Operations of the global: explorations of connectivity

How to think the global – after two decades of globalization studies, this question seems to be far from answered. Instead, it has become a fresh object of inquiry. As many scholars of globalization currently point out, a problematic understanding of the global has been unwittingly presupposed in the previous debates. The global was erroneously depicted as an encompassing, overarching spatial scale (Brenner 1999). It was misleadingly assumed to lie beyond state authority and territory (Sassen 2006). It was one-sidedly characterized as an expansion of flows that eschew borders (Brown 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson 2008). It unconsciously conflated the diagnosis of globalization with a regulatory agenda, corporate vision, and cosmopolitan utopia (Tsing 2000, 332). In sum, the global ‘as we knew it’ is larger in scale, faster in pace, and more boundless in reach than anything else (Staeheli 2003). But as today’s research makes abundantly clear, this notion of the global tends to underestimate the role of borders, state authorities, fragmentation, territoriality, and partiality that characterize and accompany processes of globalization (Cameron and Palan 2004; Collier and Ong 2005; Tsing 2005; Larner and Walters 2004). As a consequence, fundamental questions return: What is the global if it is as much a production of boundaries as their overcoming? What is it, if it is as much about immobilization as it is about fastness? What is the global, if it is to be found in enclaves and hubs that are not larger but smaller than the nationstate? These questions about how to think the dimension of the global resonate with a much more general debate in the social sciences about the reconceptualization of macro phenomena. Instead of assuming that the dimension of the ‘macro’ is larger in geographical scale than the ‘micro’, the theoretical attention has shifted towards theorizing the macro as a specific type of relation that connects, translates, and transposes social practices horizontally (Latour 2005). In this perspective, the ‘macro’ and the ‘micro’ are not juxtaposed on a level of scale, but signify different types of relations that have different degrees of density, materiality, popularity, translatability inter alia. Inspired by the now reinstated classic of sociology Gabriel Tarde and by his ‘followers’ Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze, the so-called ‘macro’ is presented as a relatively stable configuration of relations, called assemblages or actor networks (Borch and Staeheli 2009; Deleuze and Guattari 2003; Latour 2005). They are stabilized by modes of control and material technologies of connecting (Galloway 2004). But these configurations are also contingent and breakable. They have tipping points and lines of flight that signal that their stability is always a precarious state of achievement (DeLanda 2006). This special issue on ‘Operations of the global: Explorations of connectivity’ is inspired by these theoretical developments. Its aim is to shed light on the very diverse, partial, and fragmented production of the ‘global’ understood as a particular type of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory Vol. 13, No. 3, December 2012, 209–214