ABSTRACT
Across the turn of the millennium, images of planet earth were commodified as corporate icons even as they were used to signify the wonders of local and embodied life. Just as the globalization literature began to focus on the problem of the relationship between globalism and localism, corporate advertising images of the global began actively reclaiming the localized, the embodied, and the socially interconnected for global capitalism. Some of the examples are extraordinary. The telecommunications transnational Nortel transmogrifies the globe into a spongy human brain divided into eastern and western hemispheres: ‘To guarantee our success’, they say, ‘we source intelligence from both hemispheres’. Energex’s naked baby reaches towards a blue heaven, sitting on corporate cloudyblue earth. Barclays Global Investors uses an image of the globe with the words, ‘Events here. Affect your investments here . . . and here . . . and here.’ Vectors of penetration pointing to unnamed locations are used to indicate the multitude of places where your personal investments might be affected. Lockheed Martin, the producer of weapons of guided destruction, presents a globe that has been broken into a thousand facets of localized colour or globalized significance. And perhaps in the most strikingly derivative connection of the embodied and abstract, NEC, under the slogan ‘C&C for Human Potential’, uses a peacenik-style watercolour-rendered globe around which floating people – all Western, all white – link their bodies to form a kind of global garland of cosmopolitan solidarity.2 Such advertisements, as bizarre as they are, act as distorting representations within the dominant matrix of subjective representations of globalization today. They present the globe as completely postnational, without boundaries, and characterized by connectivity. It seems that as the nature of those connections become objectively more abstract and mediated by techniques and technologies of spatial extension-connection, the dominant images point in the opposite direction to imply that people increasingly finding new lines of embodied solidarity through global capital.3
