Postmodern nomadism mirrors how multinational capital disavows its origins

Evidence

As formulations of this kind become the manifest common sense of the metropolitan intelligentsia, dutifully reproduced in the literary productions and pronouncements of ‘Third World intellectuals’ located within that milieu, one wonders what these cultural positions – the idea of origin being a mere ‘myth’; the doubleness of arriving at an excess of belonging by not belonging; the project of mining the resource and raw material of ‘Third World Literature’ for archival accumulation and generic classification in the metropolitan university – might have to do with this age of late capitalism in which the most powerful capitalist firms, originating in particular imperialist countries but commanding global investments and networks of transport and communication, proclaim themselves nevertheless to be multinationals and transnationals – as if their origins in the United States or the Federal German Republic were a mere myth, as if their ability to accumulate surplus-value from a dozen countries or more were none other than an excess of belonging. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 219

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing analogy — the poststructuralist critique of origins-as-myth and the corporate self-description of ‘multinational’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting juxtaposition that exposes the political quietism latent in fashionable anti-essentialism.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘excess of belonging’ as the contemporary intellectual’s structural analogue to transnational capital — critiques of origins as the cosmopolitan class position’s self-justification.
• XREF: connects to: The nomadic-wild-animal myth mirrors capital’s deterritorialization. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 459; The myth of the wandering animal mirrors rather than opposes capital — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 459; Postmodern spatial disruption mirrors flexible accumulation’s global marketplace. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1906 (+1 more)

Related

• The nomadic-wild-animal myth mirrors capital’s deterritorialization. (similarity 0.84)