Contesting Globalisation: Space and Place in the World Economy

Citation

Openshaw, A. (2006), "Contesting Globalisation: Space and Place in the World Economy", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 356-358. https://doi.org/10.1108/17422040610706677

Contesting Globalisation aims to re‐articulate our conception of resistance discourse by emphasising the need for greater empirical study into the places and experiences of global struggle. Andre Drainville, a Professor of International Relations at Laval University in Canada, envisions the world economy as a city where struggles are “situated” and “de‐contextualised”, yet they are frequently misinterpreted by an over indulgence of cosmopolitan ideology that favours “general pronouncements” (149) leading to “false debates” (159). In an attempt to bridge a neglected gap between poststructural thought and traditional International Political Economy (IPE), Drainville introduces the legacies of the Internationale Situationiste movement to highlight how the civic ordering of global society is both “spectacular” and strategically “gridded” to guide the flows and networks of popular dissidence into a false sense of meaning. In reality the dissenting subjects appear simply as immaterial “ghosts” “directed efficiently, purposefully, with minimum leakage and vagrancy” (138). Yet Drainville offers a radical departure from dominant resistance discourses by placing the city at the heart of political engagement and emphasising the potential of Situationist ideas such as “derive” and “detrournement” to re‐focus our gaze onto the real organisational intricacies of power and rebellion.

It is in the opening chapters where the significance of Drainville's work to the disciplines of politics and critical theory becomes immediately clear. He quickly dispenses with what he calls the “cosmopolitan certainties” (9) of contemporary global theories, indicating their inadequacy in explaining the tangible effects of contested global struggle and through an analysis of the urbane imagery and strategies employed by the Internationale Situationistes, calls for those engaged in global resistance studies to “shatter their alienating identification with shadowy heroes and false images” (37) associated with the literature and begin to centre their investigations around the actual experiences of organised dissent. It is from here that he begins to rebuild our perceptions of organisation by pointing to the lessons learned during the 1889 London Dockworkers' Strike, and the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. These events marked occasions of placed political engagement where common organisation did at once liberate local communities from civic ordering but in a moment became neutralised by the logic of systemic control. Just as the Dockworkers sauntered through the city organising “gatherings” and “movements”, gaining support and being linked with “broader conditions of the people” (45), the protesters in Quebec utilised the fevered carnivalesque aesthetics indicative of anti‐globalisation protests to unite the competing factions of global social movements.

Yet, compromise and order agreed outside of the places of struggle, led to the end of the Dockers “open space” challenges and a new regime of casual work far removed from aspirations of self organisation. This, Drainville argues, was the beginning of the “deradicalisation of London's working class” (158). Similarly in Quebec, creativity was soon quashed by union officials, working with the authorities, to “steer members away from those who organised the carnival anti‐capitaliste” (150). A year later, a commemorative march seemed more like a “sad parade” (162) as it followed agreed routes through the city. Drainville's point is simple, “severance of place can be said to define governances mode of relation to the world economy” (137), as it both alienates places of struggle and allocates areas of compromise. However other modes, “products of specific historical circumstances” (11), exist within the world economy that need our attention, such as those “outside of the spectacle of purposeful and circumscribed events” (159. They are “part of the conditions under which histories are made” (11) yet remain alienated by the spectacular representations and associations of popular social dissidence.

Readers of Critical Perspectives on International Business and scholars of IPE will find chapter four particularly useful for a top down assessment of how place and space is claimed and controlled. Drainville's history of the ordering of global social relations sees the rise of civil society as a process of both subsuming opinion, whilst alienating the influence of key actors and NGO's from policy decisions. Neo‐liberal restructuring has been a “revolution of solutions” (136) grounded on the principles of private investment and forged into regional zones of “popular coalitions” (117). This has made it easy, it is argued, for coercive debt collecting among other familiar traits, which have been hidden by the “Spectacle of humanity” (138) in gestures such as the 1992 Earth Pledge. Furthermore, city level governance has seen a perceived increase in the participation of democracy and debate, yet the bio‐power exercised through risk management, disease control and anti‐terrorism measures allows the hidden political infrastructure to be installed “free of irritants and resistance” (136), and cities to become “ancillary sites” (135) in the world economy. Again Drainville channels Debord when he speaks of the “separation between quotidian life and its spectacular representation” (136).

It is clear that Drainville's thesis is a key step towards highlighting the need for a better understanding of the relationships between modes of resistance and the world economy, whilst urging a poststructural analysis of IPE. However, he neglects in his diegesis, what can be understood as the key constitutive problem in today's knowledge society. The labour force in advanced industrial societies, having being detached from physical places and now existing as a mental category, is the vanguard of the deterritorialized subject. Although Drainville recognises this “new political subject” (103) to be at the heart of the contests over control of space and place, he doesn't expose an equally significant development. The valorisation of the collaboration of subjective minds in creative industries is intrinsic to the new political economy. Claiming the proletariat is an “absentee subject” (103) ignores the plethora of empirical study into the new cognitariat and the ways in which it can disrupt the controlling mechanisms of the traditional labour/capital dynamic. Yet Drainville's tools of engagement can be coveted for this cause. The drive, understood as the “critical movements against the gridding process” (148), needs to be identified within new industries, whilst detournement can help us to articulate “deliberate” practises to uncover the exploitation of human creativity.

Drainville has, in a unique style, emphasised how we should engage with “modes of relation to the world economy”. Concrete translational negotiation and intricate empirical investigation are important if we are to escape the alienating spectacle of post‐modernity. Only through a radical re‐articulation of place and experience can we begin to build coherent “general concept of struggle” (151).