Writing in Reason, Tom Peyser (hmm. Any relation to Andrea Peyser, the NYPost columnist who called Beelzebub Amanpour “CNN War Slut,” I wonder?) adds himself to the growing list of those who’ve been less than taken in by Empire, the Hardt/Negri/Imperialism “Praxis of Evil” taking over humanities deparments around the world.
Throughout Empire one finds pronouncements that, if taken seriously, amount to a call to arms against just about everything, since Hardt and Negri maintain that government and corporations are engaged in a sinister scheme against humanity. Not only do ‘the great industrial and financial powers’ exploit the multitude; they also control human life itself, producing ‘needs, social relations, bodies, and minds,’ while ‘in imperial postmodernity big government has become merely the despotic means of domination and the totalitarian production of subjectivity.’
‘Power is now exercised through machines that directly organize the brains…and bodies…toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity,’ they write. Worst of all, ‘we are always…monitored by safety cameras.’ This is Parallax View
I know it’s probably not favorite reading for opponents of the silly academic left, but Thomas Kuhn’s <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> (which is often wrongly said to argue that science is not objective) really sheds a lot of light on the extent to which a field that’s desperately failing to make progress (i.e., contemporary po-mo literary criticism) will grasp at any straw (i.e. <i>Empire</i>
that promises to bring some coherence to their research programs.
Yes, Kuhn never claimed that science isn’t objective–just that scientists often aren’t.
Ah, yes! The “paradigm shift.” I’ve been trying to affect a shift of my own—one that moves lit crit toward a more reasonable idea of interpretation. In short, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool intentionalist.