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US Universities and the Production of
the Global Imaginary
Isaac Kamola
Research Highlights and Abstract
• Globalization and US higher education.
• Theorizing the global imaginary (Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger).
• Althusser and the imaginary.
• Universities and the production of knowledge.
I argue that ‘globalization’ is not simply a concept describing the world but rather an imaginary;
a mental practice which renders multiple, often competing, social relationships into a meaningful,
coherent whole. While some scholars have made similar arguments, none has laid out a theoreti-
cally rigorous understanding of the global imaginary. I first draw upon the work of Charles Taylor
and Manfred Steger to better understand globalization as an imaginary, but find their work unable
to explain how the global imaginary is produced. To ameliorate this deficiency, I turn to the work
of Louis Althusser to theorize globalization as socially produced within particular material appa-
ratuses that organize daily practices. I conclude by applying this theory to examine how the
apparatus of the US university has transformed from an institution designed to produce a national
imaginary to one producing the global imaginary.
Keywords: globalization; imaginary; university; global imaginary; Althusser
Over the past two decades a consensus has emerged among academics, journalists,
politicians, business leaders and political activists that the contemporary world
should be conceptualized in terms of ‘globalization’. However, despite the term’s
widespread usage, it largely remains unclear what ‘globalization’ means. The term
is ‘used so broadly that it embraces everything and therefore means nothing’, all the
while carrying ‘a powerful set of images’ making it a compelling—if otherwise
incoherent—concept (Cooper 2005, 96). Despite its ambiguity, globalization none-
theless enjoys the status of a ‘social fact’ (Bartelson 2000, 180). Many scholars
argue that the lack of conceptual clarity stems primarily from the failure to under-
stand the phenomenon of globalization correctly. Any conceptual incoherence,
they suggest, comes from the disciplinary limitations of academic understanding
unable to account for the vast complexity of the thing being studied.
This article instead argues that the confusion surrounding globalization stems not
from its empirical complexity, nor its conflicting ideological and discursive prac-
tices, but rather from the fact that the prevailing academic concept of globaliza-
tion depends upon a particular global imaginary produced within contemporary
institutions of higher education. By global imaginary I mean a set of commonly
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2012.00540.x BJPIR: 2012
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Political Studies Association
shared understandings and practices that render the great diversity of social life as
already constituting a single, coherent ‘global’ whole. In this way, a global imagi-
nary is not a representation that simply corresponds to an observable, empirical
world but rather is itself a world-view produced and reproduced within contra-
dictory and contested political and economic relations. By attending to the ways
in which the global imaginary is socially produced, this article argues that social
scientists should be both more suspicious of the concept of globalization and
more cognizant of the unintended consequences that can follow when they
fail to address the apparatuses of power that shape the production of academic
knowledge.
Understanding the global imaginary as produced within deeply embedded mate-
rial practices, such as those taking place within the university, means that the
global imaginary is not some free-floating set of ideas but rather the meaningful
content of one’s relation to the world. The most common treatment of globaliza-
tion as an empirical reality, however, effectively disables potentially emancipatory
projects that might arise imagining the world differently. In contrast, studying the
material relations within which academics imagine the world as global—as I do
in this article—opens the possibility of asking the political question ‘How might
the world be imagined differently, and what material conditions are necessary to
do so?’
While I am not the first to claim that globalization should be reconceptualized as an
imaginary, previous efforts lack a systematic and rigorous theorization of what
‘global imaginary’ actually means.1Further, those accounts that do provide a
detailed definition—such as Manfred Steger’s The Rise of the Global Imaginary—only
document the global imaginary’s existence but fail to adequately theorize the mecha-
nisms through which the predominant global imaginary is produced. As a conse-
quence, the global imaginary becomes presented as a de facto reality—the world is
imagined as global because the world is global.
In order to create a well-theorized understanding of the global imaginary I first
offer a sustained engagement with the work of Charles Taylor and Manfred
Steger. I argue that while both are useful in thinking globalization as a social
imaginary they nonetheless fail to offer clear insight into the material practices
and resistances shaping the global imaginary. To address this limitation, I then
turn to Louis Althusser to rethink globalization as a socially produced imaginary—
that is, a common (and changing) product of human labor shaped within par-
ticular material apparatuses. This alternative theorization of the imaginary
requires situating the global imaginary produced by academics within the mate-
rial apparatus of the university. I conclude the article by showing how, in the
last three decades, the Cold War university, which was materially organized to
imagine a world segmented into nation units, has been radically transformed
by neoliberal market forces into an apparatus for producing the particular
global imaginary that prevails today. To begin this argument I first draw upon a
paradigmatic example of how globalization is studied within the contemporary
university to illustrate the limitations in thinking of globalization as an empirical
fact.
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Globalization as Empirical Fact versus Globalization
as an Imaginary
Most scholars treat globalization as a concept—that is, a term that corresponds to a
‘phenomenon (real life)’ (Goertz 2006, 4; also, Sartori 1970). As a concept, a vast
array of social objects and relations—expanded telecommunication connectivity,
economic and cultural integration, supra-national institutions, international activ-
ism, flows of people and money, and the like—all become conceptualized as various
aspects of the same phenomenon called globalization. Social scientists often con-
clude that the confusion surrounding globalization stems from it being a hopelessly
complex phenomenon, and therefore difficult to conceptualize in its entirety. Other
scholars working in Gramscian and Focauldian veins argue that globalization is
actually a flexible, fluid, and contested ideology or discourse that, while often
imposed from above, can also be challenged from below. However, while these later
arguments make compelling strides towards disaggregating the complicated ideolo-
gies and discourses of globalization, they often imagine the political alternatives as
similarly ‘global’.2Even in these more nuanced accounts the world is presented as
objectively and essentially global, though recognizing that the term ‘globalization’
is shaped by conflicting ideological or discursive practices.
Attempts to address this conceptual confusion within the globalization literature
often involve calling for new, interdisciplinary modes of academic knowledge, a
solution illustrated in the reoccurring metaphor of globalization as a ‘proverbial
elephant, described by its blind observers in so many diverse ways’ (Jameson 1998,
xi). In Manfred Steger’s version of this metaphor, globalization is an elephant with
one blind observer touching the elephant’s trunk labeled ‘politics’, another grab-
bing the leg embossed with ‘economics’, and yet another touching an ear entitled
‘environment’. Another blind man pats the space between the elephant’s legs and
ridicules the others for insisting that such a fantastic beast exists. Steger claims that
‘[l]ike the blind men in the parable’ most globalization researchers ‘correctly iden-
tify[...] one important dimension of the phenomenon in question’ but make the
mistake of reducing ‘such a complex phenomenon as globalization to a single
domain that corresponds to their own expertise’ (Steger 2003, 14). While an
improvement on more simplistic conceptualizations, Steger’s metaphor still consid-
ers globalization to be a single empirical phenomenon, albeit a remarkably complex
one.
There are a number of problems with studying globalization as if it comprised a
single empirical fact. First, as illustrated in this metaphor, the study of globalization
depends upon the assumption that a single thing, even with many odd and con-
fusing components, already exists and needs only the proper conceptualization. The
metaphor, after all, assumes that the blind observers are in fact studying a single
elephant, not twelve xmathodrodons (or any other not-yet-imagined creatures).
Furthermore, only the lack of proper vision prevents this already coherent and
familiar object from being properly understood in its entirety. The starting assump-
tion is that, if present, a clear-eyed zoologist (or, by analogy, an interdisciplinary
social scientist) would certainly see the elephant as it already is, namely as a single
and coherent (if complex) being. This assumption, however, is predicated on the a
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priori claim that all parts necessarily form a whole; there is, despite all evidence to
the contrary, definitely a single elephant in the room. The second problem with
studying globalization as an empirical fact is that in practice the globalization being
studied in the contemporary university is often little more than a willy-nilly
concoction created by bringing together a whole set of divergent phenomena and
labeling them all various aspects of globalization. This is a well-known reality for
students and faculty in Global Studies programs where classes are taught on a wide
array of topics, with faculty from many disciplines, all while lacking a clear con-
ceptual consistency besides the vague sense that ‘the world is now global’. While I
explore the origins of this in more detail below, one paradigmatic example can be
drawn from a recent organizational rebranding effort to ‘globalize’ the University of
Minnesota.
Like many universities, the University of Minnesota underwent a process of Strategic
Positioning during the mid-2000s. This process was based on the general claim that
‘[w]e live today in a global, multicultural, highly competitive society and market-
place. We are judged by world-class standards. Unless the University meets and
exceeds these standards we risk losing our leadership role as one of the leading public
research universities’ (Provost 2007, 5).3Part of this institutional change involved
reshaping the University’s Office of International Programming (OIP), originally
established in 1963 to harness the institution’s legacy as a Land Grant agricultural
school and, in collaboration with the US government, to promote the Green
Revolution in North Africa and Latin America. With funding provided by USAID, the
Ford Foundation, and other donors, OIP originally developed ‘overseas technical
assistance’ in a number of countries while also establishing ‘area-oriented research
and teaching centers ... on home campuses’ (Cochrane 1968, 43; see also, OIP 1965).
By the mid-2000s, however, OIP’s mission was recast in terms of ‘preparing global
citizens’.4This included developing a number of extra-curricular innovations,
including the ‘Global Spotlight’ program that, in 2009–2010, lined up a series of
lectures, symposia, keynote speakers, gallery talks, film screenings, festivals, and
conferences focused on the theme of ‘the continent of Africa and the issue of Water
in the World’ (OIP 2009). The Senior Vice President described the program as a way
to ‘ have a very strong presence in other parts of the world’, and ‘better leverage
educational opportunities for our students’, while also ‘leverag[ing] outside grants
for faculty to continue international research’ (Katzenstein 2009). ‘The global’ that
OIP’s Global Spotlight program claimed to illuminate, however, had no coherent
content. Most programming was on either water use or Africa. A public lecture by
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was juxtaposed, for example, against a
Landscape Arboretum tour on water conservation. The Assistant Vice President for
International Scholarship recognized that ‘the two themes—water and Africa—
aren’t necessarily related’ but ‘said both problems are prevalent’ (Katzenstein 2009).
In this paradigmatic example ‘globalization’ has no actual meaning other than
serving as a useful and timely hook around which to amass different, incoherent
phenomena that nonetheless become imagined as all parts of the same phenomenon.
As such, the underlying reason why these phenomena are imagined as instances of
globalization stems less from any empirical quality they possess than from a driving
concern with re-branding the university as ‘global’ and, in doing so, ‘leveraging’ its
focus on globalization to attract students as well as future funding.
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Rejecting the assumption that some essential quality makes otherwise unlike phe-
nomena all aspects of the same proverbial elephant requires a different metaphor.
In this new parable a handful of social scientists share a typical academic office
through which steady streams of students, colleagues, books, office furniture, and
administrative memos constantly circulate. One scholar declares: ‘I’m checking my
email. This is globalization!’ Another says, ‘I’m going to Hong Kong for field
research. This is globalization!’ Another, refilling the coffee pot, says ‘This coffee is
from Kenya. This is globalization!’ Another chimes in: ‘I’m currently reading about
water conservation in Liberia. This is globalization!’ One impudent graduate
student asks, ‘If all this is globalization, then what is it?’ After deliberation they
conclude that the Internet, foreign travel, Kenyan coffee and Liberian water con-
servation are all essentially parts of the same creature. While no elephant exists, this
does not prevent every aspect of the room from becoming understood as an ear, leg
or tail that together constitute a whole. These scholars give meaning to their shared
world as if an elephant stood at its center—they are, in other words, producing an
elephant at the level of the imaginary.
To begin fleshing out a theory of the global imaginary, and how it is produced
within institutions of higher education, I now turn to the world of Charles Taylor
and Manfred Steger.
Globalization as a Social Imaginary
The term ‘social imaginary’ was coined by Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek Marxist
and psychoanalyst working in Paris during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a
re-reading of Aristotle, Castoriadis argued that humans have a two-fold imaginary,
containing both the radical and social imaginaries. The social imaginary is the
traditional philosophical and psychological understanding of the imaginary, that is,
one’s subjective understanding of the world as shaped by external forces (Castori-
adis 1997, 227). The radical imaginary, in contrast, is the psychic site of spontaneity
and creation not determined by the historical-social realm (Castoriadis 1997, 227).
Creative freedom is possible when people access their radical imaginary, thereby
freeing themselves from the dictates of the social imaginary.
The term ‘social imaginary’ made its way into the social sciences, including the
literature on globalization, largely through Charles Taylor’s study of modernity.5In
Modern Social Imaginaries Taylor argues that modernity should be considered an
imaginary because it allows ‘ordinary people [to] “imagine” their social surround-
ings’ as ‘carried in images, stories, and legends’ and creates the ‘common under-
standing that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of
legitimacy’ (Taylor 2002, 106; Taylor 2004, 23). In general, social imaginaries come
into being as ideas held by elites that eventually spread into the wider public
through their material instantiation (Taylor 2004, 69). In the case of modernity,
natural law thinkers such as Locke and Grotius developed conceptualizations of the
world as ordered by the free actions of rational people concerned with preserving
security and property. These once radical ideas would have remained ‘the posses-
sion of a small minority’ had they not influenced law, government, institutions, and
methods of self-discipline, thereby constituting modernity as a social imaginary
(Taylor 2004, 23).
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While Taylor offers a richly detailed history of modernity, he does not clearly
theorize the precise mechanisms through which some ideas—and not others—
become institutionalized as a widely diffuse social imaginary. Instead, Taylor offers
apost-hoc description; the very existence of modernity as a social imaginary testifies
to the fact that minoritarian conceptions did, in fact, emerge as dominant. Taylor’s
failure to theorize the mechanism by which certain elite ideas became social
imaginaries stems from his objection to materialist accounts that offer causal expla-
nations by way of ‘a universal principle’. Instead, he rejects both the ‘false
dichotomy ... between ideas and material factors’ and instead argues that ‘human
practices’ are often, ‘both at once ... material practices ... and at the same time,
self-conceptions, modes of understanding’ (Taylor 2004, 31). Ideas have materiality
because they reflect, and therefore prove useful to, forces of social change. For
example, changing economic models ‘must reflect what was happening on the
ground’—such as ‘the rise of merchants, of capitalist forms of agriculture, the
extension of markets’—or such imaginaries will not take hold (Taylor 2004, 31).
However, in avoiding a ‘teleological’ materialist account, Taylor’s explanation dis-
solves into thick historical description, leaving the impression that the very existence
of an imaginary confirms its correspondence with material changes. While I agree
that scholars should reject materialist accounts that reduce ideational changes
solely to shifts in the mode of production, Taylor’s non-universal materialism fails
to account for the actual mechanisms, including the material struggles and resist-
ances, by which certain imaginaries—and not others—emerge as dominant.
Furthermore, Taylor’s assumption that social imaginaries capture material realities
is particularly problematic given that Taylor’s conception of modernity seemingly
rests upon the universalization of his own Western positionality. For example,
while Taylor briefly acknowledges that there is no single modernity but rather
‘multiple modernities’ resulting from ‘the fact that non-Western cultures have
modernized in their own ways’ (Taylor 2002, 91), and despite a title indicating that
his project examines modern social imaginaries, he freely admits that his work ‘does
not engage the variety of today’s alternative modernities’ (Taylor 2002, 92; see also:
Yack 2005). Taylor’s modernity clearly originates from politically and economically
stable Western, industrialized countries: ‘As we read our morning papers about the
massacres in Bosnia or Rwanda or the breakdown of government in Liberia, we tend
to feel ourselves in tranquil possession of what we call civilization, even though we
may feel a little embarrassed to say so out loud’ (Taylor 2004, 36–37; emphasis
added). In other words, writing from a relatively tranquil modernity, it is not
surprising that Taylor is untroubled by his fairly provincial description of what ‘we
call civilization’. It should not be surprising, therefore, that he concludes that
(liberal European notions of) modernity accurately reflect existing material condi-
tions. The modern imaginary he describes is clearly one already imagined within
particular political, economic and social conditions. Yet these conditions are ren-
dered invisible, therefore allowing modernity to be presented as universal.
Manfred Steger, drawing heavily on Charles Taylor, presents the most sustained
account of the global imaginary. Like modernity for Taylor, for Steger the global
imaginary is defined as the ‘background’ of ‘communal practices’ explaining ‘how
“we”—the members of the community—fit together, how things go on between us,
the expectations we have of each other, and the deeper normative notions and
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images that underlie those expectations’ (Steger 2008, 6). He argues that the global
imaginary came into being as a result of new technologies and a post-World War II
increase in the circulation of ‘[i]mages, people, and materials ... across national
boundaries’, which created a ‘new sense of ‘the global’ that erupted within and
onto the national’ (Steger 2008, 10). As people began imagining a broader ‘global’
community, the ‘normality and self-contained coziness of the modern nation-state’
came undone (Steger 2008, 11). The rise of the global imaginary means that
ideologies previously grounded in a national imaginary—such as British liberalism,
French conservatism, German socialism, Russian communism, and German
Nazism—have become politically untenable (Steger 2008, Chapters 2 and 3). Steger
details how numerous material changes—such as the World War, transnational
alliances, Bretton Woods institutions, various technological innovations, and
atomic weaponry (Steger 2008, 131–3)—created the conditions for the emergence
of the global imaginary. Like Taylor, however, he does not examine the precise
mechanisms that produce the global imaginary.
For Steger, the rise of the global imaginary corresponds to a fairly uncontested
unfolding of these material developments. On the one hand, he points out that the
global imaginary is established through the ‘political articulations’ of ‘contemporary
social elites who reside in the privileged spaces of our global cities’ (Steger 2008, ix).
However, like Taylor, Steger recognizes that the global imaginary differs across
‘class, race, and gender’, but does not clearly articulate what these differences are
(Steger 2008, ix). While Steger does recognize the very material struggles and
resistances of Third World anti-colonial intellectuals in the rise of the global imagi-
nary, he assumes that the global imaginary they develop is largely indistinguishable
from—or even a sub-set of—the global imaginary that emerged from Europe. For
example, Steger reads Mahatma Gandhi as ‘increasingly oriented toward a global
frame of reference’ as indicated by his referencing of ‘world federation’, ‘cosmo-
politan[ism]’, and the creation of a ‘commonwealth of all world states’ (Steger
2008, 141 and 144). Similarly, Fanon’s claim that ‘genuine humanist values’ must
develop in the nation before spreading ‘throughout the whole of humankind’
indicates that Fanon was ‘[g]roping for a way to articulate the emergence of the
global consciousness from its national shell’ (Steger 2008, 149). Claiming that the
same global imaginary describes the ideas and aspirations of European colonizers
and the colonized alike, Steger undervalues the very real contradictions, tensions,
exclusions, violence, and class struggles that defined colonial rule and its resist-
ances. ‘Global’ aspirations expressed by Gandhi and Fanon, in other words, become
undifferentiated from the global imaginary emerging from Western financial insti-
tutions, post-War Europe, and current institutions of global governance.
Developing a way of theorizing how imaginaries are materially produced and
reproduced makes it possible to identify the moments of contradiction and antago-
nism and, therefore, opens the possibility of imagining the world differently. In the
next section I argue that Louis Althusser’s conception of the imaginary as produced
within particular structured apparatuses makes it possible to think of the global
imaginary as not merely a reflection of existing ‘real relations’ but instead itself the
result of dynamic and contested material struggles and transformations. Such a
theoretical perspective does not see imaginaries as ideas radiating from elites
throughout society but instead as products of human labor taking place within
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particular, structured, and contradictory material apparatuses. An Althusserian
analysis not only fleshes out a sympathetic alternative to Taylor’s non-universal
materialism but also, in so doing, avoids claiming that globalization is already
imagined. Instead, global imaginaries are constantly being produced and reproduced
through the daily practices organized within varied and conflicting material
apparatuses.
The Imaginary as Social Production
Like Castoriadis, Althusser worked in Paris during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s
and sought to use psychoanalytic theories to develop a Marxist theory of the
subject. Unlike Castoriadis, however, Althusser conceptualizes the imaginary as a
specular relation6through which the subject comes to understand herself as inter-
polated into an immanently material world. One’s imagined relationship to the
world—what Althusser calls ideology—develops as a result of daily practices and
habits organized within particular material apparatuses (Althusser 2001, 109).
While traditional Marxist conceptions of ideology focus on how ‘real’ (that is,
economic) conditions transform consciousness, Althusser contends that ideology
works in ‘the ‘lived’ relations between’ subjects ‘and the world’ (Althusser 1970,
233). Ideology, therefore, is not a ‘false’ representation of ‘the real’, but instead an
‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Althusser 2001,
109). This imaginary relationship comes into being through particular material
practices and habits organized within material apparatuses. Althusser identifies a
number of ideological apparatuses—including religion, the family, the legal system,
the media, political parties, cultural institutions, and schools—that organize and
structure daily material practices. In this way, particular activities organized within
these ideological apparatuses—such as attending church, voting, going to work,
studying for class, applying for grants, and writing academic papers—all shape how
subjects come to imagine their relationship to the ‘real’ world.
Thus, like Taylor, Althusser eschews an economistic relationship between the
material and ideational. However, rather than asserting that imaginaries exist
because they correspond to existing material realities, Althusser instead claims that
imaginaries themselves have ‘a material existence’ because they are produced within
‘an apparatus, and its practice, or practices’ (Althusser 2001, 112). Imaginaries,
therefore, are not elite ideas coalescing with material realities in some contingent
and unspecified way, but rather the lived meaning that emerges as material habits
and practices are organized and reorganized within particular structured, material
apparatuses. Althusser illustrates this relationship most clearly with the Pascalian
example of a person attending church who kneels, prays, makes the sign of the
cross, and confesses. For Althusser, it is not some preexisting faith in God that
provokes these very real activities, nor an externally imposed ideology designed to
dupe the proletarian masses, but rather the practices themselves, as organized by
the apparatus of the Church, which produce belief in God. Althusser contends that
the churchgoer’s belief ‘is material in that his ideas are his material action inserted into
material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material
ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of the subject’ (Althusser 2001, 114;
emphasis in original). As such, a belief in God (or globalization, for that matter) is
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an imaginary relationship produced when a subject repeats particular actions
within the context of structured material apparatuses. These apparatuses, them-
selves calcifications of contradictory material relations, constantly undergo trans-
formation and, in the process, continually reorganize the material practices through
which subjects come to imagine their relationship to the world.
Unfortunately, many scholars have too hastily reduced Althusser’s work to crudely
formalist claims.7Such a reading, however, fails to account for the fact that Althus-
ser treats ideological apparatuses as ‘multiple, distinct, ‘relatively autonomous’ and
capable of providing an objective field to contradictions’ (Althusser 2001, 100). As
such, one’s imaginary relation to the world is not single or static but constantly
changing as contradictory material apparatuses create the conditions for competing,
and often fragmented, imaginaries (Althusser 1970, 233–4). Drawing on Althusser’s
distinction between ‘ideologies’ and ‘ideology in general’ (Althusser 2001, 107–9),
one can differentiate ‘global imaginaries’ from ‘the global imaginary’. Global
imaginaries are produced when different subjects immersed within various
apparatuses—churches, unions, political parties, universities, etc.—engage in par-
ticular yet structured material practices through which they come to imagine their
particular relation to the world. Even if different subjects all arrive at the shared
term ‘globalization’, they do so from within different (often conflicting) appara-
tuses. As such, the ways they come to imagine globalization may differ quite
radically. Subjects within the Republican Party, the New York Times editorial board,
the United Auto Workers, or an ‘Introduction to Global Politics’ class all engage in
practices that produce different—sometimes overlapping, sometimes competing—
global imaginaries. These particular imaginaries are shaped (but not determined) by
the apparatuses within which they are produced.
Global imaginaries, therefore, have particular histories given that they emerge
within the context of specific material apparatuses, the transformations of which
can be studied empirically. In contrast to this deeply embedded understanding of
imaginaries, both Taylor and Steger attempt to describe the imaginary in general,
without accounting for the fact that their own efforts are themselves also inscribed
within structured material relations.8Thus, while Taylor and Steger claim to be
talking about modernity and the global imaginary in general, they are in fact
presenting their own imaginaries—drawn from particular locations of academic
knowledge production—as universal. Rather than claiming to understand the
global imaginary in general, an Althusserian analysis invites us to embrace the fact
that global imaginaries are always already produced within particular, material
institutions. Such an analysis makes it possible to conceptualize how the knowledge
we produce is already shaped by material changes, including struggles and resist-
ances, taking place within the university. Starting from this perspective makes it
possible to engage in academic knowledge production from a more strategically
political position, one that asks: ‘How, within the very real material confines of the
contemporary university, can the world be imagined differently?’
In the wake of the student protests of May ’68, Althusser acknowledged that ‘the
School’ has replaced the Church as the ‘dominant’ ideological apparatus through
which people come to imagine their relation to the world (Althusser 2001, 106).
Studying the production of the global imaginary in the Althusserian sense, there-
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fore, requires examining how the apparatus of the university makes it possible to
imagine an otherwise fractured and contradictory social world as a single, coherent
and shared ‘global’ reality.
Producing the Global Imaginary Within the
Contemporary University
The university has undergone a profound transformation in recent decades. While
universities still produce knowledge aimed at understanding particular locations,
regions, and nations, and still receive funding from governments to ask questions of
national interest, as in the Cold War/nationalist university of the twentieth century,
today’s universities are increasingly corporate institutions competing with each
other for students, grants, and rankings within a radically shifting international
political economy of higher education (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Bousquet 2008;
Newfield 2008). The emergence of higher education as a ‘market’ is all too familiar
to those academics who find their institutions, and therefore teaching and research
possibilities, shaped by market-oriented forces, including: federal and state funding
cuts, business-oriented priorities set by administrators, a push for rankings and
brand identity, the wooing of corporate, philanthropic and foundation donors, and
the demands of students who, fearing their dwindling job prospects and mounting
debt burdens, prioritize more ‘practical’ courses of instruction.
Using an Althusserian analysis, it becomes possible to see how the everyday prac-
tices of higher education, and therefore the imaginaries being produced, change as
the university undergoes such profound structural transformation. These changes
affect the daily practices of university life—what papers are written, courses taught,
dissertation topics chosen, books published, departments expanded (and con-
tracted), articles read, conferences attended, panels proposed, and so on. As these
daily practices and rituals change the imaginaries produced within institutions of
higher education also change. I argue that, in recent decades, a series of structural
transformations in higher education have remade American universities from appa-
ratuses for producing national imaginaries into ones highly productive of global
imaginaries. While this article only has the space to sketch out the production of the
global imaginary within the American university, it should be remembered that
global imaginaries are produced differently within various institutions, intellectual
circles, and university systems around the world. This examination, therefore, must
eventually be complemented by additional works examining how the global imagi-
nary is produced differently (or similarly) within China, Qatar, South Africa, Aus-
tralia, and elsewhere. That said, examining US universities is particularly instructive
given that the American-style research university ‘is being replicated around the
world’ as various countries come to realize ‘that the road to economic success runs
through college campuses’ (Wildavsky 2010, 41).
Producing the National Imaginary
Only a few decades ago, the US university primarily produced a national imaginary.
Humanities departments were organized around national languages and literatures,
the social sciences and area-studies explored national economies, cultures, and
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institutions, and International Relations studied a system comprised of competing
nation-states. This form of knowledge production was largely solidified during
World War II and in post-War decades.
During World War II many college administrators, skeptical of expanding federal
involvement in the economy under President Roosevelt, initially shied away
from governmental ties (Lowen 1997). However, a growing sense of national
obligation—combined with lucrative funding opportunities—encouraged many
universities to cultivate closer relationships with the federal government. Over time
American institutions—public and private alike—became dependent upon gener-
ous government contracts to pay for overhead and general maintenance (Lowen
1997). By 1960 the federal government was funding higher education to the tune
of one billion dollars, with nearly 80 percent going to twenty elite universities. At
Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT, and Harvard, for example, federal funding
accounted for half of the research budgets and between 15 and 80 percent of the
school-wide operating budgets (Lowen 1997, 147–8). Writing in 1963, Clark Kerr,
the president of the University of California system, observed that the ‘common-
law marriage’ between the federal government and leading universities meant that
universities were now less concerned with the ‘training of “gentlemen” ’ and
instead occupied ‘with such fidelity and alacrity to national needs’ (Kerr 2001, 37
and 36).
Like the scientists who invented radar, the atom bomb, Napalm, and other tech-
nologies important to national security, the humanities were also enlisted in the
project of preserving and protecting the nation. In addition to helping solidify an
American identity through the promotion of a ‘national literature’ (Readings 1996,
70), the humanities provided the nation’s ‘[m]oral education’, created ‘national
traditions’, and furnished ‘a unifying cultural identity’ (Newfield 2003, 43). Many
philanthropic institutions and government agencies even commissioned individual
writers and scholars to promote Western cultures as part of a cultural war waged
against the Soviet Union (Ohmann 1997, 74–5).9
Social scientists were similarly organized to produce a national imaginary through
the development of area studies. In 1943 both the SSRC’s Committee on World
Regions and Columbia University’s Committee on Area Studies released independ-
ent reports recommending that the social sciences develop regional specialization.
Prior to these reports most scholars trained in non-Western societies studied ‘tribal’
and ‘primitive’ peoples as timeless and unchanged, and therefore offered little
insight into the dynamic changes taking place in colonial and post-colonial Africa,
Asia, and Latin America (Wallerstein 1997, 198–199). The need for such informa-
tion encouraged heavy government spending on area studies. In 1950, for example,
96 percent of federal funding for the social sciences came from the military (Wash-
burn 2005, 42–43). In 1957 the Eisenhower administration developed the National
Defense Education Act (NDEA), which provided large sums of money to area
studies (Wallerstein 1997, 209). Funding for the social sciences also came from the
Pentagon, FBI, and CIA and focused on understanding the internal workings of
communist countries ‘to help prevent other areas from “falling into the hands of the
communists” ’ (Wallerstein 1997, 200–201).10 One result was an ‘interweaving of
foundations, universities and state intelligence agencies’ to create many centers and
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programs in area and comparative studies (Cumings 1998, 170). African Studies, for
example, received considerable government funding including NDEA grants, Title
VI funding, AID funding, money from AID/ATLAS for training African students,
funding from Fulbrights, ‘the usual disciplinary funding through NSF, NEH, NEA,
NIH’, and indirect funding through the Peace Corps (Guyer 1996, 13). Within this
context, social scientists focused their teaching and research on questions of state
formation and democratization, as well as national economies, societies and cul-
tures. The rising popularity of study abroad also helped produce a national imagi-
nary. During the Cold War, the US Department of State turned to ‘international
education’ believing that American students ‘could serve as unofficial goodwill
ambassadors on behalf of the American way of life’ (Hoffa 2007, 112–13).
In addition to area studies, the Cold War US academy also produced knowledge
about ‘the international system’ as a structural configuration of discrete nation-
states. The Realist approach to International Relations, predicated upon the nation-
state as the unit of analysis, became dominant thanks to émigré European scholars
who offered American policymakers the tools for conceptualizing the country’s new
role as a superpower. The Cold War brought the discipline numerous funding
opportunities, and considerable access to the government, stemming from a high
demand for such knowledge (Hoffmann 1977; Smith 1987). While scholars of the
international system were less interested in the particularities of individual states,
like their area studies colleagues they also took the nation-state as defining the
universe of political actors. However, instead of the nation-state serving as a
container housing various political actors, international relations during took states
themselves as actors within a system of states.
From within the American Cold War university, many scholars, students, and
administrators participated in the project of imagining the world as composed of a
series of nation-states. In many cases, universities—both public and private—
operated as extensions of the federal government, serving as a strategic reserve that,
when tapped, could help the nation address geopolitical unrest, develop new
weapon systems, or develop international strategic thinking. The American Cold
War university also contained many internal contradictions. For example, numer-
ous area studies scholars working in recently colonized, or actively decolonizing,
countries found it difficult to square these experiences with their academic training,
resulting in the development of literatures on ‘world-systems’, ‘dependency’, ‘tran-
snationalism’, ‘Third World-ism’, and even early iterations of ‘globalization’. As
evidence of university-military collaborations came to light within the context of
anti-war and civil rights protests, an emphasis on area studies had the ‘unintended
consequence’ of providing a fertile ground for the creation of ‘bottom-up’ studies of
the world’s poor and marginalized (Wallerstein 1997). The daily habits and prac-
tices of academic life in the Cold War university created the conditions in which
many scholars and students, in varying and often competing ways, came to imagine
the world as organized into discrete national units.
Producing the Global Imaginary
Since the 1980s, the political economy of higher education has undergone a
profound transformation. The neoliberal economic thinking widely introduced
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into all realms of policy-making under Thatcher and Reagan gave primary impor-
tance to capitalist markets as the provider of all social wealth (Harvey 2005). One
result of this radical change was a reconceptualization of higher education as a
private good, and therefore not a good the government should provide.11 By the
1990s this change corresponded with the emergence of a ‘New’, or ‘Knowledge-
based’, Economy that remade US universities into important sites for training
the highly skilled workers needed to fuel a ‘global knowledge economy’. The
university became a place to develop a flexible and skilled ‘knowledge class’
(Terranova 2000) capable of becoming the knowledge producers, designers, tech-
nicians, and intellectuals in an economy increasingly based on ‘mental labor’
(Bousquet 2008, Chapter 2; Ross 2000). The cost for training this new workforce,
once heavily subsidized by the state, was increasingly placed on the shoulders of
students in the form of private debt (Williams 2006; Adamson 2009). Universities
also became sites for developing intellectual property and building ‘technoscience
and market-related fields’, i.e. fields of ‘wealth creation’ (Slaughter and Leslie
1997, 37). The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, for example, allowed universities to own
and market the patented technologies they developed using federal research
funding. This created an intellectual property gold rush as cash-strapped univer-
sities and colleges looked to commercialize academic knowledge (Newfield 2008,
Chapters 11 and 12). As federal and state governments withdrew money from
higher education, the vacuum was filled by private and corporate philanthropy,
the marketization of research, the privatization of student services, and higher
tuition.
During the Clinton years, philanthropic funders—such as the Carnegie, Mellon and
Ford foundations—began de-funding area studies in favor of research with a more
‘global’ focus (West and Martin 1997; see also, Cumings 1998, 178). The Social
Science Research Council (SSRC) made a similar shift arguing that higher education
‘has become a large, heterogeneous, and costly industry’ and therefore needed to
change its research priorities to reflect those favored by private funders (Prewitt
1996, 15–16). Implicit in this account was the recognition that—unlike the federal
government during the Cold War—private funders were generally uninterested in
developing a body of seemingly esoteric area studies knowledge and instead pre-
ferred research relevant to the new economic trends.
Many universities and colleges also began investing heavily in study abroad pro-
grams to boost institutional competitiveness and attract top students. The ‘gloomy
demographic forecasts’ of the 1980s predicted larger institutional capacity than
potential students and encouraged schools to develop study abroad programs to win
the ‘struggle for bodies’ (Goodwin and Nacht 1988, 21). In addition to making
smaller and rural schools ‘seem more glamorous, cosmopolitan, and up-to-date’,
study abroad also helped schools recruit tuition-paying foreign students, harness
‘the entrepreneurial drives of faculty’, save money by locating tuition-paying
students in countries with a lower cost of living, decrease class sizes and alleviate
housing shortfalls (Goodwin and Nacht 1988, 21–29). Business schools became
one of the earliest and largest proponents of study abroad, responding to a
demand among the business community that graduates have a greater aware-
ness of the world outside the US. In 1993, the American Assembly of Collegiate
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Schools of Business (AACSB) required that undergraduate and graduate curri-
cula include considerable attention to ‘global issues’ (Fugate and Jefferson 2001,
161).
These structural shifts in higher education affected the daily practices of scholars.
Many academics trained in area studies began reframing their projects in terms of
globalization (West and Martin 1997). Students were increasingly encouraged, and
sometimes required, to take courses in globalization or global studies. Within the
social sciences, globalization became ‘an academic growth industry’; between 1993
and 1996, the yearly output of articles published on globalization nearly quadru-
pled, up from single digits in the 1980s (Busch 2000, 23; see also Busch 2007). The
humanities—which now ‘lack[ed] something to sell’ (Newfield 2008, 19)—saw
cost-saving measures that broke down the previous national divisions and recon-
solidated them into amalgamated departments comprised of regional or ‘world’
literatures. Other universities established branch campuses abroad. The 2,500-acre
Education City in Qatar, for example, hosts branch campuses of Texas A&M,
Georgetown, Cornell, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Common-
wealth University (Wildavsky 2010, 53–60). Since receiving protection from the
World Trade Organization, higher education has become the United State’s fifth
largest exportable service as universities send their curricula, research, and their
own brands overseas in search of larger pools of tuition-paying students (Ross
2008). As illustrated in the example of the University of Minnesota’s Office of
International Programming at the outset, those spaces within the university appa-
ratus that once worked with USAID to develop state-to-state development pro-
gramming have been transformed to accommodate expanded study abroad, fund
research on ‘global’ topics, oversee international visas, and develop lecture series on
global issues. Last year the Office of International Programming even changed its
name to the ‘Global Programs and Strategy Alliance’.
Conclusion
The transformation of the US university into a site for the production of the global
imaginary has taken place over many decades and has taken many different forms,
including developing administrative initiatives to address financial constraints,
adapting research programs to changing funding streams, choosing ‘marketable’
dissertation topics, developing new curriculum, creating Global Studies programs,
expanding study abroad offerings, rebranding institutions, and securing private
donors to fund centers for global studies and global citizenship. These general
practices shape what courses get taught, what programs open (and close), what
research is funded, what books are published, what topics studied, what faculty are
hired, and what curricular initiatives are pursued. In short, they shape the daily
practices of the university, and therefore what imaginaries get produced. Over the
course of many decades these seemingly minor aspects of university life together
have produced a fundamental shift in how the world comes to be imagined as
‘global’.
Taking seriously the university as a material apparatus shaped by conflicting politi-
cal, social, and economic forces makes it possible to understand how the global
imaginaries academics produce are themselves material, emerge from material
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practices, are inscribed within material institutions, and have material effects. Doing
so reveals that the rise of the globalization literature in the mid-1990s was not
simply a response to an empirical fact that the world was globalizing, but rather a
product of the changing social relations within which academic knowledge was
being produced.
This argument does not claim that the various phenomena academics describe as
‘globalization’ have not taken place. There are indeed growing levels of economic
integration (and inequality), technological integration (and exclusion), migration
(and border militarization), political freedom (and detention), democratization
(and repression), as well as a networked civil society (and imperial intervention).
My argument is simply that the tendency for academics to lump this highly het-
erogeneous, conflicting, and divergent array of phenomena—containing complex
causes and a plurality of effects—as all various facets of the same thing (‘globali-
zation’) becomes possible because of a global imaginary only recently produced
within an increasingly neoliberal university. It will be interesting to see if the new
wave of graduate student and faculty unionization, as well as student protests in
Greece, Italy, California, New York, Chile, Puerto Rico and elsewhere, will help
enable new practices of imagining the world in ways other than those provided by
the increasingly neoliberal university.
By way of a conclusion, I want to emphasize that global imaginaries are not merely
fantasies, illusions, or forms of false consciousness. While many social scientists
assume that the imaginary exists on the wrong side of a division between ‘ideas’
and ‘reality’—as little more than an ‘ethereal medium’ that ‘veils’ real social
relations (Thompson 1982, 659)—I argue instead that the imaginary is rather a
register that fundamentally shapes how material relations are lived by subjects,
what social life means, and therefore what alternatives might be possible. Global
imaginaries defines the very terrain within which subjects inhabit the world,
informing how people organize and reproduce their social worlds. Understanding
globalization as an imaginary produced within contested and changing material
apparatuses, therefore, makes it possible to ask: How might the world be imagined
differently? and, therefore, What material transformations are needed within our
own universities for such projects to be possible?
About the Author
Isaac Kamola, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street,
Baltimore, MD 21218, USA, email: ikamola1@jhu.edu
Notes
This article benefited from the vibrant intellectual communities at both the Johns Hopkins Political
Science department and Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, where I had the good fortune
to spend time as a postdoctoral fellow. I’d like to thank in particular Jill Morawski, Kathleen Roberts,
Joseph Fitzpatrick and Nima Bassiri for their support and camaraderie. I would also like to express my
thanks to Bud Duvall, Lisa Disch, Michael Barnett, Premesh Lalu, Manfred Steger, Susan Kang, Carrie
Walling, Jennifer Rutledge, Mike Nelson, Orion Lewis, Michael Touchton, Erica Fowler, Alex Livingston,
and three anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of this article and provided valuable feedback.
Serena Laws provided detailed feedback, much needed editing, and moral support throughout the whole
process. Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo helped distinguish between ‘imaginary’ and ‘imagined’ and, in doing
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so, offered a pivotal insight in my thinking about the global imaginary. This project was completed with
generous support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellows program.
1. Connell’s chapter entitled ‘Imagining Globalization’ (2007) never actually explains what it means to
imagine globalization. Klein (2003) brilliantly argues that post-War America imagined its relationship
to the rest of the world vacillating between ‘the global imaginary of containment’ and ‘the global
imaginary of integration’, but never explains where the concept of the imaginary comes from.
Friedman’s article (2002) only uses the term ‘global imaginary’ in the title and briefly in the last
paragraph. Smith (1999, 2) argues that ‘globalization is best understood as a kind of imaginary’ but
fails to theorize what he means by this. Roberts (1998, 76) argues that images from space make it
possible to think of the world as a ‘global “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s phrase)’
without explaining how Anderson’s theoretical argument applies. See also Rusciano 1997; Brown
2001; Lechner 2007, 216.
2. The ‘second’ and ‘third’ waves of scholarship include treating globalization as an ideology or discourse
(Hay and Marsh 2000, 7). Scholars working in Marxist, Gramscian, and critical theory traditions
argue that globalization is ideologically inscribed by the dominant capitalist classes. In this way,
globalization is not ‘simply “the way the world is” ’ but rather a reality constituted ‘through histori-
cally specific social relations’ (Rupert 2000, 15). Steger similarly differentiates globalization—a mate-
rial process—from globalism—’a neoliberal market ideology’ (Steger 2002, 13). Other scholars treat
globalization as a discourse since doing so illustrates ‘how many of our presuppositions about the
modern world and its history may be deconstructed’ thereby undermining the ‘uni-dimensional
discourses of globalization’ (Robertson and Khondker 1998, 38). As the globalization discourse
becomes institutionalized and normalized it shapes and delimits political actors, such as nations
involved in European integration (Hay and Rosamond 2002). The purpose of examining globalization
as an ideology or discourse is often framed in terms of presenting political alternatives, such as
‘grassroots globalization’ or ‘globalization from below’ (Appadurai 2001; Kellner 2002), a ‘global civil
society’ (Kaldor 2003, Kaldor, 2000), or justice globalism (Steger 2008, Chapter 5). However, in each
instance the alternative itself can only be conceptualized as similarly ‘global’.
3. For a critical overview of the University of Minnesota’s Strategic Positioning, see: Kamola and
Meyerhoff, 2009.
4. Office of International Programming homepage: http://www.international.umn.edu/ [Accessed
January 9th, 2009]. This page has been replaced by http://www.global.umn.edu (Global Programs
and Strategy Alliance homepage). The GPS Alliance is the ‘driving force for the University of
Minnesota in globalizing teaching, learning, research, and engagement’.
5. It should be noted that while Castoriadis and Taylor conceptualize the ‘social imaginary’ in similar
ways, they have different political reasons for doing so. Not citing Castoriadis directly, Taylor’s 2002
article appears in a Public Culture special issue ‘New Imaginaries’ organized to re-think the imaginary
in response to Castoriadis’s formulation (Gaonkar 2002, 6). While Taylor embraces the term social
imaginary, and similarly defines it as a sort of glue holding society together, he does not acknowledge
that Castoriadis developed the term in order to critique how society actually impinges upon the radical
imaginary, and therefore the possibility of a radical politics. It is not coincidental that, while Taylor
examines the elite liberal tradition of Locke and Grotius, Castoriadis’s critique of the social imaginary
influenced the Situationist International and the protests of May ‘68.
6. For Lacan, the ‘mirror-stage’ (the phase between six and eighteen months when a child comes to
know her own reflection in a mirror) is the first moment when a subject conceptualizes herself as a
single, coherent ‘I’ (Lacan 1977, 4). Borrowing this concept, Althusser argues that one’s reflection in
the exterior world does not take place in a static mirror but rather in the dynamic relations of
production and reproduction.
7. Althusser is a highly controversial theorist who many scholars, especially those working within the
social sciences, have rejected as overly formalist, top-down, and espousing a totalizing view of
capitalism (Hindess and Hirst 1977; Thompson 1995; Rancière 2011). I argue that within the
contemporary university it becomes possible to apply Althusser’s method of reading to his own
texts—i.e. ‘to read Althusser as Althusser reads Marx’. Doing so reveals an Althusser not trapped
within a stringent science/ideology distinction, but rather an Althusser that emphasizes the profound
differences and contradictions at work in the social totality, and therefore not irreducible to mere
formalism.
8. Althusser argues that one can know ideology in general through science, because ‘ideology never says,
“I am ideological” ’ only a scientific knowledge of ideology makes it possible to say ‘I am in ideology’
(Althusser 2001, 118). However, reading Althusser as Althusser reads Marx (fn. 7) involves disbe-
lieving Althusser’s own insistence upon having discovered an epistemic break between ideology and
science. Without this break it becomes impossible to maintain an outside to ideology. As such, given
that all efforts to understand it are always already situated within a structured material apparatus, one
can never access the global imaginary in general. However, examining the study of individual global
imaginaries as produced within structured material relations makes it possible to self-consciously
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produce abstractions (such as ‘the global imaginary’) that have a political use beyond just empirical
description.
9. For a harrowing account of how many artists, writers, musicians, and literary critics were organized
by the US government into a covert arm of US foreign policy, see Saunders 2000.
10. Some of the most notorious programs funded in this way were: Project Troy (1950–51) in which social
scientists at MIT developed tactics for psychological warfare (Needell 1998), Michigan State’s advising
of the South Vietnamese secret police, and Project Camelot which tapped social scientists to develop
strategies of counter-insurgency (Wallerstein 1997, 220–222). Between 1966 and 1970 the Depart-
ment of Defense spent between $34 million and $48 million on ‘behavioral and social-science
research’ (Nader 1997, 123).
11. Milton Friedman argued that while primary and secondary education might have a ‘neighborhood
effect’—i.e. benefits that apply to everyone—higher education, especially vocational and professional
schooling, does not share this characteristic. Therefore, investments in higher education constitute
‘human capital’, an investment that—like fixed capital—benefits only the owners of the investment
(Friedman 1962, Chapter 6; see also, Adamson 2009).
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