Towards a New Orientation
Author: Matko Městrović
Date Of Publication: Apr 2012
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3661-6
Isbn: 1-4438-3661-3
In a collection of nine inter-linked essays, Meštrović provides critical insights into the defining questions of our age. Mixing theoretical, empirical and normative insights, utilising inter-disciplinary or, more accurately, post-disciplinary modes of reasoning, Meštrović traces the current imbalance between market globalisation and globalised modes of sociability as a consequence of central contradictions within the current capitalist mode of production, not only between capital and labour but between capital and society and, indeed, capital and culture. The struggle to find a new narrative freed from the false binary between science and values, in the service of a sustainable future, found in the demands of movements for global justice and solidarity, may lead to the production of a new commons, for social interactions outside of, and beyond, the restrictions of the market. In a condition of capitalist crisis, in which biopolitical production is both required by, and interpreted through, the narrow confines of ‘autistic’ economic thought, Meštrović searches for new forms of subjectivity, in which a new multitude may form as a movement towards freedom in which the composition of singularities leads towards the increasing autonomy of each participating equally in the web of communication and cooperation.

Matko Meštrović is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia. He was a leading figure in the international New Tendencies movement in the 1960s. His publications cover inter-disciplinary critical theory, art criticism, and new information technologies. His last book was Dispersion of Meaning (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

“The book Towards a New Orientation by Matko Meštrović is the latest in the significant opus of this author permanently preoccupied with critical thinking about the main economic, social and cultural characteristics of the contemporary world. In the field of social theory literature, Meštrović is an author of encyclopaedic range. According to his cognitive interests, he is actually a polyhistor. In that spirit, his theoretical options could most appropriately be termed as methodically transversal while universal in scope.

Meštrović seeks a new orientation in thinking about the global processes of the world of today and of the future. He principally problematizes traditional geopolitics, both as a political-diplomatic intention and as a theoretical-strategic discipline. He points to the thesis that geopolitical inclinations, considered in a traditional way, have been exhausted and that new global horizons of political approach towards world events are in action. Considering the normative side of globalisation processes, he wonders who is actually tailoring the norms of globalization and what their interest-specific logic is, compared to the true globally-universal logic.

To that end Meštrović presents his views on the historical dimension of the globalising reality. He advocates the opinion that this historical dimension should by no means be depicted as an idyllic picture, despite the seductive tones of the ideology of globalism which conceals the actual, far-from-idyllic history of this time. By all indications, his choice is world citizenship, as a newly emerging entity of the globalised world. Nonetheless, his advocacy, no matter how eloquent, does not suffer from naïve optimism, or from the often utopian connotations related to the term. On the contrary, Meštrović’s book also deals with the troublesome relationship between what is denoted by the word “economics”, on the one hand, and world-view mindsets, on the other. It is impossible, as Max Weber had already known, to separate the sphere of economic actions from the sphere of ideas and idea-based world views. Thus, according to Meštrović also, the outcome of globalisation processes will depend not only on mere economic “narration”, but also on world-view receptions and adaptations of, and amendments to, that “narration”.

Because of its characteristics and implicit insistence on the multi-dimensionalism of the topic of globalisation, this work is of interest to a very wide circle of recipients, from experts and scholars who deal with these topics themselves, through those engaged in the study of humanities and social sciences, to a readership that proactively considers the world it lives in.”

—Rade Kalanj, PhD, Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

“[Matko Meštrović’s] work has helped feed my thinking as an economist . . . His book is both remarkable proof of the effectiveness of the method of analysis developed in previous cross-disciplinary work and a major contribution to the original and complete understanding of the meaning and challenges of the current crisis of capitalism.”

—Carlo Vercellone

“In a condition of capitalist crisis, in which biopolitical production is both required by, and interpreted through, the narrow confines of ‘autistic’ economic thought, Meštrović searches for new forms of subjectivity, in which a new multitude may form as a movement towards freedom in which the composition of singularities leads towards the increasing autonomy of each participating equally in the web of communication and cooperation.”

—Paul Stubbs

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