I want to speak to two concerns that are visible in many of the comments circulated: the tendency to understand the present as a guide to the future—a historicizing endeavor—and the concern about being political (that is, working out the social purpose of criticism). Robert Pippin quotes Hegel (Philosophy of Right): “`philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts’” (p. 000). Criticism is not the same as rigorous philosophy. But it is, in our case, infected with the spirit of that statement from Hegel. Criticism must reflect its own time. It has to both interpret and speak to the world. That is the condition for effective critique. Critique has to figure out the now. “To live in and work for our century,” is how Catharine Stimpson puts it (p. 000). Our commentators share a concern about being able to name, designate, and describe the time or period we are passing through.
    Most of the comments assume a certain definition of the present. Science and technology are critical to this definition. Tom Mitchell’s provocative opening questions set the tone: has “theory” become “therapeutic” and “timid” faced with “rapid transformation” in the media, biotechnology, and in the logic of capitalism itself? Whether or not theory has become timid, many commentators agree with Mitchell’s understanding of the present. Hansen points to the conditions created by “the unprecedented acceleration of circulation and technological innovation with the advent of digitality” in which “consciousness is more than ever inadequate to the state of technological development, its power to destroy and enslave” (p. 000). McGann, Abel, Daston, Stimpson, Miller, and others advocate engagement on the part of the humanities with these new developments in science and communications technology and even beyond them into the realms of economics, rational choice theory, primatology, and so on.
    The periodizing instinct and the political instinct are deeply connected. “To the extent that it [thinking] is invested in figuring out the now—that is to say, the enigma of the world,’ writes de Lauretis, “the thinking of theory is political.” How we periodize our present is thus connected to the question of how we imagine the political. The reverse must be true as well: that every imagination of the political entails a certain figure of the now. That is why, when we begin by defining the now in a very particular way as our first step of analysis, we have in a sense already committed ourselves to certain understandings of the political. These very understandings themselves, however, may need to be more interrogated than assumed.

The statements from the members of the board treasure the ideal of a deliberative democracy in which university-based humanities academics play the role of public intellectuals with the aim of furthering the causes of social justice and democracy. Harootunian thus explains the social-political use of theory: “What Critical Inquiry might do . . . is to provide a forum for the recovery of theory’s true vocation as a condition for beginning the difficult labor of trying to envisage a discourse on modernity that speaks to the world outside the academy” (p. 000). Even Mary Poovey’s cautious call for a more rigorous Critical Inquiry that remains confined to academia—“writing to each other (and for our students) is OK”—envisages a transcendental, albeit academic, public that acts as a repository of a “collective understanding of what it means to be human” (p. 000). Poovey’s caution is well taken, but her statement begs the question of the political, for what divides even an academic “collective understanding” of the meaning of being human are our different and colliding normative visions of human collectivities. And that is where the political comes in even if the academic-public intellectual is always situated at a distance from the writer in the mass media. Surely, the popularity of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism in the seventies and eighties owed itself, to some degree at least, to the expectation that these theories would only make our democratic imaginations ever more vigorously democratic. Think of Foucault’s insurrectionary preface to Anti-Oedipus!

Yet what—coming as I do both from an imaginary West and from somewhere outside of it—I find a little troubling in our statements is our readiness to assume that both the now and the political are easily divined. It is as if all that Critical Inquiry needs to do is to find forms of practice adequate to our divinations of the present and the political. I read Harootunian’s description of “theory’s true vocation” from two contradictory perspectives. A split informs my sense of the present. It is somewhat like the negative condition that Pippin describes in his statement but with a different programmatic implication.

The split consists in this. The normative pictures of a modern society that I carry inside my head are, typically and necessarily, European or Western in origin. I think through an intellectual tradition in which one is able to spell out, at least in principle, the broad constitution of a just social order on an a priori basis (Marx on the Gotha program and Rawls on justice would be examples of this). I use this blueprint to critique existing inequities. Yet I recognize that there are political imaginations shaping popular politics all over the world today that escape or exceed our normative understanding of the political. These imaginations belong neither to the Left nor to the Right. But they have global implications for governance all over the world. Al-Qaeda is one example. Achille Mmembe has commented on the “necropower” that makes modern forms of war making and death dealing central to the reproduction of the social in many African postcolonial states.¹ Nearer home, for me, are the politics of the so-called Dalits (or ex-Untouchables) and “backward” castes in India. The previously oppressed—and in many senses, still oppressed—lower castes of India have in many places challenged traditional hierarchy and authority thanks to the functioning of electoral democracy in India, but have not necessarily produced forms of governance that I, as an academic intellectual, would recognize as good or just. These political mobilizations are not right wing; nor are they of the Left in any orthodox sense. I could have also given comparable examples from the other political scene I know a little bit about: the contemporary struggles of the Australian Aboriginals for recognition and justice.

What is important to notice about these new political formations in many parts of the world—and not only in the South—is that their transaction with the theory classes is not a simple matter of the latter speaking to them. In fact, these new political blocs do not any longer look to the theory classes of the university for guidance in political life. They use our rhetoric, skills, and services, but only pragmatically. They have their own ways of calculating the costs and benefits of their actions. There are memorializing and pedagogical aspects to what they do. But they do not conform to any theoretical version of a global subject; they are not the proletariat, nor they Hardt and Negri’s “multitude.” They act out of their sense of justice, but their understanding of what is just is fragmented, contextual, and always shifting.

I am not simply repeating a familiar story. There has always been a gap between the professoriate and the “masses.” This gap has been fundamental to the students of democratic theory. Marxists have long theorized the gap in terms of spontaneity and organization. It was the subject of conversation between Foucault and Deleuze in May ’68. But, overall, even within democracies the structures of power have been such that the theory classes have not lost any confidence in their capacity to judge and arbitrate. They have been able to assume the stance, as Harootunian puts it, of speaking to the audience outside the university, assuming that this audience would be interested in what we had to say or that at least we could teach them to be interested. Undergirding this was an implicit faith in a rational construction of politics. Being exposed to a rational elaboration of the state of the world, it was assumed, would help people to act rationally. This has been the Left's romance of truth.

Frances Ferguson points out that we may be “well past a time in which it is possible to think that distributing more information more widely will lead to a story like the one we … told ourselves about Vietnam” (p. 000). Al-Qaeda, the Dalits of India, the Australian Aboriginals are happy to use academics pragmatically, when convenient, but are not under any kind of tutelage to academia. This leaves us, the theory classes, in a peculiar situation. There is no political conversation any longer possible between the professoriate and the masses that can happen only on our terms. The world has moved beyond that point. People all over the world have in different ways taken up ideas of rights and democracy and put them in the service of causes we would perhaps never see, strictly speaking, as democratic; consider the apparent contradiction of there being “mass demonstrations”—a form of mobilization we associate with expression of popular will and movement toward democracy—in favor of the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan. Much of this development has taken place beyond the boundaries of the so-called West. That these developments are of profound significance to the West is proved by events of and since September 11, 2001.

These developments, however, by themselves do not give us any universal, normative horizons by which to judge them. When we feel called upon to make judgements about the world, we have no academically respectable alternatives to the originally European, universal principles we discuss and debate in the university. It seems to me that today’s disjuncture between theory and the world is not a mere repetition of the old problem of reality failing to measure up to our categories. It is not, therefore, a question of Critical Inquiry finding a politics that corresponds to its time. To be sure, future theory and criticism will have to come to terms with developments in science and technology and in particular with changes in technologies of transmission. But to the degree that “the twenty-first-century American scholar” is not just a provincially American figure but also someone who embodies the global, theory will also have to joust with what today exceeds the grasp of “Western” political thought in the domain of the political. For it is only by acknowledging the murkiness of the political today that we will configure a now so plural as not to be exhausted by any single definition.

With these thoughts in mind, I suggest two additional areas in which Critical Inquiry may take an active interest:

Global and heterogeneous imaginations of democracy. Political theorists of the South have spoken of plebian or Jacobin forms of democracy or excessive politicization to describe what popular uses of familiar democratic forms have amounted to. The negative adjectives—plebeian, excessive–are all pointers to the fact that the political domain now does not correspond to any preconceived ideas of the political. This noncommensurability calls for more attention.

Political religion. I do not need to belabor this point after 9/11. Talal Asad’s recent book on the idea of the secular and Bruce Lincoln’s book Holy Terrors have both underscored, in their different ways, the importance of faith in guiding contemporary imaginations of the political. Theory in Critical Inquiry needs to negotiate the terrain of political “theology.” ²