2003 Editorial Symposium

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Full Text of Statements
Volume 30 no. 2

Critical Inquiry in the 21st century: A Call for Statements

W. J. T. Mitchell

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?