Social Imaginaries and Political Ideologies in the Age of Globalization

Social Imaginaries and Political Ideologies in the
Age of Globalization

Speaker: Prof Manfred B. Steger
Globalism Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne and
Globalization Research Center
University of Hawai’i-Manoa, Hawai’i

I attended this talk at NUS Geog Dept seminar. It was quite enlightening, engaging and thought-provoking. Prof. Steger gave his talk without a powerpoint, but gosh, his talk was good. I wish I can talk like that - guess it means you eat, breathe and know your content, literally off the top of your head and tongue!

I did a mindmap thingy while listening, so this entry seems a bit contrived as I try to represent a faint shadow of this most intellectually engaging seminar.

I attach here the abstract:

Focusing on subjective processes of globalization – particularly the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole – my presentation looks at the transformation of the modern social imaginary and its affiliated political ideologies. The rising global imaginary has been growing out of the national in an ongoing dialectical process that contradicts assertions of their mutual exclusivity. Still, there should be little doubt that the passing era drew much more heavily on powerful sentiments of nationality reared to maturity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conceptual template based on popular sovereignty and tied to a sharply delineated geographical territory emerged, first and foremost, as the political and cultural expression of the national imaginary. Today, the global increasingly complements the national as the taken-for-granted frame of reference. As the forces of globalization continue to unsettle the national imaginary, they not only change the world’s economic infrastructure, but also transform our sense of self, community, belonging, and social space. Like the profound changes that upset feudal patterns at the outset of the national age, the rising global imaginary is both reflected in and propelled by newly emerging political ideologies. In this talk, I advance the thesis that the cognitive maps that help us navigate the complexities of social and political life are antiquated. The conventional typologies and classification schemes no longer suffice in the global age. Large chunks of the grand ideologies of modernity – most importantly, liberalism, conservatism and socialism – have been discarded, absorbed, rearranged, synthesized, or even hybridized with new ideas into new political belief systems. I argue that “market globalism” constitutes the dominant new ideology of our time against which all of its ideational challengers must define themselves. Exploring the ideological dimension of globalization has been a long-term research project of mine that is coming to its culmination in my forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror.

About the Speaker
Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Global Studies and Academic Director of the Globalism Institute at RMIT University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. His academic interests include global studies, political and social theory, international politics, and theories of nonviolence. His most recent publications include Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism, 2nd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005; 1st ed. 2002); Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003); Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); and The Quest For Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

While his context was the global, I decided that this is a body of discourses I had not been following, and hence focus on his exposition on social imaginaries and political ideologies.

I think I will give my two pennies worth of the seminar- it is interesting to note that he was talking about how we literally take on a 'social imaginary' of our world (especially imaginations of the nation as a community we belong to) by explaining that we will all naturally 'do' something because we have been born into it. I was wondering if there is more to be explore.

Perhaps it was more about being borned into a set practices of materiality - that it affects the individual level so as to form the social imaginaries of someone's consciousness.

So maybe it is more than just material practices, it is about what kinds of tacit knowledges that embeds lived experiences around people.

I think there's more. How about the indivdual dreams and perceptions we have in the midst of interacting with our world? I mean, Prof Steger was talking about how social elites or intellectual elites get the privilege of representing what is going on in terms of globalization (which I think is a very empowering notion - we can do something about everything, in conflating terms), doesn't this happen with people's dreams and their own actions on it to realise its materiality in globalization.

Well, these are things I can think about while thinking about how migration affects young people's construction of national identity. Interestingly, I have also always assumed national identity must be there, in them somewhere, but I have not questioned why the 'nation' is the community in my own consciousness!

Something to think about, more things to mull upon...