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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Theory's Empire? « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2009

Harry Harootunian, in Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical Inquiry, reflects on the Critical Inquiry journal that is published by the University of Chicago. The text is from 2004 and Harootunian says that Critical Inquiry may well be one of the few forums left that still allow us to imagine alternatives to the graying and increasingly managerialized and instrumentalized world of universities and colleges, progressively being emptied of any respect for the intellectual life and its social necessity.

Harootunian adds:

Critical Inquiry faces a perilous future precisely because it still constitutes one of the few reliable guideposts enabling us to navigate through this ruined and now unfamiliar landscape, marking the immense transformation of educational institutions into administered knowledge factories that have already eviscerated the humanities, making them into service centers. We in the humanities are caught in the vise of two noncommunicating cultures in the university....an academic capitalism that insists on linking research, usually R and D, to the recruitment of funds from outside sources, diminishing those disciplines not in a position to attract financing for the kind of research they do, and a growing critique by humanist scholars that is totally oblivious of the “entrepreneurial university.”

Even more troubling is the eagerness and enthusiasm of university administrators (whose existence is the best argument yet against cloning) who demand that departments find their own funds—every boat on its own bottom, as it is called.

Harootunian adds that we have no doubt reached the juncture where theory and its offspring cultural studies are under siege and, in some advanced places, in full rout. Oneof the many uses (and thus abuses) of 9/11 has been that it has permitted a wholesale rejection of theory, which was already underway before the big
push, and widespread denunciation of cultural studies and multiculturalism as symptoms of loosening standards and the corrosive curse of uncheckedrelativism. But these charges are simply steroid-induced manifestations of earlier claims that sought to persuade the public that universities had fallen into the dirty hands of 1960s radicals.

What I’m suggesting is that the apparent collapse of theory and the distrust of cultural studies was already prefigured by endorsements that sought to place it within the system and make it a part of normal professionalization that had, and would have, no relationship to the world outside of the academy. In this regard, theory was transmuted into a functional prerequisite of professionalization. The functionalism that had once dominated the social sciences had metastasized and spread into the humanities,notably in the field of literary studies. Hence the folding of Empire had as much to do with this historical conjuncture as the “eventfulness” of 9/11.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:03 PM |