Words of Warning: Global Networks, Asian Local Resistance, and the Planetary Vulgate of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Globalization is the first and last word in the vocabulary of media pundits, cultural commentators, economists, politicians, and activists. Its attributed characteristics are many. It is first cause and last effect, the ultimate constraint, the final enabler, the absence of freedom, the latest greatest hope. So diverse, so opposed, so contradictory are these coexistingothers that onemight almost describe the term as the final resting place of an earlier harbinger of momentous change, dialectic. So spaecious (spacious and specious) is its semiotic play that, with a greater sense of irony, one might describe it as the most significant floating signifier of the new century.1 Yet when the meaning of lived human being is at stake, diversity, opposition, and contradiction rarely make for peaceful coexistence. Rather, such significance, such weight of time and place, facilitates practices of compaction, constriction, and exclusion. Neoliberalism is the loudest voice, a first among unequals in the discourse of globalization. According to Pierre Bourdieu, neoliberalism