The Forces of Globalization.
Edited and with an Introduction by Gabriele Schwab. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002 (forthcoming.)
Contents:
- Etienne Balibar: "A Global Culture?"
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh:
“"Towards a Political Economy of Belonging:
Historical Difference and the Logic of Capital"”
- Chambers, Iain: "A Torn Map, a Fold in Time, an Interruption"”
- Comaroff, Jean:
“"Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism"”
- Conley, Verena:
"Globalism and Environment: Ecological Territories"”
- Ferguson, James:
"Transnational Topographies of Power:
Beyond ‘the State’ and ‘Civil Society’ in the Study of African Politics"”
- Grosz, Elizabeth:
“"The Global, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future"”
- Miller, J. Hillis:
"Will Literary Study Survive the Globalization of the
University and the New Regime of Telecommunications?"”
- Miyoshi, Masao: "Empty Museum"”
- Ning, Wang:
"Postmodernity, Globalization and the
Chinese Cultural and Intellectual Strategy"
- Poster, Mark: "Nations, Identies and Global Technologies"”
- Rabine, Leslie:
"Globalization from the Margins: The Case of African Fashion"”
Research Project: "Futures of Property & Personhood"
(1999-2003)
In the 1999-2000 academic year the Critical Theory Institute at the
University of California,
Irvine began its new three-year research project, “The Futures of Property
and Personhood.”
In its focus on property, the topic explores the challenges to social and
cultural theory posed
by privatization and its broader political, cultural and institutional
effects. It considers, too, the
manifold changes in the status of personhood brought about by the forces
of privatization and
globalization, as well as the new technologies that facilitate the
remaking of human bodies and
determine the politics of reproduction. The most pervasive effects of
privatization include a
general weakening of liberalism’s hold on the social imaginary, a trend
that profoundly affects
state practices, socio-cultural reproduction, and the institutional
production of knowledge. By
exploring the synergy and dissonance between conceptions of the private as
marketable and
the private as inalienable, the CTI poses the question of how critical
theory can productively
engage with the contemporary transformations and futures of notions such
as property,
personhood, and related concepts of citizenship, state, culture, and
knowledge.
Since the Enlightenment, definitions of property have entailed
corresponding
configurations of the person who owned, and/or was subjected to,
property.
In the past three decades, critical theories have devised and debated
new
models to respond to historical changes in the relation between
property and
personhood. Most of these theories challenge the classical paradigms
of liberalism,
Marxism, and psychoanalysis, expanding their focus to include issues
such
as symbolic economies, regimes of power and knowledge, or the
superimposition
of commodity and sexual fetishism. Many of these theories rethink the
legacy
of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud from the vantage point of the new
economies of
a global corporate media culture and its continually changing impact
on relations
between property and personhood. Today, new forms of privatization
demand
that we rethink the range of available models of subjectivity in
relation
to late capitalist, global and corporate economies and their effects
on personhood.
We need to ask whether contemporary critiques of the subject are
adequate
to challenge narratives of the triumph of the market and the
privatization
of knowledges, persons, and life itself.
Privatization, as we understand it, refers to a complex array of
interconnected
processes and relationships through which political rights, social
membership,
knowledge production, and the related spheres that constitute
personhood are
increasingly brought within the ambit of the capitalist marketplace.
We are
currently living through a profound acceleration of such processes of
privatization
and their far-reaching effects on the social and cultural imaginary.
Among
such effects we may count the economic, political, and epistemological
reworking
of notions of citizenship, the re-definition of the nation-state in
relation
to a transnational economy and its global markets, and the
privatization of
services formerly under state management. Similarly, privatization
deeply
affects social and cultural identities, subjectivities, and
cosmologies of
personhood. Niche marketing and demographic “indicators” of
consumer
preference, for example, are rendered as self-identity. Moreover,
identity
itself is increasingly framed through acquisitive individualism.
Self-identity
becomes a product to be worked on, invested in, and competitively
performed
and deployed as a social currency. In a similar vein, identitarian
forms of
social protest are increasingly recoded as consumptive and private. We
witness
a pervasive expansion and transformation of property, accompanied by
concomitant
changes in the self-as-proprietor and the self-as-investor. Newly
expanded
property constructs and laws extend from rights in potential and
future ideas,
to rights in cells, organs, and genetic material.
These complicated economic, legal, and social changes are also
transforming
the very category of culture. As the concept itself comes under
scrutiny in
the anthropological and literary circles that made it their hallmark
for the
greater part of the century, culture is now increasingly recoded in
proprietary
terms. Collectivities and corporations battle over knowledges and
practices
newly configured as potentially alienable and commodifiable cultural
properties.
Individuals protect cultural works through the apparatus of patent and
copyright.
Opponents of a neo-liberal stance often frame their project in terms
of claiming
collective properties, re-imagining the commons, and reinvigorating
the community.
But what is the status of commonality and community when culture
itself —
in Marilyn Strathern’s phrase — has been “enterprized
up?”
What happens if culture can be both chosen and selected from a
seemingly infinite
array of patented goods for consumption? What are the consequences
when culture
is deemed intrinsic to identity and becomes the object of collective
property
rights?
These processes are transforming not only the world at large, but also
the
immediate environment of our intellectual activity. Everyday practices
of
privatization in the academy include the university’s use of
market models
to guide curricular changes and the privatization of knowledge —
from
information technologies and copyright restrictions impacting the
classroom,
to modes of knowing and new categories of the known.These practices
are radically
transforming the most fundamental relations concerning the conceptions
of
person, knowledge, and property on which intellectual production has
long
rested. The consequences of such transformations have yet to be fully
anticipated
and explored.
The proposed project identifies three rubrics within which to focus
its analysis
of how privatization and the related reconfiguration of the social
imaginary
pose a challenge
for contemporary debates in critical theory:
property
citizenship and personhood
the posthuman
Challenges to Property
Liberal nation-states in the post-War era claimed to serve the public
good
through social services and economic redistribution, with the promise
of full
“social” as well as political citizenship for all. Today,
deregulated
markets and international trade and finance, together with the
increasing
importance of international organizations, have produced a world in
which
such promises are explicitly disavowed, even as an ideal. But if the
welfare
state is dying, the interventionist ways of the nation-state are alive
and
well. States today subsidize and enforce markets through tax policies,
enterprise
zones, interest rates and central banking, as well as through property
regimes
and the promise of violence should they be breached. At the
inter-governmental
level, states attempt to harmonize their protocols both for the use of
force
to guarantee property, and for the construction of proprietary
entities. Labor
emerges as the only commodity that does not enjoy freedom of
movement.
We are thus witnessing less the decline of state regulation than the
expansion
of the domain of property itself. The state gives over some of its
traditional
functions to private enterprise and to the voluntary sector, resulting
in
increased competition that also means increased risk. New property
regimes
demand new forms of securitization, resulting in the creation of
fungible,
negotiable proprietary interests in any thing or entity. Financial
entities
tie property so closely to risk that it threatens to collapse into
risk itself.
We witness the emergence of actuarial properties, persons rendered as
risk-profiles,
contracts specifying corporate relationships to “potential”
properties.
What are the implications for critical theory of a change in the very
meaning
of property? What new theories of capitalism, labor, and value are
called
for in response to such reconfigurations? How can critical theory
recognize,
and provide insight into, both the new forms of oppression or
exploitation
as well as the new possibilities for liberation and resistance that
such transformations
may open up?
Critical theorists have successfully demonstrated the bankruptcy of
narratives
of linear development and progress. But we have not yet thought
through the
consequences of this bankruptcy for the production of knowledge and
for the
logic and justification of our own knowledge practices. Critical
theory traditionally
saw itself in opposition to nationalism and liberalism alike. But how
can
critical theory remain “critical” at a time when the
fundamental
principles of liberalism are themselves being called into question,
less by
theoretical critique than by socio-economic transformation?
Today, even the knowledge produced in the university is being
privatized.
In the absence of an over-arching state commitment to social
citizenship,
and in a property regime that restricts dissemination and use of
knowledge,
what becomes of the traditional function of the university, and its
project
of imparting “universal” knowledge to the citizens of the
nation?
If we reject both the liberal assertion of knowledge as universal
enlightenment
and the “privatized” notion of knowledge as a commodity for
sale
in the market, then how do we understand the place and efficacy of our
own
knowledge production? And how can we re-imagine the university in a
way that
enables a critique of the logic of privatization without reaffirming
notions
of liberal enlightenment or an unsituated, universal knowledge?
Citizenship and Personhood
In classical liberalism, the private sphere entailed the domain of home,
religion,
family, personal relationships and affiliations through which
individuals
created and realized themselves. It was also the domain where
individuals
came to know their interests — personal, and economic — and
to go
about fulfilling them. The public existed above and between various
“private
spheres,” providing a space in which everyone was supposedly
allowed
to pursue his or her private interests and affiliations without threat
of
force or fraud. How are private and public being rerouted and
redefined in
the present? How are new proprietarian logics challenging the vision
of personhood
at the heart of liberal conceptions of the public (the world of the
citizen,
equal to all others) and the private (the world of the individual,
unique
among all others)?
In much of the world today, social citizenship is no longer a central
goal
of the state. In rolling back the contract between state, capital, and
labor,
abandoning social welfare policies to private and voluntary
enterprises, and
replacing social citizenship with consumer citizenship, the state
seems uninterested
in its traditional civic obligations. Who “belongs” in a
world of
consumer citizenship where one participates in the nation by virtue of
one’s
investment in the national productive-consumptive product? What are
the boundaries
of rights and obligations, given the extensive commodification of
citizen
identity? And, what are the limits of protest, given the
commodification of
dissent and the sale of a politics of lifestyle choice or gut-level
preference?
In addition to a change in relation between citizen and state, the
expansion
of privatization brings in its wake new exclusions within and between
states.
Suprastate organizations like the WTO, MAI and GATT reconfigure
sovereignty
and political liberalism even as strong states dictate foreign policy
through
the language and mechanisms of the “market.” Working less in
terms
of “national interests” than in terms of free
market-principles,
states have not so much abandoned their powers as transformed the
field in
which they operate. Privatization thus has a direct effect on concepts
and
practices of “security” both within and between states. In
much
of the world, public police are increasingly supplanted by private
security
corporations; public prisons by corrections management facilities; and
state
armies by private mercenary forces. The privatization of security
means both
new forms of “war” and new forms of “peace.” It
thus gives
new meaning to the “rule of law,” dismembering
liberalism’s
promise of rules of law over rules of men, of public over private
interest.
How can critical theory address these challenges to citizenship
without falling
into nostalgia for the citizen-subject of liberalism, the rule of law
as guarantor
of rights and freedoms, and modern notions of belonging and identity
that
continue to animate conflict and community?
The Posthuman
What futures hold for the category of the human when the
self-as-proprietor
explodes into a dispersed network of corporate interests? Whither
social protest
when the privatization of identity recodes interests as fungible
preferences?
How can critical theory map this post-humanist, or as some prefer to
call
it, posthuman landscape? How can we provide a theoretical grip on the
new
subjects and objects of a hyper-commodified world? Can we find
theoretical
means or grounds for a critique of the privatized human body that does
not
fall back into a humanist nostalgia?
Across disciplines and theoretical orientations, the very boundaries
of the
human are in the process of being redefined. The challenges to
personhood
have vast implications and ramifications beyond the material,
political, economic,
social and cultural spheres. They affect the social and cultural
imaginary,
the psychosocial formation of persons or subjects, as well as possible
philosophical,
ethical and epistemological conceptions of the subject, of personhood,
and
of agency more generally. A wide range of recent theories on the
posthuman
and the posthuman body (Deleuze/Guattari, Halberstam/ Livingston,
Squier,
Hayles, Haraway) as well as the inhuman (Lyotard) have been engaged in
theorizing,
analyzing, and conceptualizing these profound changes in the status of
personhood.
A whole body of current theoretical work on the politics of
reproduction is
equally concerned with issues of privatization and related challenges
to property
and personhood. Reproductive politics, one of the most controversial
and hotly
debated issues in critical theory today, concerns sexual and gender
politics,
bioethics, communal politics, subject constitution, human and civil
rights,
as well as modes of information characteristic of a technological
media culture.
Many current debates, ranging from genetic engineering and the Human
Genome
project to the “sustainability” of our planet, focus on the
relationship
between property, privatization and reproduction. Current changes in
the politics
of reproduction challenge fundamental theoretical concepts across
disciplines
and force us to rethink the relationships among, and the erosion of
boundaries
of, traditional categories such as nature and culture, the subject,
the human,
civil rights, property, the body, etc. Moreover, economic reproduction
is
itself linked to the “politics of reproduction” more
generally,
particularly in light of the reconfiguration of the human body to
serve industrial
production and of its submission to a regime of discipline and
punishment.
As Susan Squier argues in Reproducing the Posthuman Body,
discourses
about reproduction and reproductive representations “help to
consolidate
the global power of multinational late capitalism,” defining and
distributing
difference “within and across a variety of temporally and
geographically
overlapping power grids,” including civil society, institutional
science,
medicine and industrial capitalism (p. 115f.).
Finally, the changing relationship between the public and the private,
and
the challenges posed by privatization and new property constructs,
similarly
determine the politics of cultural reproduction, pertaining to the
renegotiation—
if not obliteration—of the boundaries between nature and culture,
human
and nonhuman, inhuman or posthuman. According to Halberstam and
Livingston,
“the posthuman does not necessitate the obsolescence of the
human; it
does not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it
participates
in re-distributions of difference and identity” (10). Such
profound redefinitions
of personhood, and of the boundaries of the human more generally,
pertain
to global culture and global flows of capital, information,
discourses, and
bodies. In the social imaginary, they engender a particular
“postmodern
gothic,” a “gothicization of the body”
(Halberstam/Livingston)
afloat with phantasms of the “body without organs”
(Deleuze/Guattari;
Beckett) or even of the “grotesque clone" (Baudrillard). If
this
posthuman body is, as Halberstam and Livingston argue, only the
“seismograph
and epicenter” of epistemic changes, the concomitant revaluation
of cultural
values affects all politics, transcoding the spheres of economy,
technology,
law, biology, culture, and psychology. Theories that trace the effects
of
globalization in the cultural imaginary—such as those of
Appadurai, Jameson,
Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, among others—prepare the futures
of theoretical
models that make such transcodings part of their basic
presuppositions.
Such transformations are, of course, often partial and even
contradictory.
Even while the very categories of the human, the subject, and
personhood are
under revision, the “human” is enjoying a remarkable
renaissance
in global discursive fields centered on “human rights.”
Human rights
are precisely not a universal standard applied irrespective of place,
not
a bulwark against the processes of privatization or the
reconfiguration of
personhood. On the contrary, the very notion of human rights
circulates within
the circuits of governmentality structuring and structured by a
privatized,
neoliberal global economy. For example, the World Bank and IMF attach
“human
rights conditionality” to countries receiving
“assistance”
in “structural adjustment.” Human rights become a device of
governmentality
and commodification when deployed as an index of
“liberalization”
(of markets) and “democratization” (of non-Western political
orders).
Thus, discourses of the human, human rights and humanitarianism need
to be
critically explored under these changed conditions.
The trends and developments outlined herein should make it clear that
the
anticipated futures of property and personhood fundamentally affect
the most
central parameters of the debates in critical theory as they have
developed
in the past decades. They, in fact, reach far beyond the now familiar
critique
of the categories and values of the tradition of humanism and
enlightenment.
The gradual refashioning of fundamental theoretical concepts and
binaries
such as nature/culture, body/mind, self/other, human/inhuman,
life/death,
man/woman, subject/object has begun to converge in a pervasive
epistemological
change. At stake is nothing less than the sustainability of
theoretical concepts
in a global ecology in which transcoded social, cultural, economic,
political,
somatic and psychic energies and flows have transcended even the
familiar
signatures of the postmodern.
Works Cited:
Posthumann Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and
Ira Livingston.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Squier, Susan Merrill. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions
of
Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994.
Research Project: "The Forces of Globalization"
(1995-1998)
"In the Fall of 1995, the Critical
Theory
Institute at
the University of California, Irvine begins a new three-year project
devoted to the general topic of "globalization" and a critical
analysis of just what forces constitute "globalization" as
the term and its related concepts are used today. Like other idioms of
the intellectual community, such as "culture" in our previous
research project ("'Culture' and the Problem of the
Disciplines," CTI Project, 1992-1995), "globalization"
is used with great frequency to describe complex processes and yet
these uses are often uncritical of their ideological and methodological
assumptions. In the tradition of our previous projects, we intend to
read critically the multiple assumptions behind the term, in order
better to theorize the range of meanings associated with
"globalization" today.
We understand "globalization" in terms of communications'
models, which we terms "networks" to distinguish these
signifying practices from those governed by more narrowly conceived
linguistic and semiotic models, which were developed before the advent of
the technologies partially responsible for the new globalization. One of
the subtexts of this project is an investigation of similarities and
differences between "modern internationalism" and
"postmodern globalization." By the same token, the
"networks" we hope to analyze are not utterly distinct from the
older semiotic models; each network suggests a coherent discursive
community, not unlike the unified field model of some semiotic systems,
that transcends specific national and regional boundaries. Implicit in
many of these new discursive communities are new theories of social
organization that follow from the communications' protocols of these
networks. In many cases, these social organizations include
reconceptualizations of traditional categories of social division and
identification, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual identity.
Although the four networks of globalization we propose to study
critically are intended to provide an approximate mapping or topography
of the new transnational terrain, they are not indended to constitute the
total scheme of cultural expressions and social behaviors in what some
have termed the "new global order." Just what this expression
means cannot be answered even by a manifold project such as this one, but
will in large part be determined by historical events. Academic research
projects like this one should not attempt to predict or anticipate those
events; instead, such research can read critically what is already
operative within the several different networks of transnational practice.
During our planning year, 1994-1995, we have analyzed the forces
of globalization into four dominant networks, each of which is
immediately recognizable by a term or concept used today as one
conventional sign for the new "global" situation. These
networks are:
Corporate
Cultural
Technological
Environmental
These networks of globalization intersect in many crucial ways, and we
have analyzed their respective predicates in approximately analogous
terms. It should be noted, however, that the analogies between the
subdivisions of these different networks do not presume homologies that
we expect to "find" in our research. We are merely trying to
organize the different areas investigated in ways that will make
productive comparisons and contrasts more likely.
In order to foreground possible overlaps between different global
networks and thus articulate better what we mean at this stage by
"global forces," we intend to apply three different
methodological criteria to each of our four transnational networks. We
shall ask to what extent each of these global networks contributes to:
decentering or recentering of the customary modes of scientific
knowledge; new hierarchies and process of hierarchization, such
as class, gender, race, and such formulations as "first,"
"second," and "third world"; diasporac,
nationalism, local, and regionalism as metaphors for new social
organizations.
Corporate Network
Transnational corporate networks will be investigated in terms of
their control over new forms of world-wide cultural dissemination,
language circulation, consumerism, labor organization and finance. The
way in which global economic and financial institutions have made
national governments obsolete and exercise unchecked powers over peoples'
lives of a magnitude unequalled in the past will provide a focus. We
will also examine the paradoxes involved in the practices of these
economic giants. How have they created hyperorganization on some levels
of social and ecological life while producing unprecedented chaos on
other levels? How has their supra-national power rendered obsolete
traditional notions of social contract while leading to intensified
claims of citizenship? How have they destablized traditional boundaries
of class, ethnicity, gender, generation, and authority while creating new
hierarchies and intensifying the polarizations between haves and
have-nots on a world-wide scale? We will explore the contribution that
critical theories can make on the one hand to understanding the role of
institutions like the World bank and the IMF and on the other hand to the
experiences of migrant workers. We will ask what kinds of theories can
help us envision the as-yet-undiscovered political and social forms that
would redistribute social power away from corporate control into more
democratic relations?
Cultural Network
The unstable, contested concept of culture looms large in many of
the key debates that seek to define the present moment, both within the
academy and outside it. As an analytical concept, "culture"
has undergone major transformations in recent years, transformations that
may most readily be identified as hybridization, creolization,
multiculturalism, transnationalism, globalization. Further, such
transformations at the level of the disciplines and media open up new,
hitherto unmarked, links with political and social discourses throughout
the world.
In dealing with this problematic we want to differentiate, first of
all, two conceptions of culture, one allied to cultural studies and the
other to anthropology: on the one hand, a cultural studies (or
"aesthetic") approach is oriented primarily to cultural products
and expressive forms; on the other, the anthropological understanding of
"culture" is directed to the lifeworlds of people, to symbolic
and cosmological systems. We are interested in exploring the increasingly
important intersections between these two conceptions, and notably the
ways in which such intersections are being determined through processes of
globalization.
As we approach the last years of the twentieth century, it is to
be expected that many of the struggles over culture and globalization,
purity and creolization, will take on new urgency. Practices of taxonomy
and dissemination become determining in altogether new ways in areas like
pedagogy, work and leisure, art and media, belief and ritual. Our aim is
to be attentive both to the symbolic and political dimension of this
process and thus to foreground ethical stakes that are implicit in the
kinds of transformations we have outlined in the conceptualization of
culture.
Technological Network
Both of the previous areas of investigation depend upon our study
of how various technologies have contributed to the globalization of
economies and cultures. Of technologies, we are especially interested in
communications' technologies, such as e-mail, video, fax, hypertext,
internet, satellite, and film. We are especially interested in the ways
new technologies have resulted in new modes of commodification,
both in terms of "objects of consumption" and the more general
"object-relations" through which human subjects in part socially
construct themselves. If the "commodity" is, for example, no
longer defined primarily through its materiality but rather through its
discursive (or semiotic) functionality, then its mobility across national
and other territorial borders is likely to be greater. In a related
area, the "the image" (lacking a better term at this stage of
our project) takes the place of both the humanly constructed
"object" and the linguistic "sign." What is the
phenomenology of the "image" in a global framework, and to what
extent does the "image" function within or
beyond the parameters of specific languages? In this
latter regard, does "image production" depend upon criteria of
valuation, such as performative and communicative efficiency, that differ
from the criteria governing a "useful" object or
"meaningful" statement in language? More complex structures
incorporating "images" into narratives, such as "virtual
realities," will have to be examined similarly according to their
implicit criteria for valuation.
Environmental Network
New forces of globalization suggest variously coordinated
transnational efforts in ecological awareness and
environmental protection. These same forces suggest, however,
technological transformations of "Nature," such as in genetic
engineering and the human genome project, that constitute yet
another force of globalization: the thorough incorporation or
subordination of Nature to social and economic domains. In this conext,
we would be particularly interested in studying assumptions of political
responses to the globalization of environmental issues, ranging from
specific political movements (Earth First!, the Green Party and its
international offshoots, various eco-feminisms) to the recent valorization
of the local over the international,, as well as just
how such neo-regionalisms are configured in terms of a postmodern
cosmopolitanism. Certain health issues are also relevant
in this network, as they they are in the cultural network
(above), especially as epidemics and pandemics (such as AIDS)
and environmental crises and disasters (such as damage to the ozone layer)
shape transnational policies and thus contribute to what is understood in
the phrase, forces of globalization.
Conclusions:
Insofar as "transnational," "post-national,"
"global," or other terms designate a research "area,"
it remains one that is still at its earliest formulation in terms of the
diferent disciplines appropriate to its description and analysis.
Scholars in the Humanities are particularly in need of research examples
and models, because of the frequency with which they use these terms in
uncritical or conventional ways. In many discussions among humanists,
the idea of "multinational capital," for example, is assumed to
have a very specific reference, but in fact merely designates the
historian's, literary critic's, or philosopher's vague sense that economic
processes are no longer tied to distinct nation-states.
Our new research project depends crucially on contributions by
anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, in
addition to the scholars in the traditionally defined humanities. The
extraordinary interdisciplinarity required to investigate our four global
networks will thus be a particular challenge to the scholars involved in
this project, both the permanent members of the Critical Theory Institute
and those scholars outside Irvine invited to contribute to our research.
Our research project is, then, one that will encourage
inter-disciplinarity across not just the often compatible disciplines of
the Humanities but across the often more unbridgeable divisions of the
natural and physical sciences, social sciences, and fine arts, and
humanities. In our own modest way, we hope to encourage new research
that encompasses the complexity of social, national, and transnational
formations better than more humanities-specific projects in cultural
studies have done to date."
Members:
(1996-1998)
Gabriele Schwab -- English & Comparative Literature,
Director of the Critical Theory Institute
Lindon Barrett -- English & Comparative Literature
Chungmoo Choi -- East Asian Language & Literature
Rey Chow -- English & Comparative Literature
Jacques Derrida -- French & Italian, Philosophy
Liisa Malkki -- Anthropology
J. Hillis Miller -- English & Comparative Literature
Mark Poster -- History, past Director of Critical Theory
Institute
Leslie Rabine -- French & Italian
John Carlos Rowe -- English & Comparative Literature
John Smith -- German
Brook Thomas -- English & Comparative Literature
Previous Research Project (1992-1995)
"`Culture' and the Problem of the
Disciplines"
"In recent years the question of culture has become a focus of
theorizing in several disciplines and intellectural currents. Postmodern
theorists disputed the distinction between high and low culture.
Anthropological theorists problematize culture as an object of knowledge
as well as the position of the ethnographer and the
"informant." In literary theory deconstruction and new
historicism revise the understanding of culture, raising a general
question of the translatability among cultures. Historians open a field
of "a new cultural history" to unsettle the treatment of
culture in the older social and intellectual histories. Feminism and
ethnic studies indicate limitations of theorizing culture in relation to
masculine and Eurocentric presuppositions. Finally a newer tendency has
emerged called cultural studied which draws upon diverse theories and
analytic traditions to address the domain of culture as an autonomous region.
At the epistemological level, these initiatives raise doubts about the
possibility of culture as a discrete object of knowledge, of cultural
identity as a stable unity, and of the subject as the basis for aesthetic
judgements. The Critical Theory Institute wishes to explore the issue of
culture from the many theoretical perspectives that may shed light on it
in order, if possible, to bring these various positions of questioning
into defined loci of scrutiny, to develop theoretical postures that may
clarify the issues at stake, and perhaps to propel them to a new level of
understanding.
One area where collaborative work may be especially productive for a
group like ours is that of the institutional framework of our own
profession. Thus a focus on the culture of academia will enable us to
examine assumptions underlying our professional-institutional practices
(e.g., of criticism, of pedagogy) and to initiate specific investigations
such as the following: the rationale of the disciplines; the life-span
and the mutation of theoretical schools or movements in academic
principles; the interdependence and antagonisms in the relation of
cultural criticism to the disciplines. In these examples we would like
to focus on the way notions and assumptions about culture interact with
disciplinary practices.
We understand critical theory and the problem of culture as
dialectically constituted, not discrete or isolable theoretical practices
or entities. Our goal is thus both to explore the role that cultural
presuppositions and stated or implicit theories of culture have played in
the constitution of various forms of critical theory and also to explore
the theoretical presuppositions underpinning the notion of culture in its
various historical and disciplinary forms."
(Excerpted from the UCI General Catalog)