Abstract

This commentary argues that while Bourdieu and Wacquant make an important statement on the necessity of coming to grips with a discourse that has become increasingly popular in academic and less than academic circles, this is not a mere downward diffusion from the central halls of US imperialism. It is part and parcel of a massive transformation of the global system, one which has combined a shift in capital accumulation to East and Southeast Asia with a rapid increase of disorder and cultural fragmentation in large parts of the world and with a significant increase in class polarization in economic terms. The reason described as `imperialist reason' is not an American import, but signifies the emergence of a globalized elite identity, one that celebrates movement, the transnational, hybrid and multicultural, and distances itself, in representation as well as reality, from the downwardly mobile and immobile majorities who are themselves becoming increasingly alienated from their own state elites and increasingly xenophobic since they experience variations on `loss of control' over their conditions of existence.