Long Sunday

the future of / criticism / the future of / theory / the future of / questions / the future of / LS / the future of / the future

I had a chance to read again some of the infamous 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to "The Future of Criticism," really the Future of Theory. Here's a description of the originating situation from W.J.T. Mitchell's introduction to the special issue:

On 11–12 April 2003 the editorial board of Critical Inquiry gathered in Chicago to discuss the future of the journal and of the interdisciplinary fields of criticism and theory that it addresses. Academic conferences are, as we all know, a dime a dozen; and the board meetings of academic journals are not usually reported (as this one was) in the New York Times and Boston Globe. There was something different about this meeting, something (if you will forgive a lapse from editorial neutrality) quite special, unique, even extraordinary.

[...]

The symposium was divided into two sessions: a public “town meeting” on Friday, 11 April and a closed meeting of the board and editors on Saturday, 12 April, which was further subdivided into sessions on theory, politics, and technology. Approximately 550 people from the academic communities of Chicago and beyond came to the public session; the Swift Hall auditorium was filled with a standing-room-only crowd, and the overflow space in Swift Commons also filled up with people watching the discussion on closed-circuit TV. The event was covered by major newspapers, dismissively by the New York Times (“Latest Theory Is That Theory Doesn’t Matter”) and with a touch of wit by the Boston Globe (“Crisis Theory”). The question remains: why should the convening of an academic journal’s editorial board muster so much interest? What critical or theoretical “crisis” drew together this critical mass?

I remember feeling incredibly pissed back when this came out. I feel differently now - still not a great feeling, but it is more complicated than simply "pissed." I was disappointed at the time that a mode of thought I had invested myself in heavily as a technique capable of social change, transformation, amelioration, revolt, whatever was being disowned, right at the critical moment, by its inventors and first-generation inheritors themselves.

Later in the piece, Mitchell includes the prompt that he sent out to those who would participate in this conference.

Critical Inquiry in the Twenty-first Century: A Call for Statements

The aim of this meeting is to set an agenda for critical inquiry, both the intellectual practice and the journal for which it is named, in the coming century. We want our diverse and multitalented editorial board to spend two days brainstorming about the possible, probable, and desirable futures of criticism and theory in the human sciences. What are the crucial topics, themes, and issues that will demand special attention and "special issues"of a wide-ranging interdisciplinary journal in the coming decade and beyond? What transformations in research paradigms are on the horizon? How will technology change the transmission and production of knowledge? What will be the fate of the humanities, of literature, the arts, and philosophy, in what is widely heralded as a posthuman age? How will the very notions of criticism and critique change in the epoch and in the current state of perpetual crisis and emergency? What will be the relation of the coming criticism to politics and public life?

The first thirty years of Critical Inquiry witnessed the emergence of structuralism and poststructuralism, cultural studies, feminist theory and identity politics, media and film studies, speech act theory, new historicism, new pragmatism, visual studies and the new art history, new cognitive and psychoanalytic systems, gender studies, new forms of materialist critique, postcolonial theory, and discourse analysis, queer theory and (more recently) "returns"to formalism and aesthetics, and to new forms of public and politically committed intellectual work. These critical and theoretical movements (and this is only a partial and unsystematic list) have spawned whole new schools of thought, new educational and research institutions, new journals and collectivities of knowledge production. Have we now reached a plateau in which the future is likely to be one of consolidation, refinement, and continuity? Or are we at the threshold of new developments, whether reactive rollbacks to earlier paradigms or dimly foreseen revolutions and emergent innovations

Just as crucial as cagey predictions are utopian declarations of purpose. What, in your view, would be the desirable future of critical inquiry in the coming century? If you were able to dictate the agenda for theory and criticism in research and educational institutions, and in the public sphere, what would you imagine as the ideal structure of feeling and thought to inform critical practice? And, above all, what steps do you think need to be taken in the present moment to move toward this desirable future? What, in short, is to be done?

Five Suggestions
1. It has been suggested that the great era of theory is now behind us and that we have now entered a period of timidity, backfilling, and (at best) empirical accumulation. True?
2. It has been suggested that theory now has backed off from its earlier sociopolitical engagements and its sense of revolutionary possibility and has undergone a "therapeutic turn" to concerns with ethics, aesthetics, and care of the self, a turn of which Lacan is the major theoretical symptom. True?
3. It has been suggested that the major challenge for the humanities in the coming century will be to determine the fate of literature and to secure some space for the aesthetic in the face of the overwhelming forces of mass culture and commercial entertainment. True?
4. It has been suggested that the rapid transformations in contemporary media (high-speed computing and the internet; the revolution in biotechnology; the latest mutations of speculative and finance capital) are producing new horizons for theoretical investigations in politics, science, the arts, and religion that go well beyond the resources of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the "theory revolution"of the late twentieth century. True?
5. Following on number 4, it has been suggested that the criticism and theory to come may have to explore other media of dissemination besides those of the printed text, the scholarly article or monograph, or even language as such in its prosaic, discursive forms. What is likely to happen or ought to happen to the "arts of transmission" of knowledge in coming century?

I would be interested in hearing how we here at LS and our commenters would respond to Mitchell's 5 queries today.

My very brief answers are under the fold.

tradition and appropriating the past in heidegger

A huge task for Western reason has been showing us that there is a gap between the particular world an agent happens to occupy and the dictates of reason itself. This is necessary because of the strong tendency to view one's own environment as the right and just one. For instance, if you ask a group of high school or college students what the right kind of political system is for humans, they will answer, "democracy." Or, if you ask them about the prospects of a political system that is not the one they grew up in, they will say it is unreasonable and irrational. They have a hard time separating out what is just and rational from what they are familiar with.

Victims' Rights? No, thanks. We already have plenty!

Cross-posted from I Cite:

Looking at the neoliberal approach to the state suggests that viewing the state as both a consumer of services and provider of consumer services alerts us to changes in the understanding of citizenship. Since the state is not conceived in terms of the active sovereignty of the people, a vehicle for people's self-governance, or a forum for the deliberation over issues and carrying out of decisions in the interest of the common, it becomes but one market actor among others. The attack on big government (carried out most effectively by the Clinton administration) combined with years of emphasis on deregulation, repositions the state ideologically: now it is an unwieldy corporation, hardly the lean, efficient, adaptive machine necessary for the new economy. Not only is not an ideal site for the investment of affective meaning and identification, but it is an efficient locus for the realization of distributive goals.

knee-jerk

Hmm. That's an uncannily familiar scene, isn't it? Paris, Texas? Austin on the Seine?

What's that? You want more uncanniness? More strange in the familiar's dress, more already-known masquerading as the unfathomable and, well, fucked up? Got it:

From the NY Times today:

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, told CNN on Sunday, “It would be nice to have someone who’s head of France who doesn’t have a knee-jerk reaction against the United States.”

Now wait a minute, Chuck. When we, as Americans, mention a French "knee-jerk reaction," we really mean only one thing, right? And that thing - we agree now that it was a colossal mistake, at this point. We're going to run in '08 on the fact that, well, it was a clusterfuck from the start, n'est-ce pas?

You have to give it to the US Dems - when it comes to courage of conviction, they possess the rigidity of a crack yoga teacher. In the face of the criminally obvious and the obviously criminal, their knees don't jerk, but rather gracefully swim and swoon and sway, only to buckle and drop elegantly but resolutely to the floor.

Human Rights and Cosmopolitanism

Below the fold, extracts from Judith Butler's review of Hannah Arendt's The Jewish Writings, Gary J. Bass' review of Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History, and Michael Blake's review of Seyla Benhabib (et al)'s Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations.

multiple choice

One would think that if you were a relatively well-read American political magazine, if one that has become in large part intellectually and almost entirely ideologically corrupt, and you decided to get all hip and whatnot and start a group "weblog," that you would make sure to keep your eyes on what is going on on your new hip website. You would, perhaps, have an editor or even a copy-editor every once in a while pass her or his eyes over the stuff being posted, just to make sure it was neither insane, inscrutable, factual wrong, or even stupidly and logically incorrect.

One would think all these things, right? But clearly, this is not the case over at the New Republic's Open University. I'm not going to go into detail here about how deep these problems run, but rather let's just look at a post from today. It's by Robert Brustein, and it deals with the ostensible decline of the study of Shakespeare in US English departments.

Just to set this up correctly, let's start at the end of the article, which tries to make a funny out of the rise of cultural studies and some half-assed cartoon:

"And at the University of Virginia," the report continues, "English majors can avoid reading Othello in favor of studying 'Critical Race Theory' which explores why race 'continues to have vital significance in politics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities,' including 'sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism.'"

A recent newspaper cartoon shows two young girls walking out of a school. One turns to the other and says, "I have two mommies." The other replies, "How much is two?"

So the joke is that we're so busy filling kids heads with relativist agitprop that there's no time left for teaching basic skills. Ha! That's hilarious. (Be better if they were nappy-headed mommies, but we'll leave that to the other contributors to work out...) But what is even more hilarious is that this moment of jocular jouissance comes at the end of an article that includes the following passage in the middle:

But the ACTA report is not about the torments of secondary school education. It concerns the fate of Shakespeare courses in colleges and universities. Entitled "The Vanishing Shakespeare," the report asserts that at three-quarters of the institutions surveyed, which is to say 15 out of 70 of our leading colleges and universities, English majors are no longer asked to take a single course in Shakespeare's plays. And if you think this omission only applies to huge state institutions, look at the Ivy League universities where Harvard alone still considers Shakespeare a requirement. "Thus," the report mournfully concludes, "55 of 70 schools we surveyed allow English majors--including future English teachers--to graduate without studying the language's greatest writer in depth."

In 1996, that number was 47 out of 70, which suggests that, at the present rate of attrition, in twenty years you won't find a Shakespeare course anywhere in the country. "I am dying, Egypt, dying," says Antony to Cleopatra. "I am dying, America, dying," Shakespeare could be saying to us.

Hmmm... "In 1996, that number was 47 out of 70, which suggests that, at the present rate of attrition, in twenty years you won't find a Shakespeare course anywhere in the country." Um, no, it decidedly does not suggest that. It might suggest that few colleges will require Shakespeare courses, but this study certainly can't predict what Brustein wants it to predict. This is basic, SAT-type problem solving, and Brustein is apparently not up to the task. (And then, of course, there's also the 15/70 = 3/4 further up the quote, but we'll give a pass on that one...)

Perhaps, in case Brustein stops by, we should set it up in a nice, clear format for him to print out and practice with:

If in 1996, 23 out of 70 universities required Shakespeare, and in 2006, 15 of 70 required Shakespeare, then:

a) the darkies have the run of the place now.
b) girls who like girls write books now, which is a little bit disturbing and a little bit exciting to think about.
c) course requirements are on the wane in our nation's universities, for both good and bad reasons.
d) is our TNR bloggers learning?

Apparently, to TNR, blog means unmonitored collection of worthless shit of questionable veracity... If it weren't for what has gone on with that magazine in the last decade or so, you might be led to think that the Open University is actually an ultra-subtle guerilla attack on the b'sphere on the part of the mainstream print media, beating us by disasterously joining us, as it were. But I'm pretty sure they're not really up to the task.

How is it with being in Iraq?

Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online is back in Baghdad. He's in a car with two other Iraqi journalists.

There's a checkpoint ahead. Incoming traffic has to slow down in front of a Hummer of the Iraqi Defense Forces. A soldier is talking to the driver of a van. Suddenly there is a shot. The soldier falls to the ground, right before our eyes, screaming in pain. He is not dead instantly. His companion, by the Hummer, takes some time to react, then also starts shooting. People duck in their cars; general wisdom is that if these were US troops, they would be shooting at random and every car would be sprayed with bullets.