Imre Szeman

Pierre Bourdieu Fieldwork in Culture

Chapter 1 Introduction: Fieldwork in Culture Chapter 2 Bourdieus Refusal Chapter 3 Resistance, Recuperation, and Reflexivity: The Limits of a Paradigm Chapter 4 Anglicizing Bourdieu Chapter 5 Bourdieu and Common Sense Chapter 6 Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx Chapter 7 Cultural Studies Bourdieus Way: Women, Leadership, and Feminist Theory Chapter 8 Habitus Revisited, Notes and Queries from the Field Chapter 9 Pierre Bourdieus Fields of Cultural Production: A Case Study of Modern Jazz Chapter 10 Romancing Bourdieu: A Case Study in Gender Politics in the Literary Field Chapter 11 The Prestige of the Oppressed: Symbolic Capital in a Guilt Economy Chapter 12 Space, Time, and John Gardner Chapter 13 Passport to Duke

Who's Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization

Fredric Jameson’s proposal that all third world texts be read as ‘‘national allegories’’ has been one of the more influential and important attempts to theorize the relationship of literary production to the nation and to politics. Unfortunately, its influence and importance has thus far been primarily negative. For many critics, Jameson’s essay stands as an example of what not to do when studying third world literature from the vantage point of the first-world academy. His attempt in the now infamous essay, ‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,’’ to delineate ‘‘some general theory of what is often called third-world literature’’ has been attacked for its very desire for generality. The presumption that it is possible to produce a theory that would explain African, Asian, and Latin American literary production, the literature of China and Senegal, has been (inevitably) read as nothing more than a patronizing, theoretical orientalism, or as yet another example of a troubling appropriation of Otherness with the aim of exploring the West rather than the Other. The most well-known criticism of Jameson’s essay along these lines remains Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of

System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster

And lurking behind any possible reconfiguration of world politics would be questions of access to energy and to water, in a world beset by ecological dilemmas and potentially producing vastly more than existing capacities of capitalist accumulation. Here could be the most explosive issues of all, for which no geopolitical manoeuvring or reshuffling offers any solution. —Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Curve of American Power”

Culture and Globalization, or, The Humanities in Ruins

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken.

WHAT IS THE MULTITUDE

Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman continue their conversation with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (See ‘The Global Coliseum: On Empire’ in Cultural Studies, 16.2, (March 2002), p. 177–192). In this new interview they press the authors of Empire and Multitude on questions that have arisen both out of their own involvement with the theoretical issues generated by Empire and from new areas opened up by Multitude. Why is the multitude not a class? How can the unity of a political project be maintained in the multiplicity of the multitude? Is democracy still a project for the future? Can a political subject constitute itself outside the structure of sovereignty? In other words, what is the multitude?

Introduction: The Globalization of Fiction/The Fiction of Globalization

The idea for this special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly emerged out of a question posed by one of our students: Does it make sense to speak about a literature of globalization? This question seems easy enough to answer, or rather, a whole host of possible answers offer themselves right away, which may not in fact be the same thing as coming up with a simple, satisfactory response. First, one could suggest (as a number of other scholars do) that though we have discussed it almost exclusively in national terms, literature has in fact long been globalized. Writing at one of the key moments of European nationalism, Marx and Engels already pointed to the existence of a world literature produced out of the constant revolutionizing of bourgeois production, and discussed its spread across national and cultural boundaries. Without question, one of the first elites linked globally—materially as much as imaginatively—was a literary elite able to sample exotic narrative confections produced outside of their original national and local contexts. But glimmers of a ‘‘world literature’’ appeared long before the explicit formulations of Marx and Engels or Goethe in the nineteenth century.

THE GLOBAL COLISEUM: ON EMPIRE

In this interview with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Brown and Szeman press the authors of Empire on a number of questions which have arisen both out of their own use of Empire s theoretical and political framework and, given Empire s immense popularity both within the academy and outside it, out of more widespread controversies surrounding the book. What is the relationship between the theory of Empire and the new American Empire which some US political and military leaders are proclaiming? How is Empire different from globalization? How does the theory of Empire relate to classical Marxism? Why do we need a political theory of globalization? What are the philosophical stakes of constructing such a theory? How is resistance possible in a globalized world? And perhaps, most significantly: what are the possibilities for the future?

Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? I provide an answer to this question by examining the narrative and aesthetic choices through which the problem of oil is framed in three recent “feature” documentaries: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s A Crude Awakening (), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (), and ShannonWalsh’sHOil (). My aim is to understand not only the specific politics enacted through the formal and aesthetic choices made in each film, but to map out what these documentaries tell us about the social life of oil today, and the capacity for films such as these to meaningfully intervene in the looming consequences of our dependence on oil. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, by offering readings of the discursive, narrative and aesthetic strategies of these documentaries, I draw out the ways in which each comes to understand the problem of oil. In the second part, I identify the key insights that these films offer regarding the specific social contradictions and political blockages that emerge from their attempt to name and understand oil. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the insights these films provide for addressing the antinomies that define and separate the anticapitalist and environmental movements.

‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negris Empire are a number of short sections whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expository style of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinozas Ethics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material already presented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point to hidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of these which did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of space are published here for the first time. The matters touched on are as diverse as those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender of biopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nationstate, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the function of fear, postmodern prophecy,Hollywoods imperial fantasy, and the paradoxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled and fascinated many of Empires readers.

Remote Sensing: An Interview with Ursula Biemann

Even more so than that first significant moment of the video age-the brutal footage of the Los Angeles Police Departments attack on the prostrate body of Rodney King-the antiglobalization protests have marked the first sustained use of new digital technologies (audio and visual) to document the contemporary uses of power and the resistances to it.