NYTimes.com Article: What Is The Next Big Idea? Buzz Is Growing for 'Em

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by threehegemons@aol.com.

First Bourdieu, now Hardt/Negri--its been a weird couple of years in terms of 
what is trendy in the trendy circles of academia..

Steven Sherman

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What Is The Next Big Idea?  Buzz Is Growing for 'Empire'


By EMILY EAKIN

 

URHAM, N.C. — It comes along only once every decade or so,
typically arriving without much fanfare. But soon it is everywhere:
dominating conferences, echoing in lecture halls, flooding
scholarly journals. Every graduate student dreams of being the one
to think it up: the Next Big Idea.

 In the 1960's it was Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. In the
1970's and 1980's it was Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, Michel
Foucault and poststructuralism and Jacques Lacan and
psychoanalysis, followed by various theorists of postcolonialism
and New Historicism.

 And now scholars are wondering if the latest contender for
academia's next master theorist is Michael Hardt, a self-effacing,
41-year-old associate professor of literature at Duke University
and the co-author of "Empire," a heady treatise on globalization
that is sending frissons of excitement through campuses from São
Paulo to Tokyo.

 Since Harvard University Press published the book in March last
year, translation rights have been sold in 10 countries, including
Japan and Croatia; the leading Brazilian newspaper has put it on
the cover of its Sunday magazine; and Dutch television has
broadcast a documentary about it. Fredric Jameson, America's
leading Marxist literary critic, has called it "the first great new
theoretical synthesis of the new millennium," while the equally
eminent Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek has declared
it "nothing less than a rewriting of the `The Communist Manifesto'
for our time."

 During the same period, Mr. Hardt has given 21 academic talks and
received tenure from Duke (a year early). And the compliments keep
coming.

 "He's definitely hot," said Xudong Zhang, a professor of
comparative literature and East Asian Studies at New York
University, who taught a graduate seminar on "Empire" for the
second time this spring. Masao Miyoshi, a professor of literature
at the University of California at San Diego, said, "He's one of
the very few younger people who will have an impact."

 There is no question that Mr. Hardt is unusually talented. But
talent alone does not provoke scholarly commotion. Other factors
must also be at work. For one thing, the topic must be in vogue;
and globalization happens to be the trendy subject right now.

 Then there is the allure of Mr. Hardt's flamboyant co-author,
Antonio Negri, a 68- year-old Italian philosopher and suspected
terrorist mastermind who is serving a 13- year prison sentence in
Rome for inciting violence during the turbulent 1970's.

 In large part, however, the fuss over Mr. Hardt and "Empire" is
about something else: the need in fields like English, history and
philosophy for a major new theory. "Literary theory has been dead
for 10 years," said Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "The most
important point about `Empire' is that Michael is addressing the
crisis in the humanities, which has reached the point where
banality seems to pervade the sphere."

 Indeed, by the end of the 1990's, the sweeping approaches of the
previous decades had been exhausted. Yet no powerful new idea
emerged to take their place. A deep pessimism crept over the
humanities. Today, scholars complain, their fields are fragmented
and rudderless.

 So just what does a disquisition on globalization have to offer
scholars in crisis?

 First, there is the book's broad sweep and range of learning.
Spanning nearly 500 pages of densely argued history, philosophy and
political theory, it features sections on imperial Rome, Haitian
slave revolts, the American Constitution and the Persian Gulf war,
and references to dozens of thinkers like Machiavelli, Spinoza,
Hegel, Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Foucault. In short, the book has the
formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition.

 Then there is the theory itself. Globalization isn't simply the
latest phase in the history of imperialism and nation-states, the
authors declare. It's something radically new. Where other scholars
and the media depict countries vying for control of world markets,
Mr. Hardt and Mr. Negri instead discern a new political system and
a new form of power taking root. They call it Empire.

 Unlike historical empires, however, this one has no emperor, no
geographic capital and no single seat of power. In fact, given the
authors' abstruse formulation, it's almost easier to say what
Empire isn't than what it is: a fluid, infinitely expanding and
highly organized system that encompasses the world's entire
population. It's a system that no one person, corporation or
country can control. (It's also apparently still under
construction. One hallmark of Empire is "supranational organisms,"
few of which seem to exist yet. The authors regard the United
Nations, for example, as a precursor of a "real supranational
center.")

 More surprising still, Empire is good news: it's potentially the
most democratic political system to hit the face of the earth. As
Mr. Hardt puts it, "The thing we call Empire is actually an
enormous historical improvement over the international system and
imperialism." The reason? Because power under Empire is widely
dispersed, so presumably just about anyone could affect its course.

 "Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the
modern regimes of power," the authors write, "because it presents
us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set
of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is
directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them."

 The book is full of such bravura passages. Whether presenting new
concepts — like Empire and the multitude — or urging revolution, it
brims with confidence in its ideas. Does it have the staying power
and broad appeal necessary to become the next master theory? It is
too soon to say. But for the moment, "Empire" is filling a void in
the humanities.

 For literary scholars it is evidence that the work they do is
politically important. They are not simply analyzing Milton's
religious convictions or parsing "Finnegans Wake," they argue, but
shedding light on the way the world really works. Consider
deconstruction; it revolutionized scholars' understanding of
language. Lacanian psychoanalysis did the same for the human
psyche. In a similar way, "Empire" lays out a new way of thinking
about global politics. When it comes to understanding current
events, the book insists, even literary scholars have something
important to contribute. And at a moment of disciplinary crisis,
that's a message that's bound to appeal.

 Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Princeton University, argued as
much in a famous article titled "How to Become a Dominant French
Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida," which appeared in The
American Journal of Sociology in 1987. She concluded that Mr.
Derrida's popularity had less to do with the intrinsic value of his
ideas than with his "sophisticated writing style," "distinctive
theoretical framework" and lucky timing. Deconstruction, she wrote,
"was an answer to a disciplinary crisis." His famously stylish
clothes and his thick French accent didn't hurt either.

 Of course, Mr. Hardt can't trade on credentials like those. Not
that long ago he even had trouble finding a job. With a Ph.D. in
comparative literature from the University of Washington at
Seattle, he lacked both an Ivy League diploma and the kind of
narrow specialization that many academic departments look for these
days.

 "I applied to French, Italian, English, political science and
philosophy departments," he recalled recently over lunch at an
Italian restaurant near the Duke campus. "But the reality of it is
that almost no one would hire me."

 With his soft voice, denim jacket and unruly dark hair, Mr. Hardt
looks and sounds more like an idealistic graduate student than a
rapidly rising star scholar. When he did land a job in the Italian
department at the University of Southern California in 1993, he
said, he found himself at odds with colleagues in his field.

 "I went to a conference on Marx and deconstruction," he recalled.
"I listened to a series of papers that were so convoluted and
abstract. The speakers said they were talking about politics, but I
couldn't understand a thing political about them. I was so
frustrated after the weekend that on the Monday after, I called the
state prison commission and found out how I could volunteer
teaching at the local prison."

 By this time he was already collaborating with Mr. Negri. Inspired
by the Italian philosopher's writings and political activism, Mr.
Hardt had asked a friend to introduce them during a visit to Paris,
where Mr. Negri had fled to avoid serving his jail sentence. (In
1997, he returned to Rome — and went directly to prison.) They
began collaborating on "Empire" in 1994.

 From a professional standpoint, it was a risky move. Though Mr.
Hardt had published a book of his own (on the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze), he had no obvious area of specialization.
Moreover, interest in contemporary Italian philosophy was small in
the United States.

 For Mr. Hardt, the risks obviously paid off. Of course, his book
has skeptics. Some say nation-states are as strong as ever; that
the book fails to back up its theory with facts; that it's hobbled
by Marxist ideology.

 "The argument that the world exhibits a completely different power
structure is at least grossly hyperbolic and more probably merely
false," said John Gray, a professor of European thought at the
London School of Economics, who has published his own critique of
globalization, "False Dawn" (New Press, 1999). " `Empire' theorizes
the current state of the world in a way which produces romantically
alluring phrases that gloss over the actual conflicts,
discontinuities, uncertainties and sheer unknowability of the world
and its power relations today."

 Such criticisms don't seem to bother Mr. Hardt. He says he is
pleased that the book has found an audience outside what he calls
"our small fanatical readership." He has few illusions that he is
the next Derrida.

 "I'm sure I'm not," he said. "Toni and I don't think of this as a
very original book. We're putting together a variety of things that
others have said. That's why it's been so well received. It's what
people have been thinking but not really articulated."

 And he readily concedes that "Empire" has flaws. Mr. Zizek
complained that for a book that preaches revolution, it had an
unforgivable omission: no how-to manual. Mr. Hardt agreed:

 "I wrote him an e-mail and said, `Yes, it's true we don't know
what the revolution should be.' And he wrote back saying, `Yeah,
well, I don't know either.' " 

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/arts/07IDEA.html?ex=995508938&ei=1&en=5d2ea1383c684823

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