For some decades now, discourses of terminal lament and epochal change have multiplied. We have heard about the destruction of our common culture, the death of literature, and the end of nature; and we have been experiencing the social transformations wrought by such phenomena as disorganized capitalism, late capitalism, flexible accumulation, post-industrialism, the service economy, the post-scarcity economy, the information age, the third wave, postcoloniality, postmodernity, postnationalism, and globalization. For some, we are witnessing no less than the emergence of posthumanity or, still more urgently, ultra-humanity. These claims represent ends of narratives, fragmentations of master narratives, and increasingly globalist extensions of master narratives; they span a discursive range from the mandarin-academic to the populist-counterculture. Of late, in the popular arena, an accident of chronology has added a still further popular term to this mix, the proclamation of the twenty-first century as a key turning point in our collective history. ¹

One of the most recent of these frames of reference is globalization. Around as a term in academic discourse since the 1980s, globalization has emerged recently as a respectable player in theory, spreading well beyond the anglophone sociology that gave it birth. Indeed, Malcom Waters is right, I believe, in arguing that "just as postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept of the 1900s." ² Many--including me, although ambivalently--have been trying to make it that. Generally speaking, globalization focuses on the [End Page 548] ways in which nonlocal factors interact with local ones in producing sociocultural identities and forms. The most ambitious incarnations of this interest has been to sketch narratives of changing global-local orders--that is, narratives of changing forms of worldwide interaction and integration, narratives of a succession of world-systems. ³ Globalization thus traces prehistories to our current hyperawareness of the interrelationship between local and global interactions, histories that, for some, date back to the expansion of the West, for others the Middle Ages, and for still others early civilizations and before. ⁴ At the same time, globalization provides a basis for describing what is unique about the present moment--the subject that concerns us here. It explores the grounds for the widespread perception that another significant reorganization of global structure and local sociocultural forms is underway at the present moment.

Descriptions of contemporary global reorganization have been very varied and have been advanced in a large number of disciplinary discourses. Very broadly, the process has been pictured in two extreme ways. On the one hand, the process of contemporary globalization is characterized as a new stage in the narrative of capital, one named variously as late capitalism, a regime of flexible accumulation, and disorganized capitalism. As such, globalization means deeper penetration, integration, and postmodern hyperdevelopment. Fredric Jameson has argued that multinational capitalism "ends up penetrating and colonizing [the] . . . precapitalist enclaves of Nature and the Unconscious." But "penetration" retains also a more geographic meaning, describing the forcible incorporation of remote, fourth world peoples and locales. Tighter integration means increasingly that capital goes above and below the nation, both splintering it and transnationalizing it. Capital encourages, on the one hand, transnationalization, and, on the other hand, subnational localization--to which the vocabulary of marketing has responded by inventing the term glocalization. Thus, for example, transnational corporations (TNCs) have, via disaggregated production and the transnationalization of finance, knit remote localities throughout the world together, and just-in-time production has helped make this happen in real time. Penetration and integration are usually accompanied by hyperdevelopment, which means commodification of all areas of experience, and the development of a new kind of global postmodern consumer culture of flexibly produced, heterogenous, customized simulations. [End Page 549]

Opposing this version of recent globalization--one largely based on extending a narrative of capital into a reorganizing present--is a more interactive, often sociologically-based depiction of the process. This approach extends the discourses of nationalism, postcolonialism, and internationalism into different kind of transnationalism, one that privileges new transnational communications networks as key mechanisms. Tighter communicative integration of the globe means, potentially, the splintering of national communities locally and the creation of a heterogenous transnational public sphere globally. Nations are no longer so separated by their own borders; instead, they--along with a host of new sub- and supranational actors--communicate more interactively in real time, along multiple, more decentered, and more polyglossic communication circuits, and via a greater complexity of positions from which to speak. Enclaves are thus opened onto each other not colonized, and conversations and transport across them sponsor a new, critique of universalism as parochial and advocacy of an uncertain-creative kind of hybridity. Though such a communicative and interactive system may seem fundamentally cosmopolitan, it is important to point out that these same processes may produce increased fundamentalism, ethnic conflict and globalized terrorism. ⁵

On the one hand, then, current globalization may mean a single, though heterogenizing system tightening its grip on the world's remotest localities and enclaves. On the other hand, globalization may mean a complex system becoming still more decentered and interactive. The former version of globalization focuses on transnational capitalism and the global economy; the latter on peoplehood and imagined communities, from diasporas to civilizations. Thought about globalization has thus been deeply uncertain and schizophrenic: it is centering and decentering, catastrophic and creative all at once.

One important theme of both versions of contemporary global reorganization is the question of whether the era of the nation-state is coming to an end. In the following survey of culture and contemporary globalization in the United States, I am taking the position that the demise of the nation has been greatly exaggerated and that recent U.S. culture is characterized less by insurgent postnationalism (however much it is being invoked now by dissident-progressive cultural movements) than by the invention of a new breed of cultural nationalism--a form of cultural nationalism for post-national circumstances. Contemporary globalization has in fact not meant the withering away of [End Page 550] nations and national cultures and the erasure of the constraints of political and even physical geography. Eric Hobsbawm's prediction to this end in Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality is at best premature. Arjun Appadurai has argued that imagined national communities have been replaced, in our new electronically mediated global system, by imagined worlds, in which many people live and which allow them to contest and sometimes subvert the official minds and entrepreneurial mentalities around them. Though this is a cautious formulation, Appadurai has gone on to claim that, in the course of expanding his original article on the new global cultural system into a book, he has "come to be convinced that the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs." ⁶ The sweeping claim seems wrong to me, and, to the more cautious formulation, I would respond that, though globalization has certainly had the effects he describes, it is also still substantially managed by the official mind of nations and by transnational, as well as national, entrepreneurial mentalities. Similarly doubtful are Fredric Jameson's assertions that "the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm" and that "postmodern culture" is the cultural logic of the new global economy, rather than just one site-specific concomitant of it. ⁷ Still more dubious are Rob Wilson's and Wimal Dissanayake's assertions that the nation-state is being "undone by the fast imploding heteroglossic interface of the global with the local" and even that "the dissolution and disinvention of e pluribus unum narratives" is unambiguously happening in the US. ⁸ In general, both celebratory and dystopian claims about the global economy's borderlessness, as well as claims that the new economy necessarily whittles national sovereignties down to ineffectuality, have been exaggerated.

In disputing these claims, I argue that, while current global reorganization has had profound effects on culture, these effects have not signaled the end of nationalism in the cultural arena. Instead, they have had much more complex results. They have sponsored a wealth of new theorization of social and cultural relationships. They have stimulated the growth of new oppositional movements and new critical perspectives. But they have had a still further effect: they have set the stage for the reconstitution of U.S. cultural nationalism in an interesting, new, "postnational" form.

In the United States, national culture thus mutated has moved the [End Page 551] debates of the 1980s and early 1990s beyond ones largely invoked and determined by defensive-fundamentalism: border-enforcing and belt-tightening reactions against external stresses and internal radicalism, positons usually expressed in the traditional American jeremiad form. Instead, recent U.S. culture is marked by something different: the attempt to recreate official national culture out of the very heterogeneity and heteroglossia that were supposedly undoing it. Very roughly, the micro-historical process went as follows. At first, globalization produced in the United States both a proliferation of discourses of shock at undermined foundations and a contentious polarization between a nationalist right and a left that was increasingly developing postnationalist positions and alliances. Gradually, however, the "global" became itself a significant mainstream discourse--and, under Clinton, a site for combining nationalism with postnationalism, right with left, by reinventing a kind of national culture for postnational circumstances. This reinvention, though it is easy to identify it with the Clinton presidency, is something that has been accomplished by a variety of actors in a variety of different spheres, including neoliberal politics, corporate policy and public relations, the media, and even a variety of the newer intellectual and social movements.

Concern with the "global" began with the alarmed perception that the United States was slipping from a position of global centrality, that the "American century" was ending, and that, for many, the United States was in danger of slipping into "Third World" status. Omi and Winant tote up many of these anxieties. The U.S. "suffered the humiliating 'losses' of Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iran in the 1970s"; since the oil crisis in particular, it seemed the United States "was being 'held for ransom' by the OPEC nations, which controlled 'our' vital energy resources." Soon, slippage from the top of the global heap economically became the chief preoccupation: thus, "once the world's creditor, [the United States became] its chief debtor; once the chief exporter of manufactured goods, it was now their main importer." ⁹ And, internally, traumatic restructurings began. These included rounds of union-busting and large-scale layoffs, the flurry of corporate reorganization via mergers and acquisitions (accompanied by bank failures, junk bonds, and investment scandals), a relocation offshore of manufacturing, a deskilling of the labor force, an increase in visible foreign penetration and ownership of American industry and real estate, and the downsizings and outsourcings that pruned the ranks of middle management [End Page 552] and split labor into classes of permanent and temporary employees. These restructurings were all parts of a larger systemic shift: the undoing of what Robert Reich calls the "national bargain" reached in the postwar era between big labor, big business, and big government, or what Scott Lash and John Urry have analyzed globally as "organized capitalism." ¹⁰ And these relationships were accompanied by highly divisive scapegoating, neo-fundamentalist rhetoric on a variety of fronts, as apparently lost national foundations were lamented and blame for this was levied widely and loudly on anything liberal or leftist.

By the time of President Clinton's 1992 campaign, however, the phrase the global economy had entered mainstream conversation. As such, the term "global" became less the nightmare that haunted Americans than a word to conjure with--a key term for restructuring the political discourse of national crisis and internal division into a new kind of recovery narrative, one that seemed to blend conservative nationalist and radical-postnational positions together into a new kind of nationalism for a global era. This line of argument became central to Clinton's first campaign. Defensive nationalism's external enemies and internal subversives were no longer the problem; indeed, targeting them primarily meant that one had not thought thoroughly enough about the "newness" of the new global economy, an omission that led to serious mistakes. Neoconservative nationalist solutions in fact exacerbated the problems instead of remedying them. Thus, for example, given the de facto erosion of national economic borders everywhere, trickledown meant trickleout, and monoculturalism was vastly less suited than bridge-building multiculturalism for creating peoplehood in the United States and for reattaining centrality in an interactive, cosmopolitan global economy. Correspondingly, rather than a field for geopolitical emnities--a competitive war zone--that global economy was increasingly styled in post-cold war era terms as an interactive, interdependent cosmopolitan system and the new frontier for American business and society. New kinds of openness, cultural, social, and economic, became important and gave neoliberal policies the edge as means of solving domestic problems and getting helping the U. S. back to a version of its former glory.

In this process, I believe, much of the potentially transgressive and potentially liberatory quality of what I have singled out as the second stream of globalization theory was embraced and channeled in the [End Page 553] United States into a narrower, anxious-eager focus on national recovery, even as the cultural movements based on it have had to contend with the paradox of ostensible, official acceptance of their agendas coupled with an actual worsening of conditions just outside the limelight. And crucial to this ambiguous recovery narrative has been the equally paradoxical reconstitution of an American national identity for postnational circumstances. This new identity is one that is, much more transparently than ever before, produced with global forces and a global audience in mind; it is much less a narrative of self-identity and much more transparently the fruit of wise positioning for successful integration. To illustrate how heterogenous the process has really been, I shall, in the following, single three specific areas out for close examination, as I track this process of culture-construction from jeremiad-style laments over lost foundations, through a variety of different projects, to the partial reconstitution of U.S. national culture for a postnational world.

Culture

The culture wars were, of course, one of the most visible responses to the global slippage felt by many in the United States. Different jeremiads analyzed things differently, but they typically included several themes: an angry lament at a common Western culture lost to ethnic separatists and culturally relativistic tenured radicals; a weakening of moral fiber, family values, and the sense of hierarchy owing to the sexual revolution and ethical relativism (something characteristic of both the old counterculture and the new mass consumer society); and a literacy crisis, caused by levelling mass culture and the dumbing down of education, thanks to the loss of standards, the bureaucratization of the public schools and the radicalization of the professorate. ¹¹ The sense that multiculturalism was one of the signs that the United States was turning into a Third World country was reinforced from without as well, when Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro told his Liberal Democratic party comrades in 1986 that "in America there are many blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and on the average America's level [of intelligence] is very low." ¹²

The issues of common culture and the radicalized academy became hugely and obsessionally popular. In magazines like Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The National Review, The New Criterion, The Hudson [End Page 554] Review, and Commentary, lead articles criticized the academy for its political correctness and multiculturalism. Figures like George Will, President Bush, and Richard Bernstein styled multiculturalists (as opposed to foreign powers) America's worst enemies, said they were working to end free enterprise and freedom, and claimed (literally) they were comparable to the Spanish Inquisition and the French Reign of Terror. Internal whippingpersons were thus created, as a variety of disputes erupted, the most vehement of which was about the canon. ¹³

This rhetoric--the rhetoric of endangered national foundations--was, in effect, a new kind of fundamentalism. As such, it represented, for most participants, a more and less manipulative attempt to capitalize upon and control a sense of national crisis that, in fact, had more complicated--and more global--roots than could be understood in terms of intra-national dissension and external national slippage.

From its inception, multiculturalism really meant many things, depending on the theory and political project in the eye of its beholder. This was a fact that went maddeningly unarticulated in most discussions of the subject. The hostile polemics were the worst in this respect: "multiculturalism" was repeatedly spoken of as a singular, easily-labeled position, one that amounted to (1) separatism and (2) cultural relativism. But thanks to a variety of local and cosmopolitan influences, multiculturalisms proliferated; gradually positions emerged that were neither separatist nor relativist, but which, along with forming themselves in dialectic with the right, formulated themselves out of an internal critique of separatist cultural nationalism on the one hand and a recognition of the external influences of the new global system on the other. From these multiculturalisms a new understanding of the "global" emerged, one that recognized that an important and complicated restructuring of the nation and the international system was in process.

Elaine Kim, in her introduction to the anthology provocatively entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead, provides one account (among many) of how this worked in Asian-American cultural history. In the late 1960s, cultural nationalisms, imitating or responding to black nationalism, had spread through a wide variety of groups, including of course Asian Americans; indeed, Kim was a part of the movement, which marked her field-consolidating book, Asian American Literature. But in her recent account, she looks back at that time and recognizes that the group identity constructed in a "longing for a final 'homecoming'" and as a defence against "dehumanizing characterizations" of Asian Americans [End Page 555] by mainstream society was itself confining. It consolidated an anti-assimilationist identity by

dividing "Asian American" from "Asian" as sharply as possible, privileging race over gender and class, accepting compulsory heterosexuality as "natural," and constructing a hierarchy of authenticity to separate the "real" from the "fake." According to this definition, there were not many ways of being Asian American. ¹⁴

What happened, then, was that cultural nationalism replicated what it resisted, positing an identity which, in effect, marginalized many of its own. To a second generation, looking back in light of this fact, and through more explicitly social-constructionist eyes, the work of the first needed to be honored, but altered.

At the same time, transnational influences had considerable impact. Globally, "Third World" nationalism--both cultural and political--succeeded and then, disillusioningly, began to create new versions of what it had resisted in many of the new postcolonial nation states. Also, a new, clearly postcolonial global migration commenced, aided in the United States by the 1965 revision of the immigration law. Simultaneous with this immigration--one substantially "Third World" in origin--came, of course, the cosmopolitan theory boom, eventually bringing "postcolonialism" as well into American universities and cultural debates.

Thus, today's Asian immigrants, Kim argues, are marked by their remarkable, hybrid-hybridizing diversity. They are diverse "in terms of origin and ethnicity, language, social class, political situations, educational backgrounds, and patterns of settlement." They have "moved to cities and towns where few Asian Americans had lived before and are doing things to earn their livelihood they could have never imagined when they were in their homelands." An Asian American immigrant teenager, Kim continues,

deals daily with a not necessarily anguishing confusion of divergent influences . . . . she might rent Korean language video melodramas from a shopping center in Southern California today, after having watched "MacGyver" and "Entertainment Tonight" on television in Seoul as a child.

Thus Asian American identities today are more than just hybrid; they are multiple, fragmented, and, as Kim asserts, [End Page 556]

fluid and migratory: the Minnesota social worker who clings to the idea of Hmongs as limited-English-speaking refugees from a pre-literate society may be surprised to encounter a Hmong teenager who composes rap music, plays hockey, and dates Chicano boys or girls. (xi)

Immigrants like these move, in effect, from a postnationalized periphery to an increasingly postnationalized core.

In the United States, this new kind of heterogeneity neither assimilates nor stays territorialized in ethnic neighborhoods like "Chinatowns." It spreads out, Kim argues, throughout America, including small Minnesota towns. The immigrants carry their racial-cultural identities with them, foregrounded (thanks to the visibility of "racial" differences that had classified them as "nonwhite") even as they Americanize. ¹⁵ They are thus consummate exponents of what William Boelhower calls "weak" ethnic identity--one that does not cluster about family and community, but destabilizes a supposedly color- and ethnicity-neutral regime by producing signs of ethnic difference everywhere within it. ¹⁶ On the one hand, they retain something of the aggressive legacy of cultural nationalism (they foreground racial-cultural identity everywhere, confronting the racialist society that had rejected them). On the other, they combine this with a strengthened version of an old assimilationist sub-tradition, one that challenged Anglo-centrism's claims to be the fundamental American identity, as they integrate immediately and visibly into a pop culture that itself cultivates fluidity and foregrounds signs of difference.

Kim's proceeds to make this latter point. American culture is not and never was as centered as neoconservatives were claiming:

"Majority culture" which is no more monolithic and unitary than "Asian" or "Asian American culture," . . . [has] never been fixed, continuous, or discrete. The notion of an absolute American past, a single source for American people, a founding identity or wholeness in America, is rooted in the racist fiction of primordial white American universality. (xii)

More specifically, from an immigrant perspective, current notions of "an absolute American past"--the legacy of a common culture--were simply a latter phase of the Anglo-Saxonist appropriation of national identity that occurred in the later nineteenth century, something embedded in the much-maligned image of the melting pot. Even at the turn of the century, however, immigrants contested this appropriation, from within the assimilationist paradigm. [End Page 557]

As Werner Sollors shows, turn-of-the-century immigrants sometimes claimed status as representative Americans over the nativists and Anglo-centrists who at that time had been styling themselves the real "native Americans." ¹⁷ For example, Mike Gold, in Jews Without Money, reverses the usual hierarchy when he tells how a bus of slumming uptown tourists passing through the chaotic Lower East Side of his youth was pelted with "rocks, garbage, dead cats and stale vegetables" and the "stuckup foreigners" ("foreigners" on the Lower East Side, though, uptown, the "Native Americans") were told to go back where they came from. ¹⁸ The offal Gold's kids hurl at the bus is an echo of the stuff ready to be hurled at the King and the Duke in Huck Finn; Gold's kids are thus the real successors to Huck and, as such, more American than those they hurl it at. Indeed, one side of Jews Without Money is Huck Finn in the city, even as another side is Whitman reincarnate. Even as immigrants claimed to be the real Americans, because, unlike those who merely inherited citizenship, they went through the process of transformation American ideology celebrated and because they therefore identified more deeply with democratic principles, Gold tacitly claims that he is the real inheritor of American literary tradition.

At the beginning of the century, when this position was developed, it was definitely a minority discourse. But, in the wake of forecasts that, by 2050, the majority of Americans will be nonwhite, and in the wake of the demotion of the WASP to the status of ethnic, not representative citizen, it is much more powerful, and Kim's still more inclusive strain of multicultural postnationalist-postassimilationist ethnic-immigrant activism would seem to be in a strong position in the United States. ¹⁹ Third World origins, not Anglo forebears and difference, not self-identity, would become candidates for representative American identity. And to this development we must add a third undercurrent in racial and ethnic theory and writing--one that runs back at least to Randolph Bourne's 1916 essay "Trans-National America"--and comes into play in fiction like Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, William Kennedy's Quinn's Book, and Bharati Mukherjee's short stories. According to this view, immigrant perspectives are empowered by their cosmopolitanism; in particular, the post-1965 immigrants are global cosmopolitans, quintessential insiders for the new postcolonial global system, rather than premodern huddled masses seeking asylum in modern America. Their heterogenous, hybrid, complex identities make them, if anything, postmodern, and they bring these qualities to a now [End Page 558] localist, parochial, even sometimes backward United States. Though the jobs they get in the United States may be at the bottom, they bring global realities and polycultural experience to a U.S. that is still suffering from its old postcolonial cultural inferiority complex and that, having suppressed its own legacy of actual multiculturalism by an oppressive and also parochial official monoculturalism, is in dire need of these things. ²⁰ In a globalist/postnational world system, they can help enhance U.S. cultural status and power.

The emergence of postnationalism and global hybridity/cosmopolitanism as positions from which to speak--a widespread development in multiculturalism domestically and postcolonialism globally--has, however, carved less distinctively new and genuinely alternative space in U.S. cultural discourse than it might have. For even as multiculturalism has been stigmatized as ethnic separatism by another name, it has been, I would argue, reconstructed during the Clinton presidency as a new form of national consensus. To be sure, Samuel Huntington's recent book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, raises the old culture wars cry with undiminished urgency, bringing back all the old hysteria and exaggeration that characterized conservative polemics. For Huntington, multiculturalism's "rejection of the [American] Creed and of Western civilization was the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means the end of Western civilization"--and the startled reader, veteran of old battles, wonders at the unquestioned assurance Huntington has about who the "we" are and whether the ambitious global canvas of his whole book came (like Allan Bloom's work arguably did) from parochial prejudice and pique, not objective scholarship. ²¹ But such flarings up of the old rhetoric seem increasingly out of place these days, as Nathan Glazer entitles a recent book We Are All Multiculturalists Now, retrospectives are held to memorialize Bloom and the controversy he initiated, and a New York Times columnist writes, with sardonic accuracy, that the phrase "'culture war' is starting to sound a little like 'leisure suit'--a throwback to a bygone era." ²²

Multiculturalism's apparent victory in the culture wars, however, has been anything but complete. On the one hand, fighting has not ended, but has been moved out of the academic and popular limelight and into a variety of legislative engagements over such topics as welfare reform, affirmative action, anti-terrorism bills, and anti-immigrant legislation. In the process, the battles have become in some ways more difficult to [End Page 559] fight. Equally problematic, in being mainstreamed, multiculturalism has changed, and its ascension to a new style of official nationalism has brought new kinds of criticism upon it. David Rieff has styled multiculturalism as part of a silent partnership, the front person for much larger interests, namely those of the new TNCs. Far from being revolutionary, as both radicals and conservatives claim, multiculturalism is, Rieff argues, cosily the handmaiden of globalizing capitalism: it provides a new market for both consumer and academic diversification, as ethnicity, non-Western culture, and the study of it are all commodified. Thus, phrases like "cultural diversity," "difference," and "product diversification" are strangely appropriate bedfellows. And both multiculturalism and transnational corporations show the same forward-looking interest in responding to the racial and gender transformations in the United States and its workforce, even as they respond to the disintegration of national economies and the integration of enterprise globally. ²³

If multiculturalism-as-difference (and postcolonialism too, thrown in for the bargain) has been seen as the dominant ideology of TNC's, multiculturalism has been also advanced and castigated as hybrid-homogenizing neo-official culture. ²⁴ Thus, Time's issue devoted to delineating "The New Face of America" notoriously featured a computer-morphed picture of the future, racially-ethnically hybrid American on its cover. Roger Rouse calls this a form of "corporate liberal multiculturalism" and quotes the magazine's nationalist text:

there is no going back: diversity breeds diversity. It is the fuel that runs today's America and, in a world being transformed daily by technologies that render distances meaningless, it puts America in the forefront of a new international order. ²⁵

Recently, Wired magazine, also no liberal rag, has celebrated diversity as the future of the United States and the new global system, predicting that "at the turn of the century, the U.S. [will be] the closest thing the world has to a workable multicultural society" and thus again a light to all nations. ²⁶ Lisa Lowe describes a third variant of much the same thing. The September 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts celebrates the diversity of cultures in a city where, as the organizers put it, "85 languages [are] spoken in the . . . school system." ²⁷ The Festival celebrates "a new America existing for a new world" (88), but it is, Lowe argues, really a device to contain people, to "maintain a [End Page 560] consensus that permits the present hegemony, a hegemony that relies on premature reconciliation of contradiction" by using aesthetic display to erase awareness of the "material positions, means, [and] resources" of the populations (86).

Rieff and Rouse see multiculturalism as the restructuring and commodification of culture in service of corporate agendas; Lowe sees it as a resurgent, neoliberal politics of consensus; together, these moves form part of an attempt to refigure American identity advantageously for the global economy--the goal is to show "America is [again] in the forefront of a new international order" and to tell "new stories for a new America existing in a new world." ²⁸ Recoveries like these have been, I believe, so successful that they are today the threat that radical multiculturalism--or, to use the most relevant successor term, postnationalism--most reacts against. Moreover, fighting the new enemy is in some ways less inspiriting than sparring with the old. For as multiculturalism has become official ideology and the culture wars have left the media limelight and dispersed into more complex legislative engagements on a variety of fronts, there has arguably been a loss of the liberatory hopes of previous years. Indeed, one can see something of this gloomy picture in recent Asian-American fiction like Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, which gives very negative spins to both celebrations of heterogenous ethnic identity and immigrant cosmopolitanism in a U.S. and globe grown meaner and more divisive.

Crucial to the fragile construction of a new postnational nationalism is the American discourse of globalization and the recovery narrative it fostered. A future-oriented global mission means a lot to U.S. citizens. Metamorphosed from a nationalist narrative--a narrative of the internal development of national character and values--to an act of global positioning, American multiculturalism appears world-influential, soothing anxieties about and familiarizing Americans with the idea of a new, supposedly interdependent, interactive global economy. Akira Iriye, in his recent book on the history and development of cultural internationalism, adds weight to the idea that multiculturalism is a new, powerful official culture for the United States in a global world. "The more U.S. society seemed to become divided ("disunited" as unhappy observers often pointed out)," Iriye argues, "the greater grew its influence abroad." ²⁹ More pointedly, Federico Mayor Zargosa, the director general of UNESCO, commented that "America's main role in the new world order is not as a military superpower, but a multicultural [End Page 561] superpower." ³⁰ Even Arjun Appadurai's call for decomposing nationalism altogether, by seeing America as just one node in complex of transnational circuits--seeing America as "a sort of cultural laboratory and a free trade zone for the generation, circulation, importation, and testing of the materials for a world organized around diasporic identity"--becomes, paradoxically, a kind of transmogrified nationalism. ³¹ Such an America recaptures a place in the symbolic economy (now supposedly where the high-end work is) by putting the United States in the position of being able to add the most value to it. Following Appadurai's argument one step further, the United States would thereby house the lead cultural industry: it would be where a truly "post-national imaginary" would be produced (428).

Information Technology

The culture wars were only in part about the idea of a common national culture. They also concerned the issue of declining literacy--an issue that has sponsored its own lament over lost foundations. Among the highlights of this scenario have been the deleterious effects of television, the decline in reading scores and practices ("something like 60 percent of adult Americans never read a book"), the failure of bureaucratized public schools and the defection of the academic elite, who still occupied "bricks and mortar" universities, but subverted unique literary essences into mere textuality and intertextuality. ³² Deeply involved in the process as well have been electronic information technologies, which, even more than photocopiers or contemporary theory, seem to have undermined the notion of text and book. Once again, the rhetoric of national crisis has been used: as Jonathan Kozol has written, "the nation is at risk," while Alvin Kernan has seen the literacy crisis and the rise of electronic communications as aspects of a large-scale cultural shift, which he calls the death of literature. ³³ What appears, depending on one's perspective, to be a foundation or a privileged enclave is endangered by what is both one of the driving forces behind the new global economy and one of its most prominent new industries: information technology, a means by which the interlinking and penetration of the world is being rapidly accomplished.

The new globalism is explicitly linked to the end of print culture in Sven Birkerts's nostalgic, dyspeptic The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. If the title did not set the tone, the [End Page 562] cover would, featuring a sepia-toned, imitation-Victorian photograph of an empty private library, complete with opulently bound volumes on the shelves, an empty leather cushioned chair with swan neck arms, and antimacassar draped over its arm, waiting wistfully for its occupant to return. Depicted thus, the library is an enclave of stability, privacy, opulence, meditativeness--all qualities that characterize Birkerts's prose style.

For Birkerts, reading carries enormous weight. First, it grounds selfhood: it gives individuals a sense of depth, meaning, and the experience of duration; it allows access to a "'beyond' that is right here inside"; and it represents the perpetual promise of "not just a specific inner state, but a need for getting back to it." Reading is, in short, a technology for restoring one to oneself, for continually remanufacturing a whole individual identity. ³⁴ It stands in direct contrast to electronic culture, with creates fragmented, heterogenous, postmodern selves, thanks in part to constant, multiple media inputs: it is anything but what Camille Paglia celebrates as her "multilayered, multitrack ability to deal with the world" (126).

Equally, reading has social consequences: on the one hand, it reinforces a sense of locality and place ("bounded lifetimes spent in single locales" as opposed to "lives lived in geographical dispersal amid streams of data") and it contains and authorizes the master narratives that help create traditional identities and the social forms that utilize them (72). Still more striking is the fact that print culture and reading is consistent with and supports original and unmediated contact with nature. Thanks to all the mediations of modern media, a "finely filamented electronic scrim has slipped between ourselves and the so-called "outside world" (5), and, forced now to perceive through this scrim, nature, the place we used to live, disappears: "Nature was then; this is now. Trees and rocks have receded" (120). Or, as he puts it later, "the natural given . . . is now gone. . . . Our primary relation to the world has been altered" (205).

Finally, print authorizes our sense of reality, both physical and metaphysical. Thomas Hardy's characters did not pile their belongings into the back of a Jeep Cherokee and move out; Hardy's "Christminster is not just a point on a grid" (25). His things still have "their thingness" (25). Reading thus evokes a world that still has the "reality of smokestacks and bricks, of hard durable goods"--as opposed to our current "reality of impulses and mediated information" (192). More [End Page 563] philosophically, the aura that surrounds books and reading as unique objects and experience evokes still "a separateness, a resistance--the quality of being-in-itself, the 'otherness' that all things manifest" (226).

Birkerts's descriptions, of course, encode ideas from Baudrillard and Jameson about postmodernity, applying them specifically to what Birkerts calls the "smooth devil" of electronic communications. In characterizing print culture, he draws on--essentializing and dehistoricizing where necessary--a wide variety of theories about print culture. These include print culture as a foundation for Enlightenment ideas of individual selfhood and devotional experiences of meditation and depth; print as key factor in the creation of national "imagined communities," and therefore the creation of citizenry, place, and national-cultural traditions; print as a force in the objectivization and standardization of nature, authorizing science and situating epistemological issues as crucial to the relationship between human beings and nature; and print as a foundation for objectivity and positivism generally. ³⁵ Most interesting perhaps, in light of our discussion above, is the fact that Birkerts locates the source for his endangered essentializations of print in his early experience as the child of immigrants from Latvia. From an early age, caught between American children and his parents' pasts, he sought print's imagined world (valued by neither his father nor classmates) as the place to construct identity and reality.

Print is clearly, then, a line of local defense against penetration at a variety of sites by suddenly, sickeningly integrating globalizing forces. In his lament over the passing of print, Birkerts does not cite Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but he suggests the book at every turn: the stability of "our" selfhood and social identity is threatened at every turn by electronic commumunications. Similarly, Birkerts argues, without citing Arjun Appadurai, that the new technology is crucial to undermining national societies and restructuring the world in complex and chaotically globalizing ways.

Regardless of theory's estimate of how basic recent changes in communications have been to contemporary globalization, it is clear that these developments are among the most visible of recent globalization phenomena. ³⁶ Indeed, the larger communications revolution has in fact done more than any other factor to support the economic restructuring that has globalized corporations, disaggregated production, created a borderless international financial system that circulates several times the world's yearly GNP every day, thereby creating the [End Page 564] circumstances that have led to traumatic downsizings and restructurings in the United States and rendering the gap between rich and poor wider than it has ever been. But few in the United States have seen things that way. Birkerts's lament is the weakest of the laments for lost foundations I have tracked. Its tone of almost antiquarian nostalgia waters down what otherwise could be a jeremiad expressing the passions of a small but angry interest group. Given the fact that computer technology has displaced so many workers recently, the lament could have been stronger and less specifically literary. Instead, however, information technology has been one of the most exuberant sites for reconstruction of an official national culture for postnational circumstances--even as information technology and communications have been one of the key mechanisms driving globalization, and major new global industries themselves.

In the United States, the electronic era has been depicted, I argue, in two extreme and downright contradictory ways--ways that have managed to draw on both strains of globalization theory outlined above. First, globalization has been depicted as an essential part of the production of a postmodern, futuristic world wholly penetrated by capital and catastrophically commodified. William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, hailed by Fredric Jameson as quintessentially postmodern, is now the most vivid and seductive example of this view, and the novel's impact can in part be gauged by the fact it supplied the popular media with the much used term--a term that incorporates an elaborate fantasy--cyberspace. ³⁷

In the novel's seductive dystopia, if one does not keep up with things in the violent economy of this world--one ruled by competitive corporate giants--one risks winding up in the clinics as spare parts (5), and everything--drugs, medicine, genetic material, RAM, and people--are part of what Gibson calls Biz, a combination of street hustling and corporate competitiveness. ³⁸ The novel's hero, Case, street-hustles in this world as an outlaw, cowboy computer hacker, hiring out his central nervous system to large employers to do what is, in effect, high-skilled, outsourced temp work. The novel's post-Fordist message has been well described by Pam Rosenthal:

in contrast to the relatively stable integration of the workforce into the industries of fordism, Post-Fordism . . . poses a whole new approach to time on and off the job: the hyped-up, insecure syncopations of workaholism and unemployment . . . . What until fairly recently had seemed a reasonably self-evident [End Page 565] positive dynamic within a well-defined arena now seems at best a set of mixed messages within an environment of shifting boundaries and rapidly transmutating rules. The ability to decode such messages--or more likely, to accustom oneself to occupying shifting epistemological terrain--engenders a jumpy kind of cool, the nonchalance of cyberpunk toward the bad new future that is upon us." ³⁹

Lisa Lowe would doubtless apply to this novel the same acid comments she made about Blade Runner: that its landscape plays on fears sponsored by recent globalization and that these fears, embodied in an image of catastrophically heterogenous globality, involve discomfort at the empowerment of Asians, "the foreign threat to U.S. capital." ⁴⁰ Similarly, the new landscape would be "the occulted horizon for the visible emergence of the free, white liberal subject" (85). And indeed, despite the book's postnational setting and despite its overt multiculturalism, Case represents, David Brande accurately argues, a recuperation of national ideology as well as whiteness. ⁴¹ A cowboy on the new frontier of cyberspace, he brings a pre-Frederick Jackson Turner excitement into a postmodern, hyperdeveloped world; if the old frontier has been built out thoroughly and its excitements become guilty ones in the wake of contemporary multicultural/postcolonial rewritings of western history, try, then, cyberspace in an apparently polycultural, globalized era. Not only can many of the old attitudes be recuperated, but a basic, underlying fear prompted by global reorganization can be countered: the fear that the national space--its culture, social relations, and even geography--is being undone by contemporary capitalism, even as the spatial turn in contemporary Marxist theory describes. ⁴² Cyberspace becomes the new U.S. frontier, accessible to the privileged insider who happens to be a reconfigured version of the American pulp hero.

Clearly, then, given the popularity of Gibson's fantasy, the information industry would be a crucial place for the corporate restructuring of American identity. And, indeed, corporate language, in the area of information technology, tends to superlatives. From the rhetoric of futurists like George Gilder to high tech corporations' insistence on annual "vision statements" from employees, the information economy has emerged as a sign of American dominance in the new geography that counts, "cyberspace." Time magazine, in a special edition entitled "Welcome to Cyberspace," proclaimed in 1995, "the Europeans recognize that the race is on and America is winning." ⁴³ The myth of [End Page 566] cyberspace thus helps to justify and contain American society throughout a harsh period of corporate restructuring, dismantled public services and safety nets, and growing societal inequality.

But the electronic era has also been celebrated as sponsoring the possibility of democratic global interactiveness, a new kind of transnationalism, and this, as much as Case's cyberlibertarianism, has been invoked in the Clinton-era reshapings of globalization as a national recovery narrative. If much corporate culture in and around the compuer industry positions itself in libertarian ideological terms, the blossoming of the knowledge economy has been an important site for neoliberal ideological activity--something interestingly clear from Robert Reich's book on the global economy, The Work of Nations. Indeed, Reich's essential argument can be seen as an ingenious respinning of Gibson's futurism, from the catastrophically libertarian to the neoliberal and globalist. Though the United States' international position and national coherence have been put at risk by the globalization of the economy, wise policy, Reich argues, can take us to a new position in which these desirable goals are reachieved for the benefit of all. Whereas trickle-down really means trickle-out, rebuilding the U.S. infrastructure and reorienting policy toward the creation of an export economy and encouragement of global investment will restore America to global centrality. One of the key strategies for doing this is to reshape the American worker: to turn as many as possible into knowledge workers, whom Reich calls "symbolic analysts." ⁴⁴ America's new identity as home of global symbolic analysts is thus a basis for national unity in a postnational world; simultaneously, it guarantees the best position possible in that world, by putting U.S. workers in the enviable position of adding the most value to the international economy. In short, Reich respins Case by making the knowledge worker in the global economy the new representative democratic American figure. While Gibson's version reflects the traumatic deterritorialization of the new global economy and the harsh landscape of U.S. corporate downsizing, Reich's optimism domesticates and Americanizes the new global economy as an exciting challenge and the basis for a restored community. Opposite visions agree in privileging traditionally American figures and values, but the postnational-neoliberal (at least for the time being) trumps the more traditional-libertarian.

If the information economy and information technologies have been important, the idea of information itself has been a still more potent [End Page 567] tool to conjure with ideologically. Again, the idea was articulated first in a libertarian version of traditional U.S. national ideology but was quickly appropriated for postnational neoliberalism. Stuart Brand and others have called for the freeing of information, a project that evokes (and elides) the enlightenment goal of freeing people. To free "information" means freeing it from books; from institutions; from copyright law (which is being renegotiated for the information age); from hierarchies and taxonomies (something celebrated by assertions that "information" cuts across disciplinary boundaries and distinctions between high and low culture, turning all into a quantity which is readily manipulated and measurable); and even from knowledge itself (something apparent in the way "information" waits, democratically, for its user to configure and activate it). ⁴⁵ Faiths of these sorts have inspired activists to use computers to seek an astonishing variety of goals, from ending poverty and community empowerment to drug rehab, by setting up computer networking and access. ⁴⁶ Though the Gingrich campaign threatened to corner the market opened up by this discourse, again much of this enthusiasm has been recaptured by Clinton's neoliberal agenda, which tops libertarian freeing of information with liberal incorporation of it, via the Internet, into the nation's public schools. ⁴⁷

Information can also be figured as democratic in another, still more fundamental way, making it available to both corporate and neoliberal projects. It holds out the vision that there is one universal common currency, found in the genome as in architectural design or literature. As Business Week put it in a special issue on "The Information Revolution," information is not only to be found in the pages of a book, but "scientists find it stored in our genes and in the lush complexity of the rain forest." ⁴⁸ If the monetary system that standardized the world on the dollar has vanished, controlling this new kind of currency, through both the computer and the genetic engineering industries, is perhaps more than compensatory. And if a new universalism of information opens up such corporate projects, it contributes also to neoliberal social ones. Turning all into information suggests possibilities for easy reconfigurability: reconfigurations of databases on computer screens happen at the push of a button. In the corporate world, such confidence is a mythic balm to the downsized worker, idealizing temporary freelance work and holding out the prospect of rapid, exciting self-reconfiguration according to the shifting needs and demands of the [End Page 568] complex web of postindustrial business. In the neoliberal-political sphere, such confidence in easy reconfigurability, coupled with the fairly complete adoption of social constructionism by radical and liberal cultural theory, suggests that national sociability and global-cosmopolitan skillfulness are both readily reachable goals: antagonisms are not rooted in bone, blood, or essentialist cultures, but the result of social construction. Reconfiguration for the new world order is therefore possible.

Nature

In picking "nature" as the last area in which to investigate the effects of globalization on U.S. culture, I am aware that I am choosing the one put in some ways most severely at risk by the forces of globalization. If globalization can be seen, at least partially, as supporting cultural progressivism by creating a postnational, cosmopolitan world, and if the information age can be figured as an occasion for virtually unrestrained globalist celebration, nature has been, for the most part, ignored by globalization theorists and globalization decried by environmentalists. ⁴⁹

In scientific discourse, the concept of the biosphere--the conceptualization of nature as a single global ecological system--reaches back, according to Daniel Botkin, at least as far as the 1940s and 1950s. ⁵⁰ But if the globalization of the ecosystem concept occurred then, it was followed, eventually, by a second change, one that occurred in sync with recent global reorganization and was, Donald Worster argues, very much related to it. ⁵¹ This turn comes when natural systems are no longer imaged as working (if left alone) towards the achievement of homeostasis. At this moment, nature (conceived as ecosystem) ceases to serve reassuringly either as a critical-normative model for human activity (an Arcadian norm against which human development and deviation can be criticized) or as a literal brake on runaway anthropocentrism (a standard ecologists environmentally-minded ecologists can use to limit growth and development). The change is significant, because, as Worster comments, nature/ecosystem as norm had great popular force in the environmental movement, embodied as it was in Aldo Leopold's notion of ecological community and the land ethic--an ethic that employed the language of national citizenship to depict man's proper relationship with nature. ⁵² The popular ecological [End Page 569] literature of the 1960s sought "to rescue human history from its self-destructive energies and bring it into conformity with the stabler history of nature" (423), and, on the first Earth Day (1970), the struggle seemed to be "between what was left of pristine nature, delicately balanced in Eugene Odum's beautifully rational ecosystems, and a human race bent on mindless, greedy destruction" (389). With James Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), the notion of co-evolution of earth's life forms into a globally homeostatic system took on mythic dimensions.

Worster's next comment signals the change. "Two decades [after the first Earth Day], however, ecology had lost any clear notion of what pristine meant" (389). In 1973, William Drury and Ian Nisbet began the transformation by challenging the view that change meant development toward homeostasis and cohesiveness of plant and animal communities; by 1990, Daniel Botkin argued that the "concept of a highly-structured, ordered, and regulated, steady-state ecological system" was "wrong at local and regional level." Instead, a new ecology highlighted disruptive disasters, perturbations caused by the "individualistic" activities of species, and nonequilibrium states, randomness, and instability as more fundamental than order in understanding nature.

Worster relates this change to appearance of an interest in chaos throughout the humanities, natural and social sciences (405). But he also cites Thomas Söderqvist's description of the new ecologists as "mathematically and theoretically sophisticated, sitting indoors calculating on computers, rather than traveling out in the wilds"; "they are," Söderqvist went on, "individualists . . . and the transition from ecosystem ecology to evolutionary ecology seems to reflect the generational transition from the politically conscious generation of the 1960s to the 'yuppie' generation of the 1980s" (413-14). Worster summarizes the situation tartly by commenting that, if the new ecologists "are not the mere reflection of capitalism and its ideology, they are nonetheless highly compatible with that force rearranging the earth. The newest ecology, with its emphasis on competition and disturbance, is congruent with what Fredric Jameson has called the "logic of late capitalism" (428). ⁵³

In relating this change in the assumptions of ecology to contemporary social developments, Worster has been, if anything, restrained. For the 1980s brought with them Ronald Reagan, James Watt, and a reshaped EPA; the result was a sudden new assault upon the environment [End Page 570] and the fact and logic of environmental protection. In the Reagan era, Watt labelled environmentalists as "anti-American" and argued that "we do not even have an energy crisis; we have a crisis in government management." With that, an assault was mounted on environmental laws, on regulatory rules, and on regulatory enforcement, and wildly inflammatory charges of anti-American subversiveness and unnatural values were levied against environmentalists and environmentalism alike. ⁵⁴

At the same time environmentalists were under attack locally, globally nature was faring even more poorly. Recently, the environmental community has been developing a green critique of globalization, particularly in response to treaties like NAFTA and GATT, which threaten to water down U.S. environmental controls and weaken national regulatory powers. Equally important, the process of economic globalization has been seen generally as environmentally destructive. Continued emphasis on growth in a global economy by a species that already monopolizes 40 percent of the earth's biomass for its own uses has been viewed with alarm; more specifically the competitive pressures on corporations to maximize profits by externalizing costs--not just social, but also environmental costs--has been decried. Failure to do so means the possibility of corporate takeover, as the notorious Pacific Lumber case indicated. ⁵⁵

Equally important--and more clearly postnational in emphasis--has been a different way in which globalization has been yoked to the environment: the elaboration of a new kind of environmental disaster-in-progress, the global environmental crisis. To be sure, concern over problems like resource depletion and increasing population as important (and potentially apocalyptic) global problems had been growing since the 1960s. ⁵⁶ But to these problems were soon added ones centered about the capacity of the earth as a whole, not just particular places on it, to absorb human wastes and toxins. This issue became publicly widely felt in response to incidents like Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez, the U.S. heatwave of 1988, and the Gulf War. ⁵⁷ It became clear that environmental problems crossed, without respecting, geopolitical boundaries. As Wolfgang Sachs argues, global ecology really appeared in the 1980s, as

politically it was only in the 1980s that acid rain, the ozone hole and the greenhouse effect drove home the message that industrial pollution affects [End Page 571] the entire globe across all borders. The planet revealed itself as the ultimate dumping ground. ⁵⁸

Coupled with these problems, global penetration proceeded so far that maintaining biodiversity became an issue of global-human concern.

Quickly the global environmental crisis became a highly visible issue worldwide. ⁵⁹ In the process, a second discourse of endangered foundations appeared in the United States. As noted above, the Reagan era attack on the environment has been couched in these terms: environmentalism threatened American traditions of freedom, liberty, and private property, even as it helped cause the U.S. slide from global dominance. However, as awareness of environmental degradation as a global problem grew, this discourse was trumped by another, a liberal-radical one that claimed far deeper foundations had been far more irreversibly violated. The stresses of the new global economy and the global environmental crisis revived and revised Rachel Carson's use of apocalyptic rhetoric for environmental problems. ⁶⁰ Bill McKibben's book The End of Nature does not go quite as far as the title suggests--physical nature continues; but something foundational does not, namely the idea of nature. By this McKibben means "a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place of it . . . our sense of nature as eternal and separate." ⁶¹ Nature's formerly unimaginable size--its unimaginable geologic time, and its sublime majesty--are casualties of an age that can modify and poison it so easily; toxicity and pollution are no longer local problems, but are global, penetrating and originating simultaneously from everywhere. The result is a situation worse than what Rachel Carson found: "as pervasive a problem as DDT was, and is, one could, and can, always imagine that somewhere a place existed free of its limit" (55). In the present crisis, the nature that had been celebrated by the entire U.S. wilderness tradition was dead.

Equally apocalyptic is Ulrich Beck's notion of the risk society, an analysis of the sociological effects of living in the shadow of global environmental catastrophe. ⁶² It, like McKibben's popular vision, is based on a "realist" view of the end of nature, one focused on actual changes to the earth's physical environment and the cultural effects these changes produce. Along with this "realist" death of nature, nature has been dying over the last decade or so in a variety of other ways; of late, green cultural critics have described and decried the death of nature in literary and cultural theory, a development there is only space to note, not investigate, here. ⁶³ [End Page 572]

In McKibben's realist discourse, a number of crucial foundations are undermined. Nature's size, grandeur, and majesty and, more fundamentally, its radical otherness are gone, and nature's freshness and pristine quality is lost. Origins are lost as (contra Thoreau) "God himself" no longer "culminates in the present moment" (72), and reality itself vanishes into simulations like astroturf and genetic engineering, which McKibben refers to as the second death of nature (151). In the wake of these disasters, no space exists any longer apart from human politics, for "politics--our particular way of life, our ideas about how we should live--now blows its smoke over every inch of the globe" (60) and "we sit astride the world like some military dictator, some smelly Papa Doc" (86). Many of these terms--such as the disappearance of the authentic and the invasion of treasured enclaves by politics--echo the laments for lost foundations we examined above. In the apocalyptic discourse of nature, the forces that open what now seem to have been fragile enclaves, not enduring foundations, are the global economy's hyperdevelopment and penetration, on the one hand, and its toxic poisons on the other.

McKibben's book strikes some defining notes for the new apocalyptic sensibility. First, Rachel's Carson's fable for tomorrow is an event of the past: the apocalypse has already happened. Second, it is a global, not localized devastation. Third, though our survival beyond it may seem most like a Beckettian endgame, operating according to Beckett's logic of scarcity, more often than not it involves the opposite, encoding, behind both sleek postmodern simulation and not so sleek postmodern consumerist potlach, a sense of catastrophe based upon the perception of multiplying, already out-of-control problems, ranging from uncontrollable pollution to the proliferation of simulations and false realities.

What makes this revival of environmental apocalypse so powerful is that it terminates, more thoroughly than Carson did, the traditions of American wilderness and rural pastoral. Thus, McKibben's nature has its roots in Thoreau and Muir; Don DeLillo's portrayal of postmodern environmental catastrophe in White Noise occurs in a typical American small town, the sort evoked by Carson and long the repository of American virtue and sentiment. These are not just casual losses, but traditions important to American nationalism since the eighteenth century. The force of such loss is expressed in McKibben's comparison of polluting America with a smelly Papa Doc. The U.S. thus evoked is one that, having stripped itself of the wilderness mentality, has fallen [End Page 573] immediately into "Third World" status, not from lack of power, but from having fouled its own nest and having become environmentally tyrannical on a global scale.

Attempts to reclaim American nature against these pressures--to make nature, like technology and culture, over into a site for the construction of a recovery narrative--have been difficult and compromised at best. Even though the Clinton-Gore administration did make environmentalism, like multiculturalism, one of their chief issues, and even though they did this (as I shall note in the following) by reconfiguring both issues in a new global context, few would even begin to say of recent controversies surrounding the environment what many have of disputes about multiculturalism and common culture: that the "war" has been won. Despite Gore's vice-presidency and Clinton's attempts to position himself as environmentally friendly, Clinton's record of compromise has prompted an activist like David Brower to claim that "President Clinton has done more to harm the environment and to weaken environmental regulations in three years than Presidents Bush and Reagan did in twelve" and, very recently, a number of environmentalists have threatened Gore with the withdrawal of their support. ⁶⁴ An essential part of this disillusionment--and the formulation of a discourse of endangered foundations on the environmentalist left--comes from the fact that, while conservatives' loss of the culture war could open in fact interesting vistas for corporate America and for global capitalism, the environment, however, was another issue altogether. A victory for the environment more clearly represented a loss for global capitalism.

But this is not to say that redefining nature and environmentalism in America for a new, global era--and attempting in the process to respin environmental crisis into recovery narrative--has not been vigorously pursued by corporations, by government, and by official environmentalisms. It has; but its achievements remain partial and deeply ambiguous. Corporations have vigorously adopted "greenspeak" marketing campaigns. In a sense, the concept of "sustainable development" is part of a search to reconcile corporate growth with environmentalism. Indeed, the Rio conference as a whole has been described, acerbically, by Wolfgang Sachs as an attempt to relegitimize those who created the environmental crisis in the first place (national political elites and TNCs) and to unleash a new era of inequitable "develop [End Page 574] ment" worldwide, compromising environmentalist NGOs by drawing them into the process. ⁶⁵

Respinning the global environmental crisis has occurred in a wide variety of places. Advertising and marketing have been important. Consumerism has greened. Paradoxically combining American anxieties about the global environment with American consumerism, for example, rainforest concerns have been identified with products:

The Rainforest Products wagon (purveyor of rattles, whistles, seed and feather ornaments . . . ) does a brisk business in southern California shopping malls, while Rainforest Crunch has found a niche in numerous specialty shops and upscale supermarkets. ⁶⁶

More blatantly, the Nature Company chain store has combined profits on luxury consumer goods with contributions to environmental causes, spawning a host of competitors ("the Natural Selection, the Ecology House, Nature's Own Imagination, and . . . Natural Wonders"). ⁶⁷ Behind such specific endeavors lies the much larger practice of corporate "greenwashing," as companies have not only infiltrated environmental organizations, but spent upwards of a billion dollars a year in public relations projects concerning the environment.

Yet another corporate-led strategy has been technophiliac and has appealed to the futurist-millennialist features of the new global economy to garner support for contemporary environmental disregard. Despite evidence that "post-industrial" Silicon Valley industries are as polluting as many "industrial era" concerns, corporations producing the new technologies have made the argument, in more or less millennialist terms, that "technology is being etherialized, transformed into what the cultural critic Donna Haraway calls "machines made of sunshine . . . nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves." ⁶⁸ Visionary nanotechnology has been evoked to reinforce these claims; also, post-scarcity economics, in the work of figures like Paul Romer and the controversial, and controversy-loving, Julian Simon. Finally, gene banking and biotech have emerged as corporate projects that, in part, respond to anxieties about biodiversity. All of these, pushed to a limit, envision an artificial new world, one made by man, and they have been accompanied by antifoundational, anti-environmentalist tracts like Martin Lewis's Green Delusions, which advocates decoupling from the natural world, to Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, which celebrates the stunning possibilities [End Page 575] opened up by technology-led neoevolutionary transformation of both nature and humanity. ⁶⁹

Yet another attempt to respin the harshness of contemporary globalization involves the call--by corporations, politicians, and some environmentalists--to incorporate nature and the environment into the market in a variety of ways. Rather than being seen as an enclave endangered by global capitalist penetration, nature thus refigured would become a part of, not antagonist to, global capitalism--part of its supposedly progressive, enclave-eliminating, interactive system. Thus, the regulation of polluters is being altered to the selling and trading of pollution credits, something that supposedly removes the government's heavy hand from environmental regulation and brings free-market efficiencies to bear on the problem. When the Bush administration instituted the idea of selling pollution credits, Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway registered the idea's assault on foundational values by asking if "they someday would be selling cancer bonds on the New York Stock Exchange." ⁷⁰ The formulation of ecological economics and the attempt to put nature on corporate, national, and international balance sheets is a more oppositional and interesting move in this same philosophical direction.

Perhaps the most optimistic--and enthusiastically nationalist--respinning of the global environmental crisis was Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance. After a detailed and convincing description of the global environmental crisis--a description that must have taken political courage to write--Gore turned to outlining his Marshall Plan for the environment. Some of the ideas advanced under this plan, and much of the rhetoric surrounding them, played a visible part in Clinton's first campaign. As Gore's book made clear, the environmental crisis was the world's major post-cold war challenge; the U. S., therefore, should play a leadership role in this as it had, according to Gore, in bringing about the fall of Communism and the triumph of the principles of democracy. One of the means for doing this was for the United States to become world leader in developing environmentally appropriate technologies--and to compete thereby with a Japan that has "in almost every area of technology relevant to the environmental crisis . . . boldly tak[en] the lead." ⁷¹ Global environmental problems could thus provide the site for regaining global economic and political leadership, for both repairing the nation's economic slippage vis a vis Japan and restoring America (more effectively than winning a Gulf war ever could) to its position as [End Page 576] a light to all nations in a much more cooperative, much more transnationalized world. Visions of eco-entrepreneurialism on a global scale had particular force in the wake of Rio, as the notion of sustainable development advocated there called for Northern development and sales (aided by World Bank requirements and managed by Northern ecocrats) of environmental technologies to the South.

What McKibben and Worster lamented the loss of has become, in all of these respinnings of global ecology and the global environmental crisis, the very basis for positive action and an attempted recovery narrative. If for McKibben the end of nature as an "other" to man was a tragic loss and, if for Worster, the loss of the notion of ecosystem equilibrium as normative was a severe blow to environmentalism, for corporate greenwashers, for third wave technophiles, and for eco-entrepreneurs, the loss of one or both of these foundations is the basis for new hopes and policies, and the advocacy of many of these positions involves the vision of the resurrection of American leadership in an increasingly both societally and environmentally globalized world. ⁷²

Conclusion

In the above, I have been arguing that a wide variety of efforts, in the corporate arena, in neoliberal politics, and also in civil society have, however contradictorily and fragilely, reconstituted U.S. culture within the disorganizing forces of current globalization. In the varied discourses (of culture, technology, and nature) I have examined, the shock of globalization was first registered in a conventional kind of nationalist response, one that responded to globalization as a threat to American traditions internally and American dominance globally. Globalization thus produced a variety of different anxieties about lost foundations, ones that sponsored foundationalist/fundamentalist laments and contentious disputes in many sites and on many sides of the political spectrum. Remedies remained traditionally nationalist, as internal subversives and external enemies were targeted as responsible for national malaise. Quickly, however, many of these controversies were reframed by being set in a "global" context, as a powerful U.S. discourse centering on the "global" and the "global economy" was created. In the process, many contentious issues were respun by being knit into a larger, more globally-aware national recovery narrative. [End Page 577] Thus, in both popular and academic-theoretical ways, globalization has been advocated both as a project empowering U.S. culture externally (via global cosmopolitans, symbolic analysts, and eco-entrepreneurs/ecocrats) and as a means to recreate unity internally (via multiculturalism, information democracy, and a supposed new fusion of capitalism and environmentalism). Such strategies have virtually taken the place of attempts to continue an internal narrative of national character and development. National culture has reworked itself, in short, to adapt to postnational circumstances.

Perhaps the United States has been more successful in this respect than some of its competitors. After Clinton's reelection, Roger Cohen described an America currently confident about its embrace of globalization, and he pointed to the limited support for Buchanan, Perot, or Dole, when they complain about cultural disunity, the export economy, and or such issues as the surrender of power to the United Nations. Instead, Cohen claims that "America's more open, flexible society copes more easily with the rapid flux of an increasingly frontierless world." ⁷³ How radically different this statement is from ones made just a short time ago about America's loss of competitiveness vis a vis Japan (thanks to U.S. multiculturalism, dumbing down, and uncoordinated, greedy entrepreneurialism) should make one trust current confidence no more than the stock market.

Given this fragility, globalization remains, just under the surface, a threat to reconstituting "normalcy." It threatens to dissolve borders and even the most reterritorialized of normalcies into grotesqueness and heterogeneity, as several essays, recently published in Harper's Magazine make clear. In these, a nauseatingly decentered global interactiveness is featured as lurking behind each product and activity in the local world Americans inhabit; the articles are part of the new discourse of global transparency that has accompanied the development of the global economy--and which, at the beginning, in such works as Pico Iyer's celebration of cultural syncretism in Southeast Asia or Kenichi Ohmae's celebration of the "borderless world" of the contemporary economy, were upbeat and even utopian. ⁷⁴ But now the tendency is rather toward catastrophism. Barry Lopez committed himself to being "the rare consumer who has any sense of what [his] inclinations require of the world around him" and dedicated himself to spending forty flights, or 110,000 nautical miles in one or another of the fleet of over [End Page 578] 1000 cargo planes (expected to rise to 2080 by 2014), now continuously aloft, circulating the world with their cargoes of goods. ⁷⁵ Beginning in catastrophe--a crash outside of Anchorage, in which the cargo of "white-faced Herefords [were] flung in heaps through the thick, snowy woods, their bone-punctured bodies, dimly lit by kerosene fires, steaming in the chill air" (39)--and proceeding through a mixture of tedium and fear ("pilots describe the job as 'hours of boredom punctured by minutes of terror'" [52]), Lopez journeys past the point where reality nauseatingly disappears, effectively revealing an earth in crisis. Lopez's essay is filled with lists of cargoes, constantly whirled about the earth at great expense and with considerable consumption of the earth's resources. The heterogeneity of these cargoes is not celebratory but at first funny, then grotesque: "drill pipe, pistol targets, frozen ostrich meat, lace teddies, dog food, digital tape machines, pythons, and ball caps" (40) or, more peculiarly, "a yacht headed for an America's Cup race [and] a tropical-hardwood bowling alley from Bangkok" (45). Also, place, time, and geography disappear: the planes fly over a surreal earth, looking down on "rocket fire and streams of tracer ammunition" from vicious local conflicts around the globe, even as they "take it all in: rockets flaming across the streets below, the silent moon, rain falling in the Indus Valley from a ceiling of cloud, above which the black vault of the sky glittered with stars" (45). And all is headed nowhere in this postmodern, postenlightenment, unsustainable nightmare: thinking of the "penguins two decks below, standing up on their toes and slamming flippers that once were wings against the walls of their pens," Lopez feels "the familiar, impetuous hurtling toward a void, a space to be filled only briefly, then to yawn again, hopeful and acquisitive" (54).

A more savagely Swiftian version of the nauseating dissolve Lopez experiences while tracking products is what Ted Fishman encounters in tracking his mutual fund retirement investments. Fishman traces his money back to "thirteen-year-old Honduran girls working twenty-four hour days," the potential deforestation of 8.6 million acres in the Amazon, and shipping company practices that cause stowaways to be thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean to avoid fines for unregistered passengers. ⁷⁶ In the process, Fishman shows that Noam Chomsky's exposés of the injustices involved in global economic "interdependence"--Haitan women hand-dipping American baseball [End Page 579] bats in vats of toxic chemicals--have emerged from the status of a minority discourse within anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism to mainstream satirical performance for a self-consciously globalized audience. ⁷⁷

The fragility of the present reconstitution of nationalism in a postnational form makes it highly difficult to predict the future. Another rapid shift in global hegemony or a significant global financial crisis could altogether undo the "postnational" refiguring of nationalism outlined above. Nonetheless, the present situation suggests a number of lessons for both critical perspectives on and cultural politics in today's circumstances.

The most important general points that underlie the argument of this essay are, first, that we can no longer talk about globalization simplistically in temporal terms as a sweeping transformation (whether toward utopian or dystopian ends) and, second, that we can no longer picture it in analytic terms as a single, uncontradictory, and/or internally coherent process. Globalization as a process has become globalization as discourse, and any attempt to reify it must been viewed with great suspicion. Rather than, as so many liked to do in writing about multiculturalism and postmodernism, condemning or celebrating it wholesale as if it were (1) transformative, (2) singular, (3) coherent, and (4) agreed upon, we need, in order to begin the conversation, ask just what sort of globalization is being referred to and who is doing the speaking.

That the first of these objectives--declining to see globalization as inherently transformative--is important is clear not just from the number of people who write as if globalization meant (usually a single kind of) radical change, but also from the number impelled to counter this discourse by maintaining that nothing essentially has changed. The kleig lights of these two extremes blind us to a much more jagged landscape, and they both tend to make the process seem much more inevitable and fatally teleological than it is. A more sensible perspective is to see globalization, in temporal terms, as a highly sedimentary process. Neither does globalization make nationalism go away, nor has it accomplished nothing in the way of altering national cultures and societies. For cultural, cyber, and environmental activists, therefore, it would be a terrible mistake to, on the one hand, "move beyond" forms of critique and advocacy based on ideas of national community and possibilities of change within a national frame, just as, on the other hand, it would be folly to act as if nothing has changed. ⁷⁸

Thus, to comment on two of the three discourses discussed above, [End Page 580] cultural activists must remain alert to the ways in which globalization has worked and not worked for them, and cultivate double-sided strategies for taking advantage of the new bipolar global-national field. It would be folly not to continue to expose the obscuring of difference in the present and the erasure of it in the past and to ignore current attempts to coopt and water down multiculturalism. On the other hand, I would argue that it is also important to not simply reject out of hand the new multiculturalism, but to take advantage of it. Not only does it open up the prospect of rainbow coalitions of both the mainstream sort Jesse Jackson advocated and the minority-oppositional sort Gloria Anzaldúa has called for, but it also suggests that pitched terminological battles on the left are less interesting than a flexible use of multiple positions. Thus, for example, a range of conflicting, theory-laden terms--from national terms like common culture (which, after all, has been appropriated for radical postnationalism by Anzaldúa) to more postnational/global ones like hybridity, heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism, migratory fluidity, exile, and diaspora--can be used in a variety of different ways quite fruitfully to advance the awareness, acceptance, and institutionalization of cultural difference in the United States. ⁷⁹ A term that is weak in one context/discourse may be strong in another. Similarly, one can rejoice rather than lament that, for the time being, official U.S. identity has been thus far refigured and that many educational curricula have been revised. One can see these developments as gains to be built on, as one works to spread multiculturalism beyond the national frame and beyond the academy into the specific legislative disputes, noted above, where battles now rage. Now that the right has thrown itself into (not, of course, for the first time) victimology and remodeled itself in imitation of ethnic activism, the left needs to do all it can with multiculturalism's new claims on U.S. national identity. ⁸⁰

The same sort of logic is important for the environmental community as well. On the one hand it would be senseless to abandon the old wilderness preservationist (pre-death of nature) activisms and the imagery that they have propagated, imagery which has made at least lip-service support of environmentalist goals still a majority attitude. On the other hand, it would be folly to deny that we are entering an era of postnature and that a variety of new environmentalisms (global apocalypticism, forms of social ecology, ecological economics, eco-entrepreneurialism, etc.) are necessary to philosophically and practically meet these challenges. [End Page 581]

If refusing to depict globalization temporally as transformative is important, it is equally important to refuse to reify globalization as a singular, coherent, and uncontradictory process. The most common failing in this respect comes, I believe, from those who would identify globalization solely or essentially as capitalist transnationalization. For them, corporate transnationalization is the new enemy and, adopting the old environmentalist slogan, "think globally, act locally," they argue that the meaningful realm of activism now is local. As gratifying as this may be to one's feeling of powerlessness in a reorganized world of sharply increased disparities in wealth and as gratifying as it may be to one's need for a palpable and thoroughly othered enemy, it really enshrines an increased sense of futility. David has shrunk, and Goliath gotten much bigger. Though hopeful recourse has been made to chaos theory (who knows, like the butterfly effect, local activism might perk up through the system into a big storm), chaos is a pretty weak basis for believing in agency. More reasonable to me is to catch up with environmentalism, which has now added the reverse of its old slogan ("Think Locally, Act Globally") to its rallying cry and to cultivate transnational alliances wherever possible. This is an approach which has accomplished much and promises more in such areas as the international feminist movement, the indigenous peoples movement, the environmental movement (the NGO's were players at Rio), and (perhaps least explored so far) the labor movement. Such transnationalization, it is important to emphasize, does not just mean attacking "global" problems. A local consumer boycott means much less to people in specific localities in this day and age than an international one does, and transnationalized opposition of a variety of kinds has great force in national arenas.

In the analysis above, I attempted to honor the contradictory, uneven, multiple and messy quality of contemporary globalization in another way as well. In choosing to analyze globalization in a discourse specific way, I committed myself to an approach theoretically and practically opposed to reification. A discourse specific approach requires fine-grained analyses of the interactions between the new wave of global reorganization and existing national traditions and institutions (which, of course are, in this angle of vision, themselves the fruit of older waves of global-local interactions). Analyses on this level of resolution reveal conflicts between interested parties and positions often obscured in a more global-systemic view. Further, since cultural [End Page 582] discourses are situated in specific cultural and social locations, what a discourse-specific approach makes clear is that what it finds out about one geocultural locality will not be what is found in another. Thus, for example, I have elsewhere described a Japanese postnational nationalism that is very different from the current American version, and I would gladly speculate that a whole ecology of postnational nationalisms exists to be explored. ⁸¹ And finally, emphasizing the discourse specific nature of globalization shows that the interests involved in one discursive context are often quite different from, and sometimes in conflict with, the interests involved in another. Thus, a kind of globalization that looks progressive from one situation may be alarming from another.

With the development of postnational nationalism, globalization has become itself a discourse and an important ideological activity. Identifying globalization's very varied discursive uses and resisting the temptation to simplifyingly reify what is clearly an uneven and even conflicting collection of processes are crucial steps toward understanding and negotiating the new geographies in which we live.