Theory: Still on the Table
By Megan Lisagor
Photography by Dan Dry
As Critical Inquiry, Chicago’s influential
humanities journal, turns 30, it rejects the buzz that theory is
passé and continues to seek fresh ways of viewing the world.
In its annual “Year in Ideas” issue
this past December, the New York Times Magazine claimed
the curtain had closed on literary and cultural theory; along with
carbs and Bennifer, theory was out. For Critical Inquiry, a humanities
journal born at Chicago in 1974, the assertion had as much merit
as 2001’s pronouncement, popularized and later renounced by
the punditocracy, that irony was dead.

In the pages of Critical Inquiry and
elsewhere the pursuit of new ideas persists, argue professors working
to ferret out the latest theories. “I’m absolutely certain
that the human race isn’t done theorizing,” journal
editor W. J. T. Mitchell says, bemoaning the tendency of soundbites—in
this case, the headline “Theory is Finished”—to
oversimplify complex matters. “I don’t believe in final
answers.”
Ironically enough, Critical Inquiry
posed the questions that thrust theory—those overarching paradigms
that intellectuals use to read texts and to understand the world—into
the limelight in 2003, opening it up to scrutiny. In the spring
Mitchell asked his editorial board, an all-star lineup of academic
heavyweights including Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson,
to fashion statements addressing such issues as technology’s
impact on the transmission of knowledge and the relationship between
criticism and politics. Inviting them to continue the dialogue in
person, the journal convened an April symposium to chart a course
for itself—and its lifeblood—in the 21st century. It
was an ambitious agenda exemplified by Mitchell’s opening
remarks: “We want to be the Starship Enterprise of
criticism and theory.”
About 550 people, mostly faculty and students,
crowded Swift Hall’s auditorium to hear what the scholars
had to say. But that afternoon a desire to establish theory’s
relevance seemed lost on the group; discussion returned time and
again to the recently launched military strike in Iraq and other
hot topics. Though at one point Bhabha, professor of English and
Afro-American studies at Harvard University, stepped up for the
humanities, pronouncing, “Even a poem in its own oblique way
is deeply telling of the lives of the world we exist in,”
for the most part politics eclipsed abstract matters. “I missed
the day theory was politically transformative,” said Henry
Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute
and chair of the Afro-American studies department. “I’m
too young.”
Mitchell wasn’t surprised that the conversation
turned toward the Bush administration’s policies. “Everyone
was charged up about that,” he says. “There’s
an intellectual war going on. What can theory do? Not a whole lot
at this moment. We’ve got to fight ’em with better ideas.”
Where he and the mainstream media differed in their readings of
the symposium was on the ability of those ideas to effect social
and political change. The New York Times titled its account
“The Latest Theory is That Theory Doesn’t Matter”;
the Boston Globe highlighted intellectuals’ “anxiety
of non-influence.” And in January the Times teased,
“Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs” in its coverage
of Marxist critic Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (Basic
Books, 2003). “Oh, OK, so we can go home,” jokes Jay
Williams, Critical Inquiry’s senior managing editor.
“I don’t think so.” Subscribing to the theory
that theory is perennial, the journal stands by its raison d’être.
“It’s easy to publish famous people,”
says Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley distinguished service professor
of English and art history. “The difficult thing is identifying
the young people who will be famous 20 years from now. So that’s
our job, above all else—to be the distant early warning system.”
Indeed, rather than discouraging scholars from sending their work
to Critical Inquiry, the symposium generated a flood of
new submissions. The quarterly journal fields about 350 unsolicited
manuscripts a year in addition to the handful it commissions, and
Mitchell and his team sift through them all. For each issue the
best of the bunch—seven or eight—get slipped into a
rack of manila folders, circulated, and discussed at monthly editorial
meetings.
A motley crew of seven coeditors, whose expertise
runs from American studies to feminist criticism to French theory,
hash it out in Mitchell’s second-floor Wieboldt Hall office,
seated in a hodgepodge of chairs around a school-cafeteria table.
Books, papers, folders, and videotapes blanket every surface: his
desk, end tables, 15 bookcases. This is a place where ideas converge
and reaching consensus is no small feat. Nothing gets by without
an argument, Mitchell says, relishing the inevitability. Submissions
are, in fact, judged on their ability to raise the temperature in
the room, sparking debate—a measure known within the journal’s
ranks as the “passion principle.” The other main standard
is breaking new ground; contributions to existing schools of thought
won’t pass muster. “Criticism like anything else has
its fashions, its styles,” he says. “We made a resolution
to never do that, to be open.”
Such openness wasn’t in the original blueprint
for Critical Inquiry, launched by English professor Sheldon
Sacks, PhD’60, as a voice for the Chicago School of criticism,
a literary approach characterized by neo-Aristotelian, formalist
theories. But the journal abandoned that focus before its first
issue hit the academic circuit because, as Mitchell, who took the
helm in 1978, put it in “Critical Inquiry and the Ideology
of Pluralism,” “there were simply too many other interesting
things coming in...to immure [the journal] in the gray walls of
Chicago’s critical tradition.”
Mitchell’s essay appeared the year after
Critical Inquiry reached a major milestone with “Writing
and Sexual Difference,” one of the first scholarly looks at
feminist criticism. Elizabeth Abel, then a coeditor and an assistant
English professor, spearheaded the 1981 special issue. “The
time was simply right for it,” says Abel, now an editorial
board member and professor of English at University of California,
Berkeley. “The contributors were themselves brilliant young
women in the early stages of their careers, and it was the moment
at which the intellectual possibilities of feminist criticism were
suddenly becoming apparent.”
At Critical Inquiry “Writing and
Sexual Difference” set a precedent for showcasing cutting-edge
ideas, Mitchell says. Yet it was “‘Race,’ Writing,
and Difference”—a 1985 issue edited by Gates which introduced
“race” as a meaningful category for studying literature
and shaping theory—that became a criticism classic and the
journal’s biggest seller to date. Of course, not all editorial
gambles win high praise, a lesson learned when Critical Inquiry
ran Jacques Derrida’s 1988 partial defense of Paul de Man.
After his 1984 death, de Man, like Derrida a founder of deconstruction
and a contributor to the journal, was revealed to have written for
1940s pro-Nazi publications. Derrida’s article on de Man spawned
passionate responses, which appeared in a later issue, and, Williams
recalls, some “people who had been interested in Critical
Inquiry were no longer interested.”
Despite
the backlash, the journal survived, growing in size—it now
boasts a staff of five (besides the coeditors and editorial board),
including a College intern—and scope. With support from the
provost’s office in 1989, Critical Inquiry established
a lecture series, hosting four or five talks a year. The journal
has since found a champion in President Don Michael Randel; the
longtime fan has channeled more money its way, funding the symposium
and a four- to six-week visiting professorship. The Critical
Inquiry visiting professor—most recently Julia Kristeva,
a psychoanalyst who teaches at the University of Paris VII—delivers
two public lectures and leads a seminar. As Mitchell sees it, “We’ve
become more conscious of a public role.”
That role comes at a price—even with the
extra support. Critical Inquiry, though financially viable
and in the black, he says, still has to pinch pennies. Perhaps more
worrisome than budget crises (which, after all, are endemic to academic
journals), circulation, which peaked at around 4,500 in the late
1990s, has dropped to about 3,000 today. Williams attributes the
current decline partly to budget cuts at university libraries, which
represent about half of Critical Inquiry’s subscribers.
Individuals make up the rest, and of those fewer graduate students
are willing to pay for hard copies when their schools provide online
access.
On the flip side, thanks to the journal’s
Internet presence, he believes that overall readership is up. Subscribers
are privy to its complete works on a password-protected site. (For
$165, institutions receive both the print and electronic versions.
The same deal costs individuals $42 and students $28. Institutions
can get the electronic-only edition for $149.) For nonsubscribers,
the editorial office’s 10-year-old Web site (www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/)
displays excerpts of each issue’s essays about two months
before their print publication and other features including “Rough
Cut,” a collection of preliminary, unedited articles.
Yet circulation may be more than a technology
or money matter, at least for Critical Inquiry’s
general-interest readers. The public—academics included, as
evidenced by the symposium’s tone—is consumed with geopolitics,
and the media have seen interest in theory-centered articles wane
since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “The temperature
of the times,” suggests Robert Vare, AB’67, AM’70,
a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, “has caused
a recession in the big cultural idea pieces. They may be out there,
but, because the appetite isn’t there, they’re struggling
to be born.” Still, life being cyclical, Vare believes theory
will make a comeback. “Things are pronounced dead so facilely.”
Critical
Inquiry
Hit List
Publishing essays that spark debate
and break new ground, Critical Inquiry has
secured a reputation as a must-read for literary and
cultural critics. What’s more, its traditional
fare yields passionate responses—not always favorable.
“We will accept something that pisses off the
expert,” journal editor W. J. T. Mitchell explains.
Here are five issues (or resulting books) that Mitchell
and senior managing editor Jay Williams offer as ideas
with staying power.
[more]
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That comeback might be subtler than the broad
approaches of past decades, if April’s symposium is any indication.
The event “marked an acknowledgment of transition into a new
stage of theory, which is somewhat more complicated and sober than
it was in the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s,” Mitchell
concedes. “It seems that new theories are coming from all
kinds of places around the globe,” unlike 15 to 20 years ago
when French theorists Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan
dominated. A July 2001 New York Times article billed Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negris’ Empire (Harvard University
Press, 2000), a treatise on globalization, as a potential watershed.
“It came at a point when people were searching for the next
big theory, the next big ’ism,’” Williams says.
But Empire ultimately failed to spark a movement, signaling
that “what’s really dead is the need to attach labels
to systems of thought.”
While Critical Inquiry seems content
to keep seeking out fresh theories—earth-shattering or not—what
about their meaning to the masses? “It’s a kind of trickle-down
value,” Mitchell suggests. He offers the trendiness of homosexuality—think
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace—by
way of illustration. “Homosexuality is in,” he says.
“The whole theory of sexuality and queer theory [was] tried
out in our pages,” as early as 1984, “and now it’s
nighttime TV. Theory does make something happen. I think it underlies
the important world events”—including current affairs
in Iraq. Coeditor and English professor Lauren Berlant agrees: “As
we see in any historical crisis, thought matters, but you can’t
chart in advance how it will matter.”
In the meantime, scholars continue to write
for upcoming issues. “The mailbag is always full,” Mitchell
notes, and the journal recently received an essay from Derrida.
Though there may be no real measure of Critical Inquiry’s
influence, this much is certain: the symposium drew enough intellectual
diehards to fill an auditorium (and to merit a live video feed in
Swift Commons). The journal will reprise the conversation at Beijing’s
Tsinhua University as part of a June conference, The Ends of Theory.
“I do think we’ve become more savvy about publicity,”
he says, showing off some new promotional gear, a royal blue T-shirt
with the message “Critical Inquiry, Theory Driven” emblazoned
across a Harley-Davidson-styled logo. Theory, it suggests, is one
great ride.
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