Because human beings are made up of both a body and a language, we all live a tension between the local and the universal, and one, moreover, which if psychoanalysis is to be credited we can never completely resolve. For the body will never be entirely at home in language, but will instead be scarred and fissured by it, as the cranking up of our needs to the level of linguistic demand and desire opens up that way of being forever extrinsic to ourselves which we know as the unconscious. Our creatureliness is somewhat at odds with our conceptuality. Language is one of the ways in which our bodies transcend themselves, along with labour and sexuality, but therefore one of the ways in which we can overreach and undo ourselves, as amphibious animals trapped between angel and beast, inhabiting simultaneously the realm of the sensuously somatic and that kingdom of universality which language opens up for us. It's these twin domains which Hegel thought he had finally reconciled in the Idea, and it was a nice try, but looking round at postmodern immediacy on the one hand and multinational capitalism on the other it seems somehow not to have come off. More to the point, perhaps, look at the conflict in Hegel's own epoch between the culturalist Burke and the rationalist Paine - at the illusion that we are no more than our local prejudices and the chimera that we can definitively transcend them. It's a battle now being refought on the terrain of contemporary theory between the pragmatists and the Habermasians.

The problem of interrelating culture and politics is that culture seems to be local whereas politics appears to be universal. The former is a matter of the way we live the world on our bodies, the latter a question of that abstract extension of our bodies which we call society. Of course there are local politics and cosmopolitan cultures, so the distinction is dodgy from the outset; and if power, as Foucault reminds us, is a question of bodies, then culture is just as much a matter of discourse. One might claim that the mediation between the two is called ideology, which ratifies an abstract power-structure but does so by bringing it home to lived experience, transmuting it into 'culture'. And it isn't at all clear where an institution like the family, or sexuality in general, fits into some clean division between cultural form and political institution. This wasn't, however, the way it seemed to the radical Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment, culture, in the sense of stubbornly local allegiances, particularist prejudices, provincial and partisan commitments, was really the enemy of politics, that which prevented us from becoming citizens of the world. It's hard for a rampantly culturalist age like our own to think ourselves back into this extraordinary moment when all our own buzz-terms - culture, history, bodiliness, particularity - were dark and demonised, the enemy of a civilised and progressive politics. The brave, doomed dream of the anti-culturalist Enlightenment is to reinvent the kind of solidarity we had once supposedly experienced in culture at the level of universal Reason, to persuade us to invest in the political with all the psychic intensity we had imagined was reserved for the local, the cultural, the sensuously specific. This was a noble, liberating, utterly unreal vision, unreal because virulently anti-somatic and anti-materialist, cavalierly by-passing all those vital aspects of our 'species being' as the early Marx has it, which we share in common with stoats and badgers It seemed that we could cease to be subjects of power, in the pejorative sense, only by ceasing to be subjects in the psychical sense at all. We were invited to become citizens of the world, but the price we had to pay was to stop being ourselves. Regionality was crushed beneath rationality - or at least it would have been, had it not been for that wonderfully convenient 19th century invention, the nation-state.

The point of the hyphen in 'nation-state' is to fuse culture and politics, to create an identity between the life-forms of a specific people and the structures of political power. What distinguishes nationalism originally isn't a claim to sovereignty over a specific bit of territory - a claim familiar enough to Renaissance princes - but the sovereignty of a particular people, who happen to be territorially located; what distinguishes the territorial claims of nationalism, in other words, is a form of republicanism, the wedding of people and state, the insertion of the one into the other with all the tighty bonded unity of signifier and signified. This, of course, was only ever an approximate equation, as indeed is the case with the signifier: hardly any nation-states have actually clung to the contours of some distinct ethnicity, and one reason why post-colonial states have tended to preserve the national boundaries bequeathed to them by their colonisers is because ethnic mayhem might otherwiseensue, as indeed it is doing as I write. Another problem is class: the nation-state can't really represent a divided people, can't figure forth contradiction in its formal structures, so that as its bourgeois architects find themselves eventually confronted by the proletariat its consensuality will begin to crumble. But the nation-state was also a device for reconciling regionality with universal reason, since it was the place where a potentially international community of free, equal citizens could be locally instantiated. It was the patria which 'interpellated' you as a French revolutionary subject, but interpellated you as the locus of a more global freedom and reason. The problem lay in preserving the delicate equipoise between local and universal, or if you like between culture and politics. Political nationalism sometimes found it convenient to summon a cultural nationalism to its aid, but was also in danger of being ousted by it. For the more the universal-rational form of the nation-state underpins its power by drawing on local cultural resources, the more this cultural particularism threatens to undermine the forms of universal reason. Think, in Irish terms, of the conflict between the anti-culturalist O'Connell and the culturalist Young Irelanders, or between Parnell and Arthur Griffith. Culture is the medium of political authority but also its potential antithesis and undoing; indeed just as in the 19th century culture in its narrower sense - the arts, basically - becomes constituted as anti-political, the spiritual opposite of all that dreary institutional stuff, so culture in the broader anthropological sense relevant to cultural nationalism becomes a kind of alternative to institutional politics. The anti-political animus of Irish cultural nationalism is very striking, to the point where 'cultural nationalism' begins to sound more and more like an oxymoron. 'State' and 'nation' seem to move at ontologically different levels and to resist any easy hyphenation. The state presents itself as the political locus of the national culture, its organic outcropping, as it were, in the political realm; but though this way of putting it makes the national culture seem prior to the state, the reality is that the state, or the state-in-waiting, largely brings that national culture into being, organising it for particular political ends. It is, in truth, politics which constitutes culture, but - in cultural nationalism - in a way which seems to invert the relationship between them. And it isn't of course hard to believe that the way we speak and sing and dress is somehow more immediate, and so more fundamental, than who we vote on to the transport committee. There is, then, a conflict from the outset betweern cultural and political nationalism - the former more particularist and introspective but, precisely because of this, sometimes more militantly separatist and anti-colonialist (in Ireland, Davis, O'Leary, Pearse); the latter more cosmopolitan and 'rational' but precisely because of that more akin to the institutional forms of the colonising nation and so more politically compromised (In Ireland, O'Connell, Parnell). But it can work the other way round too, since cultural nationalism's displacement of the political may lead it to be less politically-minded or politically militant (Yeats), whereas the internationalism of a more 'enlightened' political nationalism (Tone, Connolly) may side-step this culturalist displacement for a more direct political confrontation.

If modernity dreamt of fusing culture and politics, or more radically of the latter eradicating all vestiges of the former, what gave the lie to this vision was modernism. For modernism is among other things the site of an immense disturbance of the relations between particular and universal, a sort of seismic upheaveal in which local and universal, supposedly wedded in the Romantic symbol, fly apart and force each other into grisly caricatures of themselves. A remorseless abstraction and rationalisation of reality now sits cheek-by-jowl with a kind of vivily irrationalist immediacy, and one name for this (mis)coupling is Joyce's Ulysses. The universal forms of mythology, and a naturalist tale of myopic particularism, now intersect only in irony. Modernism is at once the age of deep archetypal structures which now seem to have taken on an autonomous life of their own, and the tumultuous return of the sensuously repressed, as the 'primitive' and concrete and sensuous and ineffable rise up to do battle with a reified reason. And none of this is really intelligible outside the context of imperialism and monopoly capitalism, of a world in which the truth of the particular, the regional, the national, now seems to lie in an increasingly cosmopolitan structure which is always elsewhere. It is not that these specificities have vanished, just that (like modernist time and place) they seem increasingly fortuitous and interchangable, governed as they are by a structure which transcends them and is no longer uniquely instantiated by them. As with Saussure, whose work belongs to this period, the general linguistic structure gives rise to specific utterances which are arbitrary and untheorisable, and cannot itself be palpably present in its particular instances. The world is still nation-centred, and with the rise of fascism will become pathologically so; but that gross inflation of the particular which is national socialism or the imperial nation-state is caught up, as in modernist art, with a network of increasingly global operations. The cult of the concrete, whether as national Zeitgeist or a style of painting, is among other things a protest against universal reification, but one which is in strange collusion with it. Modernism and monopoly capitalism are at once cosmopolitan and particularist, transcending specific cultures yet raiding them for its own purposes, whether as economic or cultural capital. If the cosmopolitanism of the modernists is a subversive strike against still-powerful, claustrophobic national identities, their fascination with the concrete, the fragment, the deviant, the inarticulable, is a protest against the levelling, homogenising global system which is now increasingly emerging, in which anywhere can be everywhere and modern-day Dublin merges smoothly into ancient Greece. Modernism thus cuts above and below the nation-state at a stroke, spurning its parochialism for the great cosmopolitan centres while reaching deep into the dimensions of folklore, mythology, the popular and the regional. The Eliot who airily permutates London, Geneva and Vienna is the same Eliot who is fascinated by music hall, folk dancing and Derby day. It is as though the hyphen leashing 'nation' to 'state', or culture to politics, is now palpably slackening : modernism skilfully exploits the resources of national cultures, but if it can permutate so many so indifferently it is partly because of an increasingly international political and economic order, to which the modernists as rootless cosmopolitans belong, which is in the process of transcending the political state. National cultures are, so to speak, released from their political proprietors and circulated on the global market, or in the pages of Finnegans Wake. Like commodities, they exchange, so to speak, at the same value; they are deprivileged, which is as offensive to the custodians of the nation-state, and so politically radical, as it is acceptable to the imperialists, and so politically reactionary.

Postmodernism can be read, among other things, as a pressing of this stalled dialectic between concrete and universal to an almost unimaginable extreme. As far as the universal goes, something quite dramatic happens between monopoly and multinational capitalism, which is that the international becomes the transnational, a semantically trivial but politically momentous shift. Internationalism extends but doesn't revolutionise our concept of space: there are still autonomous nations, but now they are interlinked. Transnationalism signifies a qualititatively different sort of space altogether, which one can best express by noting that of the world's 100 largest economies, 47 of them are multinational corporations. There's a shift within that sentence between two distinct conceptions of space, the one familiarly territorial ('economies'), the other ('multinational corporations') not. The multinational company is a kind of virtual or hyper-space, one whose borders and coordinates are constantly shifting, a well-nigh infinitely malleable dimension which bears the same kind of relation to physical territory as a cube does to a square, or as the Roman Catholic Church does to a Roman Catholic church. To continue the religious analogy, the multinational resembles the Almighty Herself in being at once everywhere and nowhere, always more than any of its specific incarnations but more than just the totality of those individual places as well, like God Herself absolutely real but utterly invisible, that in which we live and breathe and have our being but too close to the eyeball to be represented or objectified.(We might note, incidentally, that one difference between colonialism and postcolonialism is that in the latter the ruling powers are increasingly invisible, which is hardly an unqualified advance). It is as though in the multinational the visions or nightmares of modernist art have been finally taken on flesh, and we now actually live in some Escher-type landscape where space curves endlessly back upon itself, where all apparent exits from this windless enclosure turn out to be trompe l'oeils. Likewise, the time of multinational capitalism is pure synchronicity, not at all the linear unfolding of a national destiny but the stack of international clocks in the stock exchange, a world of perpetual consciousness where like Orwell's Room 101 there is no darkness, and where there is no distance either, and so properly speaking no space at all. If monopoly capitalism extends space, multinational capitalism offers to abolish it. Not so much the end of history, you might say, as the end of geography. But just because this system appears entirely centreless, as disarticulated as a jellyfish, anywhere can be a centre, and a 'bad' universalism thus generates a 'bad' particularism as the flipside of itself. Think of the current US cult of communitarianism, a flight from a 'bad' globalism which seems to mean among other things that if you smoke on the street or commit adultery in South Carolina your neighbours come round and beat you up. We have seen that this bad kind of particularism (there's a good one too) was already becoming true with modernism, but with modernism, you might argue, there's still the sense of some abstract system, however elusive, which is the secret absent cause of the concrete, whereas with multinational capitalism that system threatens to evaporate entirely into its specific instances, so that it's now no longer a question of a system which is there but inscrutable but of there being apparently no system at all. What this means, of course, is that the system, financially speaking, is now so pervasive, so extended, that it's no longer a centred one, and since post-structuralism believes in its charmingly old-fashioned way that all systems have to have a centre, it can only conclude that this one isn't a system at all. (Note the epistemological parallel to this: either we have a God's eye view or we have scepticism. Note also that the absence of a centre may have something to do with the decline of US hegemony and the failure so far to fill this political vacuum). The stalled dialectic of modernism is thus pressed to the point where the system is now so universalised as to implode upon itself, flip over into its own opposite and become no more than a host of random particulars and perspectives; for if objects, as Hegel reminds us, exist only by negation, by differentiating themselves from what they are not, then an apparently boundless system can logically not exist (just as God does not, for the astute theologian, strictly speaking exist). It is now no longer, as with the 19th century nation-state or the Romantic symbol, that the universal can become incarnate in the particular, nor, with modernistic imperialist monopoly capitalism, that system and particular are strangely askew, but the nominalist condition in which there is nothing but the particular, except of course for another rather similar-looking particular, which means that there is nothing particular at all. (Anyway, how can one have an individuality if one does not also have a universal to contrast it with?) Think, as David Harvey has pointed out, of the way that what is in fact an increasingly homogeneous world system must actually manufacture and commodity difference by, for example, making each of its cities apparently unique; nothing in such a world is more similar than difference, just as nothing is more international a phenomenon than nationalism.

The modernist fetish of the local, deviant or immediate is, I've argued, in part a last-ditch resistance to reification, and here modernism and postmodernism are surely in continuity rather than at odds. For the most obvious political fact about our world is that we are growing both more international and more tribal simultaneously, and the more phoney the internationalism the more morbid the tribalism. (I'm deeply uneasy with the word 'tribalism' but hope, like St. Augustine on time, that you know what I mean). Each phenomenon twists the other into a 'bad' version of itself; and one material cause of this among many is the erosion of that traditional mediator, the nation-state. Marx thought capitalist society a kind of dire parody of an authentic work of art, in which the particular becomes grotesquely inflated as the laws of the whole become correspondingly abstract, and so-called 'late'capitalism has now projected this condition onto a global scale. As far as the relations betwen culture and politics go, what we have in postmodernism is a kind of reversal of the Enlightenment in which, far from cranking up local culture to a cosmopolitan politics, or burying it beneath it, politics have now in effect slithered to a halt with the end of the Cold War, the final triumph of liberal capitalism and the consequent end of history, and what we have instead to link us is a thoroughly cosmopolitan culture. (Though actually, insofar as this culture bears the political stamp of the West, the depoliticisation is only of course apparent). One thinks of Lyotard's (in)famous declaration: "one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfune in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong...". But this isn't of course meant to be culture as a substitute for political community, as with Kant or Arnold or Leavis, for there is deliberately no community here at all. This hybridised, cosmopolitan, commodity culture is just an assemblage of differences, as much a reminder of how we aren't linked, or of how all such links are fortuitous, as any kind of culturalist substitute for political solidarity. What we consume here is exactly the 'foreignness' of the cultural products, which is as far removed as possible from culture as the immediate, the densely affective, the local piety. Or rather we have a culture which doesn't spurn the ethnic and local but exports it as international commodity, fashions an indifferent global mishmash out of the stubbornly specific, thus presenting us with a blend of 'bad' particularity and 'bad' universality. There's a parallel here with the multinationals, which adapt to some extent to the local culture or refashion it for their purposes; multinational companies have, legally speaking, multiple identities, which should give pause to those who think multiple identity an unequiovocal boon. Postmodernism, at least in its more conservative varieties, collapses the classical opposition between culture and politics by simply passing culture through the exchange-circuits of inmternational capitalism, just as the Wake passes the signifier through a sort of dizzying exchange of mythemes, so 'decathecting' it stripping it of affect, emptying it of all that which once allowed it, however nostalgically, to act as a critique of the political status quo.

But this is only one half of the postmodernist story. The other, more positive half is a much more radical retrieval of the local, the vernacular, the somatic, the communitarian, the unincorporable particular history, in the teeth of an apparently homogenised globe. And this, of course, has always been the upbeat side of the nationalist story too. One contradiction of the present world system is that the nation-state is still needed to stabilise and regulate what would otherwise be a politically uncontrollable economic system, and needed too to lend that system its particular, hegemonising national myths. However much multinational space may spurn the local, it knows that there are no disciplines like local ones; and it must thus prop itself up with modalities of power which in some ways run counter to its own logic. The state is thus now more powerful internally than it has ever been, even if externally speaking the nation-state is being increasingly squeezed out between the supranational on the one hand, and on the other hand a localism or regionalism which now seems to some people the only defence left to them, given the dwindling sovereignty of the nation-state, against the depredations of the global economy. So as the state delegates powers above itself, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to powers from below. The transnational nature of the economic base is constantly at war with the national political superstructure, which is why the British Tories are in such disarray on Europe. Base and superstructure, unlike classical capitalism, now occupy different spaces and temporalities, as capital shifts from place to place in accordance with global profit rather than local need. But another contradiction of the nation-state is that, like the sensuous particular in modernism, it can offer resistance to the very system within which it is caught. The most virulently anti-nationalist force in the world today is a multinational capitalism which keeps most of the globe in poverty and hunger. When commentators excoriate pathological or fundamentalist forms of nationalism, as indeed they should, they seem unaware of how these are often enough the dark side of the brave new streamlined world they themselves so euphorically endorse. And nobody can doubt the proven power of the nation-state, throughout the Keynsian era, of significantly limiting and repairing the damage of market forces. Anyone who thinks such a state now irreparably outmoded might consider just how progressive a force it could still be in comparison the international banditry we happen to have. Back to Keynes would be forward indeed. Those who oppose anti-colonial nationalism in the name of difference seem to forget that it can make quite a difference - that if it often enough erases internal differences it also it presses the claims of external difference, the right to differ from one's colonisers, as well as pressing the claims of identity (the right to share their right to self-determination). Anyway, there can surely be no more ambiguous political ideology than one which in Britain today means both a desire for centralisation (English nationalism) and one for devolution (Scots and Welsh), which was used first as a weapon in the revolutionary overthrow of the ancien regimes, then in the late 19th century to ratify the triumphalist expansion of capitalism, again in the inter-war years of this century to rally an ailing capitalism and pose an alternative to socialism, and used yet again in the post-war period as a remarkably successful anti-imperialist force throughout the so-called Third World. An ideology which was originally coopted by the bourgeois states in the cause of internal stability and external expansion ended up in some cases hoisting them with their own petard. Perhaps the American troops, as they scrambled out of Saigon in 1975, consoled themselves with the thought that nationalism was just an inverted mirror-image of imperialism.

What we have been witnessing is not just a transition from the nation-state to a global order - not only because the nation-state remains fairly strong, but because this shift actually intensifies the local, regional, tribalist, communitarian as a form of last-ditch defence. The system conjures up its own opposite, just as international capitalism has always enlisted as well as subverted the nation-state. In some ways, this remains true: national elites in the so-called Third World, for example, draw power and privilege from the very global system which marginalises them. But the tribalism which the political order once coopted now threatens to blast it apart. Whereas, in the classical nation-state, local and universal are meant to be at one, they are now increasingly at odds. In the Third World, where the 'rising' from local bonds to the class and citizenship which come with urbanisation has always been a problem, the undermining of orthodox political systems by international capitalism leads to a resurgence of sectarian tribalism. In Europe, one consequence of the global system is neo-fascism. And if 'culture' in the local sense is out of synchrony with the global economy, so is politics, which has yet to find some way of calling the multinationals to democratic accountability. With the old nation-states, capitalism and a limited degree of democracy were able to coexist; with the new multinational economy, this is less and less the case. Another way of putting the local-universal conflict is to say that whereas capital is global, labour is local; the unemployed can't always just leave the country.

One problem, then, is what kind of cultural and political identity we can achieve in this situation which is neither commodified cosmopolitanism or a myopic particularism. How is the subject of this world to be interpellated? How are cultural forms to catch up with the international political and economic order?

It seems implausible right now that men and women will throw themselves on the barricades crying 'Long live the European Union!'. But we should remember that in the pre-modern period the nation, for which so many have since lived and died, seemed pretty abstract too. Anyone who believes that one can't fervently identify with an abstract global organsation has obviously not been talking to a Roman Catholic. And if the new citizen of the world these days is the corporation executive, he or she is also the ecological campaigner, whose slogan is 'Think global, act local' (though in one sense what else can we ever do?). And if the multinational is non-territorial, so are forms of identity and solidarity like class or gender. Cultural identities will continue to be forced into pathological particularism, as we have witnessed in former Yugoslavia, as long as the international system is alienated rather than (necessarily) abstract, unresponsive to popular political control, and as long as it is forced to erase cultural specificity. It is not a matter of some eternal quarrel between culture and politics, but of how this conflict shapes up in an alienated global system. Culture is only divisive or non-divisive within specific political conditions, which means we need neither abolish it with the radical Enlightenment nor reify it with postmodernism. How we 'live' our relation as subjects to the new supranational order is in the first place a political rather than cultural matter, a question of citizenship and democracy ; but we can expect this to overlap with other more local, ethnic, cultural forms of subjectivity, once political change, which must assume priority over culture here, has allowed these to depathologise themselves. There can no longer, in other words, be that dream of identity between rational and affective, civic and cultural, which the hyphen in 'nation-state' sought to secure. Instead, we will no doubt live in a world of multiple 'interpellations', some more affective or abstract than others. The local and universal will be neither identical nor in mutual contradiction. As for nationalism, this may represent a 'bad' particularism, as in an increasingly racist Europe, or it may be part of the redrawing of relations between regional and global - a democratic devolution of power within a wider international community. In this sense, ironically, nationalism could help to erode the hyphen in 'nation-state' rather than help to forge it. If the nation-state is increasingly unviable, it is partly because of the diluted sovereignty of the state, but also because of the increasingly diverse character of the nation. In this situation, the meanings of culture and community need urgently to be redefined to take account of both realities. If the left does not do the job, then we may be sure that it will be abandoned to a fight between liberal capitalism and right-wing reaction.

[ Manuscript ]

Webmaster: Slobodan Markovic (twiddle@eunet.yu)

All rights reserved. Belgrade Circle Journal encourages the reproduction of material appearing on its pages, provided that the source and the author are cited, except in cases where this would constitute violation of copyright held by other organisations or individuals.