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...
By way of Ken Reinhard, Le Monde reports that against the wishes of Lacan's estate a group of the Master's scribbled drawings and diagrams are going to be sold on June 30, 2006, by Artcurial, a Parisian auction house. If you thought that the image here was Leo's latest effort to master a particularly hard macrame knot in two dimensions - you're wrong! It is Lacan's drawing of a diagram demonstrating... hmmm... let me think about that one, the topography of subjectivity????