ABSTRACT
Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. Concepts of transnationalism demand a fuller investigation of the complex processes by which societies' historically as well as today engage, articulate, and shape each other. In other words, the modern Orientalist and later Cold War order of East West binaries seems to have definitively lost its grip also on our scholarly minds. Elfriede Jelinek's sampling procedure critically dissects these topical Orientalist discourses, undoing their legitimacy claims in the aberrant', often pun-driven and ambiguity-generating flow of associations, which creates a counter-discourse within the ongoing monologue. With respect to Jelinek, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff blames the relative simplicity of the text onto the positional disadvantage' of its media chorus.
