°Theory and Empire
Matt provides a summary of recent debates over Theory’s Empire - I haven’t read the book, and I guess I don’t really feel a need to either. One’s time is probably better spent making pasta. Icite makes the point that the tussles over ‘theory’ are likely displaced anxieties over the academic labour market. Which sounds more than plausible, given the state of the universities - and the world - at present.
So, maybe it’s not just the ritual injunctions of the Anglosphere to ’speak plain English’, nor even simply an attempt to - this word appears many times in the publisher’s blurb - “redeem” some faux authenticity (power?) that is deemed to have been lost. Maybe those aspects appear with force because the question is indeed one of force, polemos and not just polemic. In which case, the question is not how to continue the skirmishes within the discipline, but how to make one’s escape from disciplinarity and from the global civil war.
Or, to put it another way:
This kind of militarizaton of the general intellectual is the main danger we are facing nowadays, the militarization of intellectual capacity. But at the same time, I see another aspect of the panic war, and this is the relationship between complexity, overcomplexity of the actual world, of the cyberspace, and the pretention of control, and the pretention of economic evaluation. you know, the relationship between the economic law and the infinite production, or productivity, of networked intelligence, this is the problem. - Franco Berardi, “Panic War”.
Personally, I find this stuff just unbelievably funny. Nostalgia for postmodernism! Oh, that just cracks me up… People are really, apparently honestly, trying to reconstruct the huge farce that was 1980s academe as the moment when we were nearly there .
T.C.O. [August 7, 2005 @ 7:38 pm]