Re: Hartley on American Cultural Studies

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary wrote:
>I am working on an article on Cultural Studies and as part of that task am
>reading through John Hartley's introduction "Cultural Exceptionalism"
>Freedom, Imperialism, Power, America" to Hartley and Roberta Pearson's :
>American Cultural Studies: A reader. OUP: New York, 2000: 1-13.
>
>Hartley is now Dean of the Faculty of Creative Industries here at QUT. He
>is my boss and my impressions so far are that he is an interesting case. He
>is full of that entrepeneurial destructiveness that I believe Schumpeter
>talked about.   Hopefully I will get around to writing more about some of
>the other articles in the book.  But for now I want to raise some of the
>issues mulled over in Hartley's introduction.

Very interesting. As Mark observed today on the L-I list, Lenin and
Leninist discourse around questions of imperialism, etc. are becoming
fashionable among academic Marxists. (I don't have to worry about using
this term. Michael Hoover unsubbed today.)

As I'm sure you are aware, our friend Zizek is organizing a big conference
on Lenin over in Paris. To show how open-minded he is, he invited Doug
Henwood to speak on why he thinks Lenin is irrelevant. I was crushed to
discover that I was not invited to speak, even though I'm sure my article
on "Lenin in Context" would clear up a lot of questions that the conference
organizers have been grappling with.

Another sign of post-Marxist flirtation with Leninism is the book "Empire"
co-authored by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the Duke professor who was
dissertation adviser to our old friend Jon Beasley-Murray from the Spoons
Collective. Here's what one reader thought of the book, according to
amazon.com:

"This dense and philosophically avant-garde tome is nonetheless passionate
and compulsively readable, I found that I could not put it down after I
picked it up. Even more remarkable is the facility with which Negri and
Hardt facilitate both the history of the west and our contemporary
postmodern terrain. Their central thesis is that the form of sovereignity
that has characterized modernity is ending and that that there is a new
form of sovereignity forming which they term 'Empire'. In doing this they
examine Machiavelli, Spinoza, the founders of the U.S. political system,
Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bill Gates and many others in creative
blend of materialism, history, radical politics and philosophy. The
criticisms of post-structuralist and postcolonial theory are especially
timely. If you are tired of coventional liberal politics try this book
headlined by Italy's most famous living philosopher and political prisoner
- Toni Negri."

Poor Lenin.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/