Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization

he multiple processes that constitute economic globalization inhabit and shape specific structurations of the economic, the political, the cultural, and the subjective. Among the most vital of their effects is the production of new spatialities and temporalities. These belong to both the global and the national, if only to each in part. This “in part” is an especially important qualification, as in my reading the global is itself partial, albeit strategic. The global does not (yet) fully encompass the lived experience of actors or the domain of institutional orders and cultural formations; it persists as a partial condition. This, however, should not suggest that the global and the national are discrete conditions that mutually exclude each other. To the contrary, they significantly overlap and interact in ways that distinguish our contemporary moment. These overlaps and interactions have consequences for the work of theorization and research. Much of social science has operated with the assumption of the nation-state as a container, representing a unified spatiotemporality. Much of history, however, has failed to confirm this assumption. Modern nationstates themselves never achieved spatiotemporal unity, and the global restructurings of today threaten to erode the usefulness of this proposition for what is an expanding arena of sociological reality. The spatiotemporality of the national, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be composed of multiple spa