When Paul de Man fussed about the future of critical inquiry, he deployed a meteorological trope: "The spirit of the times is not blowing in the direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism."¹ Once the romantic coinage has been transposed into something more effable (Hazlitt's spirit of the age now behaving like the wind), you can literalize the trope and, in an effort to test the direction of theoretical breezes, simply moisten your index finger and hold it up.
     And, yet, if you're a middle-class male under the age of twenty (living in Chicago or Beijing, Tokyo or London), you'd probably stick up a thumb instead. This is because, for the GameBoy generation, the thumb has evolved into the digit of choice. As Sadie Plant explains (from the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick), thumbs have not only become stronger and more dexterous than any other finger; they're also deployed ambidextrously and with uncanny efficiency on all keypads. They're also used to ring doorbells. They're used to scratch. And to point.
    New technology, fully manifest within the everyday, has already transformed manual technology (that is, the human hand). We're not just in the midst of losing the technologies that make the rhetoric of inscription, impression, trace, and erasure make sense. And we're not just in the midst of an altered temporality and spatiality, a change in the human sensorium, a proliferation of hyperrealities. The hand itself has become a new scene where dramas of the advance guard—where relations among the emergent, the dominant, the residual, and the obsolete—have become, say, digitized. Which may amount to no more than describing the digital age as a digital age.
    But I mean to be suggesting that when we think of the future of criticism and theory we need to think about a generation whose cognitive and physical differences may be metonymically marked by any turn or scroll of the page unconsciously thumbed.
   
Relevance/Irrelevance
    As one of the coeditors who's had the chance to learn from the editorial board's remarks about emergent critical issues and paradigms, I'm struck by the tensions (both described and enacted) that give the commentary clear shape and struck by the ways these questions about a journal (not exclusively this journal) prompt other questions about disciplinarity and institutionality, as about the systems (of education, knowledge formation, academic dissemination) that Critical Inquiry both inhabits and animates. This in the midst (tonight) of talk about the "pregame excitement in the White House," coupled with the transparent excitement (fully reminiscent of the Spanish-American War) of reporters "embedded in the military ranks," and rounded off by the excitement of Wall Street, the market's buoyant response to war at last.
    We live in a political climate—"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe. And what I believe—and I believe what I believe is right"²—where the traditionally critical roles of the humanities and the human sciences (be it the defense of reason or of communicative action, the critique of rhetoric or of symbolic violence) promise less and less purchase on the magnitude of what feels like the "public delusion." But as _i_ek says about a great range of phenomena, the problem should not be considered a matter of (false) belief; it is, rather, a matter of action: people don't really believe that the mass media grant them transparent access to reality, for instance, and yet they behave as though they do. When, then, does all our demystifying analytical work begin to look like mere condescension?
    "We may no longer be hearing too much about relevance," de Man wrote in the late 1970s, "but we keep hearing a great deal about reference."³ In the subsequent decades, though, relevance proved more compelling than reference. Although, in the board's retrospect, relevance may seem to have been more fantasy than fact, it's a fact that feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies continue to transform the way teachers and students view themselves and the world. But it is also the case that irrelevance, however irritating, is not necessarily an unproductive condition (though it is an unhappy one). The separation of language and politics was the enabling condition of Russian formalism (before being attacked by the Marxist establishment in the late 1920s), and the will-to-relevance too often forecloses analytical description on behalf of prescription. Needless to add, engaged criticism has depended on analytical models (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and so on) that hardly began by presuming political efficacy. Of course, if there's one thing that engaged criticism has taught us, it is that irrelevance itself is a fantasy. Nonetheless, should any of us find it difficult to justify the "utility" of studying the humanities (on behalf of a progressive agenda, let alone a traditional one), this may mean that we're not succumbing to utilitarian reason and not articulating a place for humanistic thought within the ideology of the U.S. service economy. At its best, then, critical inquiry will eventually prove itself useful (in the classroom, in the university, for counterpublics and for more general publics) while resisting any immediate dictate of utility. 
   
Disciplinarity/Interdisciplinarity 
    I can't think of this thirtieth anniversary without thinking of another thirtieth anniversary (celebrated 28 Feb. 2003), the anniversary of Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program. That act of self-celebration, though, was also an act of self-defense, the aggressively nondisciplinary program having endured increasing fire (especially in 2000) for, say, its lack of discipline (its lack of clear differentiation from cultural anthropology and comp lit, its lack of consistent standards, its lack of a clear mission). This is just one story from the broader, national narrative that Harry Harootunian tells about the increasing fragility of interdisciplinary institutional success. Other stories are less recent. I remember the day (1 Dec. 1987) I watched a graduate student from another department taping xeroxes of a New York Times article to our mailboxes: "Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper." The theatricalized implication (about a group of students increasingly devoted to Antonio Gramsci and Michel de Certeau) was that the collaborationist roots of our apparent commitment to theory (our apparent conspiracy against literature) had been exposed at last. Any memory of the logic of substitution whereby the "de Man controversy" became the "theory controversy" makes it clear that what we call theory is perennially threatened. Which is because, at its best, it threatens. 
    When interdisciplinarity means appropriating modes of knowing (and not just objects of knowledge), it also threatens, but it will remain unclear (if in some sense obvious) just how and what it threatens until we have a better understanding of what disciplines are—until, for instance, we have clearer accounts of what Lorraine Daston calls the epistemology and practices of the humanities. But how will some future view of the disciplines (a theory of disciplines) begin from an appropriately transdisciplinary point of view? Perhaps by combining historical epistemology (a history of what counts as knowledge, what counts as a fact) and anthropology (the study of pedagogical and experimental practices, in the manner of Bruno Latour), but not without attention to the rhetorics (linguistic, numerical, visual, spatial) deployed in the production and reproduction of the reality effect, the materiality effect, the knowledge effect within specific interpretive communities. And not without some comparative, international economic history of higher education, as of universities in their uneven relation to other institutions and agencies. Hmmmmmm.
    No doubt, it is only the august formalism of a systems-theoretical approach (its second-order observation of observation, its attention to initial acts of designation and distinction) that currently holds real promise for an account of academic disciplinarity as such. But if a discipline begins to look like nothing more than a self-sustaining and self-referential subsystem, then critical inquiry and Critical Inquiry begin to look like nothing but modes for producing reusable results, for preserving a system's requisite instability, the dissent on which communication depends. The second-order functionalism makes monkeys of us all. And it may well be in unconscious anticipation of such a fate (within theory), if not in conscious response to Niklas Luhmann's dismissal of the European habits of thought in Frankfurt, that traditional humanistic questions—about ethics, aesthetics, affect, agency—have reasserted themselves, ironically substantiating his point about how autonomous systems resist integration and (or as) disintegration.
    No description of disciplinarity as such can respond to the range of questions being asked by our board or the kinds of questions posed by literary studies these days. Once issues of literariness and of form recede from view, the discipline of literary studies (in considerable contrast to other disciplines) enjoys extraordinary elasticity.  We've all read essays (somewhere else) where Freud and Foucault, Baudrillard and Booth are each and all cited as sources of analytic authority without concern for the incompatibilities among them. At such times one ought to wonder whether the discipline of literary studies is really a discipline at all and whether its vitality as a "discipline" doesn't depend on its nondisciplinarity (which has enabled a literary studies journal, Critical Inquiry, to become, say, something else).  
   
Humanism/Posthumanism
     "Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate."⁴
    The posthumanism of the human sciences feels more radical than the humanist's posthumanism-as-usual because communication has displaced language and because human language has not even retained its status as a privileged communicative medium. The human sciences have begun to catch up with the posthumanism of cybernetics—the dissolution of the human subject, the dismissal of any subject/object relation, the erasure of the animate/inanimate distinction, and so on.⁵
    A particular (and particularly humanist) concern of mine—objects, artefacts, things—requires that the spirit of critical inquiry be blown toward reference, but it also means starting somewhere besides the subject. Still, what Arjun Appadurai has termed methodological fetishism, which is necessary to bring what Georg Simmel called object culture into focus, could devolve into material history at its most banal in the absence of, say, object relations in an expanded field—some psychological and cultural, historical and political understanding of how inanimate objects (from Gawan arm shells to Parisian ashtrays) help human subjects (individually and collectively) to constitute (or reconstitute) themselves.
    Daniel Libeskind's proposal for a new World Trade Center—where the visible slurry wall will be heroized as a witness to disaster and as testimony to the endurance of built space—provides the best publicized recent record of our investment in the potency of the material world, its ability to both mark and disavow an unendurable absence. Within America's state of mourning for the lost towers themselves, they seem to have become something like the Lost Object as such, the destroyed materialization of what is always missing.
    Jean Baudrillard's "Requiem for the Twin Towers," his contribution to the debate on 9/11 that was broadcast in France, 23 Feb. 2002, reads like an exaggerated version of what was already legible in the daily press: the inexorable (re)animation of the object. "Seeing them collapse themselves, as if by implosion, one had the impression that they were committing suicide in response to the suicide of the suicide planes." Even worse: "So the towers, tired of being a symbol which was too heavy a burden to bear, collapsed, this time physically, in their totality. Their nerves of steel cracked."⁶ Beside Eric Darton's Divided We Stand or William Langewiesche's Unbuilding of the World Trade Center, Baudrillard's requiem reads like an offensive sleight, an aggressive act of fetishization that obscures the human tragedy and the history of human labor congealed within the buildings, as well as the labor of destruction and the labor invested in rendering the absence real, in cleaning up the apocalyptic scene. And yet Baudrillard's act of personification is simply one line in this story of the social afterlife of things, the ceaseless circulation of the towers on behalf of various agendas, be it selling hamburgers or waging wars.
    Nonetheless, if some poetics of the everyday drew a different kind of attention to Baudrillard's very traditional trope, it might prompt an account of how our personifying instincts express a posthumanism of their own—not the denial of agency and autonomous subjectivity, but the extension of consciousness and agency to nonhuman objects. (This is to suppose that the epistemological and ontological effects of new technologies might be recast as the belated literalization of our most familiar figures.) I suspect that it is only such an extension, in a very different register but with no less animism, that will enable us to fathom the sameness of what we too easily call the nonhuman, to think beyond the ontological divide between "humans" and "things," and thus to imagine what Michel Serres calls the natural contract between the world and the earth. In the absence of some such contract, we can do little more than ask a subsequent generation to plug up the dikes with their thumbs.