Is the curious passivity encouraged these days by more than one present-obsessed state undermining our belief in the necessity for critical inquiry? Else how can we imagine that its moment has passed? [P. 000]
    Frances Ferguson puts her finger on a phenomenon of the present moment as disturbing as the systematic dismantling of social programs and civil liberties or the pursuit of self-justifying wars: the cultivation, especially evident in the activities of the Bush administration, of a pervasive sense of helplessness in the American populace. What Lauren Berlant calls “political depression” has settled in. It accompanies and enables changes that ought to be unthinkable. In the face of this manipulated despair we need the energizing stimulus of critical thinking and, indeed, must continue vigorously to make the case for such thinking in part by welcoming it in an expanded variety of forms and voices. As Bill Brown notes, there may even be some necessary or saving virtue, a promise of future effectivity, in the apparent irrelevance of critical voices in a time when the rhetoric of leaders and the news media are almost unbearably, and certainly depressingly, tied to accomplished deeds.
    I’m encouraged by both the passion and the particular visions in the responses to Tom Mitchell’s call for statements. Miriam Hansen’s call for a “political ecology of the senses,” Danielle Allen’s for the exercise of a “sociological imagination” that embraces equally politics and literature, Harry Harootunian’s desire for a history and ontology of our geopolitically differentiated now, Robert Pippin’s for a post-Kantian, present-day “account of the necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn’t” (p. 000), or Mary Poovey’s, Lorraine Daston’s, and Jerry McGann’s demands for more thorough immersion in other epistemologies and new media—each of these is the kind of project capable of generating anew the energies of critical inquiry. Together they suggest the basis for an organized and collective response to the potentially disabling pessimism that present events, at home and abroad, threaten to induce. I very much hope that we will take up these challenges in future special issues.
    It is probably also time for some new initiatives in the regular quarterly fare of the journal. From my personal circle of CI-reading friends, relatives, and academic colleagues, I hear of diminished expectations bred of a certain overfamiliarity they believe they encounter in the style, tone, language, and the obligatory intellectual reference points of many of the articles—even if the subject matter and the argumentative positions vary. (But almost every reader reports one or two pieces in each issue that continue to surprise and arouse curiosity, I’m happy to say.) If our readers think they can predict the style or the content of the journal then we are beginning to repeat ourselves and will not survive. For the journal to set itself against the kind of intellectual and political anomie that contemporary political events encourage, it needs to convey more effectively the continuing excitement and critical force of making social, philosophical, or political ideas legible—whether in the forms of everyday life, the events of past and present, or various types and instances of cultural expression. Daston offers some concrete suggestions for new kinds of material we might solicit and publish in the form of multiple ongoing series: confrontations with rival and unfamiliar frameworks of interpretation, “translations” of foreign modes of inquiry, reflections on remarkable events or performances in nonprint media, explorations of “how humanists know what they know” on the model of studies of the epistemology and practices of other disciplines, occasional essays that render visible and curious the invisible stuff of everyday life. The extended series—or rather several of them at once—would be an excellent way to vary the content of the individual issue while pursuing a more systematic program of intellectual investigation—exactly the combination of the curious particular illuminated by critical and theoretical self-consciousness that I take to be at the center of what we mean by critical inquiry.
     I would also like to see CI combat more vigorously false oppositions between the aesthetic and the critical that are once again current (producing a curious sense of déjà vu for those of us who study the late nineteenth century). Like Bob von Hallberg and Danielle Allen, I would urge us to pay more attention to that critical thinking which takes “creative” or “aesthetic” forms—the poem or painting, film or performance that executes its own form of critical inquiry into the conditions and controlling ideas of contemporary life, or the translation or new poem or painting that responds critically to another poem or painting. The journal could be a stronger advocate for the critical value of such productions, both by including more essays that engage the state of contemporary poetry, fiction, music, and visual arts (particularly as these constitute critical responses to present conditions) and, on occasion, by publishing pieces that themselves take nondiscursive forms or include both discursive and poetic, fictive, or pictorial elements. The latter sorts of pieces may perhaps also enable that salutary reimmersion in the resistant stuff of things that Bill Brown and Richard Neer want us—all thumbs but still able, we hope, to grasp the material quirkiness and curiousness of the not-yet-virtual—to give our renewed and enlarged consideration. I’d like to see such pieces made part of some tough rethinking of the aesthetic in its political and social meanings.
    Another area in which I would hope to see more serious exploration: the symbiosis between located and traveling cultures and, especially, the mechanisms of conversion and translation (of currencies, systems of measurement, written expression, pictorial conventions, beliefs) that have made such symbioses a recurring historical phenomenon. By traveling cultures I mean the networks of affiliation and shared cultural practices that have both supported and in turn made possible trading cultures at one time or another (Jews, Arabs, Armenians, but the list could be greatly extended), but also the specialized cultures of those who travel to sell their labor—agricultural migrant laborers, sailors, mercenaries, . . . and scholars. So much of the imaginative and historical work of the last decade or so has focused on the inevitable losses and costs, especially of less-than-voluntary travel—the situation of the displaced, the emigrant, the refugee—but the focus has usually been on the losses and slippages, the distortions and breaks in communication or history, personal and collective, that such forms of travel have meant. (Sometimes these losses are recuperated as the gain of shedding ingrained habits of assuming individual or national identity.) What I think needs more sustained attention is the creative aspects of repeated or perpetual conversion that accompany the progress of both persons and things across borders and between fixed cultures, the particular work of more or less permanent travelers who stand partly outside of (psychologically, at least) yet are essential to the nation-state or the empires where they are temporarily located. What do these traveling groups bring in turn to the relatively more fixed cultures attached to land and political states, and how do they—or might they—change them? What are the forms of traveling cultures and the practices of translation today? Although I would envision this as an area for renewed historical scholarship (and there are some recent works of both history and fiction that suggest an emerging fascination with just this phenomenon, particularly focusing on the trading networks that linked Europe, Asia, and northern Africa from the late classical period through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance), it also needs broader theorizing that will draw firmer links between the ordinary practices of translating or converting various forms of currency or the artifacts that they produce (including poems and pictures but also books and raw materials and traveling artifacts like the Mokka expresso pot) and the existence of specialized traveling cultures in the midst of the nations and empires that have so stubbornly refused to fade away since 1989. This might be one way to reconceive the place of critical inquiry, as the work of just such a traveling culture of scholars and academics. But to do this would also—helpfully, I believe—rediscover the close kinship between critical and creative acts of translation and transmission.
    I hope that critical inquiry and Critical Inquiry will not yield for a moment to political depression. Against the insidious effects of widespread disgust with what’s happening around us, the journal’s most important function remains that of reminding us of the pleasures and possibilities of thinking hard, complicated, and difficult conjunctions, including those of the social and political with the aesthetic, the technological, the philosophical—as they bear on the mundane, banal, or depressing events of everyday life. This exercise of our intellectual muscles outside the tracks of the already familiar or of the particular epistemologies of our respective academic disciplines will be needed more than ever if the looming alternative really is more self-help and self-care books or a failure to see—let alone make others understand—how cultivating our own particular academic garden patches can be of interest to anybody else. Not that we should cease to keep a vigilant eye on the grammar and diction of our authors. Despite the efforts of our in-house editorial staff, some of our essays pick up the same keywords and rely on the same set of obligatory references, dispensing with the more careful exposition that a truly interdisciplinary journal should feel compelled to provide. With the help of our authors, we could do better here in the future. Reading the journal—and the much larger stack of submissions—at its best should suggest questions not yet posed or not posed for our particular area of interest, opening the stagnant waters of isolated inquiry to what we hope will be invigorating access to moving currents of thought.
    There is also, we hope, a more public virtue to the kinds of essays CI looks for. Ordinarily the editors can’t share the pleasures and frustrations of the debates at our monthly editorial meetings, though we’d like to think that reading is equally spirited and vocal elsewhere. This spring’s symposium—and the published symposium that you are reading now—temporarily makes visible and audible authors and readers to editors and vice versa. It’s a rare opportunity to affirm a collective sense of purposeful resistance to the debasing of thought and language and the deadening of will that face us with every morning’s paper and to affirm a continued commitment to that form of critical inquiry that refreshes and reinspires even (or especially) when its arguments are most dense and difficult and their modes of explanation alien.