geography defines locality more in terms of cultural ico-nography than the actual dictum of place, for here the populace’stransactions are conducted by a “common” experience whosemodulations are predicated upon systems of communication andinformation networks.17 We all share, in global terms, a part ofour local experience in the virtual everyday gathering of kindredsoul-mates at an apportioned time to “share in a collective cer-emony;” and in the isolation and privacy of our own soul each ofus find that we are sharing the same experience, the holy com-

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munion of collectively rooting for someone to win a million dol-lars and feel blessed (for what other ceremonies are observed intheir entirety aside from the midnight mass on New Year’s Eveand the sporting events—both involving ritualistic global audi-ences) and, of course, simultaneously entertained, with a happyafterthought that we were together at that epochal moment whensomebody won that million bucks—which was never meant forus anyway, but still what a spectacle!

Notes

1. David Morley, “Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the SittingRoom,” The Media Studies Reader, ed. O’Sullivan, Tim and Yvonne Jewkess.(London: Arnold, 1997), 374.

2. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Message: An In-ventory of Effects. (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 63.

3. James Carey, Culture as Communication. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2–3.

4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 156.

5. Stuart Hall, “What is ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall: CriticalDialogues in Cultural, ed. Morley, David and Kuan-Hsing Chen. (London:Routledge, 1996), 467.

6. Hall, 466.7. Hall, 466.8. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Culture

Economy,” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32.

9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic:Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. (Seattle, Washington: BayPress, 1983), 111–125.

10. Appadurai, 32.11. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and

the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. (NewYork: Academic Press, 1976), 229–233.

12. Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. BrainMassumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

13. Ernst Renan, “What is a Nation?,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha.(London: Routledge, 1990), 18.

14. Heather Cameron, Alphabet City, 6 (1998): 100.15. Anthony Giddens, The Consequence of Modernity. (Stanford, California:

Stanford University Press, 1990), 64.16. Cited in Morley, 375.17. J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social

Behavior. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).