After Globalization E-Book

Eric Cazdyn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Manifestos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 445

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

AFTER GLOBALIZATION

“Relentlessly, remorselessly, endlessly, we are told there is no alternative to globalization, whether our lecturers are bourgeois economists, progressive journalists, or imaginative litterateurs. Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman dare to go beyond the standard thinking of the day and query the very heart of mobile capital and its impact on daily life. Their alternative vision breathes new life into our sense of evolution and inevitability.”
Toby Miller, author of Globalization and Sport and Global Hollywood

“Cazdyn and Szeman begin with the idea that the current economic crisis has historicized globalization, turning it from a process that looked as inevitable as, say, global warming still does, into an episode in the history of capitalism: hence the possibility not just of more globalization but of an “after globalization.” And hence also, they argue, the renewed possibility of an “after capitalism.” In powerful critiques of what they describe as the common sense of capital today they sketch out the terms in which changes more radical than substituting generous and honest leaders for the greedy and dishonest ones we’ve currently got might begin to be imagined.”
Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think “an after” to globalization. After establishing seven theses (on education, morality, nation, future, history, capitalism, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Naomi Klein) and considers how their work is dulled by these promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises and who understand the world very differently than the way it is popularly represented.

After Globalization argues that a true capacity to think an after to globalization is the very beginning of politics today.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Blackwell Manifestos

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

A Précis: The Argument

Part I: The Afterlife of Globalization

a. Nothing Can Save Us

b. From Globalization to Anti-Americanism

c. From Anti-Americanism Back to Globalization

d. “I face the World as it is”: On Obama

e. Of and After: Two Narratives of the Global

f. Seven Theses after Globalization

g. Something's Missing

Part II: The Limits of Liberalism

a. After Globalization, or, Liberalism after Neoliberalism

b. Neoliberals Dressed in Black: Richard Florida

c. The Anecdotal American: Thomas Friedman

d. Confidence Game: Paul Krugman

e. The Non-Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein

f. The Limits of Hollywood: Michael Clayton

Part III: The Global Generation

a. Next Generation

b. From Anti-Americanism to Globalization

c. A Map of the World

d. Biogeographies

e. Can't Get There from Here

Conclusion: “Oh, Don't Ask Why!”

Index

Blackwell Manifestos

In this new series major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts and subjects, including topics as diverse as, for example: Culture, Race, Religion, History, Society, Geography, Literature, Literary Theory, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Modernism. Written accessibly and with verve and spirit, these books follow no uniform prescription but set out to engage and challenge the broadest range of readers, from undergraduates to postgraduates, university teachers and general readers – all those, in short, interested in ongoing debates and controversies in the humanities and social sciences.

Already Published

The Idea of Culture

The Future of Christianity

Reading After Theory

21st-Century Modernism

The Future of Theory

True Religion

Inventing Popular Culture

Myths for the Masses

The Future of War

The Rhetoric of RHETORIC

When Faiths Collide

The Future of Environmental Criticism

The Idea of Latin America

The Future of Society

Provoking Democracy

Rescuing the Bible

Our Victorian Education

The Idea of English Ethnicity

Living with Theory

Uses of Literature

Religion and the Human Future

The State of the Novel

In Defense of Reading

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters

The Savage Text

The Myth of Popular Culture

Phenomenal Shakespeare

Why Politics Can't Be Freed From Religion

What Cinema is!

The Future of Theology

A Future for Criticism

After the Fall

After Globalization

Terry Eagleton

Alister E. McGrath

Valentine Cunningham

Marjorie Perloff

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Graham Ward

John Storey

Hanno Hardt

Christopher Coker

Wayne C. Booth

Martin E. Marty

Lawrence Buell

Walter D. Mignolo

William Outhwaite

Caroline Levine

Roland Boer

Dinah Birch

Robert Young

Vincent B. Leitch

Rita Felski

David E. Klemm and William Schweiker

Dominic Head

Daniel R. Schwarz

Philip Davis

Adrian Thatcher

Perry Meisel

Bruce R. Smith

Ivan Strenski

Andrew Dudley

David F. Ford

Catherine Belsey

Richard Gray

Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cazdyn, Eric M.

After Globalization / Eric Cazdyn, Imre Szeman.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-7794-8 (hardback)

1. Globalization. 2. Globalization in literature. I. Szeman, Imre, 1968– author. II. Title.

JZ1318.C39 2011

303.48'2–dc22

2010049552

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs ISBN: 9781444396461; Wiley Online Library 9781444396478; ePub ISBN: 9781444396454

For FRJ

Acknowledgments

A book is always the work of more than those who actually sat down to write it. We would like first to thank our research assistants, Nicholas Holm and Frank Castiglione (McMaster University), and Sana Ghani (University of Alberta), for their help on this project, especially the difficult work of transcribing hours of interviews. Justin Sully jumped in to help at the end, just as he has on other projects in which we've been involved; thanks greatly, Justin.

Without the support of colleagues in the countries in which we worked, we would have had a difficult time organizing the student interviews. Thanks to Jaka Primorac (Croatia), Chi-she Li and Tsung-yi Michelle Huang (Taiwan), Eva Boesenberg (Germany), Alexandra Kleschina (Russia), Sára Monok (Hungary), and Gregory Lobo (Colombia). All of these fine scholars contributed to this book through the insights they shared with us and the misadventures in which they involved us while we were visiting the countries in which they work.

The student interviews took place at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany), Institute for International Relations (Zagreb, Croatia), National Taiwan University (Taipei, Taiwan), Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and Yekaterinburg State University (Yekaterinburg, Russia). We are grateful, too, to the staff at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where a portion of this book was written in January 2010.

Emma Bennett, Caroline Clamp, Caroline Richards, and Ben Thatcher at Wiley-Blackwell helped immensely in translating the manuscript into a book.

This project was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

A Précis: The Argument

1. Globalization was generally understood to be about transformations in economics, politics, and culture – in other words, a change in everything all at once, a paradigm shift or system change produced and/or represented by specific elements (i.e., global markets, a 24-hour culture, instant communications, increasing levels of immigration, etc.), with technology as the key enabling force.

2. Globalization was also, from the very beginning, an ideological project – one that served to naturalize capitalism under its name. Globalization made capitalism invisible (or as invisible as it ever can be) behind a set of changes that were treated as quasi-natural phenomena about which little could be done by human beings. All of the things that happened as part of globalization were real enough. But the big, overarching narrative of globalization into which they were placed was a fiction – an effective one, but a fiction nevertheless.

3. When capitalism returned following the economic crisis of 2008 (as a speakable discourse and an all-too-visible mode of social organization), there was a recognition that globalization's ideological project to make capitalism disappear was over. With capitalism confronted by its mortality and globalization revealed as a fiction, many anticipated a political reawakening on a worldwide scale.

4. But there has not been a serious confrontation with what comes after globalization because globalization rested on a more fundamental ideological project, one unrecognized at the time of its constitution, even though it was essential to its effective operation. Globalization involves a certain configuration of time – one that cannot imagine an “after.” Modernity could have a post-modernity to follow it. But globalization? Post-globalization sounds like some dystopian coda to everything, not a new phase of human existence.

5. Our project is to understand the construction of this “time limit” that works in the name of globalization even when globalization's over. After establishing seven theses that challenge this ideology of time (theses that negate the standard assumptions about education, morality, nation, future, history, capitalism, and common sense), we examine four popular thinkers (Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Naomi Klein) and show how their influential work is dulled by these assumptions. These thinkers not only mobilize these assumptions, but also produce and reproduce them. The overall effect of such assumptions is to preclude the capacity to think an “after” to globalization, and to rely on older narratives of how to deal with capitalism, regardless of the contradictions obviously contained within them.

6. Of course, the ideology of globalization and its time limit is also found outside of the work of such liberal thinkers. We investigate this through conversations with students from around the globe who tend to understand the world differently than the way it is popularly represented, and who seem unconvinced and uninterested in the false promises of the seven assumptions and the “time limit” they sustain.

7. In both cases – that of the liberal popularizers of globalization and the children of globalization – we find that there's “something missing.” Something's missing between these two groups, as well as in the way that they both understand that something's missing in the world.

8. It is valuable to understand these limits and gaps, and to consider what they mean for imaginative possibilities. But we also need to be conscious of something else that is missing: a true capacity to think an “after” to globalization. This is the beginning of politics today.

Part I

The Afterlife of Globalization

a. Nothing Can Save Us

Nothing can save us. Not the schemes of government planning committees. Not the triumphant spread of liberal democracy to the four corners of the world. Neither sudden scientific breakthroughs, nor technological marvels. Neither quick fixes, nor golden bullets. Not the Right turning to the left, the Left turning right, or everyone coming to their senses and occupying an agreed-upon center. Neither vigilantes, nor vanguards. Not the nation. Not NGOs. Not common sense. Not capitalism. Not the future. And certainly not a smart, articulate, young politician able to fuel the hopes of realists and idealists alike.

If nothing can save us, why even wake up in the morning?

To understand that nothing can save us is far from throwing up our hands and closing up shop. Rather, it's the first step in grasping the real limits of where we are and what is required to overcome these limits. At present, we continue to act within these limits, accepting them as the way things are and the way they have to be. We cede to governments the rationale and logics by which our societies are planned and organized. For all manner of impending crises – the end of fossil fuel, the proliferation of disease, the rise in the earth's temperature – we await the abstract entity called “science” (or the market, or God, or compassion) to save us in the nick of time. We imagine politics as an arena in which a happy (however tortured and difficult to get to) middle ground is reached through intelligent debate among competing parties – or at least, enough of a common position that it manages to allow things to limp along for another day. Even if we still meekly cast ballots, democracy has become associated with the bizarre practice of voting for politicians of different parties with the exact same worldview. We prefer to catch our thieves red-handed, content with discovering the pleasures of exceptions rather than having to confront the hard facts of the rule, so that we can continue to invest in the market and believe in the sanctity of our social systems. We imagine that our families and economies break down not because of how they are structured, but because of covetous, greedy, or weak-willed individuals who cause them to go awry. We continue to mime incredulity and shock in the face of crises and scandals, however much such events are dialectically integrated into how things work.

All of these boundary markers, these limits, are at the very heart of our social imaginings – especially when they function unconsciously. But they are at the center of the political in a direct way, too. For all of the celebration of a new global order, we continually fall back on the nation – that old standby of a political form we once thought we had (or were on the verge of having) successfully outgrown, and yet which remains the awkward jigsaw puzzle of geopolitical space in which most of us are content to live. We know that the nation is a fiction that arbitrarily matches space and belonging. And yet, the nation still structures everything – from our most intimate desires to the armies that defend it. Even the most hopeful dreams of a post-national world – whether we imagine it taking the form of rooted locals or as rootless cosmopolitans – are refracted through the lens of the nation. Globalization was supposed to mark the withering away of the nation; instead, in the twenty-first century we witness nations asserting their identities and fighting over the last scraps of the earth's resources. The struggle to address the problem of climate change – a global problem if there ever was one – has been repeatedly sandbagged by national interests that were supposed to have been transcended. In what was imagined to be the post-national era, the nation is stronger than ever.