New Literary History after the End of the New

Abstract

In what follows I want to say something about the cultural pro duction of the future, and any such speculations will inevitably imply something about the histories of that cultural production that we may expect to accompany it (or indeed to follow it and to sum it up). But that is necessarily an exercise in futurology, and so you will not be surprised to find me shifting into a science-fictional mode. For the mo ment, let's remain in a sociological one. Any talk about the future must first confront globalization as its abso lute horizon: the term can have any number of synonyms. Marx called it universalization, but also the world market, a term that certainly remains useful for us today. As a stage in capitalism, I call it late, while others call it flexible or informational. And as a cultural formation, I have analyzed it as postmodernity, a term not everyone accepts, and even those who do are not necessarily in agreement?tending to limit its meaning to philosophies of relativism (if you dislike it) or of antiessentialism and antifoundationalism (if you greet it with enthusiasm). I'll come back to the postmodern later on. Globalization can know its interpretive revisions as well: some call it, for example, Americanization, a characterization I understand but feel to be slightly misleading, as I'll try to show. Some think that it is noth ing new, going all the way back to the neolithic trade routes. That's true, too, but I feel that it is more useful to insist on the historic origi nality of this stage, in which international relations become dominant rather than secondary or incidental. In fact, what we confront today is an immense international division of labor, which has certainly been anticipated at certain moments of the past, but has now become both universal and irreversible, with consequences for culture fully as much as for economics. I've tried elsewhere to show that this new phenomenon must be grasped dialectically, or in other words as a union of opposites, as something that can be celebrated just as much as it can be greeted with dystopian fear and foreboding. Indeed, on the level of culture, globalization mostly has been greeted positively, as when we point to its immense new communi cational and informational possibilities, and rejoice in the democratiza New Literary History, 2008, 39: 375-387