To Have Done With Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies

According to Lyotard, the criterion of technical efficiency or "performativity" provides the only broadly applicable framework for grasping historical change, and it is indifferent to questions of direction, qualitative value or goal. [...]while magic realism is one tremendously important form of what we might call "international postmodernism," it does not constitute a literature of globalization. [...]analysts who equate globalization with the impending triumph of so-called "American" economic and cultural forms like the free market and republican democracy over one-party planned economies on the one hand and pre-capitalist aristocracies of caste or sect on the other appear to fall naturally into two camps: those who favor such globalization, like its primary beneficiaries, the multinational corporations along with their stockholders and representatives, and those who implacably oppose such globalization, like the protectionist, separatist and nativist groups that can be found in significant numbers in almost every nation today. [...]in both the mass media and scholarly publications we often see an apparently monolithic opposition between corporate globalization and protectionist anti-globalization, conceived as mirror-image world-historical forces in contention for the future of humanity. [...]the economic ceases to be a narrowly defined category: the establishment of global market mechanisms for fine art, pollution credits, insurance risk, adoptive children, affect and other contemporary (material and/or immaterial) objects of exchange demonstrates this clearly.