Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational

Abstract

What can one say about transnational , citizenship , and humanities ? The three key terms, combined in this fashion, probably sound novel, but do they bring anything new? Each of the contributors to this issue has proceeded with some degree of caution. We simply put three terms on the table, fully aware that each is fraught, that each can be ironized, and that their intimated directionality might be no more than an illusion. Rather than acting as a spur, three arrows pointing toward a brave new future, transnational , citizenship , and humanities might look like the latest symptoms of a world spinning out of control, occasioned on the one hand by the diminished sovereignty of the nation-state and on the other hand by the diminished value of our own work, both unstoppable, it seems, a downward spiral. As the bombings in New York, Madrid, and London make abundantly clear, the continued existence of national borders only highlights the shared hazard of those inside those borders. And the continued existence of English departments only highlights the across-the-board decline of the discipline, the sense that innovation is now coming from fields other than our own. It is in this context, as we are being lumped again and again into corporate units—often with a less-than-happy profile—that aggregation becomes a pressing issue. Aggregation: not only as it produces random and nonrandom sets of casualties, but also as it generates different kinds of filiations on different scales, opening up the question of what counts as an entity, the platform on which it emerges, the agency available to it, and the pressure that this scalar variety exerts on more conventional forms, such as the form of the nation.

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