The wonderfully varied statements written for the Critical Inquiry symposium contain moments that are elegiac, expansionist, and deflationary. In the elegiac moments the writer invokes a fairly recent past (often the late sixties and early to middle seventies) when the practice of theory seemed to promise great cultural and political advances. In the expansionist moments (often accompanied by bitter reflections on the political situation in the United States today) the observation that theory’s political thrust has been blunted and even smothered by its academic success–that is, by its professionalization–is followed by a call to break out of the academy’s confines so that theory can once again speak to a larger audience and offer itself as a vehicle for large social reforms. In the deflationary moments (often in tandem with the elegiac moments) the whole thing is declared to have been a mistake (one remembers Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” and the “the light that never was”),¹ and we are advised to rein in our ambitions and limit our claims to those that are intelligible and achievable in disciplinary terms.

I am with the deflators and especially with Jim Chandler when he tells us how he initially wrote a “statement [that] addressed everything but the academic realm” before remembering “the origins of Critical Inquiry in the era of Watergate and how it made its difference by not setting out to produce a critique of that moment”(p. 000) In his remarks, he said, “I tried to suggest how we might do it again,” where by “it” he means working “toward a more rigorous account of what a discipline is” (p. 000). I believe that any such account must be relentlessly internal and immanent and must attend not to some comprehensive scheme of all the disciplines but to the particular history and historically emergent aims of each. As Chandler observes (correctly, I think), the totality of disciplines should be thought of not as “a set of parallel functions... but as a network of relatively autonomous practices in asymmetrical relation to one each other”(p. 000). This does not mean that disciplines have nothing to say to one another but that the interest one discipline might have in what is being said in the precincts of another will be a function of the first discipline’s already-in-place investments and goals and not of some ambition or general effectivity all disciplines share or should share. To a great extent (and this is my observation with which Chandler may or may not agree) disciplines are linked only by the accident of their being housed in the same university structures. This cohabitation has not been the result of design and surely not of any philosophical design; it just happened as a consequence of the fortuitous success of various interests in securing space, research support, and a piece of the curriculum. It follows then that any attempt to find in this ramshackle collection an underlying unity either of practice or purpose is at once misguided and quixotic. Interdisciplinarity–as a project rather than as the mere fact of occasional and opportunistic borrowings–is just a nonstarter.

I do not intend this as a merely negative statement, for I believe that it is by focusing narrowly that we have the best chance both of getting it right and of speaking with power to the constituencies we do not directly address and, indeed, refrain from addressing. And I am sure that when we expand our focus and broaden our aims we lose whatever rigor we might be capable of achieving. This is for me the point of Bill Brown’s wry comment on those essays “we’ve all read...where Freud and Foucault, Baudrillard, and Booth are each and all cited as sources of analytic authority without concern for the incompatibilities among them” (p. 000). The unconcern these essays display is with the claims made by the theorists cited, claims that arise from the particular problems they set out to solve, problems that are urgent and perspicuous in the context of some specific project–psychoanalytic theory, speech-act theory, political theory, film theory, economic theory, whatever. As long as you maintain the focus of that specificity, this or that proposition can be assessed and interrogated: Does Rawls’s political liberalism really do justice to the claims of religious sectarians? Does Foucault’s analyses of power provide a basis for criticizing power’s effects? Is Wayne Booth’s account of irony sufficiently straightforward? But if you have your eye on a larger horizon–a horizon so large that it barely knows boundaries, never mind laws of entailment–almost anything you come across will seem relevant and capable of being plugged in unproblematically. Borrow a little of the Freudian model there, a little Habermas or Apfel, here and whenever you need a transition–say from the mirror stage to global capitalism or terrorism–throw in one of the more elastic bits from Rorty or _izek or, better still, go on for a while about performativity. It’s all great fun, easier than falling off a log (and with the same problem of traction), pertinent to any point you care to make, and therefore pertinent to no point whatsoever.

This kind of work–massive, encyclopedic, (rhetorically) magisterial–is as empty as it is ambitious and fails where it most wants to succeed: as a predictor and shaper of the future. The reason is given by Joel Snyder: “Absent the motivation of having to come to terms with changes taking place on the ground (or of projecting effective means for bringing off such change), there is little point to theorizing and few, if any, dividends”(p. 000). That is to say, truly effective theorizing occurs within disciplinary contexts and in response to the urgent questions those contexts have precipitated–what Snyder means, I think, by “on the ground.” Truly gaseous theorizing occurs when those contexts have been left behind and we ascend to the aery heights of the really big (and stupefyingly dull) questions. Recall the books that really set you thinking and you will see that for the most part they were sharp and brilliant considerations of issues narrowly conceived, in my case Walzer on the revolution of the saints, Austin on how to do things with words, Empson on Milton’s God, Magali Larson on the rise of professionalism, Roberto Unger on liberalism, H. L. A. Hart on the concept of law, and, most recently, Jeremy Waldron on Locke and religion. What characterizes each of these books–and everyone will have his or her list–is a determination to plow a relatively small patch of ground, tilling the same furrows over and over until there is, for the time at least, nothing left to be traced out. Of course, as a reader of such books you have no obligation to confine your imagination as their authors confine theirs and every right to think beyond the boundaries they so carefully adhere to. The wonder is that your ability to be expansive (and even imperial) in your thoughts is directly proportional to the measured restraint (sometimes of an exuberant kind) they unfailingly display. Because they stay small–that is, take something, not everything, for their subject–you are able to enlarge on the conclusions they have so painstakingly reached; you can go somewhere because they have not gone everywhere. Harry Harootunian complains that theory has been reduced to furthering “professional proficiency... within the borders of the academy” and by limiting itself to “interpreting the world...has been removed from any possibility of changing it” (p. 000). No, the possibility of our changing it–or at least furnishing some of the formulations that might be adopted and adapted by those whose business it is to change it–depends on the nearsighted situatedness of those who remain within the borders of the academy. A “discourse...that speaks to the world outside the academy” will only emerge if we remain inside and produce the delimited analyses that just might get taken up by someone with a project a million miles from ours.

This does not mean that there is nothing in general for theory to do or nothing general to say about it. It is still possible to speak of theory and to practice it. Sander Gilman gives us the definition: “the self-conscious awareness of the methodological approaches that one uses” (p. 000). This awareness, which amounts to the historicization of the routine practices we once regarded as the inevitable fruits of a teleological progress, can take, and has taken, two forms. In one of those forms we have a new object of study, variously called the given, the assumed background, the taken-for-granted, what goes without saying, and (with quotation marks) the “natural.” The project is to raise to the level of analytical attention formative structures that lie beneath the surface of life and give it its shape; and the pleasure (provided for us by a line of theoreticians from Propp to Weber to Lévi-Strauss to Goffman to Bourdieu) is the pleasure of making visible the work of so many hitherto invisible hands. It is a vast project and it is without any natural end because its materials–the sedimented conventions that produce everyday life–are continually being replenished by history. The turn (and the second form) occurs when the insight that common sense norms rather than guiding human activity are its ever revisable products becomes the basis of a criticism of just about everything under the rubric of the inauthentic. Here too there is a project–the demonstration, serially repeated, that the cultural systems within which we live and move and have our beings are not natural but constructed and therefore imposed. It is this last–“and therefore imposed”–that is at once incoherent and the source of theory’s politicization. It is incoherent because the substitution of the constructed for the natural was supposed to have removed the natural as a baseline category; but when constructed becomes an accusation–you say it’s merely constructed–the natural is restored to just that position. The advantage of the incoherence is that it gives theorists an extra-academic assignment all too readily accepted by many, the assignment of going out into the world and exposing constructedness–read hegemony, power, illegitimate authority (there is no other kind)–wherever it is found, and because the initial move is to replace essence with history it will be found everywhere. No end of work for theorists to do, or at least pretend to do, and no end to the overblown hopes–we will tell you the truth and the truth we tell you shall set you free–in whose wreckage the Critical Inquiry symposium was mounted.

Does this mean, as Hillis Miller fears, that we should just teach Victorian novels in an “apolitical way” as the republic burns? No, it means that we should attend, as most of us always have, to the political (and economic and social) concerns that find their way into these novels and treat them seriously as components in an aesthetic structure. But taking those concerns seriously in that sense does not require taking them seriously in the sense that we proceed immediately to political action and indeed requires that we resist the temptation to do so. (Bill Brown: “the will to relevance can foreclose analytical description on behalf of prescription” [p. 000]). Politics does not need our professional help; texts do.