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LOCALISED SPACES, GLOBALISED PLACES: TRACING THE PACIFIC RIM

Timothy W. Luke

On Glocalisation: The Pacific Rim

The new world order of sovereign nation-states, which was to have led to joint collaboration within the United Nations to pursue truth, justice, and the American way, did not last much longer than the victory parades after the 1991 Gulf War. Something else has begun to fill the void opened by the collapse of communism, and it does not look like the international harmonisation of the interests promised by former President Bush after the UN coalition's victory over Iraq. This paper addresses these developments, suggesting that at least one kind of postnational and transnational order gradually is emerging above and below the realms of the modern nation-state in an informational mode of production. It is evolving in new spaces and places, like the European Community, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or the Pacific Rim, which are still forming as economic zones, political sites or cultural regions to deal with these globalising tendencies.

With all of the economic, political, and social developments around the Pacific Ocean over the past twenty years, this region has become the cen ter of these informa tionalising transformations. A transnationally articulated mode of production (stretching from design centers in Tokyo, Los Angeles, or Osaka to production facilities in Malaysia, South Korea, or China to merchandising enterprises in Brisbane, San Francisco, or Taipei) knits together technology, capital, design, management, labor, and markets within the basin as one economic entity. At the same time, mass media representations are spinning tales about "the Pacific Century," "the Pacific Rim," and "the Pacific Basin" that construct new spaces where new peoples, societies, and economies are developing hybrid fonTlations of local and global order.

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Characterising these changes is difficult, but this study provides one start towards interpretation. Arguably, the workings of power, politics, and ideology in these new transnational flows of capital, people, commodities, information, and culture are generating spaces and creating places in a cybersphere/ telesphere that its coextensive with, but different from, first nature in the natural biosphere, and second nature in the industrial technosphere. This new "third nature" ofcyberspatial/ televisual/ informational spheres fuses the local and the global, as "glocality" in particular "glocales," in many people's everyday lifeworlds. Argua bl y, the struggle for access to and control over the h yperreal estate of these glocalised spaces now preoccupies political organisations, economic competitions, and cultural groups in many regions of the existing capitalist world-system. The Pacific Rim perhaps best represents oneofthesenewly emerging glocales. Partly anchored in trans-Pacific trade, partly centered in the struggle between Japan and America for regional supremacy, partly a zone of transnational cultural creolisation of Asia/ Australasia/ America, and partly the site of newly industrialised countries integrated with newly informationalisingcountries, the Pacific Rim provides many examples of glocalisation's transformations.

Beginning with the early debates in the 1950s and 1960s about the nature of "technological society" or "postindustrial society," critical discourses of social analysis, dealing with rapid changes in modern industrial society, have noted how individual and collective perceptions, discourses, and interpretations are transformed radically by the electronic mass media. These shifts are still not completely understood, but they are reconstituting the most ba?ic understandings of transnational community. Such transformations often are discussed as aspects of "postmodernis!1.1." I The most pervasive influence d riving these shifts in the structure and substance of community, however, appears to be the informationalisation of the social means of production, consumption, administratiol\ and destruction during and after the 1950s and 1960s as the global impact of mass telecommunications, electronic computerisation, cybernetic automation, and rapid transportation began to be felt all across the globe.2

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As Jameson claims, this coming of "late capitalism" is a change "which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernisation and industrialisation, less perceptible and dramatic somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thorough going and all-pervasive."3 The mass mediations of informationalisation, then, change existing structures of community as social action as well as institutional sites of community as cultural process in many different ways. Because of these global flows, new microstates and city-states along the Pacific Rim are finding new comparative advantages for their economies in their labor forces, geographic location, resource endowments, or business climates that attract investment, visitors, and growth. And, older, established nation­states arrayed around the Pacific Rim are providing volatile settings for the global ising forces, restructuring large segments of their populations and territories as new informational glocales.

Community as Simulation

Obviously, the meanings of modernity as such change along with the growth of this type of advanced capitalist society as it becomes more entwined with the informational ll'\Odes of production. FukuyalTla's "end of history" is not so much the end of the realist state's national history as much as it may be the beginning of hyperreal transnational communities.4 A new reality logic based upon simulation rather than representation perhaps constitutes the dominant organising principle of this new era. Therefore, in Baudrillard's vision of today's new world order, "McLuhan's formula, the medium is the message," appropriately is "the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the ITlessage--the sender is the receiver--the circularity of all polls--the end of panoptic and perspectival space--such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be envisaged at its limit."s Baudrillard suggests that the means of information in today's global transnational economy unhinge traditional metaphorical relations, because the operative semiotic principles of this informCltional order are those of simulCltion rather than those commonly used in value relations pegged to pre-industriClI counterfeit or industriClI mechClnical reproduction.

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If the masses no longer act as conventional historical subjects in their traditional national communities, then what happens to that traditional context, namely, the modern nation-state? It increasingly becomes meaningless in the Moebian logics of simulation that create sense and non-sense simultaneously.

Theoretical abstractions can no longer be seen as "the maps," "the doubles," "the mirrors" or "the concepts" of any terrain metaphorically regarded as "the real." On the contrary, all abstract frames of the real begin to function only as simula tions. For Baudrillard, "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or a reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory ... " .6

These "postmodern shifts in the sign are a critical juncture in maintaining the "hyperreal" collective order that transnational mass media and capitalism are fabricating today. Basically, Baudrillard now claims,

When the real is no longer what is used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of rnyths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurativp when the object and substance have disappeared and there is a panic-stricken productil)i1 of the real and the referential, above and paralIel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us--a strategy of the real , neo-real and hyperrenl whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.7

The practical mediations of generating hyperreality,as BaudrilIard appraises it, are the electronic media carrying the communal flows of informational networks. The social and the state, or the realms of work, government, orcapital as rational distribution, all

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are becoming absorbed into communicative simulacra. In new zones of interaction, like the Pacific Rim, "the radical sociality of the contract, dialectical sociality (that of the State and of civil society, of public and private, of the social and individual) gives way to the sociality of contact, of the circuit and transistorised network of millions of molecules and particles maintained in a random gra vi ta tional field, magnetised by the constant circulation and the thousands oftactical combinations which electrify them."s

Traditional notions of causality, perspective and reasoning are undercut completely by the electronic means of information, which efface the difference between cause and effect, ends and means, subject and object,activeand passive. Baudrillard observes, "we must think of the media as if they were, in out orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other, micro-molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal."Q Simulation goes beyond the distinctions of space and time, sender and received, mediurn and message, expression and content as the world's complex webs of electronic media generate unbound(ed)aries of new hyperspaces with "no sense of place." In other words, the emulation of face-to-face exchanges of ideas and values in the 'mass media are forming postnational/astatal terrains for constructing new transnational communities as relations of "contact" and not "contract." If Baudrillard is right about simulation, then the geopolitical setting of the realist state is disappearing.

National Community: As State Power in Context and Chrontext

As the primary containers of modern community, the modern realiststate presumed a sociality of contract in discourses of instrumental action, rational reflection and linear causality to ground its political treatment of worldly space as perspectival and social time as neutral. Once granted, its power becomes motion enforced, or energies moved from point to point or place to place, within space measured from some political center. The power of this center--a metropole, a capito\' or royal court--might be seen as being specially ap-pointed by some coercive/legitimate

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in-state-ment, like the illustrative eye gazing/imposing a three­dimensional geometric grid in perspective-based painting. Perspectival visions of time and space also are the register of political power and its effects in action. Triangulation against a homogenous horizon line and a distant imaginary vanishing point permits the duly ap-pointed author(ity) or legitimately instated sovereign(ty) to measure the impact of its forces exerted on point B - its subjects/citizen - from point A - its agents/ agencies - as judged in gazing out at point C - its centers/ peripheries. State power becomes a form of motion through time, gauged as the in-state-ment's institutional surviving or thriving in on-going operations, neutralised units ofhomogenously standardised time. Basic qualities, like sovereignty, authority, security, and autonomy, are linked in a past, present and future that can be disclosed, delineated, and described in terms of the same uniform fungible units of time. to At some discernible point in the past, the state apparatus was in-stated, and it survives through the passage of invariant measures of homogenous time that accumulate like territory or population.

Not only can the state realise "space travel" for its powers through territory as communal context, it also can attain "time travel" for its powers through temporality as communal chrontext. The future completes the present just as the present fulfilled the past, but, in each instance, a discourse of panoptic omniscience underpins the entire sweep of constmcting this state power. In geophysical space, the stateacts as an omniscient illustrator, drawing out lines of its domains from its ap-pointed instate-ments. Like a modern rationalist artist working in single point perspective, instated omniscient illustration equals omnipotent constmction as history "illustrates" or the state "draws a line in the sand ." In such re-presentational space where both sovereign and subject "could grasp an invariant logic of relationships (a "world") that remained the same regardless of his or her position and that extended to infinity, thus having the value of universal tmth."" In time, the state speaks as an onIniscient llarrator, speaking of distant beginnings and far-off endings in equally absolute terms about its historical unfolding. Again, like a modern single point perspective artist, instated omniscient narration equalsomnipo,tent fabrication as "history speaks" or "the state commands." In such

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representational time, both sovereign and subject experience "the inscription of a single, homogenous time stretching to infinity and carrying along in its powerful current absolutely everything .. .it leaves nothing aside or behind. The powers thus available to 'human' consciousness are enormous. In a convention that extends to infinity the rationalised powers of hum an attention, no atrocity need remain unexplained, no mystery unsolved, no mistake unrecti fied ." 12

National community follows state sovereignty as governments preoccupy themselves writing and/or drawing lines of communal identity and antagonism on the earth. Since 1648, nation-states have been those legitimate monopolies of violence charged with enscribing, discursively and coercively, writs of communal difference--in money, religion, markets, ideology and militaries--from what transpires within and without the geopolitical spaces framed .by international borders. By endogenising various disciplines of monopolistic order inside, and exogenisingdiverse practices of free-for-all anarchistic conflict outside, of those borders defining each nation-state's in-stated place on the planet's terrain. 13 Defending borders, controlling airspace, and patrolling off-shore waters all are regarded legitimately as essential practices for drawing, defining, and then disciplining the various places of national territory to create a community of interests which differentiates the geographical context and historical chrontext of this nation-state from that nation-state.

UnboundCed)aries of Flow

As fictive constructs of linear space in real time, the jurisdiction of nations, states, territories, or possessions, as in­statements of power, can be seen as discursive fields of state authorship. These fields become enscribed upon individuals and groups, whose attributes and behaviors are continuously remanufactured by the coercive gaze or normalising hand of jurisdictive state power. Informationalisation, however, alters the power dynamics of in-stated jurisdictions in nation-states by generating and mediating new fields with their own organising discourses, or perhaps alternate encoding dictions, nested in

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rapid and intense transnational flows of ideas, commodities, symbols, people, and images on a global scale, which are disjunctive and fragmenting, anarchical and disordered. 14

Castells, for example, argues "what is facilitated by information technologies is the interconnection of activities, providing the basis for the increasing complexity of service industries, which exchange information relentlessly and obiquitously .... Whatever becomes organisationally and legally possible can be technologically implemented because of the versatility of the technological medium."ls In appraising today's global economic changes, Reich asserts that collective forms of material prosperity are no longer national; instead, they all depend upon "the same transnational trend . Barriers to cross­border flows of knowledge, money, and tangible products are cmmbling; groups of people in every nation are joining global webs."16 As the networks of informational exchange unfold in the cybernetic spaces of informationalised processes, many new arrangements arise. Again, as Castells asserts, "there is a shift, in fact, away from the centrality of the organisational unit to the network of information and decision. In other words, flows, rather than organisatiolls, become the units of work, decision, and output accounting. Is the same trend developing in relation to the spatial dimension of organisations? Are flows substituting for localities in the information economy? Under the impact of information systems, are organisations not timeless but also placeless?/l17 These forces of flow can be seen most clearly in glocales, or the new transnational communities formed by electronic mass media and global trade.

The imagery of the global mass media, then, can represent these forces of flow. Flows are unbounded by spatial borders, but pass along unboundaries without frontiers in the constant flux of exchange. Plainly, a "transna tional" flow of commodified goods, capital, people, and ideas has existed for centuries; it certainly antedates even theriseofmodern nation-states. However, this historical flow, at least until the late 1950s or early 1960s, tended to move more slowly, move less, and more narrowly than the msh of products, ideas, persons, and money that developed with the onset of jet transportation, political decolonisation,

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extensive computerisation, and, most importantly, electronic telecommunication after 1960. It is these greater intensities, rates, densities, levels, and velocities in the informational flows of global capitalist production and the televisual flow of electronic mass media, which transmute cultural community quantitatively into something qualitatively new, complex, and different. ls

Actually, in the postmodern culture of global flow, "culture" itself "has become a product in its own right; the market has become a su bstitu te for itself .. .. Postmodernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process."lq Rather than acceding to a privileged geopolitical or partial geoeconomic reading of global power, the televisual flow's postmodern spectra of commodification generate many different grammars across a wide band of still less well-understood "writings" and "readings" of existing political communities. These other stmcturalising powers, or collectively "polydictions," today flow more placelessly beneath, behind, between, beyond in-stated boundaries set into space as these new artifices of encoding stmcture and process become quite fluid, defined by shifting networks of images and information mediating these flows over unbound (ed)aries.

The unravelling of in-stated political communities today, or the loosening of its jurisdiction(s), echoes the cacophony of new polydictive codes made articulate in the mass media by informational transformations. New social discourses beyond the state, which are grounded in the market, science, the intelligentsia, technology, the mass consuming/ producing pu blic, medicine,oreven the global ecology, find individual and collective agencies allowing them alternative communities to write over/ against/for and speak to/against/for the state. Exclusively political poles and polarities are slipping out of phase. In infofl1'lational communities, many different voices can and do speak outsideof (and within) the rationalised instmmentaispeech locales of statist juris-diction. So, when looking at the economy and 11'lass media, are there not new discursive fields ofpolydictive community at play, fabricating their own codes of power, spaces of operation , frames of time, and signs of authority?

Consequently, everything is not entirely pacific in the Pacific Basin. Who controls access to, and thereby many of the

Localised Spaces, Glolmlized Places 47

material benefits from, the transnational economy is a source conflict in many Pacific Basin states. In some areas, like China and Vietnam, state socialist reginles are struggling to maintain the political supremacy of the Communist Party, while actively promoting an economic transition to capitalist relations of production by becoming industrial peripheries to the informational core. In other areas, like Taiwan or South Korea, more authoritarian military regimes, which developed during the cold war as bulwarks against communist expansion, are struggling with their own designs for greater democraticisation. In other areas, formerly socialist systems states, like Russia or Cambodia, are attempting to stimulate the development of capitalism and democracy at the same time. And, finally, in other areas, like Japan, Canada, or the United States, mature industrial economies are grappling with informationalisation's ramifications in intranational structural dislocations and international market competitions, which are severely straining domestic political institutions as well as foreign diplomatic ties.

In each instance, astatist forces nl11ning through the multiple channels of the economy or electronic mass media seek to make their own plural, parallel community in speaking of "the worlds" of commerce, finance, technology, ideas, health, etc. They attempt to rule off some space of exclusive control, rule as the most legitimate expert force, and set the rules for definitive codes of a chrematisdictive, ecodictive, technodictive, plutodictive, or biodictive authority. These power centers/ speech communities exist, but their existence as communities still float inarticulately or undetected in realist readings of global business circles, international technical exchanges, transnational environment"l debates, or multinational popular culture crazes. Perhaps we should examine more carefully how these new astatist transnational communities dictive boundaries, dictational legitimacy, and dictatorial influences are being felt above and beyond the grasp of realist nation-states in the proliferating discursive channels of global flows.

Moving from place to flow, terrains to streams introduces non perspectival, anti hierarchical, and d isorganisational elements into tradition"l spatial/industrial/national notions of sovereign community. Without conceptually making this turn of events

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another simple transition from one abstract state of political existence to another successor state of abstract political being, key distinctions can be made. Having open and unconstrained access to flows, not closed domination of places, becomes a crucial attribu te of power in informa tionalised societies. Likewise, a chaotic cultural community spins out from within the complex codes of the flow by providing individuals and groups with dynamic levels ofaccess, linkage, turnover, connection, exchange, orservice in the flow. Thediverseagendasofthevariousdifferent encoders and decoders build communal interactions, while a sense of communal security slips into concerns over the assuring integrity of codes, openness of access, extent of service, scope of linkage,and increaseof tumoverwithin unbound(ed)aries. Caught in the currents of commercial and televisual forces moving across the mediascapes of informationalisation, the nation-state (with its more traditional geopolitical concerns for policing juris-dictively its territories, populations, and market) often comes up short with nothing near complete control over events within its boundaries. When moving in these dimensions, as Der Derian observes, one mightsupplementexistingcategoriesexdusivelytied to geopolitics and the control of space by teasing through alternative outlooks linked to chronopolitics and the setting of pace.20

Given these larger structural trends, the older concrete reality of place, expressed in terms of a peculiar socioculhlral context defined in spatial location, gradually is being displaced by the tangible hyperreality of flow, understood in terms of the localised access to or enactment of new globalised practices through networks of informational circulation. The latter is not entirely displacing or destroying the former, but rather they are coexisting together. From these growing contradictions between organisational centralisation and informational decentralisation, or "between places and flows," one might uncover in the workings of global change, "the gradual transfonllation of the flows of power into the power of flOWS."21 Indeed, the televisual flows are the basis of defining new types of commercial/technological core, semiperipheral, peripheral and external areas as they restructure the market niches of cities, regions and countries.

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Economic and Mass Media Communities

Most importantly, the glocales emerging fro 'm informationalisation entail entirely new sociospatial, semiopolitical, and sociochronic logics that simultaneously generate the spaces of contemporary power, ideology, and exchange. The flow is partly postspatial, partly postsovereign, and partly the primary networking of a new kind of international community. The world-system of transnational capitalism gains its new figura tions in the televisual / compu ta tional/ cy berspa tial conduits of the flow. For example, Reich (1991 :131) contrasts the "nominal nationality" professed by many modern major corporations with their "actual transnationality" as global parts sourcing, foreign markets, expatriate management, multinational laborrecruiting, and world-wide financial operations increasingly typify their operations.22 These distinctions are reshaping what is meant by economic community.

By believing that their security and prosperity are the products of national policies, national interests, or national decision-makers, contemporary consumers and producers often mistake thoroughly transnational or largely local forces to be the workings of their nation-state. Xenophobic political appeals, stressing exclusively nationalistic benefits or costs, occlude how closely coupled most present-day core economies and societies have become. Borders today are highly porous, and the flows of goods and services are continuously eroding them even more everyday. To take only one example, consumers and producers all around the Pacific Rim depend upon a global array of products in their localities: oil lifted in Alaska or Indonesia to be sold in Japan or New Zealand, fast food from Canadian-owned franchise operations, credit cards from Hong Kong controlled banks, automobiles built in Mexico by Japanese firms transplanting their outpu t as American cars, groceries produced in Central America, South Africa or Sou theast Asia sold in British-owned store chains, newspapers held by Australian multinationals but publishing in New York, medicines developed in Germany manufactured in California for sale in the Philippines, televisions fabricated in Taiwan by American companies to show programs made in

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Canada by Japanese-owned studios headquartered in Los Angeles, clothes designed in New York sewn together in American Samoa for sale in Hawaii, and information gathered by British wire services in Eastern Europe for broadcast on 24-hour cable new networks centered in Atlanta. The modelling of personal behavior in both production and consumption is more glocal than national. Similar accounts of glocal interdependence can be adduced for virtually any "nation-state" in the world today, but it is very advanced in the regions around the Pacific Rim. The notion of "national interest" increasingl y has less and less meaning in these glocal webs of interdependence. Forcing these loosely-coupled but vital connections of everyday life into the categories of realist state thinking results in xenophobic reactions: if something is not produced and/or consumed at home, then it allegedly must represent necessarily a weakening of "national" power, productivity, or prestige.

Yet, this archaic reading of transnational flows in terms of national states misses how embedded and efficient these glocal webs of exchange actuall y have becorne. Outside of the state, and inside shared technological goals, common ecological challenges, similar symbolic systems, parallel coding orders, and comparable product meanings, the flow creates new glocal communities that are blurring the old geographies of "them" and "us," "other" and "I," or "friend" and "foe" in new informational modes of ideography, technography, videography, or plutography. The origins and outlets of its many component currents can still be traced back to in-stated ethnogeographic settings, or the spaces of nominal nationality; however, their effects, taken together in the streams of the global flow, are also being felt glocally, or locally and globally as actual transnationality.

These distinctions also can be extended to interpret the workings of many cultural networks, woven into the intermeshed telecommunication links of global media markets. Nominal nationality increasingly competes with actual transnationality in the processes of many international events and trends. Cultural products coming from Milan, Liverpool, New York, Kingston, Nashville, Hollywood, or Dallas become global image streams eroding political stmctures made in Moscow, Washington, or Tokyo.

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Flows arf: decentering, despa tialising, and dema terialising forces as thE: j work alongside and against the geopolitical codes of spatial sovereignty. Their cybergraphic/videographic force is redrawing community within and across the old national geographies written by states since 1648 by providing new psychosocial framing systems of moral values, political ends, or economie needs. Within the flow, there are new universals and new particulars being created in the networks of transnational exchange as fresh identities, differences, and conflicts emerge from sharing access in the mass media to the same symbols, markets and commodities. The values of CNN advertising clips or the images on CNN news reports, for example, can establish common desires, shared fears, or collective needs in forming a transnational discursive space to address them. Outside of the state, and inside of shared technological goals, common ecological challenges, sin1ilar symbolic systems, parallel coding orders, and comparable product meanings, the flow creates new transnational communities that are blurring the old geographics of "them" and "us," "other"' and "1," or "friend" and "foe" in new informational modes of ideogrnphy, semiography, or videography. Again, like CNN sending signals from Atlanta by cable and satellite, the origins and outlets of its many component currents can still be traced back to in-stated ethnogeographic settings, or the spaces of nominal natIOnality. Yet, their effects, like CNN "Headline News" or the rush of global advertising in the televisual streams of global flo\-vs, are also being felt postnationally--or locally and globally--as actual transnationality.

Beyond the realities of territorial national statics, fixed to state-stmcturpd processes inside of tightly enscribed borders, there are the new hyperrealities of global flow dynamics, fluctuating with: n televisually-coded links along loosely coupled local/global networks. In the mass media sphere, every television receiver is a portal, opening into/looking out on to images of these teleterrains. Cultural meanings of these images develop out of codes set iJ"lto the global flow of substantive and symbolic information. Tl1e Cable News Network, is a globalised artificial space available in scores of nations around the world twenty­four hours a di'ly . Much of the coverage is transnational, focusing on worki politics, world economics, world sports, and

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world mass culture, even though it is often framed by" American" producers using American techniques for "Americanised" consumers in Americanised markets. These hypermodernising transformations in the flow, however, are not mediations of national realist modernisations. Instead, they act as the carriers of transnational postmodernity, because even Americans are being subjected to further "Americanisation" at this stage of postmodernity. As Jameson observes, "postmodernism is what you have after the modernisation process is complete and nature is gone for good."23 Being American or becoming Americanised in these informational formations can take place almost anywhere and anytime. Mass media video-graphies of transnational community are redefining traditional oppositions of us/them, same/ other, friend / foe, in cui tural codes; in a second sense, they alter categories of more/less, growth/stagnation, and elite/ common in defining economic divisions; in a third sense, they delineate boundaries of inside/ outside, foreign/ domestic, ours/ theirs in global community; and, in a final sense, they shift barriers of access/exclusion, power/powerlessness, order / disorder in the political frictions of transnational community.

Outside of their efforts to guarantee national security, nation-states often are little more than virtual realities imagineered on a geographic basis at a national level to in-state delivery of varied mix of social services as their defining feature. Today, the attributes of "nationality" often boil down to fleeting, floating coefficients of personal entitlement to a basic material standard of living that now marks the collective identity of different "national" entitiesasstates. Varying levels of individual and collective access to goods and services from the capitalist world-system, which are measured along a flexible continuum of statistical indicators, establish the essential socio-economic profiles of "what is" a so-called First, Second, Third or Fourth World nation-state. Americans are "Americans" or Thais are "Thais" because they have this or that covariant chance to own a car, have a TV, eat red meat, see a dentist, use a VCR, possess a dwelling, or die after age 80. Such "standards of living" also are little ll'lOre th(ln tactical hallucinations deployed to induct the silent majorities to "live out standards" that are set in an endless precession of new corporate-generated goods and services in

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glocales mutating from simulation to simulation. Looking at these nation-states, simulated differences, driven again by copying models of meaning for which there are no originals, and neutralised id en lilies, d ynamicised by parallel processes of rna terial prod uction and consumption in each state's everyday lifeworld, are no more than parodies of national diversity or global community.

Despite the pretexts of "national" cultural autonomy, the transnational commodity flow of McDonald's food products in Montreal, Moscow, Manila, Melbourne, and Minneapolis is the same deterrent force arrayed against real local/national specificity. A simulation of cuisine in "fast food" creates its own models of culture, behavior, and desire within the confines of "fast capitalism."24 Now, the territorial in-statements of nations simply provide territorialised historical imaginaries to sort out transnational economic and social welfare benefits in accord with their closeness to or distance from the central posthistorical currents in the global flow of capital, energy, goods, and power. What is far more important are the glocales that these currents are cutting above and shaping below the realm of nation-states.

Running Along the Rim

The economic, political and social forces behind these trends toward glocalisation are working on several different levels to realise divergent and diverse agendas. On one level, corporate providers of telecommunication and computing services are constructing elaborate networks of complex infostmcture, which essentially efface many of the existing (b)orders of the prevailing Westphalian state system. On another level, corporate and individual users of these networks are fabricating new semio-communicative communities, developing innovative techno-economic ensembles, and organising unusual socio-political institutions within these cyberspaces. On yet another level, the glocal grids of exchange, manufacture, and identity made possible by these networks are disembedding many cultures, economies and societies from their traditional nation-state milieux.

The nature of glocali·ty, when viewed in nation-state terms, appears fluid and unbounded. Several different channels

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for glocalisation exist and operate simultaneously in the current world-system. Nation-states continually attempt to contain and even resist their workings, but glocalities continue to evince decentered/ differentiated/ disorganised dynamics against the centralising/ standardising/ organising logic of nation-states. In one pre-national glocal web, ethnic/religious/linguistic/racial identities and interests spill over arbitrary national-statal (b)orders, bridging local frictions with central state authorities to transnational communities seeking/ finding a common dictive code. Inside a second non-national glocal web, transnational trade networks buy and sell thousands of different commodities-necessary and sumptuary, legal and illicit, essential and frivolous, high-volume and high-value--in markets that thrive beyond, behind, and beneath anyone nation-state's control. In an extra-national glocal web, nature's various biotic, geologic, and atmospheric zones continue to evolve in thousands of different bioregions that surpass all national-statal efforts to manage them, while incurring all of the damage that human societies continue to inflict. Inside a post-national glocal web, the informatic/ telematic/ robotic flow of cyberspaces are knit together in an emergent planetary infostmcture, shredding the barriers once thrown up modern industrial states to create national autonomy, national security, and national identity. And, in a trans-national web, the combined effects of all these webs are generating new cultural codes and practices that stress difference/resistance/multiplicity beneath and beyond na tional statal confines in a cybercreole of placelessness, eccentricity, and simultaneity. All of these webs criss-cross the Pacific Rim as the ties that bind this glocal community.

Glocalities, therefore, are infiltrating their many poststatal stmctures and postnational processes into the still proliferating terrains of infozones/ technoregions/ semiodictions defined by intensive modes of informational production. Transnational topographies and transcultural territories emerge in the flow from the daily traffic of international communication, travel, commerce, and transportation. No longer grounded to one planetary place, one ethnonationallocation or one environmental site, these semi-imaginary /semi-concrete glocalities form their own diverse reengineered cultural space in places like lithe Pacific

Localised Spaces, Globalized Places 55

Rim." Increasingly, they also are becoming the most meaningful homelands of contemporary individuals and groups. They provide simulations of territory, models for behavior, circuits of operationalisation that frame thought and action glocally. Glocalities are in place, but placeless as they integrate artificial spaces, built environments, and coded milieux into meaningful locations that bridge many nation-states. They provide new practical placements of economic, cultural, and social interactions within glocal networks of sub national, national, and supranational exchange from which individuals and communities fabricate their shared strategies for occupying these spaces.

Endnotes

* An earlier version on this paper was presented at the Third Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, August 24-29,1992, and pieces of it appear in Alternatives, 18, 1993: 229-258.

1. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern ConditiOl'I: A Report of Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; and, Fredric Jameson, Pos t 1I10dern is 111 , or theClIltll ral Logic of Late Capitalisll1, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

2. Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology, Dominatiol'l, and Rl'sistance ill Illforlnational Society, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989: 3-14.

3. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. xxi. 4. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New

York: Free Press, 1992. 5. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York:

Semiotext(e), 1983: 101-102. 6. Jean Baudrillard, Simlliations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983: 2. 7. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 8. Baudrillard, Shadvw, p. 83. 9. Baudrillard, Sillll/latiolls, p. 55. 10. See, for example, J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1982; and, Ernest Gellner, Nations aNd Nationalislll, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postll1odernism and the Crisis of Represl!lltational Timl', Cambridge University Press, 1992: 26.

12. Ibid., p. 28 . 13. See Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western

56 /ol/Y/lnl of Pncific Stl/dies, Vol. 17, 1993

Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; and, E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

14. See Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: Free Press,. 1990.

15. Manuel Castells, The Informational City, Oxford: Blackwell, 1898: 142.

16. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York: Knopf, 1991: 172.

17. Castells, Informational City, p. 142. 18. See Tachi Sakaiya, The Knowledge-Vallie Revolution, ora History of the

Futllre, New York: Kodansha International, 1991. 19. Jameson, Postll1odernism, p. x. 20. James Oer Oerian, "The (S)pace of International Relations:

Simulation,Surveillance, and Speed," International Studies Quarterly, 34, September 1990: 295-310.

21. Castells, Informational City, p. 171. 22. Reich, Work of Nations, p. 13l. 23. Jameson, Postll1odernisll1, p. ix. 24. See Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1989.