“Flow”Author(s): Stuart Alexander RockefellerSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 557-578Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660912 .Accessed: 30/09/2011 16:18

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Special Section: Keywords

“Flow”

by Stuart Alexander Rockefeller

“Flow” is a term that is frequently employed in anthropological discussions of globalization, althoughlittle attention has been paid to the word or the presuppositions and history it carries with it. Therise of this keyword has been surprisingly inconspicuous. In this article, I show some of the ways“flow” is employed in anthropological and other social science writing today, tracing its developmentthrough the works of Deleuze and Guattari and ultimately to the writings of the philosopher HenriBergson. I then raise two important concerns regarding the use of “flow” to talk about globalization.First, I argue that as it is employed today, the term lends itself all too easily to a metaphysical dualismthat can only impede our understanding of the dynamic nature of locality and global interconnections.Second, I argue that the term encodes what I call a “managerial perspective” that sees agency onlyin large-scale social patterns and institutions and that is largely unable to recognize individual agencyor the significance of small-scale organization and phenomena.

In the introduction to Keywords, Raymond Williams describeshis return to university life after several years of military ser-vice in World War II (Williams 1985:11). He found that theconversations had changed and that people were debatingwords, many of them familiar, such as “culture,” in ways thatsuggested that their meanings and the importance attachedto them had changed. I had a similar experience in 1994 onmy return from two years of fieldwork in Bolivia and Argen-tina. I had been working with a highly mobile group ofQuechua speakers and had followed some of them to BuenosAires. On my return, I found that people at the Universityof Chicago were talking about international connections in away different from the one they had had when I left. Peoplewere using and debating such terms as “deterritorialization”as well as “transnationalism” and “globalization.” “Hybridity,”“place,” and “borders” had taken on a new significance andurgency. “Glocal” made a mercifully brief appearance. It issignificant, however, that “flow” was not a term that anyonewas discussing. The word had come to be widely used in thesocial sciences and critical theory as part of a way of talkingabout transnational movements of money, people, images,commodities, and other such bearers of significance, but ithad a way of slipping under the radar. People used the term

Stuart Alexander Rockefeller is Lecturer at the Center for the Studyof Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University (421 Hamilton Hall,Mail Code 2880, 1130 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, New York10027, U.S.A. [sr2772@columbia.edu]). This paper was submitted 26XI 07 and accepted 5 VI 08.

but did not talk about using it; for this reason, it took meseveral years to recognize that “flow” was one of the mostimportant words constituting a new social scientific perspec-tive on the relation of scale, agency, locality, and mobility onthe global scene.

Part of the power of the word “flow” as it is currentlyemployed in anthropological conversations arises from itssheer multiplicity: it has had a range of meanings in commonparlance for centuries, and as a result it has entered the socialsciences at many junctures in many contexts. “Cash flow,”“traffic flow,” the “flow” of time, “flow” as a psychologicalstate (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), and the “flow” of conversationare all well-known terms in popular and academic discourse.But in recent years, use of the term “flow” has taken on anew intensity and specificity, or rather several specificities.This change has been brought about by some sociologists’and anthropologists’ efforts to develop tools to think aboutthe new extent of interconnectedness of cultures and eco-nomic systems: in a word, globalization. This new specificitytakes advantage of polysemy of the word “flow,” and it isquite difficult to discern a single meaning for the term.

One indication of the nature of the word’s recent popularityis where it appears and where it does not. It often appears inthe titles of articles, books, and chapters; for instance, Meyerand Geschiere (1999) subtitle their collection on globalizationDialectics of Flow and Closure; Inda and Rosaldo use “flow”in the title of each section of their reader on the anthropologyof globalization (Inda and Rosaldo 2002); Leitch’s book Post-modernism (1996) is subtitled Local Effects, Global Flows. Yet

558 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

“flow” is much less often to be found in an index. The termhas an aura and can appear to say a great deal, yet it can beemployed in a nearly unaware fashion, as if its meaning wereentirely uncomplicated and its use so innocuous as to call forno special mention. The word is suggestive of something rad-ically new, yet it maintains the innocence of common English.

As I show below, “flow” is nowadays used to talk aboutthings for which it probably would not have been used in thepast, and it is increasingly invoked as a stand-alone noun todenote a broad perspective on the world. The word has be-come a feature of the social scientific landscape, particularlyanthropological writing on globalization, transnationalism,media, global finance, international migration, and the like.

There is nothing wrong with terms with complex originsand protean usages; they can be particularly useful for talkingabout the complex and protean reality we inhabit, whichseems to be getting more complex and protean every moment(see, e.g., Geschiere 1999). But these qualities can also makeit hard to figure out what work the term is doing in specificsituations, and more ominously, they can facilitate the use ofa term that incorporates assumptions that many of its userswould very likely not endorse.

In this article, then, I show how the term is employed totalk about globalization and trace some of the more importantgenealogies behind the term’s current use. I begin by showingthe tremendous range of meanings it can have in anthro-pological discourse, as a keyword, or just as an everyday usage.A word as common and polysemous as “flow” cannot betracked through a single genealogy; rather, throughout thearticle I argue that several specific genealogical backgroundsare mobilized by certain authors’ use of the term. A keymoment in the rise of “flow” as a keyword came with theconjunction of some writings by Arjun Appadurai, ManuelCastells, and Ulf Hannerz; I explicate how they adapted theword into a way to approach globalization. Then I advancetwo critiques of the way anthropologists invoke “flow” to talkabout globalization, both of them turning on the word’s cu-rious tendency to give rise to dichotomies and lend itself toa covert dualism. First, it is often used as an image of “pure”movement and opposed to relatively static enclosed “places,”part of an argument that places are being undermined throughglobalization. Second, flow as an image of agentless movementwith no starting point and no telos can elide agency, privilegethe large scale over the small, and in the process rhetorically

align the observer with the perspective of a manager.

Uses of “Flow”

In order to give the reader a feel for the wide range of senses

“flow” can cover, I went over uses of the word in eight issues

of the journal Cultural Anthropology from November of 2003

to August 2005.1 The word “flow” occurs at least once in 28of the 39 articles that appeared during this time.2 Twelve ofthese articles can be said to in some sense engage issues ofglobalization or transnationalism; 13 include mentions of“flow” whose sense broadly fits with the keyword I am dis-cussing. All the other mentions of the word, including manyin articles that use the keyword, represent the linguistic back-ground from which the keyword has arisen. For instance,references to flowing water (Bissell 2005:235; Lowe 2004:505;Russ 2005:138) or blood (Axel 2004:47) employ only the lit-erally fluid senses of the word and have no particular con-nection to globalization or recent theoretically weighted usesof the term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary(OED), a form of the verb “flow,” referring to the movementof liquids, appeared in English as early as 1000 CE.3

Sometimes the word refers to flowing cloth (Boellstorff2004:171; Rouse and Hoskins 2004:239) or hair (Ramamurthy2003:534); this sense seems to rely simply on the metaphoricalassociation of the drape of fibers with the movement of water;the OED traces this usage to the early seventeenth century.In other articles, the noun “flow” seems to indicate thesmooth movement of multiple items, as in the flow of “ma-terials” into an archive (Buckley 2004:261) or the flow of“voters and ballots” through a voting station (Coles 2004:564). The traces of such movement having occurred can alsobe said to flow, as in Buckley’s “stacks of boxes overflowingonto the floors” (2004:262). Chesluk (2004:254) quotes some-one from New York talking about trash “flowing around thestreet.” According to the OED, something like this sense wasfairly common by the 1600s.

Bissell mentions the “flow” of time (Bissell 2005:215, 221),and in a usage that might be derived from the temporal as-sociations of flow, others talk of the “flow” of events and ofverbal associations in therapy (Pazderic 2004:205, 207; thisusage dates to the sixteenth century) or use the term to denotecausal connections (“waria [men] usually assume their desirefor men flows causally from a prior mismatching of soul andbody”; Boellstorff 2004:168). These kinds of deployments of“flow” date to the 1600s, according to the OED. Two articlesabout China use “flow” to describe the movement of qi, orenergy (Farquahar and Zhang 2005:322 [quoting a Chineseauthor]; Pazderic 2004:200). In most of the examples I havegiven so far, the term “flow” turns up in a sense that is

1. I should make clear that this sample is not intended as “proof” ofany developments in anthropological terminology but rather a demon-stration of the possibilities implicit in the term “flow” today. My choiceof Cultural Anthropology might appear parochial, but given that it is ajournal that makes some effort to embody multiple strands of thinkingin cultural anthropological work and consistently publishes work byscholars from many parts of the world, I feel that it is an adequate sourceto make my point.

2. I excluded a couple of articles that contain only related words, suchas “overflow.”

3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, v.” (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/72001?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp4#eid, accessed December 15,2005).

Rockefeller “Flow” 559

ancillary to the theme of the paper—in passing, or as part ofa specific description or quote rather than as part of thearticle’s main point.

Grant mentions “the flow of Caucasian bodies to Russia”(Grant 2005:49). As early as the fourteenth century, Wycliffealso referred to people flowing, but to my knowledge the useof the nominal form of the word to denote large-scale move-ments of people is much more recent; the earliest examplethe OED cites is from 1832.4 This usage has a slightly sur-prising effect, because we are more accustomed to seeing theword applied to inanimate things that are clearly moved bya force outside of themselves. By saying that people or bodiesform a “flow,” Grant subtly highlights the fact of movementand downplays any sort of intentionality or agency that thepeople who live in those bodies might have. Fassin appearsto intentionally invoke this tendency of the term in relationto migration when he uses it to highlight a state’s perspectiveon deciding “how to manage transnational human flows”(Fassin 2005:366).

Another traditional use of “flow” is to talk about the move-ment of money, as in “cash flow.” This is a handy term thatgroups a mass of extremely varied events and actions by look-ing at them strictly in terms of how they affect the “move-ment” of money into and out of some financial entity. In thecorpus I am looking at, “cash flow” as such appears only inLiechty’s and Ramamurthy’s articles, although Liechty men-tions it repeatedly (Liechty 2005:8, 20, 24). In spite of therarity of the term “cash flow” in our articles, “flow” is usedfrequently to refer to the movement of money, and when itdoes, the usage is generally central to the articles it appearsin. Bernal, for instance, calls remittances “transnational flowsof resources from Eritreans abroad” (Bernal 2004:15) and saysthat charitable donations “flowed” into Eritrea (Bernal 2004:3). Pinto (2004:338) mentions “international flows of funds,ideology, and regulation through North India,” while Ra-mamurthy (2003:528) talks of “flows” of investment.

The earliest English-language association of the term “flow”with “cash” that the OED records is from 1707, but it tracesthe first use of “cash flow” to a 1954 article in a businessjournal.5 Here again “flow” refers to smooth, apparently un-broken movement of something, but unlike the “flow” ofarchival materials or bodies, monetary flows are not neces-sarily made up of discrete items or of any sort of objects atall so much as of monetary value (of signs, that is to say),and they need not involve any long-distance physical move-ment at all. Any mention of the “flow” of money can referto radically different scenarios, from the physical transport ofcurrency between places to the addition and subtraction ofnumbers in bank accounts whose physical location is irrele-

4. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December15, 2005).

5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “cash, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/28425?rskeypavtLKv&resultp1#eid, accessed March 10,2007).

vant and might be impossible to specify. This sort of abstractand disembodied quality begins to get us close to the neweruses of “flow,” which are often concerned with the “move-ment” not of objects or liquids but of symbols, such as money.I would suggest that the current popularity of “flow” as akeyword owes more to the image of cash flow than to thatof water flowing; more precisely, it arises from watery imageryby way of the image of money moving like water.

The association of “flow” with the words “transnational”or “global” is a hallmark of the keyword; this pairing of termsis one of the defining features of many discussions of glob-alization. For instance, Bernal (2004) argues that one of twomain models of transnationalism is that of Arjun Appadurai,who “sees transnationalism largely in terms of capital, ideas,and images flowing across national boundaries” (4). Bernal’saccount exemplifies two key dualistic tendencies of the term.She invokes a model that characterizes transnationalism bythe opposition between something flowing and the bound-aries that would (but cannot) contain those flows. She thenopposes Appadurai’s model of transnationalism to that ofLinda Basch, which focuses on people who routinely inhabitmultiple places in multiple countries, thus invoking an im-plicit opposition between “flow” and actors. These two du-alisms—flow versus static places and flow versus actors—are,I argue, central to both the keyword’s popularity and its weak-ness.

Even more characteristic of the new specificity “flow” hasacquired are references to “flows” of multiple kinds of things,or of abstractions, or of multiple abstractions. For instance,Bissell (2005:230) mentions flows of “capital, images, andpeople,” Pazderic (2004:215) cites flows of “Taiwanese reli-gious currents,” and Ramamurthy (2003:531) describes flowsof “imported oil, processing plants, technology, and capital.”These uses of “flow” are qualitatively different from the “flow”of water, cloth, time, or words. For one thing, these usagesare evidently straining at the grammatical constraints whereby“flows” are “of” something or other (i.e., whereby a flow isdefined by its content).

Most historical uses of the verb “flow” were either part ofa subject-predicate pair (rivers flow, tears flow, conversationflows) or part of a noun phrase that tied the flow to somecontent through the preposition “of” or an adjective thatindicates content (flow of water, cash flow, tidal flow). Or thesubstance that is said to constitute a flow is left implicit be-cause the context leaves it unmistakable. So the OED saysthat the noun “flow,” unmodified, can refer to a volume ofmenstrual blood, or of tidal water, or of fluid passing throughcertain kinds of meters.6 A number of our texts use the noun“flow” without specifying what it is that flows, but in thesecases the substance of the flow is left unspecified rather thanimplicit. In this usage, “flow” stands alone, accompanied at

6. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December15, 2005).

560 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

most by an adjective, most commonly “cultural” or “trans-national.” So Bernal mentions the role of “transnationalflows” in constituting nations (2004:3), and Bissell says thatanthropologists have recently been grappling with “transna-tional flows and forces” (Bissell 2005:225). This sort of un-specified flow is the most distinctive way that the keywordappears. While these usages do not leave us completely in thedark as to what it is that is flowing, they clearly put theemphasis on the flow rather than on the substance that isflowing, on form rather than on content.

This, then, is the basic sense of “flow” as a keyword today.From a multitude of usages—some ancient, some quite pe-destrian, all interconnected—a new term has arisen. Apartfrom its use to talk about movement at a transnational scaleand its application not just to cash but to masses of migrants,television images, consumer goods, and many other oftenvaguely specified sorts of things, the distinctive thing aboutthe keyword is the way it tends to privilege a form (unbroken,agentless movement) over any content.

Something like this usage has antecedents that do not ap-pear in the OED, although a hint of them appears in one ofour texts. Alonso (2004:463–464) quotes the Mexican writerJose Vasconcelos arguing that the United States (in contrastto Mexico) is “open” to “the flow of civilization” (Vasconcelos1926:8). It seems that the association of civilization with adynamic force or “flow” was a relatively commonplace ideain the early twentieth century. As Hannerz (2000 [1997])points out, anthropology has never made systematic use ofthis sense of the term, although Kroeber employed it fromtime to time. The usage never died out entirely, and Hannerzcites uses of it (in which “civilization” has been replaced by“society”) in the latter part of the twentieth century (Barth1969; Vincent 1977; Watson 1970).

Forging “Flow”

“Flow” in the sense I am talking about slipped onto the scenein the social sciences in a 2-year period from 1988 to 1990,mainly because of the work of Arjun Appadurai (along withCarol Breckenridge; see Appadurai 1996 [1990]; Appaduraiand Breckenridge 1988), Ulf Hannerz (1989), and ManuelCastells (1989). By the end of 1990, the basic outlines of anew meaning for the term had been laid out by the juxta-position of their separate projects. “Flow” had become a termuseful for talking about large-scale, even global cultural andeconomic phenomena; it was a heterogeneous word that al-lowed writers to highlight formal commonalities in the move-ment of people, ideas, money, images, goods, and more; itwas a way of talking about social relations and culture whileemphasizing process rather than stasis; accordingly, it wasantagonistic to traditional conceptions of place. Over the nextseveral years, many features of the term were elaborated onas each of these authors and others published further, moredetailed work making use of the term (Appadurai 1996[1993], 1996 [1995]; Castells 1996a, 1996b; Hannerz 1991,

1992, 1996, 2000 [1997]), but the term’s new specificity waslargely in place. A key moment in the development of thenew word came in 1984–1985, when Appadurai and Hannerzwere both fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in theBehavioral Sciences in Palo Alto (Appadurai 1996:x; U. Han-nerz, personal communication), although in keeping with thefluid nature of the term, each author has made significantlydifferent uses of it, apparently drawing on very different ge-nealogies.

Arjun Appadurai is one of the key figures in the devel-opment of the language of the anthropology of globalizationbecause of both his role as coeditor of the journal PublicCulture during much of the 1990s and a series of articles hewrote in a remarkable burst of creativity from the late 1980sto the mid-1990s (collected in Appadurai 1996), in which headdressed various aspects of the problem of how to writeabout culture in a way that does not localize it and that lendsitself to the multiscalar and fast-changing conditions underwhich it is nowadays produced and lived. In the openingsentence of the “Editors’ Comments” to the first issue ofPublic Culture, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1988:1) declaredthat the journal is intended as “an intellectual forum forinteraction among those concerned with global culturalflows.” Although they put considerable emphasis on “flows,”they treated the word as unproblematic and did nothing togloss it. Two years later, Appadurai published “Disjunctureand Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (Appadurai1996 [1990]), in which he introduced a new vocabulary fortalking about culture on the global scale. Prominent in histerminology were “global cultural flows,” “deterritorializa-tion,” and a series of terms for articulations of cultural spacethrough “flows”: he called these “ethnoscapes,” “media-scapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes,” and “ideoscapes.”

A key concept of Appadurai’s is that the production ofidentity and communities, as well as of cultures, are today“deterritorialized” (Appadurai 1996 [1990]); that is, they areno longer produced in relatively contained places but ratherare made and experienced translocally, often in locales acrossthe globe. Underlying deterritorialization are “flows,” whichappear to be persistent, self-sustaining kinds or patterns ofmovement of symbols, such as money, media images, and thelike. He argues that “commodity flows” have transformedconsumers from actors into signs (Appadurai 1996 [1990]:42). At the end of the article it becomes clear that he views“flow” as a central problem for any effort to think aboutculture today. Indeed, he suggests that the concept is necessaryto introduce process into any theory of global culture:

In a world of disjunctive global flows, it is perhaps important

to start asking [questions of causality and contingency in

global culture] in a way that relies on images of flows and

uncertainty . . . rather than on older images of order, stability

and systematicness. Otherwise, we will have gone far toward

a theory of global cultural systems but thrown out process

in the bargain. (Appadurai 1996 [1990]:47)

Rockefeller “Flow” 561

Here, flow is both the problem and the solution, the causeand the means of anthropological inquiry into globalization,the reality that challenges our understanding and the tool tounderstand that reality. While Appadurai never defines theterm—and in other writings he relegates it to a prominentrole in the background of his anthropological mise-en-scene—it remains a key underlying concept in his analysis ofcurrent challenges to the association of culture and localityand a key means of understanding large-scale cultural phe-nomena. In addition, he argues that the new significance of“flows” marks a historical break with “place” as it has longbeen seen and experienced, a break that in the term “deter-ritorialization” he posits as a contradiction between localitytraditionally conceived and the new reality of flows.

In 1989, the urban sociologist Manuel Castells publishedThe Informational City, in which he opposed “spaces of flows,”the organizational space created by information technologyand characterized by global interconnection, to traditionalspaces of experience, the “spaces of places” (Castells 1989).Of the three authors I am discussing here, Castells makes themost ambitious and historically specific claims, arguing thatin large part because of the rise of information technology,we are witnessing the rise of new “forms of space and time”(Castells 1996b:376) that constitute “a new era of the humanexperience” (Castells 1996a:34) and that not only is socialstructure changing but also what constitutes social structureis changing; the new material from which social structure, aswell as selves, is made is “flows” (Castells 1996a:31).

In The Informational City, Castells (1989:167) argues that“a new spatial logic” has emerged as a result of myriad changesin the structure of productive enterprises, mostly because ofthe rise of information technology. The result was that “thespace of organizations in the information economy is in-creasingly a space of flows” (Castells 1989:169; emphasis inoriginal). The space of flows is inherently antagonistic to the“space of places”: “the supersession of places by a networkof information flows is a fundamental goal of the restructuringprocess” (Castells 1989:349).

Until recently, people inhabited the “space of places” con-stituted by bounded places whose interconnection is domi-nated by relationships such as proximity. Or, as Castells putsit, “A place is a locale whose form, function and meaning areself-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity”(Castells 1996b:423). Information technology, in particularthe long-distance and global integration of economic practice,is creating a new kind of space characterized not by boundedplaces such as neighborhoods or towns but by dynamic struc-tured interconnections. He calls the global city “not a place,but a process” (Castells 1996b:386) that exists mainly through“information flows” that connect the city more closely toother global cities than to its own hinterland. The spatial logicthat he initially identified within organizations has come tocolonize entire cities. He views it as the currently dominantmode of spatial logic and social structure in the world, whichis increasingly marginalizing not only the “space of places”

that constitutes most of our lived experiences but also peoplewho are dominated by organizations that inhabit the spaceof flows but are kept from participating in it themselves. Suchpeople resist by clinging to prenetworked “selves” and iden-tities (Castells 1996a). The major challenge facing us today,he argues, is resolving the growing disconnect between thespace of places and the space of flows (Castells 1996b:428).

Ulf Hannerz’s “Notes on the Global Ecumene” (Hannerz1989) appeared in the second issue of Appadurai and Breck-enridge’s journal Public Culture. This article is mainly an in-tervention in the debate over the impact of globalization oncultural variety, presenting an alternative to the view thatnondominant traditions would be swamped by Western cap-italist culture. Hannerz argues that we are instead entering a“global ecumene” in which “transnational cultural flows”(Hannerz 1989:68) are bridging and transforming culturesthat once were less intensively connected to one another. Thisprocess does not inherently mean that colonized and non-Western cultures will be wiped out. Hannerz’s starting pointis the long anthropological tradition of focusing on culturaldiffusion—what he terms “cultural flows,” following a phraseof Kroeber’s (Hannerz 2000 [1997]:4; Kroeber 1952:154). Partof his argument is that the world today is characterized bythe prevalence of cultural flows, the rapid and long-distancetransmission of ideas and influences. It is these extended andintensive cultural flows that constitute the “global ecumene.”

A few years later, Hannerz wrote Cultural Complexity(1992), an effort to make the anthropological culture conceptuseful for thinking about not just traditional “small-scale”scenarios but also complexly interconnected conjuncturessuch as global cities, nations, and international financial net-works (Hannerz 1992). One reason he found “flow” usefulfor this project is that it could be scaled up, and in fact muchof his book is concerned with reviving anthropology’s com-mitment to studying culture at multiple scales. He lamentsethnography’s increasing concern with “miniatures” (Han-nerz 1992:21), attributing it to the plethora of other socialsciences that take on large-scale structures and behavior; forHannerz, “flow” is part of a larger project to restore anthro-pology’s commitment to studying complex cultures.

He illuminates this project in a later article on “flow” as akeyword (Hannerz 2000 [1997]), in which he points out thatKroeber used the word in two distinct senses—both to talkabout the transmission of cultural material from one peopleto another and to refer to the internal dynamism that gaveany one culture its vitality—this is the “flow of civilization”sense that I mentioned above. Hannerz points out that he isadapting both of these senses of Kroeber’s term when he writesabout the global ecumene—that “flow” can refer both to themeanings and other values transmitted between cultures (abasically diffusionist sense, as Hannerz points out) and to theinternal movement of ideas that constitute a culture’s dy-namism (which Hannerz regards as a more processual per-spective). This point is quite profound and tells us somethingimportant not only about the keyword but about globaliza-

562 Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011

tion. When we can start to call culture “global,” or when itbecomes possible to imagine that there is an inclusive “ecu-mene” that embraces a huge variety of cultural traditions, thetwo senses of Kroeber’s “flow” cease to differ. This, I think,is where and how “flow” takes on its current status as akeyword: when it is used with reference to some sort of en-compassing global conversation or structure in relation towhich the outside of any single tribe, city, nation, film in-dustry, literary tradition, and so on is an inside of somethingthat contains it. The structured movements of people, money,images, and so on that connect Chicago and Mumbai, Parisand Tokyo, Aguililla and Riverside are also the internal pro-cesses that lend any global ecumene its dynamism—they arethe “flow” of global civilization.

Flow and Place: Deterritorialization

One point where Hannerz’s use of flow imagery is quite dif-ferent from Appadurai’s and Castells’s is that he never opposes“flow” to places; rather than seeing in the flows of globali-zation a deconstruction or effacement of places, his Kroe-berian distinction appears to be working toward a processualmodel of how we can think about any sort of organized entity.In this he is following Barth (1984), who used “flow” as away of talking about ethnic identity in a nonessentializing andprocessual way (U. Hannerz, personal communication), andremains consistent with the Boasian tradition of understand-ing spatial and cultural boundaries as inherently dynamic andconstituted by circulation rather than opposing it (see Bash-kow 2004).

In contrast, for Appadurai and Castells, one of the mostinteresting and important things about flows is that they un-dermine the actuality or future of “place,” that is, a certainkind of space that is both significantly bounded and associatedwith such human matters as experience (Castells) and pro-duction (Appadurai). In treating flow, a kind of pure mobility,as an antithesis to static place, Castells and Appadurai playeda crucial catalytic role in the development of a now-commonapproach to globalization. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,for instance, invokes metaphors of liquids to characterize thecorrosive effects of global capitalism on fixed features of hu-man environments (e.g., Bauman 2000, 2002, 2005; see esp.the cover of Society under Siege). Gupta and Ferguson (1992)make the centerpiece of their pathbreaking article on an-thropology and globalization the disappearance of a certainidentification of culture with locality that has long been cen-tral to anthropology.

Most often these arguments associate the disappearance ofplaces with a new intensity of unfettered movement, whichmakes the association with fluids unsurprising. One of thekey terms in this complex of ideas is “deterritorialization”(see, e.g., Garcıa Canclini 1995; Tomlinson 1999), althoughsome authors, such as Auge (1995) and Bauman, talk aboutthe disappearance of place without using this term, and manyof those who are concerned with the challenges to locality

use metaphors of fluids (such as Bauman) or images of un-constrained “pure” speed (such as Virilio 1997:119–145).

Such associations between “flow” and displacement pop uprepeatedly in the Cultural Anthropology articles I reviewedabove. Bernal (2004) argues that Eritrea is being deterrito-rialized and then reconstituted in a less place-based formthrough global flows. Hairong (2003) says that Chinese peas-ants have been uprooted from their connection to the landand “reimplanted” in the (nongeographical) sphere of “Mar-ket and Development” (499). Bissell (2005:225) attributes“dislocation” to transnational “flows and forces,” and for himnostalgia, the main topic of his paper, functions much like“reterritorialization” (see below). In contrast, Favero (2003:576), while adopting the language of flows, refuses the con-nection with “deterritorialization,” even attributing to thatline of argument the dualism that I find in “flow.”

The term “deterritorialization” was apparently coined byGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the 1970s at the intersectionof philosophy and psychology. For Deleuze and Guattari, “de-territorialization” is inextricably connected to “flow”;7 it sig-nifies the opening of something (a body, a polity, a sign) toflows, which allows it to integrate with and be incorporatedby (or incorporate) something else. Deleuze and Guattari sug-gest that it is a moment of becoming not-oneself in the actof becoming part of something else. In general, deterrito-rialization is followed by “reterritorialization,” when whateverhad been opened or made part of something larger returnsto being itself (although it might not be the same self it wasbefore).8

To clarify, here let me cite the first illustration of “deter-ritorialization” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari1987). There is, say Deleuze and Guattari, a certain kind ofwasp that plays a crucial role in the reproductive cycle of aspecies of orchid. The wasp carries the orchid’s pollen toanother orchid, enabling the flower to reproduce. The waspis “deterritorialized” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:10) in thisinteraction, becoming part of the orchid’s reproductive ap-paratus and in the process reterritorializing the orchid byallowing it to reproduce. Taken together, the two form a “rhi-zome.” When the wasp is acting as part of the orchid’s re-productive apparatus, it is no longer just a wasp but a waspthat is being part of an orchid, or in their terms, “becoming-orchid” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:10). Presumably, oncethe wasp moves on and stops carrying pollen, it is reterri-torialized, only to be deterritorialized again when it goes backto feeding on orchids. Deterritorialization is a universal phe-nomenon, whereby one thing opens—or is opened—to ex-ternal flows, becoming integrated into a foreign apparatus.

It is interesting to note, however, that the term has takenon a very different meaning in much social science literature.

7. Flux, in French.8. The two phenomena are in fact “mutually enmeshed . . . like op-

posite faces of one and the same process” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:258).

Rockefeller “Flow” 563

To be brief, the sense explicated by John Tomlinson and im-plied by Appadurai in his earlier use of the term suggests afairly simple though profound historical shift in the way peo-ple relate to places. Its simplest expression comes from GarcıaCanclini (1995), who calls deterritorialization “the loss of the‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social terri-tories” (229).9 In a similar vein, Morley and Robins (1995)talk about the separation of identity from places. In discussingdeterritorialization, Tomlinson brings in Auge’s idea of “non-places,” spaces (such as airports and service stations) that areno longer sufficiently historical or concerned with identity to“create the organically social” in the way that real, or whatAuge calls “anthropological,” places do (Auge 1995). Thisstrictly geographical use of the term has become widelyenough accepted that recently one author, in recounting thetheft of land from indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mex-ico, in the late nineteenth century, said that the communitieswere “deterritorialized” (Stephen 2002). This last usage reallyowes nothing to Deleuze and Guattari, being a simple ref-erence to the legal separation of a community from the landthat it had owned and that provided its members’ subsistence.

It is sometimes difficult to work out the actual connectionbetween the word as used by anthropologists, sociologists,and geographers and its original use by Deleuze and Guattari.This is in part because social scientists use the term to marka historical epoch: culture is deterritorialized nowadays, butthis was not the case in the past. In addition, they use it ina much more geographical sense than do Deleuze and Guat-tari. For them it is not an inherently historical concept in thesense that it does not mark a one-way transition from onecondition to another; rather, it happens perennially and is acondition of being. It is also not inherently geographical; De-leuze and Guattari seem to mean by “territory” anything thatis in some sense bounded and self-identical.

Here let me present a speculative narrative of how the terms“deterritorialization” and “flow” came to take on their currentcentral roles in work about globalization. In the late 1980s,some social scientists began developing a new vocabulary totalk about the increasingly evident tangential relationship ofculture, identity, and locality. Everyone was to some extentfamiliar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and manyelements of their exuberant vocabulary were in the air. Per-haps inspired by the Deleuzian associations of “flow,” Ap-padurai began using “deterritorialization” (Appadurai 1996[1990]), and others soon followed his example. The termquickly became a leading word to characterize the phenom-enon whereby people participate so fully in the large-scale“flows” of information, capital, people, and goods that havearisen as part of advanced capitalism that their sense of whothey are (individually or collectively), not to mention theactual conditions under which they live and act, could no

9. In this superficially clear definition, however, much of the murkinessof “deterritorialization” has been displaced onto the quotes around “nat-ural.”

longer be contained within a single “place.” This is what Icall the “geographical” sense of the word because it specificallyreferences the geographical aspect of many dislocations thatcharacterize the world today.

But as the term spread in popularity, a series of questionsarose: Just what was the relationship between this “deterri-torialization” (which often appeared in conjunction with“flow”) and the word used by Deleuze and Guattari? Was itthe same word? Was it related? The reason I infer that thesequestions were being voiced is that a few years after the termappeared in discussions of globalization, some people beganmaking efforts to draw a clearer connection between the twouses of the term. By 1996, Appadurai was footnoting Deleuzeand Guattari when he used the term and connecting it toother Deleuzian terminology. In 2002, Inda and Rosaldo, intheir introduction to a reader on the anthropology of glob-alization, explicitly raised the connection to Deleuze andGuattari, pointing out that “deterritorialization” is accom-panied by “reterritorialization” and that it does not necessarilyindicate a one-way historical transition (Inda and Rosaldo2002). In the meantime, however, the word had become quitepopular in its “geographical” sense, as used by Garcıa Cancliniand others, to the point that Tomlinson, writing an extensivediscussion of the term in 1999, mentions in a footnote “forthe sake of completeness” that Deleuze and Guattari use thesame term but that he will not discuss their usage (Tomlinson1999:213, n. 1). He in effect draws a line between the geo-graphical usage and the Deuleuzian usage. So the term hasdivided into two tenuously or ambiguously connected senses.

Although the geographical and Deleuzian senses of deter-ritorialization are different in important respects, it seems tome impossible to try to understand the more matter-of-factversion of the term (and, by extension, the sense of the term“flow” that accompanies it) without reference to its apparentpredecessor in Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari’sdeployment of “deterritorialization,” “reterritorialization,”and “flow,” as well as “rhizomes,” is part of their effort toconstruct a nondialectical way to talk about being, change,and interactions. They regard dialectical analysis (in all of itsmany forms, apparently) as the invocation of a fake plurality,an appearance of difference that is actually “biunivocal,”which is to say that it actually reduces plurality to a positionin a totalizing scheme that encompasses and resolves all ap-parent difference. In contrast to the relentless relationality andinterconnectedness implicit in Marxian dialectics, they erecta difference of kind between interconnection and change onthe one hand and being and selfhood on the other. Deter-ritorialization, then, is not a process whereby something be-comes itself through dynamic interaction with something elsebut rather one whereby something ceases to be itself while itis in contact with something else because it actually becomespart of that other thing. When it is part of something elseand open to “flows” from without, it cannot be itself. Reter-ritorialization involves a withdrawal from difference into self-hood. For Deleuze and Guattari, the virtue of this approach

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is that it allows us to describe and analyze dynamic inter-actions while preserving a permanent difference that is neverreduced to a single encompassing logic.

Yet at the same time, this language posits an oppositionbetween radical mobility (“flow”) and radical fixity (“terri-tory”), with flows taken to be ontologically more fundamentalthan territories. One thing to point out about the story ofthe wasp and the orchid is that by postulating an intermittenttransition between being a wasp and “becoming-orchid,” De-leuze and Guattari seem to be employing a very rigid notionof what it is to be something—as if the wasp is just a wasponly when it is not pollinating anything, is not making itselfpart of the life apparatus of anything apart from itself. In fact,their conception of “territory” seems to be a fundamentallyclosed space or entity with impermeable boundaries thatceases to be “territory” when it opens. Deleuze and Guattarihave constructed a system in which selfhood and interaction,being and change, territory and flow are rigidly distinguishedand the transitions between them are treated as changes ofkind. Both “deterritorialization” and “flow” are crucial termsin this scheme, and combined with “reterritorialization,” theyindicate the basic oscillation that underlies the Deleuzian the-ory of change.

When I first read A Thousand Plateaus, the second of De-leuze and Guattari’s pair of volumes Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia, I was haunted by a sense of familiarity in the ar-guments, particularly those relating to time and change.Eventually it occurred to me that Deleuze and Guattari’s as-sertion of a strong opposition between change and stasis andtheir insistence on an ideal and seemingly transcendent dy-namism characterized by oscillation between lively change andrepressive stasis bore a strong resemblance to key elementsof Henri Bergson’s philosophy. As it turns out, Gillian Rose(1984:87–108) refers to Gilles Deleuze’s work as a “new Berg-sonism,” and many authors note Deleuze’s debt to the phi-losopher (see, e.g., Borradori 2001; Tomlinson and Habberjam1997; Watson 1998). Deleuze even wrote a book on Bergson’sphilosophy (Deleuze 1997) in which Bergson comes outsounding quite a bit like Deleuze himself.

One of Bergson’s major arguments is that the intellect hasinherent difficulties in grasping the true nature of being andchange. Our minds, being practically oriented, tend to en-vision the world as made up of things that are in themselvesstatic but that periodically move or change. This movementwe generally conceptualize as identical with the route it covers(Bergson 1944, 1988); in other words, as a stretch of space.For Bergson, this is a serious misconception and in effect asubordination of movement (or duration) to space that arisesfrom imagining that there are things at all. Instead, where wegenerally perceive the world to be made of things that some-times move or change, Bergson argues that there is nothingbut movement and that the appearance of things is simplyan imposition by our minds. He argues further that if westart by imagining existent things, we will never be able tograsp change or “duration,” which is real.

Bergson’s views on movement are helpful to understandinghow people use the term “flow” today, particularly when theyemploy it as a noun. In English translations of Bergson, “flow”appears mainly as a verb, but even more often we see thenoun “flux.” The first word is a translation of the verb couler,while the second is a translation of the French noun flux.This is the same noun that Deleuze and Guattari’s translatorsrender as “flow” (see, e.g., Bergson 1998; Deleuze and Guattari1972). The French flux covers a range of meanings fairly closeto that of the English noun “flow,” particularly in that it refersboth to movement within a body of fluid, such as currentsand eddies in an ocean, and to the unidirectional movementof a fluid, such as the flow of melted wax; in other words,the same two senses that Hannerz distinguishes for the key-word “flow.”10 Flux was central to Bergson’s vocabulary, oftendenoting the vital principle that underlies his particular kindof dynamism.

This excursion into the work of Bergson and Deleuze andGuattari is intended to demonstrate that certain usages of“flow” carry some intellectual baggage that I doubt most peo-ple who use it would welcome—a radical time/space dualismand incompatibility with dialectical approaches. If we acceptthe terms of the dichotomy implicit in this genealogy of“flow,” it becomes impossible to understand places or any-thing as the products of movement. Rather, things and move-ment remain in permanent opposition as appearance versustruth. Bergsonian/Deleuzian “flow” is part of a scheme ofthought that appears to be processual but is in fact rigidlydualistic.

In the social sciences, particularly in the work of Castellsand Appadurai, this dualism has made possible a rhetoricaldichotomy that locates the agency and dynamism in globalsystems all at the larger scales while treating small scales, suchas the level of human experience, as essentially passive andreactive. These writers imply that we must choose betweentwo models of the world in the globalized era. The old modelis static; in it, borders divide populations and cultures, andthings are self-identical and continuous in time. The new oneis a fluid model in which places and even people are beingreplaced by flows and in which stasis is illusion or reactionor both. For anthropologists, this is, of course, not much ofa choice. Given the universally critiqued ahistoricism of struc-tural functionalism, the rigidities of Boasian cultural holism,no anthropologist presented with this choice could chooseanything but the fluid model, with all that it implies. Part ofthe power of the Deleuzian language of “flows” is that itcontains within itself, in its implicit opposition to stasis, acritical representation of any opposing theory.11

10. There is no sign, however, that the similar ranges of “flow” as usedby Kroeber and “flux” as employed by Bergson are the result of any directinfluence.

11. Castells’s characterization of places in terms of the geographicalcontainment of “form, function and meaning” (1996b:423; cited above)is a clear example of such straw-man arguments; no such “places” could

Rockefeller “Flow” 565

But of course, this dichotomy does not represent any nec-essary choice of cultural theories, nor does it encompass allof the range of approaches to globalization, transnational in-tegration, cultural hybridity, and the multiscalar organizationof culture. In order to engage in this debate effectively, then,we need to reject the assumptions implicit in this dichotomy.In fact, this rhetorical stance, as well as the Deleuzian workfrom which it draws inspiration, represents a dualist approachthat in itself should be troubling to social scientists.

Flow and Agency: The ManagerialPerspective

For Deleuze and Guattari—who follow Bergson in treating“flow” as something prior to being, identity, or conscious-ness—the lexicon of “flow,” “deterritorialization,” and so onare key parts of their construction of an antiphenomeno-logical project that allows them to dissolve subjects as muchas they do wasps. All of these authors treat “flow” as a realitybefore perspective. In different ways, so do Castells, with histalk of the creation of a new reality, and Appadurai, in as-serting that today we live in a world of flows.12

This is ironic, because “flow,” as it is used to talk aboutglobalization, has long been part of the perspective of a par-ticular sort of people. In a recent critique of anthropologicalwork on globalization, Karen Ho argues that “the languageof flows, decenteredness, and immateriality” (Ho 2005:69),as well as the assumption that capitalism is inherently nonlocaland nonhuman in its makeup, involves the importation ofthe capitalist’s self-perception into theory. Her ethnographyof an investment bank is intended in part as a critical projectto highlight and protest the “conspicuous similarity betweenwhat investment banks say about themselves . . . and whatmuch critical scholarship says about capitalism” (Ho 2005:70). In a similar vein, Graeber (2002:1224) argues that theimage of “flows” as used to talk about global culture is actually“a classic fetishized image of capital acting of its own accord,metaphorically treated as a natural phenomenon . . . and,simultaneously, identified with an image of the liberation ofhuman creativity and desire.” There is indeed a striking sim-ilarity between much current anthropological and other sup-posedly critical writing about globalization and the self-jus-tifying ways that businesspeople represent themselves.

The language of “flow” itself has a long history in business.As I mentioned above, the term has been associated with themovement of money since the eighteenth century; in thetwentieth century, however, it began to take on a more specificset of uses. In 1920, the OED cites the earliest mention of a“flow chart” in the book Graphic Production Control by C. E.

ever have existed, and none but the most naive of social scientists couldever have seriously argued that they did.

12. Hannerz is careful not to make such claims for the reality of flow,making it very clear that he regards the term as a useful metaphor.

Knoeppel, an early management guru.13 As I mentionedabove, “cash flow” was first mentioned in a managementjournal from 1954; in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a flo-rescence of “flow” terminology in the business press, partic-ularly in discussions of the organization of factory production.One popular term of the time was “flow production,” a wayof talking about the movement of raw materials and productswithin the manufacturing process of a particular factory. Allof these uses of “flow” correspond to the sense of dynamismthat Hannerz identifies in one of Kroeber’s uses of the word:the form of an internal animating movement. The manage-ment writers differ from Kroeber and Vasconcelos in that theyare, in general, trying to map internal flows rather than justrecognizing their existence. Ho shows that these days, “flow”is also used to talk about the movement of capital and goodsbetween countries, factories, banks, and so on—in businessas in anthropology, the term describes both “temporal” and“spatial” mobility, both dynamism and interconnection. Iwould also argue that in the business world, as in culture,globalization means that external movement is internal, thatinterconnection is the dynamism of the global economy.

We can be more precise, however, than to say that “flow”corresponds to the perspective or the self-presentation of“capitalists” or “capitalism.” Ho, after all, did not do herethnography with “capitalists” as such but with bankers, withpeople working at a very abstract level of management in thefinancial world. They were not entrepreneurs, rentiers, clericalstaff, or, obviously, wage laborers. By the same token, Knoep-pel was not writing about business in a general sense or abouthow to invest or start a business but specifically about howto manage a business. “Flow” is a term that matches mostspecifically the perspective of managers, of a large segmentof what Pfeil (1990:97–125) calls the “managerial-professionalclass,” which includes not only bankers and factory managersbut also bureaucrats and administrators of all sorts as well asmanagement consultants, among others. While the term cer-tainly does encapsulate the neoliberal ideology that identifiesthe unfettered movement of goods, information, and capitalwith human liberation and even ecstasy, it does so from theperspective of those charged with managing the economicand social worlds we inhabit.

In a number of the articles with which I began this essay,when “flow” is invoked it is to explicitly or implicitly invokethe stance of someone who is managing things. Fassin’s men-tion of the French government’s concern with how to manageimmigrant flows, mentioned above, is a case in point, as isZaloom’s (2004) use of the term in describing the perspectiveand activities of traders at the Chicago Board of Trade. Ngaiimplicitly invokes this stance when he describes a Chineseresidence policy as having “usefulness for controlling the flowof migrants into Shenzhen” (Ngai 2003:485), as does Bissell

13. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “flow, n.1” (http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71998?rskeyp3qbU6G&resultp1#eid, accessed December15, 2005).

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when he says that “tourism as a development strategy dependson intensified flows of capital, images, and people” (Bissell2005:230). Hairong’s (2003) entire article is fascinating in thisrespect, focusing as it does on how the world looks to thosecharged with managing migrant labor in China.

“Flow” does several things that are quite convenient if yourjob is to oversee and manage the functioning of a complexorganization or situation. As a formal term, it facilitates theabstraction of many kinds of activity into a single category.By the same token, it enables an observer to talk about move-ment at a large scale without saying anything in particularabout how that movement is generated at a smaller scale.Finally, by breaking the connection between cause and effect,that is, between human actors and the aggregate products oftheir actions, the term facilitates the cultivation of the “in-difference” that Herzfeld (1993) identifies as a key attributeof the bureaucrat. To invoke for a moment the oldest andmost liquid sense of “flow,” some of the distinctive qualitiesof flowing water are that its constituent elements have noagency—nor have they any telos, individually or in aggre-gate—and that water has no claim on an observer’s sympathyor solidarity. In Cultural Complexity, Hannerz advocated the“flow” metaphor with the example of a river—from afar itmight look like a static line, but as you come closer, it resolvesinto ceaseless movement and change (Hannerz 1992:4). Whathe did not mention is that if you come even closer, if youexamine the river even at a molecular level, all you get isincreasingly detailed flows, molecules acted on by gravity,ultimately a highly complex system reducible to a set of phys-ical conditions. With rivers, unlike human societies, there isno scale at which you can see the actors or the practices thatconstitute the whole.

None of this should be taken to suggest that agency is asimple concept; it has some of the slipperiness of “flow” andhas been under intense debate in the social sciences for sometime (see, e.g., Ahearn 2001; Gershon 2011). By invokingagency and practice in opposition to the language of flow, Ido not intend to postulate agency as something primordialor monolithic. Rather, my aim is to underline that while“flow” lends itself to understanding multiple scales of orga-nization and movement, it does so at the cost of making itharder for us to understand the scales at which practice andagency are manifestly important. For those committed to top-down analysis or those who hold that agents and selves arenothing but moments of large systems of power or signifi-cation, this may not be a problem. But for any approach thatholds experience, practice, and agency to represent particu-larly significant moments of social life, the tendency of “flow”to elide specificities of action and personhood, not to mentionplace, should be troubling.

In the Cultural Anthropology articles, “flow” is most ofteninvoked in its keyword sense with reference to the macro-context in which the subject matter of the article takes place.In these cases, the flow is generally “off stage,” as in Bernal’sreferences to the “flows” that constitute nations and the

“transnational flows” of remittances (Bernal 2004:15) that arecurrently remaking Eritrea, Pinto’s passing reference to “in-ternational flows of funds, ideology, and regulation throughNorth India” (Pinto 2004:338), or Ramamurthy’s “flow ofinvestments” (2003:528). Even if the research is done at asmall scale, in these cases the invocation of “flow” allows theauthor to momentarily soar above the actions in question andmake reference to the macrophenomena that “set the stage”for the action under consideration. Like much modeling ter-minology, “flow” works by elision; it enables one to glide overvariety, scale, and agency in order to focus on the formal, thelarge, and the systemic. “Flow” is action seen from high above.

Unfortunately, because of the word’s innocuous and pro-tean character, this elision has gone unremarked. Such un-spoken elision is surely useful if you are a manager, but ithardly seems to fit with the scientific and ethical commitmentsof anthropology as a whole. It is telling, then, that the man-agement press seems to have adopted the word from physicsand engineering writing of the late nineteenth century. Thismove corresponds to a wholesale importation of scientificand engineering terminology into philosophy and the socialsciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries(see Kern 2003; Rabinbach 1992).14 Physics, of course, has noconcern with particularity or agency, and the engineer is themanager of the physical world. In this sense, then, when De-leuze and Guattari open Anti-Oedipus by saying that “we areall handymen; each with his little machines” (Deleuze andGuattari 1983:1), they are continuing this mechanistic tra-dition and at the same time, in effect, naming us managersof our selves.

Interestingly, Appadurai’s more recent writings suggest thathe might have a perspective not entirely dissonant with someelements of the one I have presented here, although he iscommitted to the view that “this is a world of flows” (Ap-padurai 2002:5). In his article “Grassroots Globalization andthe Research Imagination” (Appadurai 2002), he takes up thequestion of how researchers can do something useful for thosewho are excluded from and/or oppressed by the global econ-omy, those who are not in a position to manage the worldof flows. His answer lies not with what we research but withthe organization of the production of knowledge—he con-cludes that intellectual production must become aware of theconditions under which it occurs and that knowledge of globaleconomic and cultural organization must be organized in sucha way that it can be accessible, in a useful form, to thosewhose struggles put them in opposition to the current courseof globalization. These are both noble and practical ideas, buthere again Appadurai privileges a managerial perspective onthe world.

14. One part of the genealogy of “flow” that remains to be exploredis that behind Kroeber’s and Vasconcelos’s use of the term. I suspect thatthis can be traced to the same nineteenth-century borrowing from scien-tific language that ultimately led to the prominence of “flow” in man-agement writings.

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None of this should be taken to mean that the managerialperspective is without interest. (Appadurai shows convinc-ingly that it is crucial.) There are doubtless situations in whichhuman actions, taken in aggregate, can be modeled with theexample of the behavior of particles, or fluids. In other words,there are situations in which, in aggregate, people act as ifthey had no agency or volition. Yet those situations hardlymake up most of social behavior seen at any scale. Even moreto the point, today we are often called on to act as managersof our selves—to treat our selves and social relations likeorganizations.15 To that extent, managerial language like“flow” is crucial for understanding how citizens of post-industrial societies experience themselves. But if the languageof flow is one means by which we are being domesticatedinto a new sort of managerial subject, anthropologists cer-tainly should not unreflectively adopt that language as theirown.

Conclusion

In Hannerz’s river illustration, “flow” flags something thatseems fixed yet is in constant movement. Language empha-sizing that things that might be seen as concrete and mo-tionless are in fact emergent is certainly the sort of thing weneed in talking about society and culture at any scale. An-thropology also needs, as Hannerz points out, a language thathelps us to focus on and relate different scales of action. Butthe flow metaphor transforms action into pure movementand opens itself to multiple scales precisely by eliding thesmallest scale of social action. It is telling here to note thatin Cultural Complexity, Hannerz makes use of flow imagerymost frequently in his chapters on business and bureaucracybut much less when he is discussing perspectives (“A Networkof Perspectives”) or urban artists (“The Urban Swirl”).

The things that get called “flows”—long-distance move-ment of money, the transmission of media images, the large-scale travel of migrants and tourists, and even, for some au-thors, the transmission of information between participantsin a conversation—are all constructions. They can be seen inmany ways and as many sorts of things; indeed, they have tobe seen in many ways, because in most cases there is no singleperspective that captures their entirety. But privileging themas “flows” has the unfortunate effect of rhetorically effacingtheir constructed nature. James Ferguson points out that onthe one hand, “global flows” are effectively walled off frommany people by barriers such as national borders (Ferguson2006:155–175) and on the other, they are not continuous;money, for instance, “jumps” from financial center to finan-cial center without moving through the space between them(38). Although Ferguson does not question the language of

15. For one particularly egregious example, see the book The FamilyCFO (Allvine and Larson 2004). Gershon (2011) elaborates eloquentlyon this point.

flows, he makes an illuminating point about the limits of theterm’s applicability.

If money is transferred from Paris to Tokyo, that moneydoes not in any meaningful sense cross the space betweenthose cities—no money goes through Germany, Russia,China, or any other space. Information must leave one lo-cation and arrive in another, but it hardly helps our under-standing to imagine that the money itself moves smoothly orcontinuously.16 The mobility of media images takes place var-iously through broadcast, through the physical transport (inbulk and on a small-scale) of recorded media, and throughthe World Wide Web and the Internet. The indigenous Bo-livians I worked with never had any sense they were takingpart in a “flow” of people across the border to Argentina;rather, they were making trips based on the needs and op-portunities of the moment. At a certain level of resolution—perceptible, perhaps, by intellectually squinting our eyes orremoving our glasses—media images and capital can be saidto travel smoothly or continuously, but they can just as wellbe said to hop about, appearing and disappearing (where isa movie when it is not showing? where is a bank’s moneybefore it “arrives” in Tokyo?), moving in a herky-jerky fashion.Seen in aggregate, the hundreds of thousands of trips madeby Bolivians back and forth to the cities and farms of Ar-gentina could be said to form a stream or a “flow,” but thereis hardly any strong reason to adopt this particular metaphor.

The patterns of movement, or of appearance and reap-pearance at a distance, that constitute “global flows” are not,like the water of a river, the objective result of uniform sub-stances responding to uniform conditions. Rather, they arecobbled together by actors and observers from extremely het-erogeneous actions, projects, and interactions that occur atmany different scales. As if to prove this point, the geographerMaria Kaika wrote City of Flows, a history of the water systemof Athens and other cities (Kaika 2005). It is necessarily con-cerned with flows, not to mention management, but worksas a marvelous defetishization of the keyword. In defiance ofthe word’s gravitational pull toward naturalizing large-scalepatterns of movement and internalizing the perspective ofmanagers, Kaika shows the constructed and constantly con-tested nature even of the flow of water into cities. Far fromapproaching action and conflict through the image of flowingwater, she shows that the flow of water into and through citiesmust be approached as a historical product, the result ofcenturies of struggle, planning, and labor. Absent such con-scious efforts to explore the process of construction wherebysomething can come to be called a “flow,” the imagery offlow has a strong tendency to naturalize large-scale patternsof movement. Used in the nonreflective way that I argued in

16. Ironically, the movement of money in the global economy—itexists in one place, then disappears into virtuality to appear in another—is one of the few actual instances of the “cinematographic” motion thatBergson denounced as a travesty of flux, the continuous “flow” that reallyconstitutes life and the world.

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the beginning of this article is one of its hallmarks, the termseparates putative “global flows” from the shifting interests,projects, and agents that are their continuing sine qua nonand rhetorically projects them into an ethereal realm in whichflows appear to transcend not only agents but also places andmateriality itself.

Anna Tsing’s book Friction (Tsing 2005) is a magisterialillumination of much of what the word “flow” effaces. Bylooking at fraud, social and economic failures, and the dis-astrous aftereffects of the intrusion of the timber industryinto the forests of Kalimantan, Indonesia, she undermines theharmonious overtones of “flow.” Never directly critiquing theterm, she persistently privileges what she calls “zones of awk-ward engagement” (Tsing 2005:xi), precisely the situations inwhich the worldly instantiations of information, capital, andhumanity do not flow but collide, grate against one another,push each other out of the way. It is these areas that are thereality of globalization, she suggests, not a quasi-naturalsmooth movement whose source is always elsewhere.

A few years ago, the journalist Barbara Garson wrote MoneyMakes the World Go Around, in which she “followed” herbook advance, starting at the bank where she deposited it, tosome of the places where it was invested, and she describedthe circumstances and consequences of those investments(Garson 2002). Rather than adopting the distanced perspec-tive of the financial managers who moved her money about,she problematized their perspective by juxtaposing it to theactual instantiation of their decisions, the people employedand fired, the factories built and wetlands destroyed, the com-plex and contingent dilemmas created. Her book is at oncea testament to the dramatic level of integration ruling theglobal economy and a refutation of any idea that the globaleconomy is really as decentered and immaterial (to use Ho’sterms) as it presents itself to be.

Rather than treating “flow” as if the word were so trans-parent as to need virtually no comment, we should recognizethe heavy metaphysical and ontological cargo riding on it andredeploy it as a critical term. Any word that manages soelegantly to embody managerial and neoliberal perspectiveson movement is clearly of great power and worth carefulattention. Hairong and Fassin implicitly deploy the term inthis critical fashion as they tactically adopt a managerial per-spective when talking about the world of modern or post-modern states.

But if we must recognize that “flow” is a term that containsprecisely the perspectives that anthropological “studying up”is supposed to criticize, how are we to talk about the manyissues that seem to have been so happily gathered into “flow”?How do we talk about internal dynamism and external con-nections, about restless capital, the rapid movement of in-formation, the tremendous ease of long-distance communi-cation and transportation, the massive mobility of people? Tostart with, we can move beyond misleading oppositions be-tween space and time, which means asking not how mobilityis undermining locality but on what terms locality has always

been constituted by mobility and how the current state ofsupermobility is reconstituting localities and being enactedby people in places. Also, we can focus on how things cometo manifest themselves (sometimes, to some people) as flowsrather than taking flows for granted.

Hannerz is right that anthropologists need better ways totalk about process and about culture as it is organized atmultiple scales. It is all too convenient that bureaucrats, bank-ers, and managers in general have forged a language for talkingabout precisely these things. But “flow” as it is often usedtoday is a kind of organized forgetting. Places, agency, andperspective, not to mention the complex nature of large-scaledynamic organizations, get swept up into what seems like acrystal-clear invocation of dynamism. The things “flow” callson us to forget and to remember lend themselves well tocertain projects of power, but these are projects of whichanthropologists should be wary.

Acknowledgments

This article has benefited from the insightful comments ofDavid Graeber, Lauren Leve, Laurie Kain Hart, Maris Gillette,Zolani Ngwane, Keith Hart, Jennifer Patico, and the anony-mous reviewers of Current Anthropology. Diego Caguenas alsoprovided valuable help in preparing the article for publication.I would also like to thank Ulf Hannerz for generously sharinghis insights and recollections about the genesis of this key-word.

Comments

Arjun AppaduraiInstitute for Public Knowledge, New York University, 20Cooper Square, 5th Floor, New York, New York 10003,U.S.A. (aa133@nyu.edu). 11 X 10

Stuart Rockefeller has done an elegant job of doing whatanthropology does at its best and not often enough, which isto wake up a key term from the professional slumber thathas made its sense common. His detailed analysis of theweight the word “flow” has borne in the 1990s and in thepast decade—especially in the anthropological analysis ofglobalization, transnationalism, and diaspora—is certainlyfair and evenhanded. He is right, too, to detect certain re-cessive debts that these recent usages in anthropology owe tosuch thinkers as Bergson and Deleuze, although he mighthave gestured even deeper in time to Heraclitus and otherfans of riverine metaphors in Western thought. His cautionarynotes, which constitute his main critical point in the essay,are also well taken. Flow tends to elide bumps, liquids tendto trump solids, and all watery tropes tend to dissolve, erode,or submerge the all-too-solid terrain of power, limit, border,

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and restraint in the politics of real life. So far I am entirelysympathetic to Rockefeller’s views. I now take up his invi-tation to a dialogue that might put some solids back into theaqueous terrain of flow talk and ask what his invitation mightentail (or elide).

Rockefeller worries about the managerial point of view,about its “large-scale” epistemology, its tendency to margin-alize the already marginal, its apparent disinterest in smallagencies and local lives. I assume that this worry is whatinforms his warm endorsement of various flow skeptics inand around anthropology. So let me put a counterquestionto his question.

What is the sociology of the flow skeptics, who usuallyspeak in the name of the small, the marginal, and the forgottenpeople of the global present? Is the real problem an anthro-pology of flow that could efface the frictions, struggles, andstories of these little worlds? Or is it the possible loss ofauthority of a whole generation (or two or three) of anthro-pologists whose authority was constructed on their knowledgeof these little worlds, on their power to report on these distantlocalities and to tell us about agency, authority, voice, andbeing in these worlds? If anthropologists like myself, ostensiblevirtuosos of managerial reason, have found new ways to speakin terms of the large, the general, and the universal, alsoknown as the global, and have found some measure of res-onance among our readers and students, what threat do wereally pose? I doubt that we pose a real threat to the smallmarginal people of the forests, islands, and swamps of an-thropologyland. These people are being destroyed by preda-tory states, rapacious corporate interests, brutal militias, andhorrifying ethnocidal movements close to their localities. Per-haps the real threat from those of us who were bold enoughto stake a place in discussions of global, transnational, dias-poric, and translocal spaces in the name of anthropology wasour threat to those who had hitherto served as the guardians,trustees, and ventriloquists of the local in the name of ahumbler anthropology. If the local was being unsettled bynew processes and points of view, what was really under threatin Western academia was the regnant anthropology of theout-of-the-way. In other words, those with an interest in thealways local were the ones who could go out of business ifthe stability of their object was to be seriously disturbed.

This problem of professional struggle in the belly of thebeast is not the only one we must face. Rockefeller is worriedby what he calls the managerial point of view because of itstendency to take the bird’s-eye view, the view of large cor-porations, big interests, and global players. But what of some-one like Marx, from whose work both Rockefeller and I takeinspiration when we seek to identify with quotidian struggles,whether they issue from India, Bolivia, or much smallerplaces? Marx’s biggest contribution from the point of viewof the idea of flow was to put the analysis of global circulatoryprocesses squarely on the map, and in this he belonged to along tradition of thinkers concerned with the circulation ofsuch substances as blood, money, and atmospheric gases and

vapors. Anthropology does not yet have a robust theory ofcirculation, and when such a theory does emerge, it will oweas much to recent theories of flow as to the long-standingethnographic concern with the local, the bodily, and the non-modern as elements of social life. In this sense, Rockefeller’splea, which I am happy to endorse, is for a more robustanthropology of the ebb to balance the recent excesses of theanthropology of flow.

Paolo FaveroCentro em Rede de Investigacao, 160 Avenida ForcasArmadas, s/n Edificio ISCTE, Salas 2N7 e 2N9, Cacifo 2370-083, Lisbon, Portugal (paolo.favero@iscte.pt). 8 II 11

“Flow,” “deterritorialization,” and “rhizome” are terms thathave indeed characterized a specific epoch in the developmentof social theory. Having gained popularity in a time markedby a growing need to understand a changing world—that is,globalization—a world allegedly made up of new social re-lations and new borders and characterized by greater andfaster interconnectedness, such words have indeed becomefundamental instruments for interpreting and addressing con-temporaneity at large. Offering us, indeed, a series of newepistemological insights and leading us to a critical rethinkingof some of the key categories through which social scienceshave enacted their understanding of contemporary societiesin particular (such as identity, place, and culture), these termshave, however, to some extent progressively become epitomesof our understanding of contemporary postindustrial societiesat large. Influential in the field of anthropology, in particularin the areas of research on media, finance, migration, andtransnationalism, they have almost become banners of theseareas of research.

Connected primarily to the work of Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari (Rockefeller’s article brilliantly show us Berg-son’s influence on them and in particular on Deleuze), suchwords, marking the definitive incorporation of French post-modern philosophy into the anglophone world of social sci-ences, found their way into this world paradoxically late.While the first English translation of Capitalisme et schizo-phrenie by Deleuze and Guattari (published in France in 1972)appeared in the late 1970s, this book and its authors gainedpopularity in the English-speaking world only in the late 1980sand early 1990s. It is therefore quite ironic to acknowledgehow such terms have been capable of offering (and main-taining across time; see below) an aura of novelty despite theevident delay with which they were adopted. In the world ofanthropology, for instance, these words (mostly the first two)have in fact stood for a fairly long time as flags or markersof a kind of “hip anthropology,” an anthropology flirting withallied disciplines as if they added a surplus value of “coolness”to those who used them. It was very much so 15 years agowhen I let myself be fascinated by such approaches at the

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beginning of my doctoral work, but I was also recentlystunned to notice (during a conference that took place justa few weeks before this text was written) how a colleagueintroduced the use of “rhizome” in a paper, justifying it asan almost experimental attempt to offer a kind of novel twistto the discussion. These terms seem to have been able toignite a sparkle of novelty in the anthropological communityfor a very long time now.

Rockefeller’s article offers us a brilliant and critical reflec-tion on our usage of such terms while also introducing us totheir own, to borrow from Arjun Appadurai, “social life,” alsooffering us, therefore, an explanation for their capacity tomaintain across time this aura of novelty. Rockefeller in factintroduces us to the multiple travels of these terms. Startingfrom the original etymology of the term “flow” (referringoriginally to the movement of liquids), he brings us into awonderful reflection regarding the usage of “flow,” pointingout the lack of problematization that has surrounded it(“flow” has been used more than it has been talked about,he says). Rockefeller suggests that across time, in fact, “flow”has been used in such varying ways that it has ended upconfusing us about its meaning. The diffuse usage that hascharacterized its life in academia has led to the progressiveblurring of content of what the term seeks to address (“thekeyword . . . tends to privilege a form [unbroken agentlessmovement] over any content,” writes Rockefeller), leading ustherefore to lose sight of what we were seemingly trying toaddress through it. What is actually flowing in such flows?Rockefeller asks. Generally used “as an image of ‘pure’ move-ment,” “flow” ends up eliding agency and small-scale processand, in other words, dehumanizing the (human) phenomenait aims to describe. Emphasizing form over content, the useof “flow” (and I suggest that the same argument could bevalid for “deterritorialization” and “rhizome” as well) indeedseems paradoxically to take away from us the possibility ofenquiring further into what we were addressing. In a way, itis as if these terms shine out a stronger light than what theyseem to be trying to illuminate.

Richard HandlerProgram in Global Development Studies, University of Vir-ginia, P.O. Box 400772, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4772, U.S.A. (rh3y@eservices.virginia.edu). 8 XI 10

How appropriate that Stuart Rockefeller should quote UlfHannerz (2000 [1997]) referring back to Alfred Kroeber’s useof the term “flow,” because Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1952)treatise on the term “culture” is a paradigmatic example ofthe interesting project Rockefeller has undertaken. Rockefellersuspects that usages of “flow” that apparently take up andmove forward antiessentializing critiques of cultural holismin fact reproduce its epistemological premises. A theory ofculture in which flow overwhelms bounded places (locales,

cultures) paradoxically reinforces our dualistic worldview ofbounded things opposed to movements or events (cf. Farnell2000; Handler 2002). As always, we fail to escape our foun-dational dualisms—mind/body, or in this case, verb/noun,event/thing—even when we try.

Rockefeller observes that social scientists currently use“flow” as a “stand-alone noun,” one whose salience derivesfrom “watery imagery.” Thus, a term such as “cash flow,” anoun, is a metaphor that conjures up images such as “a riverof dollars,” just as the term “human flows” suggests “a streamof immigrants.” These phrases are Whorfian container for-mulas in which “homogeneous continua” are depicted as con-tents and container, a “formless item plus a form” (Whorf1956 [1941]:140–141). As Rockefeller argues, taking an angleof attack Whorf would have appreciated, to use such meta-phors obscures our vision of two crucial aspects of the phe-nomena we are studying: first, the agents responsible for theactivities (like the bankers who make decisions about wheredollars are to be invested or the travelers who decide whento migrate and when to return home) and second, the irreg-ularities and discontinuities in activities that are not in fact“homogeneous continua.” To use but one counterexample,one that Rockefeller also notes, James Ferguson (2006:34–38)points out that capital does not flow evenly into Africa, it“hops” from international centers of finance across vast ex-panses of the African continent that are not of interest toinvestors to resource enclaves from whence profits can beextracted.

The history of social science is littered with dead metaphors,terms that, unfortunately, lull us to sleep. Rockefeller’s pieceputs us on guard against “the innocence” of a “commonEnglish” term that has become part of our theoretical jargon.Sometimes social theorists create terms that gain wide accep-tance as part of our common vocabulary (such as Freud’s“ego” and “id”). More often, as Durkheim (1966 [1895]:37)knew, everyday language orients social scientists in their initialstudies, and thus it is that popular terms are transmuted intosocial-scientific objects and topics (“marriage and the family,”“crime and punishment,” “magic and religion”; cf. Rose1960). It will be interesting to see whether “flow” will becomefurther institutionalized (e.g., in the titles of universitycourses) or whether use of the term will slow to a trickle andeventually dry up.

Ulf HannerzDepartment of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University,S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden (ulf.hannerz@socant.su.se). 3XI 10

Rockefeller covers a wide intellectual ground in his scrutinyof recent varieties of flowtalk, and I believe that he basicallydoes justice to them. I can only try to clarify certain pointsand voice some slight disagreements.

Rockefeller “Flow” 571

“A key moment in the development of the new word,”Rockefeller suggests, came some 25 years ago when ArjunAppadurai and I (coincidentally) found ourselves together atthe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences(CASBS) in Palo Alto. I doubt that we spent much of ourtime in focused discussion of “flow,” but we were convergingon interests in processual analysis and, as it would turn out,on global interconnections. Although according to RockefellerI wrote Cultural Complexity “a few years later,” this is, strictlyspeaking, inaccurate; that was my main project at CASBS, andno doubt it continuously influenced my contributions to ourconversations. But revising the manuscript was somewhat de-layed, so the book appeared in 1992. My 1989 article in PublicCulture is basically an extract from it. At CASBS, Appadurai,I believe, was engaged primarily in editing and writing a majorintroduction for The Social Life of Things (Appadurai 1986),also with a processual bent, where the term “flows” makesan occasional appearance. It is likewise present in my article“The World in Creolization” (Hannerz 1987), originally apublic lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where Ap-padurai was then based.

The writings of Deleuze and Guattari never had any directinfluence on my own work. While I may have struggled withrhizomes in the garden of my summer house, I did not doso at my desk. Apart from the year at CASBS, most of mywork in the relevant period was based at Stockholm Univer-sity. Although we hardly spent much time there arguing overthe meaning of “flow,” I note that Rockefeller points to PaoloFavero’s criticism of the idea of deterritorialization; Faverowas part of our Stockholm milieu at the time.

As Rockefeller shows, my own use of “flow” as a theoretical(or rather prototheoretical) notion draws more on earlieranthropological sources, such as Kroeber. Anthropologists, Ihave recently argued (Hannerz 2010a:131–160), are now oftentoo inclined to disregard the intellectual resources of theirown discipline’s past. Apart from the writings cited by Rock-efeller, I would mention an article by Fabian (1978) playfullyproposing “a liquidation, literally speaking, of the concept ofculture” (329), by which he obviously meant making it amatter of flow rather than abolishing it. (The same articleinspired my use of the idea of creolization.) I would alsoemphasize that while Kroeber used “flow” in both temporaland spatial senses, my emphasis in Cultural Complexity wasmostly on the temporal—“flow” as a processual metaphor—although as I turned to global interconnectedness, the spatialdimension also entered in.

Concerning matters of scale and agency, it is true that atthe time, I was concerned with the absence of anything muchin the way of a macroanthropology (Hannerz 1986). But inCultural Complexity, I engaged with the scale of culture morecomparatively (Hannerz 1992; see esp. 68–81), including aconception of “microculture.” This was, furthermore, centralin a study by Helena Wulff, notably titled Twenty Girls: Grow-ing Up, Ethnicity and Excitement in a South London Micro-culture (1988). Wulff had also been engaged in the interactions

in both Palo Alto and Stockholm, and in her usage, “flow”is used primarily to denote local processes of inventing andtransmitting culture. With a small number of concretely iden-tified actors, agency and personhood are certainly not ignoredin this study. I would claim that with the strong emphasis ona concept of “perspectives” in Cultural Complexity, agency ishardly played down there either. I must confess that I ampuzzled by Rockefeller’s reference to “chapters on businessand bureaucracy” in that book. I never thought of any chap-ters in such terms.

Finally, I offer a response to Rockefeller’s inclination, whichhe shares with various other commentators, to detect in the“flow” metaphor a bias toward the smooth and even. If somany believe that there is such a tendency, there may besomething to it. Nevertheless, I do not think that this is allthere is to flow. I have recently referred elsewhere (Hannerz2010b) to the work of the political scientist James Rosenau,who makes “turbulence” a key concept in a theoretical edificeand identifies “cascades” as a characteristic form “analogousto a flow of white water down a rocky river bed. . . . Theflow churns and shifts, sometimes moving sideways, some-times diagonally, and sometimes even careening in the reversedirection, and leaving sprays, eddies, and whirlpools in itswake” (Rosenau 1990:298–299). “Flow,” it seems, can also beturned into a root metaphor sensitizing us to diversity inprocesses in time and space.

Laurie Kain HartDepartment of Anthropology, Haverford College, 370 Lan-caster Avenue, Haverford, Pennsylvania 19041, U.S.A.(lhart@haverford.edu). 1 III 11

The pleasant rhetoric of “flow” obscures the brutal dynamicsof contemporary north-south global political economy, withits massive labor migrations and refugee exoduses. Bothworld-systems theory and globalization theory made impor-tant contributions to anthropology’s increasingly complex ap-proach to the nature of “locality,” beginning in the 1970s.Forty years later, tracking the multidirectional global circu-lation of apparently remote events and interests continues tobe among anthropology’s central concerns. If “globalization”talk, however, as Rockefeller argues, turns us away from thesituated (if highly mobile) events, entities, bodies, and placesthat make up the biographically scaled world we inhabit, andif scholars mistake their own condition of mobility for a com-mon privilege, then we are blinded by our scholarly habitus.17

Rockefeller argues that anthropology’s celebration of high-speed global syncretisms matches up too well with currentneoliberal ideology that equates “the unfettered movement ofgoods, information, and capital with human liberation and

17. On the political salience of reterritorialization processes, see, forexample, the careful study by Feuchtwang (2004) on China.

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even ecstasy.” The standard list of things in flow that Rock-efeller cites from globalization theory includes “capital, imagesand people” and “people, ideas, money, images, goods.” It iscrucial, however, to disaggregate this list. A critique of “flow”involves serious stakes. Human migrants are not ideas ordigital transfers of money, and the implications of flow inimmigration talk are different from its implications in mediatheory. The contrast is crucial: if the dehumanized flow met-aphor conjures a cartographic-geological cosmic view thatsolicits managerial (vs., e.g., political or humanitarian) inter-vention, it has effects. “Flow” naturalizes human migration.The term “goes without saying” in the mass media, and thehydraulic language prefigures a dehumanized, technocraticresponse. Respondents are asked in opinion polls, “How im-portant is it to develop a plan to stem the flow of illegalimmigrants?” (O’Leary 2010). Law enforcement officials aredirected to “mitigate the dramatic flow of illegal immigrantsinto our nation and state” (Hardy 2010). Blogs announce that“immigrants flow in, but cap imposed by feds could limitfuture numbers” (Turenne 2010). But “capping” is a tech-nocratic cipher for arrest and deportation. References to thereified flow of immigrants escalate periodically into the morethreatening millennial metaphor of “flood”: for example, theanti-amnesty political action committee Americans for LegalImmigration accuses conservative “sellouts” of advocating animmigration reform plan to “flood America with illegal aliens”(Gheen 2010).

Most importantly, “flow” is an unfortunate term if by itsreifications and pseudocontinuity it draws our attention awayfrom embodied and individualized suffering of migration(e.g., the more than 10,000 documented dead in Mediterra-nean crossings in the last 10 years; see also Holmes 2006 onmigrant mortality at the U.S. border and Quesada, Hart, andBourgois, forthcoming). The final stages of migration passagesare increasingly a test of physical endurance that triage forproductive labor. “Flow” is doubly unfortunate if it divertsanalysis from the complex and uneven political technologiesof securitization as revealed, for example, in Luiza Bialasie-wicz’s insightful analysis of the “offshoring and outsourcing”of the borders of Europe (Bialasiewicz 2010). The inclusionof new states in the European Union is no longer focused ondemocratization but on securitization, via legal obligations,to serve as buffer zones or filters. The United States, Biala-siewicz points out, has long been “de-bordering its borders. . . blurring traditional distinctions between ‘external’ and‘internal’ security” in a panoply of management techniquesand new technologies both within the United States and inMexico and Canada (Bialasiewicz 2010:2–3). Europe, in apartnership with new and peripheral states, is following suitwith its own vast web of policing bodies and regulations thatare externalized beyond “conventional” nation-state bordercontrol. The unevenness and arbitrariness of global politicaltexture require emphasis here. Nick Vaughan-Williams (2009:746) calls this globalized regime an “archipelago of zones of[juridico-political] indistinction,” a no-man’s-lands of “bare-

life” (Agamben 1998) policing that can be carved out of so-called normal national space and projected into “peripheral”zones. This is the poor migrant’s inverted complement to thedisjunctive corporate “enclaves” of foreign extractive enter-prise and imported workers described by dependency theo-rists in the 1970s and by James Ferguson (2006) more recentlyfor neoliberal Africa. The multiple unequal statuses extendedto extralegal immigrants by the U.S. Department of Home-land Services can be understood as a regime of “bare labor”:arbitrary discretionary state power is codified, for example,through bureaucratic instruments such as “deferred enforceddeparture permits” or revocable “temporary protected status”that increase the pool of inexpensive vulnerable workers.

“Flow” also masks the increasing importance of what Ribas-Mateos designates as “transit cities,” holding pens such asTangiers or Durres where the urban space is increasingly de-fined as a “waiting place for migration to Europe,” a “doorto Europe,” and even, given the difficulty of the final step ofmigration, as a simulacrum of Europe (Ribas Mateos 2005).Border megacities (such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez) aswell as the personal histories of migrants, exiles, and politicalrefugees demonstrate the lack of free “flow” in human trafficbut also show us how place is indeed constituted throughmovement. Rockefeller counsels us against the comforts of“organized forgetting”: the creative effects of cultural “fric-tion” notwithstanding, we should be wary of misrecognizingthe directionality of power inherent in the multiplication ofborders in a landscape of increasing human inequality.

Andrew OrtaCenter for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Univer-sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 201 International Stud-ies Building, MC-481, 901 South Fifth Street, Champaign,Illinois 61820, U.S.A. (aorta@illinois.edu). 13 XI 10

The grip of “globalization” as a constitutive problem of con-temporary analysis has shifted in the past decade. This isevident well beyond anthropology. In the business literature,for instance, the 1980s were marked by efforts to come togrips with the erasure of differences across a global landscapeshaped by intensifying circulation (e.g., Levitt 1983). By theturn of the twenty-first century, it was clear that the antici-pated ecumene would not come to pass; international businesstraining has come increasingly to focus on preparing businessprofessionals to negotiate a world where places matter, localdifferences count. “Bringing the Country Back In: The Im-portance of Local Knowledge in a Global Economy” was thetheme of the 2007 Meetings of the Academy of InternationalBusiness; other evidence of the swing away from the flat worldof naive globalization discourse ranges from the rise of “lo-cavore” cuisine to the enthusiasm for the “bottom of thepyramid” (Bartlett, Ghoshal, and Birkinshaw 2004; Prahalad2004; cf. Thrift 2000).

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Rockefeller’s critique of the keyword “flow” calls this tomind as he surveys a term that has done largely unexaminedwork in constituting the object of the anthropology of glob-alization. He is especially interested in “flow” as a routinizedmetaphor evoking the contexts and connections of globali-zation. Flowing is the constitutive symptom of the globalcondition. A secondary effect is that phenomena in theworld—groups of people, ideas, dollars—become themselvesavailable for analysis as tokens of a new global type: flows.Rockefeller’s core critique is that the lens of “flow” bringsonly certain features of globalization into view. He sets himselfto the task of asking how this came to be to better show uswhat has been left out.

Rockefeller’s critique illuminates two limitations of “flow,”each arising from dichotomies implicit in the term. One con-cerns the ways the analytic identification of flow requires anoriginal stable alter. This framing has tended to locate researchon globalization in places beyond the classical loci of eth-nographic study, seen as encompassed by but not represen-tative of global flows. This has the ironic effect of reifying theinsular locality it seeks analytically to surpass. A related lim-itation is a scalar dualism, because the rhetoric of flow impliesa bird’s-eye view keyed on macrolevel scales. The implicationthat the moving parts of globalization are best viewed fromon high has a darker side; the optic of flow routinizes a low-resolution legibility, foregoing a critical examination of theparts as it circulates the vantage it achieves over the whole.

Rockefeller’s cautions about the baggage and blind spotsof “flow” point toward a set of productive challenges forcontemporary research. One concerns seeing process and dy-namism, indeed globalization, at all levels of scale and acrossall spaces of human activity. This is more than moving beyondstatic or insular views of communities; at stake is researchshowing the ways that the production of local small-scalecommunities is the work of globalization (e.g., Colloredo-Mansfeld 2009; Piot 1999).

Locating globalization (at least partly) on the ground alsoentails recognizing that the rhetoric of flow naturalizes andfetishizes as an aggregated phenomenon a set of occurrencesthat on the ground are not as smooth, continuous, or neatas the rhetoric would imply. There are frictions, gaps, andfailures of meaning. Not all of these data will be relevant tothe questions we ask about global phenomena. But our un-derstanding of global phenomena will always be hobbled ifour analytic language helps to hide such data from view.

The business trend toward the local reflects a recognitionthat such spaces are not swept away, or swept level, by flows.Yet the business shorthand for this sort of zooming-in remainstelling, as the aggregated “dashboard” view enabling managersto track the flows is complemented by the action of “drillingdown” into the data to look at something with greater “gran-ularity.” These framings suggest a freezing of the action, takingdata out of the flow to interrogate it in another way. “Gran-ularity” suggests the subdivision of data from coarse to finecategories or perhaps an isolation of the individual particles

that when in motion make the smooth surface of the flow.Yet the promise of such analysis is that the new knowledgecan be scaled back up; the more granular data are episte-mologically continuous with the claims of flow (e.g., Baghai,Smit, and Viguerie 2007; Prahalad 2004). Far from challengingthe dominant framing of flow, this sort of engagement withlocality reproduces different facets of the model all the waydown.

A core strength of ethnography is the agility it providesresearchers to respond to new questions provoked by our data.A key challenge in the present case is for ethnography notjust to be multiscalar (as the cry for an anthropology of glob-alization once had it) but to be reciprocally so. Putting flowin its places promises new questions and framings of globalphenomena. The routinized rhetoric of flow has discouragedsome of these. Rockefeller’s critical examination of this keyword underscores the need for additional analytic orientationstoward the phenomena of globalization.

Keith WoodwardDepartment of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madi-son, 455 Science Hall, 550 North Park Street, Madison,Wisconsin 53706, U.S.A. (kwoodward@wisc.edu). 14 II 11

Rockefeller’s survey of the flow concept follows its meander-ings through the regime where today it is most solidly man-ifest: the globalized, capitalocentric logics that today projecthegemonic managerialist perspectives onto all aspects of so-cial, political, cultural, and economic life. The troubling epis-temological consequences that come with the concept’s priv-ileged spot in the social sciences, he suggests, are evident inboth the disappearance of “place” as a lively concept and theconcomitant decline of viewpoints that locate the individualas a relevant unit or “level” of agency. Elsewhere and in asimilar vein, I, along with Marston and Jones (Jones, Wood-ward, and Marston 2007; Marston, Jones, and Woodward2005; Woodward, Jones, and Marston 2010), have criticizedthe “fetishistic” notions that suggest that complex social re-lations are reducible to pure movements of unfettered flows.There, we challenge imaginaries that envision capital’s globalfluidities as a model for sociopolitical liberation—or worse,as its very foundation—while simultaneously ignoring theeconomic unevenness that smooth movement of capital bothdepends on and sustains. From this perspective, there is muchto agree with in Rockefeller’s account. However, where hesuggests that flow discourse embraces the perspective of themanagerialist capitalist at the cost of considering the partic-ularities of agents and places, our challenge concerns the ten-dencies in both flow- and agent/place-based accounts to passover the many concurrent constitutive sites—the cluster ofmaquiladoras along the United States/Mexico border, for ex-ample—where global capital flows are enabled by fixing andconstraining the movements of people within localized ex-

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ploitative socioeconomic relations. This difference emerges inpart through Rockefeller’s criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari.Specifically, I find their philosophical project in many wayshelpful for highlighting how exploitative systems take advan-tage of the cooperation of fluidity and stasis.

For Deleuze, flows are most closely related to processes ofcoding and—most importantly for operations of capitalism—decoding. If “flow” (or flux) refers to moving, dynamic, “un-formed” matter (Deleuze and Guattari 19872:43–44), a codeis something “subtracted” from flows, a bit of matter that isstabilized by having code attached to it (Deleuze 1971, e.g.,refers to changes in hairstyles). In this regard—contrary toRockefeller’s contention that Deleuze reduces individuals toflows—subjects are the agents who interrupt flows. In a lectureon Anti-Oedipus, he explains that “Every code in relation toflows implies that we prevent something of this flow frompassing through, we block it, we let something pass” (Deleuze1971). In keeping with Foucault (who was equally critical ofneoliberalist managerialism; see Foucault 2007, 2008), it canonly be with regard to abstract populations that flows occupycenter stage: “the general theory of society is a generalizedtheory of flows” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:262). However,when turning to the particularities of social lives, Deleuzeemphasizes the centrality of specific, grounded relations me-diated by pragmatic theorizations and descriptions (Deleuzeand Guattari 1987:139–140). The flow of power, for example,“is not homogeneous but can be defined only by the particularpoints through which it passes” (Deleuze 1988:25). These“points” are none other than the agents who interrupt flows,just as in the flows of academic theories, data, site visits, andethnographic research, it is precisely the research subject whointerrupts the researcher’s assumptions or presuppositions.

A multiplication of such codes, particularly when occurringas a repeated environmental process, can constitute a territory(as happens with birdsong; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). De-leuze equates deterritorialization with Melville’s use of theword “outlandish” (Deleuze 2004), but if this suggests a kindof spacelessness or placelessness, it does so only by suggestinga departure from a specific constituted territory. Thus, ratherthan “flow,” deterritorialization is better identified with a shiftin an otherwise stable pattern of body-environment relations.Consider the transformation in territorial relations that occurswith the rise of factory-style production: masses of artisans,whose bodies are accustomed to specific styles of work withspecific materials, are subject to a host of new relations whencompetition and dispossession forces them into the factory.Their bodies are made to work—to exert force, to bend, tofollow the rhythms of machines—in new and different waysat the same time that the value (or code) of that work issubject to new forms of measure (the number of commoditiesor the length of the working day). What is most importantfor capitalism is that the “outlandish” or deterritorialized di-mension (the new form of mass labor in the new factoryspace) can be subject to a simultaneous reterritorialization(new practices are unprofitable if they cannot be brought into

line with a code and a territory). Rather than driving theseprocesses, capitalism follows behind change (flux) in an on-going effort to capture (stabilize) and absorb it. “Agents,” farfrom being reduced to flows, are quite literally caught in themiddle of this system. By developing an account that allowsus to envision the combined workings of flows and stasis,Deleuze provides a social sciences with language for describingthe role of sociospatial difference in processes of capitalistexploitation.

Reply

To begin with, I would like to express my gratitude for theways in which various commentators showed the productivenature of the critique of “flow” articulated in the article byadapting it to areas that I had not considered, as well as forthe collegial, even appreciative tone adopted by the authorswhose work I critiqued. In reading the comments together, Iam struck by the level of agreement among the contributionson certain fundamental points. Nearly all the authors agreethat imagery of unbounded mobility fails to help us under-stand global interconnections, and many implicitly or ex-plicitly hold that what I am calling the “managerial perspec-tive” holds serious snares for ethnographic projects in partbecause it facilitates the elision of specificities of experience,agency, and place (although not all agree that the keyword“flow” encodes that perspective). It also seems to me that weare all arguing for a processual approach to action, power,and circulation, while we may disagree about what version ofprocessualism is going to help us.

Hart’s commentary is in many ways an ideal complementto the article, revealing the “organized forgetting” engenderedby the language of “flow” in a concrete manner where I doso from a theoretical perspective. She highlights the traumaticand often violent reality of transnational migration and globallabor practices and some of the ways that bureaucratic lan-guage elides the human consequences of business and statepolicies. Favero focuses quite fruitfully on my point aboutthe persistent novelty of the language of globalization, arguingthat much of the Deleuzian lexicon embodies the same par-adox. Handler, in saying that I claim that uses of the keyword“that apparently take up and move forward antiessentializingcritiques of cultural holism in fact reproduce its epistemo-logical premises,” puts one of my key points more succinctlythan I managed to myself. I am flattered by the connectionshe finds between my argument and Whorf’s writings.

Woodward cleaves to a project in many ways complemen-tary to my own rejection of managerialist fantasies of unlo-calized and unfettered flows as a useful way to think aboutsocial reality generally and globalization specifically. But heargues that Deleuze, far from being one of the sources of theproblem, offers us ways to overcome it and that my preferred

Rockefeller “Flow” 575

approach, that is, bringing subjects and places back into anyapproach to globalization, may generate blindness of its own.I am intrigued by the fact that the language he uses as heinitially contrasts his position and mine (i.e., “fixing and con-straining the movements of people within localized exploit-ative socioeconomic relations”) is remarkably similar to somekey concepts I use in my own ethnographic approach to powerand mobility (see Rockefeller 2010). Similarly, his claim that“capitalism follows behind change . . . in an ongoing effortto capture (stabilize) and absorb it” is reminiscent of my ownclaims in the same book that powerful social formations (suchas nation-states) depend for their existence on the appropri-ation and constraint of the creative capacities of their subjects.In short, his reading of Deleuze is a good deal more congenialthan the Bergsonian Deleuze I have found. Here I must cedesome authority to Woodward, who is far more of a Deleuzescholar than I am, and also emphasize that my article is notintended to contain a definitive statement on Deleuze’s workor on its adoption in the social sciences generally but tocritique a particular use of part of his approach. To put thematter in the terms Woodward offers, it is entirely possiblethat what I object to in anthropological uses of “flow” is theway they have tended to privilege what he calls “abstractpopulations” and deploy a “general theory of society” whenwhat is called for is an understanding of particularities.

Hannerz begins his comments by pointing out a certainlack of precision in my chronology of the genesis of the key-word. His clarifications are well taken, and I trust that theydo not affect my overall argument. He also gives instances ofconcepts related to “flow” being used to represent difference,nonuniformity, and conflict as well as small-scale interactions.Orta makes a related point in his remarks about “granularity,”but to a different purpose, implying that even when the dis-course of “flow” is adapted to the understanding of small-scale situations, it remains caught in the same dualisms asalways. In this vein, I should point out that my argument isnot that “flow” is a concept that fails to illuminate anythingimportant about the globalized world. On the contrary, I tryto make it clear that it can do many handy things for thosetrying to think about multiple scales and process, but I main-tain that the cost of making use of the concept is far greaterthan one might think. A way to rephrase my overall point isto say that “flow” bears the mark of the manager, and whenthe term appears in the ways I have critiqued, we can be surethat we are reading about a reality created by managerialismand/or that we are seeing the managerial perspective on theworld enacted in text. So if we are going to talk about “flows,”we ought to talk about bureaucrats, bankers, planners, con-sultants, and managers generally and not let their perspectivesand omissions reproduce themselves uncontested.

I follow Appadurai in beginning with our areas of agree-ment, which are considerable. I concur that anthropology asa discipline lacks an adequate means to understand globalcirculation. It is also indisputable that the work of those whohave developed the language of global flows will prove to have

played an important role in the happy event that we comeup with such an approach. Not only do I agree that thestability of the traditional object of ethnographic concern (letus call it the “local community”) has been disturbed by large-scale exercises of power, but I also hold that such communitieswere never as stable or as local as some anthropologies imag-ined them to be. The rise of the language of “flow” was a keypart of an intellectual movement of the 1980s and 1990s thathelped us break from a preoccupation with stability and self-containment that impeded the development of a global an-thropology. But theory making is a dialectical process, andwe are now in a position to internalize the processual pos-sibilities created partly by writings on “flow” while leavingaside their dualistic and managerial baggage.

Of course Appadurai and those who follow in his footstepsdo not present any threat to “small marginal people of theforests, islands, and swamps,” to Andean campesinos, to in-digenous peoples, or to migrant workers. Rather, the languageof “flow” represents a missed opportunity. I suspect that oneof the attractions of this language is that it facilitates con-versation with a range of relatively empowered actors (policymakers, development officials, financial managers, and thelike) who worry about and affect some of the same thingsthat anthropologists have begun focusing on but who havelong found anthropology to be opaque in its language andpreoccupations and perhaps quaint in its attachment to theconcrete. These cross-institutional conversations are good inthemselves, but if the price of achieving them is to join withmanagers in their collective forgetting rather than to pointout that forgetting, then the resultant conversation will standin the way of our efforts to understand the global and thelocal in their mutual constitution and make it harder to seewhat the managers of our increasingly managerial reality areactually doing.

Appadurai claims that “flow” skepticism might reflect ananxiety about the loss of the traditional local object of eth-nographic attention. Thus, he says that “flow skeptics” oftenspeak in the name of the “small.” This may be the case, butit is worth noting that the authors whom I held up as offeringus alternatives to the language of “flow” (for reasons of spaceI left out Theodore Bestor’s Tsukiji [2004], a magisterial “eth-nography” of the global sushi trade) are concerned with large-scale, often global actors and processes as well as with “small”experiences and actions. In my own work (Rockefeller 2010)I strive not only to “disturb” the traditional local object ofethnographic study but also to put the interaction of wildlyvaried scales of organization and power at the center of myapproach to the lives of an indigenous people. Institutionally,anthropology has had great success incorporating translocal,transnational, and global discourses, and I doubt that manyanthropologists these days are actually threatened by the lossof what Garcıa Canclini calls the “natural” identity of cultureand place. My own concern is that we have been more suc-cessful in this area institutionally than conceptually, and myethnographic work is intended to show that it is possible and

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desirable to grasp large-scale processes and institutions by“starting from” the scales characterized by experience andhuman subjects.

In closing, I want to reiterate that the problems with thelanguage of “flow” underline the pressing need for more ro-bust and processual anthropological approaches to circulationand scale, agency, and locality. My hope is that the ebb of thesurprisingly murky waters of “flow” will reveal to us a complexterrain, heretofore only partly visible, that is dynamic, mul-tiscalar, and most importantly, inhabited.

—Stuart Rockefeller

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