Norman Klein: A Brief Archaeology of Our Present Crisis: Feudalistic Pluralism (24.06.2015)
Abstract
Over the past eighteen years, as a civilization and a capitalist economy, we have indeed entered a new era, beyond globalism. Are there instructive parallels from other eras that might help us? How do we imagine ourselves fixing this growing crisis? The changes are worldwide, consistent in many ways, but thoroughly irregular in their rhythms, like a heart condition across seven continents. It is a new species of feudalism.
Info
Norman M. Klein is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts and a critic, urban and media historian, as well as novelist. His books include: The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; and the database novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86.
His essays have appeared in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, and on the web. They are symptoms of a polymath’s career, ranging from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, from special effects to cinema and digital theory, to LA studies, fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) has centered on the relationship between collective memory and power in urban spaces; the thin line between fact and fiction; and erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, and the social imaginary.