Schooled by Footnotes
Anne H. Stevens and Jay Williams offer in their article, "The Footnote, in Theory" a celebration of Critical Inquiry. "Polemical," "passionate," "professional" are adjectives that stud their article in their descriptions of CI's mandate and CI's importance to both theory and the future.
The proliferation of footnotes is rightly hailed as a sign of the "professionalization" of the humanities: the more insecure the author, the more footnotes. And according to Stevens and Williams, the footnote is "marginal, but not minor." Footntoes indicate our participation in a community of professionals, and implicate the author in a conversation
Citationality validates an author's importance, but as the authors deplore, Judith Butler is ONLY woman "to make it into the top ten in any five year period." Butler is the top ranked woman in general. What I find most depressing about this is that the top ranked woman theorist intervenes most often on the questions of sexual difference and heteronormativity. One suspects that an academic woman is better received if she talks about in some way being a woman, or at least about questions of identity in the academy. This is the unspoken, invisible rule we have often suspected exists, but is now more or less statistically confirmed. Laura Mulvey, Helene Cixous, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Herrenstein-Smith, Catharine Mackinnon, Simone de Beauvoir figure among oft cited theorists of the fairer sex.
But what is problematic about this article and its presumed object of study -- the future of theory -- is the presumption that if footnotes are minor, Critical Inquiry is somehow MAJOR since a study of its citational past is going to determine our intellectual future.
Yes, a theoretical canon as John Guillory predicted has been established, and i find myself squarely mainstream within that canon. I've been schooled in the top ten of CI's list, and I'm ready to school others, but at the same time, since the explosive presence of the internet, of electronic publishing, of the blog, of a generation of theoretically informed, powerful, but non-academic writers and journalists like Doug Henwood, Thomas Frank, Lisa Featherstone have emerged on the publishing scene, CI and its list making seems increasingly -- as Lindsay Waters pointed out cruelly -- a playground for senior citizens and I would add -- young fogeys.
Of course, Henwood, Frank and Featherstone are not "professional" academics..but let's leave that for another discussion...
The proliferation of footnotes is rightly hailed as a sign of the "professionalization" of the humanities: the more insecure the author, the more footnotes. And according to Stevens and Williams, the footnote is "marginal, but not minor." Footntoes indicate our participation in a community of professionals, and implicate the author in a conversation
Citationality validates an author's importance, but as the authors deplore, Judith Butler is ONLY woman "to make it into the top ten in any five year period." Butler is the top ranked woman in general. What I find most depressing about this is that the top ranked woman theorist intervenes most often on the questions of sexual difference and heteronormativity. One suspects that an academic woman is better received if she talks about in some way being a woman, or at least about questions of identity in the academy. This is the unspoken, invisible rule we have often suspected exists, but is now more or less statistically confirmed. Laura Mulvey, Helene Cixous, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Herrenstein-Smith, Catharine Mackinnon, Simone de Beauvoir figure among oft cited theorists of the fairer sex.
But what is problematic about this article and its presumed object of study -- the future of theory -- is the presumption that if footnotes are minor, Critical Inquiry is somehow MAJOR since a study of its citational past is going to determine our intellectual future.
Yes, a theoretical canon as John Guillory predicted has been established, and i find myself squarely mainstream within that canon. I've been schooled in the top ten of CI's list, and I'm ready to school others, but at the same time, since the explosive presence of the internet, of electronic publishing, of the blog, of a generation of theoretically informed, powerful, but non-academic writers and journalists like Doug Henwood, Thomas Frank, Lisa Featherstone have emerged on the publishing scene, CI and its list making seems increasingly -- as Lindsay Waters pointed out cruelly -- a playground for senior citizens and I would add -- young fogeys.
Of course, Henwood, Frank and Featherstone are not "professional" academics..but let's leave that for another discussion...
7 Comments:
I've been following your postings with interest -- thanks for taking the time to read our article!
thanks for checking in with the blog...
Since universities started using lists to "measure" their own success, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the humanities started down the same path. Who needs humanities anyway, except for perhaps a composition course that might teach you how to write in a way Wall Street demands?
My pet theory, one inspired by Bill Readings, is that lists reflect the decline of the nation-state. In a globalized academic world, there has to be some way of comparing the return value on an education at Carleton College and the ENA in France, even though the two were configured in radically heterogeneous terms during the phase of high modernism. Lists of the best global universities are truly frightening things. As if USNW Report weren't bad enough.
What I think is sad is that the "professionalization" of the humanities really means that it has adopted the social sciences model of citation -- and it has not been able to produce any counter-hegemonic interdisciplinarity for a little payback.
I didn't remember about the Readings' book...will have to look it up. Thanks Kyle for bringing it up. The list makes comparable and organizes in a hierarchical manner the radically incommensurable -- it re-produces the demolishing, nivellating power of money. We have all internalized the list because it is a way of organizing the world that makes it recognizable to capital…
Thanks for taking our essay seriously, but may I first point out that you quote us as saying that footnotes are not minor, but then you say that we say that footnotes are minor in order to make the false point that CI is major. In any case, CI is not going to determine the future of theory. CI lives and dies according to who submits to it, and it is just one of many--it wasn't even the first--theoretical journals. There seems to be quite a bit of anxiety out there about CI's position in the academia. I think its status—and other journals’ as well--within the academy is problematic; Derrida himself attacked CI in the Summer 1989 issue. I still think Why CI? is a legitimate question, and we had hoped that people who asked this question would allow us the luxury of studying what we know best. Now it strikes me as strange that everyone assumes, Why not CI? thus betraying the assumption that CI is the most important, most influential, etc etc journal, assumptions we didn’t make and would never accede to. Further, we did not create proscriptive lists. Our lists however can be attacked for being merely descriptive. Finally, there is no editorial bias against the new or the young; in fact, I think quite the opposite is true; the health of the journal depends on promoting young authors. Daniel Morgan, a grad student, in our spring issue is an example, and a quick read shows that the only theoretical rock stars he cites are Fried and Cavell, if they can even be considered rock stars. The worst thing that now could happen is that people stopped submitting to CI because they felt they hadn’t cited the proper authorities. After all, our initial claim—the future of theory depends on its past—could be entirely wrong. So I think that while questions of the commodification or fetishization or concretization of theorists and their status are interesting questions, they are not questions dealt with in our essay, or only tangentially so. Those kinds of topics would take a whole different kind of essay to address.
this preening about academics' attitudes towards critical inquiry (the journal) is not itself a critical inquiry - it is an attempt to keep the journal relevant. fair enough, but don't pretend otherwise. if this really was about the future of theory, there are several very judicious and easily available publications on that topic that don't even make it into your footnotes.
Jay,
Please allow me to cite you and your co-author regarding your ambitions in the article, "Searching for definitions of theory and Critical Inquiry by defining the status and use of footnotes may seem like a risky venture-are the stakes really that high?-but we believe with Grafton, John Guillory, and others that the footnote illuminates larger concerns within the disciplines and thus helps us speculate on the future of theory."
I don't think I was purposefully misreading you when I wrote that you conflate the future of theory with the future of Critical Inquiry. Indeed, I have nothing against this conflation -- on principle. Why shouldn't CI be the steward for the persistence of theory?
In fact, I applaud you and Anne Stevens for opening up a space for discussion, but I think that your article's modest scope leaves room for -- well further critical inquiry
That said, your defense of the age diversity of the journal seems a bit weak. You've included one graduate student in a recent issue. Is this ground for self-congratulation? I find that the "big" theory journals tend to reproduce themselves, but that is what happens when a journal undergoes the famous Weberian phase of "institutionalization." Self-reproduction is critical to any kind of continuity. But since you and Anne Stevens bring up the question of historical analysis and speculation, I would have to say that the charisma of theory has been fully institutionalized and is undergoing a period of dissemination and canonization. Isn't this, in fact, what one wanted all along? Or is it?
I remain open-minded about both the future of theory and Critical Inquiry. In fact, Waters' attack on your article in the Chronicle got me to pick up the journal again and read it.
Post a Comment
<< Home