Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global:
Elements for a Theorization
Saskia Sassen
The multiple processes that constitute economic globalization inhabit and
shape specific structurations of the economic, the political, the cultural, and
the subjective. Among the most vital of their effects is the production of new
spatialities and temporalities. These belong to both the global and the
national, if only to each in part. This "in part" is an especially important
qualification, as in my reading the global is itself partial, albeit strategic.
The global does not (yet) fully encompass the lived experience of actors or the
domain of institutional orders and cultural formations; it persists as a partial
condition. This, however, should not suggest that the global and the national
are discrete conditions that mutually exclude each other. To the contrary, they
significantly overlap and interact in ways that distinguish our contemporary
moment.