Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical InquiryAuthor(s): Harry HarootunianSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 396-402Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421140 .Accessed: 27/09/2011 01:41

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Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004)

� 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/04/3002–0017$10.00. All rights reserved.

396

Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocationfor Critical Inquiry

Harry Harootunian

I should say at the outset that my experience with Critical Inquiry stems

from the years I served as a coeditor until I left the University of Chicago,

not as a teacher and reader of literary texts, as such, but as a fellow traveler

(or camp follower, depending upon your politics) of literary culture who

taught the history of an Asian society and was thus obligatorily armed with

the conceits of area studies and the perspective of the softer social sciences

like anthropology. Anybody trained in regions outside of Euro-America,

then and even today, was socialized into approaches that saw the study of

Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America as an extension of field-

work, where we would spend time extracting raw data that would be pro-

cessed and refined by Euro-American theory. While my presence on the

editorial board atCritical Inquiry represented, perhaps, bothamoveoutside

of Euro-American literary culture and a new engagement with the wider

world that cultural studieswas beginning to encounter and incorporate into

teaching and research, my own involvement more often than not drove me

further into the new world of literature and theory. Because the bulk of the

submissions that all of us were required to read and talk about at our

monthly meetings still came from literary studies, I felt I was being supplied

a lasting and valuable education by just trying to keep up. And I was always

out of breath. This experience, I should say, was consistentwith thebroader

intellectual agendas associated with the University of Chicago and its ob-

sessive desire to promote genuine interdisciplinarity among its faculty and

student body, constituting a valued inflection of that great tradition that,

as I now teach at another university, I’ve recognized exists nowhere else.

Where it has beenhesitantly and timidly implemented, thepracticehasbeen

put under constant siege by departments and disciplines that operate as if

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 397

they are inhabiting a zero-sum world, are still fearful of losing their tenuous

hold on a patch of turf. At the university atwhich I currently teach thispanic

was reinforced by the Social Text scandal, which is now regularly invoked

like a totemic churinga wielded by administrators and their loyal retainers

in the faculty to remind the rest of us of the dangers of transgressingbound-

aries and the necessity of upholding standards apparently set by the com-

munity of scientists we must all follow in everything from tenure cases to

envisaging innovative interdisciplinary programs.When youbegin to think

about it Critical Inquiry may well be one of the few forums left that still

allow us to imagine alternatives to the graying and increasingly manager-

ialized and instrumentalized world of universities and colleges, progres-

sively being emptied of any respect for the intellectual life and its social

necessity.

But before I dissolve into a spasm of nostalgia or excessive sentimental-

izing of the University of Chicago, it is important to say thatCritical 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 transformationof educational

institutions into administered knowledge factories that have already evis-

cerated the humanities, making them into service centers. We in the hu-

manities are caught in the vise of two noncommunicating cultures in the

university, Masao Miyoshi has recently reminded us: an academic capital-

ism 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 uni-

versity.” 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. This policy directive accompanies the appearance of

a swelling chorus in the humanities shrilly chanting its rediscovery of a love

of literature, demanding its immediate restoration, and inspiring all those

recent programs devoted to “world literature” that seek only to reaffirm the

hegemony of the West by annexing the rest to its modular template. But all

of this merely reinforces a worrisome impulse already driving large num-

Harry Harootunian is formerly Max Palevsky Professor of History and

Civilizations at the University of Chicago and a former coeditor of Critical

Inquiry. He is currently chair of the department of East Asian studies at New

York University. He has recently coedited with Masao Miyoshi a book titled

Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (2002).

398 Harry Harootunian / Theory’s Empire

1. See Timothy Brennan, “The Empire’s New Clothes,”Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003):

337–67.

bers of faculty and the media to identify the sign of theory with political

radicalism itself.

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.

What is important about the place we currently occupy is that it inflects a

larger historical conjuncture we are moving through marked by economic

failure, political repression (nobody wants to use the fword, but fascism in

its second coming more accurately describes our moment), and the im-

minent prospect of senseless imperial wars, already inaugurated by the ill-

conceived invasion of Iraq and endless shapeless military occupations.One

of 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 unchecked

relativism. 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. (Has anybody ever known of an ad-

ministrator who was actually a Marxist or whose politics was anythingmore

than ill-disguised self-interest?) The shining symbol of this cultural and in-

tellectual implosion was the fate of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s

book Empire (brilliantly reviewed by Timothy Brennan in a recent issue of

Critical Inquiry),1 which seemed to conjoin theory and cultural studies into

a barely digestible civet.Empirewas on everyone’s intellectualmenu—more

bought than read (for a moment you couldn’t buy the book in New York

City, but that may have been because there are no credible book stores

here)—but whose significance and salience collapsed as fast as the Twin

Towers. (The speed of this failure has been equaled only by how swiftly new

fashions disappear, their incapacity to last the duration of time it takes to

write a dissertation, and thereby supplying cultural studieswith adefinition

by description.) What this book signified and probably prefigured, with the

added shove from 9/11, was the collapse of theory, as such, as an academic

vocation and its promise to figure and thus interpret the world anew. Mo-

mentarily,Empirebecame all things to all people, onboth theLeft andRight.

If it offered a rich potpourri ofDeleuzian, Foucauldian and“Neo-Marxian”

theoretical possibilities promising to renew both cultural and literary stud-

ies, it also provided a new lease on life of older and stale conceptions of

modernization that have now paved the way for a rehabilitated revival and

new respect for empires and imperialism. Before Hardt and Negri, Rey

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 399

Chow had proposed that theory had already been disclaimed by a virulent

rear guard who had once been its most prominent proponents. They feared

its kinship with Marxism and the encounter with the world outside Euro-

America and the spectacle of real difference, and the consequences of this

retreat from theory invaded the ranks of cultural studies and ultimately all

those hyphenated programs committed to multiculturalism and identitar-

ianism, which increasingly were seen as secondary infections demanding

instant containment. Even before 9/11, the effects of this immunizing cam-

paign were already manifest, exceeding its direst endorsements, and even

surpassed the functionalist conviction that teaching theory was simply an

enhancement of professionalization.

What I’m suggesting is that the apparent collapse of theory and the dis-

trust of cultural studieswas already prefiguredby endorsements that sought

to place it within the system and make it a part of normal professionali-

zation that had, and would have, no relationship to the world outside of the

academy. In this regard, theory was transmuted into a functional prereq-

uisite of professionalization. The functionalism that had once dominated

the social sciences hadmetastasized and spread into thehumanities,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. The con-

temporary conjuncture had already produced a recognitiondemanding the

formation of a new discourse on modernity, one thatmight limnFoucault’s

general sense of an ontology of the present and thus enable us to envisage

a genuine history of the present (Marx’s current situation). Such a history

of the present would necessitate historicizing the unity of modernity as a

“complex set of temporalizations,” according to Peter Osborne, the coe-

vality of unequal moments, coexisting immanently yet “differentiating”

global geopolitical space. With Empire, and a good deal of theoretical prac-

tice today, theories are simply jumbled like numbered balls bouncing

around in a circulating chamber before they are spit out in random but

winning combinations in the great game of academic Lotto, while history

of the present and past, here and there, is reduced to mere rumor. Brennan

has shown how Empire has become an exemplar for thewidespreadpractice

where theories are made to express winning combinations even as they

manage to cancel each other out, while history is emptied of its temporal

force for the easy identification of spatial fixes.Mypoint is that the apparent

retreat of theory occurred long ago when its supposed practice was grafted

onto the professional expansion of literary studies and the creationof a new

imperium within the boundaries of the academy, the systems the early

Bourdieu and his American followers apotheosized, proliferating new sub-

ject matters, moving into area studies, seizing new terrains, poaching on

400 Harry Harootunian / Theory’s Empire

other disciplines, trope theft—in a word, Empire. By the same measure that

the expansion worked to domesticate and housebreak theory, it also

snapped its tenuous but necessary relationship to political and social prac-

tices that exceeded the gated communities of academia and, by “academi-

cizing” culture, severed symbolic meaning from the political and social

worlds to which it must always stand in a tense and asymmetrical relation-

ship. What resulted was the production of significations independentof the

historical mediations of other forms of social activity and the social subjects

who live them. Theory, thus, as it has played out in cultural studies and

served to further professional proficiency in interpreting the world within

theborders of the academy, has been removed fromanypossibilityofchang-

ing it.

But the professionalization of theory is simply the reverse of a long-

standing and persisting conceit, rearticulated during the meeting of the

Critical Inquiry editorial board, that theory has no effect outside of aca-

demia, nor should it, according to some. Yet this slide into easy and un-

knowing cynicism seems oddly out of stepwith the actual conduct of theory

in academic disciplines and the history of scholarship which are lasting tes-

timony to its—theory’s—effectivitybeyond thegatedcommunity.Weknow

that this claim to solipsism stems from precisely the professionalization of

theory during the last decades as a functional requisite empowered to en-

dow its holders with cultural capital and even stardom, so long as its dis-

course remains safely within the academic compound. But the University

of Chicago, the site of the editorial meeting, provided only the most im-

mediately available example of how theory and intellectual work, time and

again, have imprinted their presence on the “real” world. Because our mo-

ment is dominated by war in Iraq and its uncertain aftermath, one need

only trace the theoretical trajectories of policy makers like Paul Wolfowitz

and company or right-wing opinion makers like William Kristol back

through the genealogy of an attenuated Straussianism of epigoni like Allan

Bloom and others. What this vision once advanced, and which current ac-

tion still echoes, was a distrust and rejection of mass politics, and its alliance

with mass culture, a reluctant acceptance of procedural democracy for the

excesses of substantive democracy, curbed by the guidance of a gifted elite

of latter-day philosopher-kings (invariably male) sitting in major univer-

sities. Who, moreover, could ever forget the impact of the “Chicago School

of Economics” on the political economy of countries like Chile or the role

played by Chicago sociology in the formation of urban social policy?While

we will all have our favorite examples of how theory and intellectuals have

seeped through the apparently porous boundaries of academia to make

their mark on the real world, as Confucius might have said (school loyalty

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2004 401

has to count for something) the chants that continue to disavow theory’s

broader vocation suggest simply how codes of professional socialization

have succeeded in becoming unquestioned common sense.

Some critics have correctly argued that cultural studies departed from

poststructural theory the moment when the concerns for otherness could

no longer be contained safely within the European tradition. Much of this

concern for otherness as a subject for teaching and research was already

enacted by the practice of area studies. While both cultural and area studies

occupied the same ground, the latter veered off in the direction of the social

sciences and committed its energies to providing information on strategic

sites for the national security state, while the former privileged textuality

and envisaged an aspiration devoted to examining cultural and ethnic dif-

ferences. And while both sought to connect with a putative outside—cold

war America and the post-Vietnam andpost–civil rightsmovementpursuit

of identity—they remained very much locked within the academic com-

munity, not necessarily through a disavowal of theory, as such, but rather

through its effective separation of politics and culture. In the end, both

headed for the valorization of difference in the post–cold war era, reinforc-

ing the affirmation of what Jacques Ranciere has called a “consensus de-

mocracy,” the wish to place and count each identity, where even the victims

of modernity (refugees, diasporic groups, migrants, and exiles) are finally

assimilated to their proper place and all are included and accounted for, to

secure not a democratic politics but simply a postdemocracy. Chow has

rightly observed how area studies has come to safely endow their own ret-

rograde positions with the glorious multicultural aura of defending non-

Western traditions, a fiction not worth delving into, Frantz Fanon once

advised. With cultural studies, we must recognize that a politics of identity

is not the same as political identity, whose formation depends less on dif-

ference than on some recognition of equivalencies. The pursuit of cultural

difference has become a candidate for a universal, regulative idea like global

law or human rights, the study of which today has become the model for

an area studies lite that is managing to replace the older practice. But its

political form never exceeds the so-called consensus system, where com-

munity is seen as an organized body affirming difference(s) on the basis of

an acknowledged contingency identical to itself, with nothing left over.

What Critical Inquirymight do in this current conjuncture, now prom-

ising to stretch out into an indefinite future, is to provide a forum for the

recovery of theory’s true vocation as a condition for beginning the difficult

labor of envisaging a discourse on modernity that speaks to the world out-

side the academy. This discourse would be centered principally in under-

standing the history of our present as the unity of uneven temporalizations

402 Harry Harootunian / Theory’s Empire

differentiating global geopolitical space rather than merely affirming or

cheering on a globalizing project that sees the globe only as the true space

for completing the commodity relation. Paradoxically, both cultural and

area studies had once been in a position to supply the kind of proper his-

toricization of the present I am calling for. By this I mean returning cultural

studies and area studies, whose representation in the pages of Critical In-

quiry have remained recessive, to the place where they are once again in a

position to give shape to a proper ontology of the present , acting in concert

to rejoin culture to a politics that will succeed in exceeding the system and

its endless fetishization of cultural capital serving the cause of profession-

alization. Such an ontologymust be sensitive to or accountable for the“dur-

ational present,” rather than a merely “punctual” one (the phrasing is

suggested by Osborne) and the role played by contemporary political

struggles. But any effort to begin this enormous task of imagining how we

might fuse an understanding of the historical present to acting on it re-

quires at the same time that we confront and engage the corporatization

of the university and the desire of its officers to reduce the humanities to

an instrument of socialization—a new civics—and marginalize our his-

toric intellectual mission.