Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
President Bush was roundly criticized for likening America’s antiterrorism measures to a “crusade” in 2001. Far from just a gaffe, however, such medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the war on terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.
Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror addresses the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights.
The American Game | Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball
It is easy to mistake the United States for an empire. But as John D. Kelly explains here, the American approach to global relations is best understood as a competition—one in which the United States, through the reshaping of economic theory and the global economy itself, imposes its own rules on a game played to win. How and where the United States implements these rules can be tracked through complexities in diplomacy and business. But Kelly here cleverly uses the quintessential American game of baseball to show how the United States maintains and advances its dominance over other nations. A thought-provoking read, The American Game could well revolutionize our understanding of the United States’ influence on global politics and economics.
Reading *Legitimation Crisis* in Tehran | Iran and the Future of Liberalism
The Iran depicted in the headlines is a rogue state ruled by ever-more-defiant Islamic fundamentalists. Yet inside the borders, an unheralded transformation of a wholly different political bent is occurring. A “liberal renaissance,” as one Iranian thinker terms it, is emerging in Iran, and in this pamphlet, Danny Postel charts the contours of the intellectual upheaval.
Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran examines the conflicted positions of the Left toward Iran since 1979, and, in particular, critically reconsiders Foucault’s connection to the Iranian Revolution. Postel explores the various elements of the subtle liberal revolution and proposes a host of potential implications of this transformation for Western liberalism. He examines the appeal of Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin among Iranian intellectuals and ponders how their ideas appear back to us when refracted through a Persian prism. Postel closes with a thought-provoking conversation with eminent Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo.
A provocative and incisive polemic highly relevant to our times, Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran will be of interest to anyone who wants to get beyond alarmist rhetoric and truly understand contemporary Iran.
Phantom Calls | Race and the Globalization of the NBA
In the twenty-first century, the idea of race in sports is rapidly changing. The National Basketball Association, for instance, was recently home to a new kind of racial conflict. After a recent playoff loss, Houston head coach Jeff Van Gundy alleged that Yao Ming, his Chinese star center, was the victim of phantom calls, or refereeing decisions that may have been ethnically biased. Grant Farred here shows how this incident can be seen as a pivotal moment in the globalization of the NBA. With some forty percent of its players coming from foreign nations, the idea of race in the NBA has become increasingly multifaceted. Farred explains how allegations of phantom calls such as Van Gundy’s challenge the fiction that America is a post-racial society and compel us to think in new ways about the nexus of race and racism in America.
Museum, Inc. | Inside the Global Art World
Has corporate business overtaken the art world? It’s no secret that art and business have always mixed, but their relationship today sparks more questions than ever. Museum, Inc. describes the new art conglomerates from an insider’s perspective, probing how their roots run deep into corporate culture. Paul Werner draws on his nine years at the Guggenheim Museum to reveal that contemporary art museums have not broken radically with the past, as often claimed. Rather, Werner observes, they are the logical outcome of the evolution of cultural institutions rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the colonial expansion of the liberal nation-state, and the rhetoric of democracy.
In a witty and argumentative style, Werner critically analyzes today’s art institutions and reframes the public’s accepted view of them, exposing how their apparent success belies the troubling forces operating within them. He ultimately argues that the art museum we know and love may have already run its course. An engaging discourse structured as an informal gallery talk, Museum, Inc. is a thought-provoking and passionate polemic that offers ideas for a new, more democratic museum.
Neo-Liberal Genetics | The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology claims to be the authoritative science of “human nature.” Its chief architects, including Stephen Pinker and David Buss, have managed to reach well beyond the ivory tower to win large audiences and influence public discourse. But do the answers that evolutionary psychologists provide about language, sex, and social relations add up? Susan McKinnon thinks not.
Far from being an account of evolution and social relations that has historical and cross-cultural validity, evolutionary psychology is a stunning example of a “science” that twists evolutionary genetics into a myth of human origins. As McKinnon shows, that myth is shaped by neo-liberal economic values and relies on ethnocentric understandings of sex, gender, kinship, and social relations. She also explores the implications for public policy of the moral tales that are told by evolutionary psychologists in the guise of “scientific” inquiry. Drawing widely from the anthropological record, Neo-Liberal Genetics offers a sustained and accessible critique of the myths of human nature fabricated by evolutionary psychologists.
The Hit Man’s Dilemma | Or Business, Personal and Impersonal
“It’s not personal; it’s just business,” says the professional killer to his victim. But business is always personal, and even though modern business corporations have been granted the legal status of persons, they are still part of the impersonal engines of society that operate far beyond human reach.
Keith Hart explores in his thought-provoking pamphlet The Hitman’s Dilemma how we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities, but we live in a society increasingly ruled by faceless corporate forces. He ultimately asks: What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social and economic frameworks we live within? This is the hitman’s dilemma, and it is ours as well.
The Law in Shambles
It’s an enduring axiom: before there is democracy, there is rule of law. Thomas Geoghegan argues here in his lively pamphlet that as the pillars of the American legal system are crumbling, so too is the American democracy.
Geoghegan convincingly explains how the 2000 presidential election was only the first sign that justice is now driven by party politics. He notes how even lawyers are becoming disillusioned with the law, as federal cases are increasingly determined by whether they are heard by a Bush-appointed judge or a Clinton-appointed judge. Geoghegan ultimately contends that the sense of disorder in our legal system has never been greater, and we may no longer have the basic civic trust necessary to preserve the rule of law.
The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo | How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political Party
Contributors: William A. Galston, Adolph Reed, Jr., Ruy Teixeira, Dan Carol, Daniel Cantor, Robert B. Reich, Michael C. Dawson, Elaine Kamarck, Richard Delgado, Stanley Aronowitz, Philip Klinkner, Larry M. Bartels
A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?
Rick Perlstein probes this central paradox of today’s political scene in his penetrating pamphlet. Perlstein explains how the Democrats’ obsessive short-term focus on winning “swing voters,” instead of cultivating loyal party-liners, has relegated Democrats to political stagnation. Perlstein offers a vigorous critique and far-reaching vision that is a thirty-year plan for Democratic victory.
The Empire’s New Clothes | Paradigm Lost, and Regained
Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance—not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for twenty-first-century living. Harry Harootunian turns his unrelenting gaze to signs of the new imperialism in the world—from the United States’ occupation of Iraq to other supposed terrorist enclaves around the globe.
The arguments being made today for imperialism’s historical and contemporary value echo earlier rationales for modernization theory and its conception of “development” during the heyday of the Cold War. Harootunian decisively cuts through the layers to reveal that under the new clothes, it’s the same empire.
Enemies of Promise | Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship
Why should books drive the academic hierarchy? This controversial question posed by Lindsay Waters ignited fierce debate in the academy and its presses, as he warned that the “publish or perish” dictum was breaking down the academic system in the United States. Waters hones his argument in this pamphlet with a new set of questions that challenge the previously unassailable link between publishing and tenure.
As one of the most important and innovative editors in the humanities and social sciences, Waters has long witnessed the self-destruction occurring in the academic world because of the pressure to publish. Drawing upon his years of experience, he reveals how this principle is destroying the quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning. It is time for scholars to rise up, Waters argues, and reclaim the governance of their institutions.
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn’t?
This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.
The Root of Roots | Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got its Start
Anthropological iconoclasts Richard and Sally Price have spent the last two decades not only creating an unparalleled oeuvre of scholarship in several areas of anthropology but also unabashedly calling foul on any untenable or patronizing concepts of “us” and “them,” “primitive” and “modern,” that cross their path. For this pamphlet, they crack the yellowing diaries kept by Melville and Frances Herskovits on their famous 1920s expedition deep into the South American jungle, exposing—with their trademark combination of deadpan wit and theoretical rigor—the origins of the field that has come to be known as African diaspora studies.
What Happened to Art Criticism?
Art criticism was once passionate, polemical, and judgmental; now critics are more often interested in ambiguity, neutrality, and nuanced description. And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes.
On the Edges of Anthropology | Interviews
Since the publication of Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World, James Clifford has become one of anthropology’s most important interlocutors. A key figure in theory and criticism, he has written seminal essays on topics ranging from art and identity to museum studies and fieldwork. This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.
The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy’s Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantanamo
Each Thanksgiving, the president of the United States symbolically pardons one turkey from the fate of serving as a holiday dinner. In this pamphlet, anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö uncovers the hidden horrors of such rituals connected with the power of pardon, from the annual turkey to the pardoning of the original Teddy Bear. It is through these ritualized and perpetually remembered acts of mercy, Fiskesjö contends, that we might come to understand the exceptional—and troubling—status of the “War on Terror” prisoners being held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay.
9/12 | New York After
In a series of snapshots after the attack on the World Trade Center—from a day, to a week, up to a year and beyond—Eliot Weinberger offers thoughtful and provocative reflections on his city, the country, and the state of the world. Originally published only outside the United States, these essays are now available together, and for the first time in English. Taken as a whole, they constitute a remarkable “archive of the moment,” way-markers for a story that is still unfolding.
The Companion Species Manifesto | Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in “significant otherness.” In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway’s answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just “cyborgs for earthly survival” but also, in a more doggish idiom, “shut up and train
Revolt of the Masscult
We live in an age of “popular culture”—another term, to some, for an organic mess of marketing strategies aimed at giving us the illusion of choice. From Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club to presidential politics, however, distinctions of taste are more accurately understood to be “blunt instruments of antidemocratic elitism.” So argues Chris Lehmann, in a discussion that ranges over the work of Edward Shils, Clement Greenberg, and Jonathan Franzen with equal ease. The resulting pamphlet is an impassioned plea for the rebirth of culture with content.
Talking Politics | The Substance of Style from Abe to “W”
If politics as practiced is talk, then how does a political figure—especially an American President—talk politics? If someone can be all style and no substance, is there any actual political substance to style? Talking Politics looks at the alpha and omega of presidential image, its highs—Lincoln at Gettysburg—and lows—“W” at any microphone—demystifying the spun mists of political “message” on which an institution like the American presidency has always depended.