A Marxist Makes His Case

American Review Metres continuedfrom previous page to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of "theory," he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of "poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation." At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, and Michael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions oftheorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual. In thefigures ofSaid, the early Salman Rushdie, and Antonio Gramsci, Brennan offers us something like modelsfor a critical and creative cosmopolitanism. In the figures ofSaid, the early Salman Rushdie, and Antonio Gramsci, Brennan offers us something like models for a critical and creative cosmopolitanism . Yet even here, Brennan offers a substantive critique ofeach figure (andourunderstandings ofthem). Brennan sees the early Rushdie as a cosmopolitan and politically oppositional novelist whose novels rely more on pop cultural forms than on nativist cultural allusions; the political and cosmopolitan Rushdie, in the affair around The Satanic Verses (1988), was ironically "silenced and subverted, although this time by his protectors," who cast him as a Muslim Indian critiquing Islam rather than Thatcherite England. Throughout, Brennan submits to hard scrutiny the ways in which cosmopolitanism—or the contemporary phenomenon of "cosmo-theory" (perhaps an iteration of imperial cosmopolitanism)—courts the same problem as postmodern and poststructuralist theory; in Fredric Jameson's famous coinage, postmodernism was not—as it had been heralded—an oppositional discourse, but rather "the cultural logic oflate capitalism." Rather than a mode ofresistance, postmodernism was business as usual, only more so. Cosmopolitanism, then, may provide a new way of conceptualizing the new realities (what Jameson once called "cognitive mapping") and offer a new oppositionality, but it could also function simply as handmaiden to global capitalism. In the end, Brennan's vigorously interrogative style dramatizes an unsettling yet productive skepticism, a sobering homeopathic injection into the current euphoria about the possibilities of globalization. Philip Metres is an associate professor of English at John Carroll University; his books include two chapbooks ofpoetry, two books ofpoetry translation , and the forthcoming Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on theAmerican Homefront since 1941 (University ofIowa Press). A Marxist Makes His Case Martin S. Kenzer Spaces of Global Capitalism...