Tales of the Floating Class, Writings 1982-2017; Essays and Fictions on Globalization and Neo-Feudalism

Book excerpt: We rummage through the worlds where culture, entertainment and power share a contested space. This space could be a street that has been staged for effect. It is software where fake money circulates. Or the site of scripted pleasures, in games, casinos; architectural illusion. Inside this space we find the Floating Class, outliers who must survive casino capitalism. This cast of characters include artists, the semi-employed, hipsters; migrants; the racially ignored-- and always the immigrants. The Floating class is often afflicted by gold fevers. For almost forty years, Norman Klein has written about many such locations, and stories often blending the fictive within the factual, since the arrival of globalization and neo-feudalism. He also traces what for him is the most peculiar site of all-- the present itself. For Klein, the present is an archaeological irony overrun by mad policies, dominated by urban erasure and collective forgetting. In Tales of the Floating Class Klein creates tales of a comic picaresque, a comic tragedyin a historical journey that has barely started. Meanwhile, like mutant flora, new floating species grow ever more varied. This is clearly our Iliad and Odyssey combined-- what follows after the end of the Western Hegemony (ending formally in the 1970s). Featured are twenty-two essays that have been re-edited, covering writings from 1982 to 2017. Norman M. Klein is a cultural critic and historian. Much of his work deals with cities, media, collective and political history. Past works are, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86; (media novel) Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales, plus others. He is a professor at the California Institute of the Art