Empire of Indifference

Martin Randy Martin

Description

In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans' everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management-the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain-is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control.Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered "at risk." He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to "civilize" them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social theory
• Cultural studies
• Americas

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822389804
• Langue: English

Extrait

A N E M P I R E O F I N D I F F E R E N C E

:

S O C I A L T E X T B O O K S

Edited by Brent Edwards,

Randy Martin, Andrew Ross,

and Ella Shohat

RANDY MARTIN

An Empire of Indifference

A M E R I C A N WA R A N D T H E F I N A N C I A L L O G I C

O F R I S K M A N A G E M E N T

Duke University Press : Durham and London : 2007

∫ 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Cherie Westmoreland Typeset in Minion and Arial types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 : From Security to Securitization

2 : Derivative Wars

3 : Self-Managed Colonialism

4 : An Empire of Indi√erence

Notes

Index

vii

1

17

64

97

124

169

205

Acknowledgments

There have been many responses to the wars prosecuted by George W. Bush’s administration in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Some can be found in the streets, others in the battlefield, more in the cities and countryside visited by the war on terror, and still others on the airwaves, screens, canvases, stages, and not least of all, the page. This book, therefore, stands in very good company. I myself have been just as fortunate. I have enjoyed a generosity of mind and a plentitude of opportunity at myriad occasions of teaching and learning, meeting and writing. Stanley Arono- witz, Michael Brown, Patricia Clough, Bill DiFazio, Mark Driscoll, Larry Grossberg, Stefano Harney, James Hay, May Joseph, Arvind Rajagopal, and Ella Shohat have provided keen insights and key venues in which the ideas for this book have germinated. My dear colleagues atSocial Text, an edi- torial collective with which I have been a≈liated for over twenty years, provide a milieu where thought and writing can flourish. The Brecht Forum, an independent left school and cultural center, o√ers a ground where contemporary political concerns can be worked out directly with those engaged in e√orts to e√ect radical change. Some of the material in chapters 1 and 2 appeared in the journalsTransitionsandCultural Studies; my thanks to the publishers of both. My academic home in the Depart- ment of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, has been an extraordinary place to develop curricular applica- tions for intellectual commitments. The writing of this book corresponds with the completion of my term as associate dean of faculty, and I am thankful to the school’s dean, Mary Schmidt Campbell, for her support over the years, as well as to Anita Dwyer, Emily Stephens, and Theresa Smalec, who have made it possible to research and write amidst my admin-

istrative duties. I have been sustained and enriched beyond words by Gin- ger Gillespie and our children, Oliver and Sophia, whose small voices have already made themselves heard against the wars. Reynolds Smith, at Duke University Press, saw a book before it was written and Fred Kameny pro- vided the expert copy-editing that gives the book its finish.

viii

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Empire is back. But like a long-running cinematic franchise, the sequel is always already in production. An imperial unconscious percolates up from a desire for domination and an urge to see the whole complexity of the world. The long-standing attention to imperialism in the Marxist tradition was interrupted by the promise of something new. The new term was globalization—conventionally seen as the transnational spread of markets and commodities or, from a more critical perspective, what it means for ∞ the idea of the global to be implicated in social life. Discussions about globalization raised concerns that the integrity and authenticity of local cultures and experience would be lost as the world became flattened. Typi- cally, however, globalization talk underplayed the military adventurism ≤ involved with making the world one. When used in a celebratory sense, globalization was associated with the spread of democracy—free markets were harbingers of expanded choice— ≥ and hence the return of local wills by means of political participation. Whether its e√ects were to be embraced or resisted, whether they were homogenizing or di√erentiating, globalization o√ered an inclusive view of the world. The war on terror cast aspersions on this presumed inclusivity, as it provided cover for imperial reassertion. The spread of a particular ideal of the global could be violently rejected; exclusion and isolation could become generalized values. Force would be required to sort things out. Order would demand imperial rule and not simply the reason of the market. Imperialism became a widespread topic of public discussion and various political perspectives, from liberal and conservative apologies for it to left critiques of it. A century ago Rudolf Hilferding formulated the Marxist anti-imperial critique. The key term of his analysis was finance capital, the fusion of productive capacity with the circuits of credit and debt by which products