diacritics / fall 2001

67

IN THE WAKE OF
CULTURAL STUDIES

GLOBALIZATION, THEORY, AND THE
UNIVERSITY

TILOTTAMA RAJAN

1

Theory today has become an endangered species, as evidenced by the resistance to
difficult language. This is not to deny that it leads a quasi-life as the domesticated ground
for what has replaced it, or as a form of prestige: a signifier for “cutting-edge” discourses.
But in using the term here, I refer to the work that came into prominence after the Johns
Hopkins conference on “The Structuralist Controversy” (1966), the modes of thought it
made possible, and the antecedents for such thought going back to the late eighteenth
century. Like the humanities generally, this Theory has become submerged in Cultural
Studies,

1

which displaced it in the nineties as a central concern of institutes,

interdisciplinary programs, and lecture series. “New” academic undertakings in the
humanities are by definition those that have a cultural focus. Occasionally we come
across programs in “Theory and Cultural Studies” which equate fields that could overlap
dialogically but are not identical.

Let us grant that practices at the ground level of teaching are more diverse because

hiring has occurred over generations; or that there are no absolute epistemic shifts because
of what Mary Poovey calls a process of “uneven development,” in which “emergent”
“rationalities” develop from “and retain a constitutive relationship to . . . residual domains”
[Social Body 14–19]. At the level of marketing and image (and thus also the self-image
of academics), Cultural Studies has become the primary focus of North American
academic publishing in the humanities,

2

which thus reimagines itself in terms of the

globalism of culture rather than the nationalism of “literature,” even as the wider

An earlier version of this paper was published as “The University in Crisis: Cultural Studies,
Civil Society, and the Place of Theory” in Literary Research / Recherche littéraire 18.35 (2001):
8–25. I am grateful to the ICLA for permission to reprint material from this paper and to the
editor Calin Mihailescu for his support. Literary Research also included astute critiques of my
paper by Jan Plug, Marc Redfield, and Orrin Wang, from which this new version has benefited,
though perhaps not as much as it should have.

1. I use the capital letters to designate Cultural Studies as a disciplinary container for the

two varieties of cultural studies I go on to discuss.

2. Older subfields such as Romanticism and Victorianism continue to have book series through

Cambridge University Press and Palgrave. This, however, is not because of uneven development,
but because Britain’s place in the global economy is, among other things, to preserve her national
literature, albeit in a critical mode. Moreover, the Cambridge series publishes books on British
Romanticism, but not the comparatist studies or hybrids of philosophy and Romantic literature
that appeared from American university presses in the eighties.

diacritics 31.3: 67–88

68

technocratic apparatus thereby reduces the entire humanities to a form of “area studies.”
And as Heidegger presciently saw in 1938, publishing is a form of governmentality:
through the “prearranged and limited publication of books,” publishers “bring the world
into the picture for the public and confirm it publicly” [139]. On the other side, if a
space has been kept for Theory, it has migrated out of English into continental philosophy
departments and book series. The result has been an esotericizing and narrowing of
Theory to post-Heideggerian French philosophy: the most powerful current in American
continental philosophy departments—hence the survival of Derrida but not the early
Foucault, and hence the survival of a Derrida very different from the one who made an
impact in the seventies.

3

Why did Cultural Studies so readily replace Theory? And why focus on the loss of

Theory rather than literature, which has also entered the domain of the residual? After
all, Anthony Easthope, a decade ago, saw Theory as no more than the “symptom” of a
crisis leading from the collapse of literature to the emergence of Cultural Studies [5]. In
starting with the cathexis onto “culture” of an academic desire once mediated through
“Theory,” I suggest that both Theory and Cultural Studies are encyclopedic organizations
of knowledge that have therefore served as meta- or flagship disciplines for the
humanities. Constituted outside the regular structure of departments in programs and
“centers,” both have been responsible for a decentering innovation (recognizing the
emergence of knowledges outside traditional boundaries) and a recentering of the
humanities’ “mission” by which it addresses the university at large. The encyclopedic
impulse goes back a long way, whether it takes form in such gatherings as the early
cabinets of curiosities, in universities as attempts to gather different disciplines into an
institutional plurality, or in actual encyclopedias. Enkyklos paideia, meaning “circle of
learning,” is a gathering of subjects that are meant to be interrelated as knowledge by a
single individual, in contrast to indexical systems (such as dictionaries), which are
secondary reference tools that store information outside the mind for selective retrieval
by different people. Actual encyclopedias, from Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais to
the Encyclopédie and Hegel’s “philosophic encyclopedia,” have thus been intimately
tied up with existing or projected organizations of knowledge. They have functioned as
proto-universities, legitimizing a certain range of knowledges, a method for interrelating
them, and indeed a concept of what constitutes knowledge.

Both Theory and Cultural Studies have served as invisible encyclopedias for the

liberal arts, themselves a figure for a residual resistance to the multiplication and
autonomization of fields and the recasting of knowledge as information. That said, they
have distinct disciplinary investments that go back to a bifurcation in the Encyclopedia
after the Enlightenment. Briefly, the Encyclopédie marked a post-Baconian turn away
from the arts (which had not initially been distinguished from the sciences) toward an
intellectual public sphere constituted around technology, science, and politics, as well
as toward the encylopedia as a forum for new ideas rather than a consolidation of existing
knowledge. The other major Enlightenment encyclopedia was the Britannica, and so
this turn can be set alongside the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on a “Republic of
Letters” responsible for the diffusion of knowledge and the emergence of public opinion
[Yeo 173–74]. The Enlightenment encyclopedias have their parallel in encyclopedic
projects for the organization of knowledge. Adam Smith, for example, planned a
“Philosophical History,” a “grand synthesis of the human sciences . . . across the civic
and pedagogical domain of the university curriculum” [Duncan 40]. Within this episteme,

3. For a discussion of what distinguishes the early work of Derrida and Foucault from their

(quite different) later work, see chapters 4–7 of my book Deconstruction and the Remainders of
Phenomenology.

diacritics / fall 2001

69

political economy (as the management of a nation’s resources) and moral philosophy
(as the management of the self for the public good) were contiguous disciplines. The
Scottish Enlightenment was thus at the origins of what Kant later calls pragmatic
anthropology, which defines knowledge on the ground of culture.

As against the content-based encyclopedias of the Enlightenment, which Friedrich

Schlegel rejects [Behler 284], the German Romantics explored the possibilities of an
encylopedic method. The German “encyclopedia” is not a formal entity, but connotes
the interconnectedness of knowledge as well as its disparate comprehensiveness.
“Encyclopedia” is the term Fichte uses throughout his “plan” for the organization of
studies at the University of Berlin [e.g., 192]. The Schlegels made “literature” the ground
of knowledge, though hardly in the Arnoldian sense critiqued by Readings [70–88], in
which literature is part of political economy. On the other hand Hegel, who became a
Professor at Berlin in 1818, constructed a “philosophical” Encyclopedia, deploying the
term “philosophy” in a quite different sense from Smith. Hegel’s critique of “ordinary
encyclopedias” as “assemblage[s]” of topics “taken up in a contingent and merely
empirical manner” is part of his project of providing a rationale for education and the
organization of knowledge at the university [Encyclopedia 53]. Moreover, while German
Romantic “encyclopedistics” was directed against the fragmentation of knowledge by
the alphabetic encyclopedias, it was also aimed against the organization of knowledge
on the ground of the social as a purely positive domain [Hegel, Encyclopedia 53–54].
Additionally, then, though there were antagonisms between the “literary” and
“philosophical” encyclopedias, along the broad lines of Romanticism versus Idealism
[Hegel, “Sur l’enseignement” 33], in the longer term the two have much in common—
as has been evident in their increasing convergence from Nietzsche, through Benjamin
to deconstruction. Indeed lest we too readily equate the Romantic university with absolute
identity and aesthetic education [Readings 63], let us note Schlegel’s comment that the
encyclopedia is a “critique of idealism” [“Introduction” 255]. And finally, within this
general division between the social-scientific and the humanistic encyclopedias, “culture”
has not always been thought on the positivist side: the work of Simmel is profoundly
Hegelian, and Foucault’s early work on the clinic is very much part of the philosophical-
cum-literary encyclopedia.

A genealogy of encyclopedic thought-forms from post-Kantian idealism to the

present must await a longer study. But we will better understand what is at stake in the
culturalist turn if we consider it within such a genealogy. Indeed, both Theory and Cultural
Studies need to be approached through a history of organizations of knowledge—a
precedent for which is furnished by the early work of Foucault, who held a chair in the
“history of systems of thought.” Such an analysis could also consider how Theory might
enter into the domain of culture, and the defensive crystallization of “High” Theory
within post-Heideggerian philosophy and the turn to ethics (whose defenses are at work
here is an interesting question). But my focus here will be less on Theory than on Cultural
Studies, and less on a history of the latter or a mapping of its encyclopedic impulses
than on the more recent symbiosis between the cultural encyclopedia and globalization.
This reflection, then, falls into two parts, beginning with a critique of the current
organization of Cultural Studies and then turning more briefly to two other knowledge-
forms with encyclopedic ambitions: post-Kantian “philosophy” and its later return as
“Theory.”

70

2

We can begin with Cultural Studies, which some will argue no longer needs to be the
object of a critique since its effectiveness has been diluted by its amorphousness.

4

Thus

Readings, who in 1994 had not quite decided whether it was a spent force, complains
that Cultural Studies has become “dereferentialized,” encompassing the study of all
signifying practices [98–99].

5

I would suggest instead that the elasticity of the term

reflects its original encyclopedic mandate: a comprehensiveness not of contents but of
constituencies. As Easthope says, cultural studies operates on the “democratic principle
. . . that the discourses of all members of a society should be its concern” [7]. Emerging
in the fifties alongside “the Americanization of Britain [and] new forms of
modernization,” it sought to include the working classes as well as various subcultures
and later “work around gender and sexual difference” [Grossberg 24–26]. In its
beginnings it was thus a populist expansion of the bourgeois public sphere: a civil society
made up of groups bargaining for political power and formulating common interests on
their own terms.

As much as this original cultural studies promoted a form of “socialist humanism”

[Grossberg 7], the new complex that emerged in America in the nineties has a subtly
different encyclopedic mandate. Its aim—or effect—is to simulate the preservation of
civil society after the permutation of the classical public sphere into the “sphere of
publicity” where, as Habermas argues, public communication is no longer protected
from economic imperatives, and where the public is no longer a dialogically formed
collectivity but is collectivized through segmentation [Structural Transformation xii,
160, 175]. Far from being a spent force, Cultural Studies, I will argue, has undergone a
symbiosis with globalization, wherein its dereferentialization is what makes it dangerous
to some of its own original components. The new Cultural Studies complex may not be
a mirror in which individual culturally oriented critics will recognize themselves: indeed
if it is not, this critique will have served a purpose. But despite having failed as what it
was, and despite having become something else, a certain culturalism has “occup[ied]
the entire field of the humanities without resistance” [Readings 99]. I adapt the word
culturalism from what Clifford Siskin calls “novelism” as a naturalization of the novel.
The novel may have been the site of the new, but when “writing becomes just like
hunting,” novels (and likewise culture) are drawn into a consumerism that domesticates
them and, more importantly, deploys even individually subversive phenomena
collectively within an apparatus of power [185].

What has given culturalism its current dominance despite its lack of explanatory

power is precisely an inclusive vagueness that masks underlying contradictions. Both
British and American Cultural Studies have a functional identity as forms of canon-
revision that have ended the “High” cultural regimes of literature and now Theory. But
this said, the new Cultural Studies encompasses two very different tendencies whose
divergences are strategically elided in an institutional pax americana—an arrangement
enabled by the fact that the United States, as Readings notes, does not “legitimate itself
. . . by appeal to any particular cultural content but only in terms of a contract among its
subjects” [102]. The new Cultural Studies takes in populism and New Historicism; it is

4. Hillis Miller provides a further argument for the timeliness of seemingly belated critiques

in using the model of trauma. Something has indeed changed in the university, which he sees as
“irreversible” and thus not even amenable to the vocabulary of crisis. But as with trauma, we did
not experience the change when it happened, and experience its post-traumatic stress only when
repeating it in a later analysis [19–21].

5. While critical of Cultural Studies, Readings does also see it as the wave of the future [174,

183].

diacritics / fall 2001

71

antitheoretical and theoretical, and thus reduces factions. On the ground level are the
conglomerate of approaches described by David Simpson as the academic postmodern.
These include postcolonialism (though, I would add, not the work of Bhabha), some
kinds of gender studies (though not French feminism), and studies of popular culture
and “everyday life.” Simpson provides a trenchant analysis of these approaches as
nostalgically reverting to Benjaminian storytelling, autobiography, and subjective
experience, ostensibly to insist on local knowledge, but really to reinstate self-expression
and identity politics. Accusing it of a “narrowing-cum-pluralizing” focus, Terry Eagleton
likewise describes this cultural studies as concerned with the signifying practices that
constitute “the complex of values . . . and way of life of a specific group,” and thus as
allowing Arnoldian “literature” to continue as “cultural politics” through a shared
promotion of (social) subjectivity [15, 33–34, 39]. These approaches are humanisms
that often avoid Theory, although they are also the humanities’ anthropologically inflected
attempt to appeal to the same market as the social sciences. What they retain from the
theoretical revolution of the late sixties is “poststructuralism” as the oppositional
overthrowing of structures, but not the rigor of its linguistic turn.

6

As John Guillory

argues, these forms of cultural studies result in a canon revision that changes the contents
but not the forms of thought, the thematics but not the structure of scholarly inquiry.
And although this is not as insignificant a mutation as Guillory claims, it is true that
cultural studies of this kind is not theoretically innovative, which is why literature
departments have easily absorbed it into an existing template of textual, authorial, and
period study [3–84]. Hence also Eagleton’s complaint—typical of a broader Marxist
unease with Cultural Studies—that the study of the social, aesthetically abstracted from
the economic, leaves no room for “‘politics beyond . . . the particularisms of cultural
difference’” [31, 43].

However, the second kind of cultural studies is eminently theoretical. Examples

include the work of Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and Gregory Ulmer: theorists of
techno-poststructuralism and changes in mediality, whose work cannot be repatriated to
the study of texts or the establishment of collective identities. While the academic
postmodern fails to recognize its nostalgia for models that precede commodification,
this second cultural studies embraces technology so as to ally itself with science, progress,
and membership of the global scene. I mention these particular theorists because their
subject matter makes literally visible a shift in the very thinking of culture from education
or cultivation to technology,

7

or in Andrew Milner’s words from “culture as art” to

“culture as society,” and the instrument rather than opponent of industrialization [3–4].
But we could include under this rubric works such as Mary Poovey’s A History of the
Modern Fact, which explores one particular domain of “governmentality” or the study
of “the technologies and theoretical accounts” (the two being synonymous?) “by which
individuals were rendered thinkable as governable subjects” [147]. In her assumption
that the role of humanists is to provide a disciplinary critique of the social sciences—a
critique that is also a self-discipline in taking something nonhumanistic as its object; in
her “stubborn attachment”

8

to a massively detailed genealogy of the “fact” as a means

to this goal; in her choice of political economy as the metadiscipline of modernity going
back to the Scottish Enlightenment; and in her overlooking of competing disciplines at

6. On the nineties’ appropriation of poststructuralism into positivist forms of pragmatism

and activism that draw on (and domesticate) Deleuze and the later Foucault, see chapter 2 of
Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology.

7. It is worth noting that before the prominence achieved by Cultural Studies in literature

departments, its first entry (into Canada at least) was via communications programs.

8. I borrow the phrase from Butler’s perceptive psychoanalysis of the “disciplinary cultiva-

tion of an attachment to subjection” [102, and more generally 83–105].

72

the time that were not sciences of “wealth and society,” Poovey exemplifies cultural
study as the mimetic repetition of the technologization it studies.

A focus on technology as the shaping of nature by culture is not new. In 1907 the

Hegelian sociologist Georg Simmel, who founded cultural studies in an earlier form,
saw culture as the cultivation of natural propensities, even as he lamented its sacrifice of
“subjective being” to the disciplines of Hegelian “Objective Spirit.” He foregrounded
questions concerning “technology” and “technique.” Yet Simmel—who already wrote
on gender, fashion, and money—still had as his ideal the synthesis of Subjective and
Objective Spirit. That this could not happen without giving up an irreducible remainder
of singularity was “the tragedy of culture” [54–59, 70–72]. In the second kind of cultural
studies, however, culture does not try to be “education” as the leading out of what is
within; rather technology, in the Heideggerian sense of the word, names the manufactured
character of a disposable, manageable subject. While the current phrase “technologies
of the subject” seemingly contains enough rhetorical slippage to accommodate an older
sense of techne as self-cultivation, the technologized self has become raw material for a
new power complex. Publishers’ attempts to create a global academic consumerism by
displaying an array of technologized selves in their book catalogs and exhibits are but
one example of a spectacularization of speculative labor whose goal is assimilation into
what Baudrillard analyzes as an “industrial” model of differences. In this model,
differences are merely “marginal” and “are systematically produced in accordance with
an order which integrates them all as identifying signs” [88, 86, 93]. If catalogs and
exhibits are economic markers of this industrialization of scholarship as “culture,” its
containing intellectual form would be a social systems theory in which everything is
codified and contained (but not really everything, since the very notion of a social system
is exclusive).

The two cultural studies described above coexist, despite their profound disjunction,

because of common operational features that result in their performing the same work
of discursive exclusion and the redistribution of disciplinary power. Indeed this double
identity allows Cultural Studies to bypass the tragedy of culture in a seeming
accommodation of Subjective and Objective Spirit. This same dereferentialization is
also what makes the Cultural Studies complex structurally homologous to “empire” as
defined by Hardt and Negri. Empire is not imperialism, because it does not involve a
dominating relation between inside and outside [xii–xiii, 166]; in this globalized version
of liberal governmentality,

9

anyone can become part of the empire, as everyone can

participate in Cultural Studies.

Among the shared aspects of both cultural studies is a certain presentism that signals

the end of history. Although cultural studies of the humanist kind may deal with earlier
texts, it is oriented by today’s social politics. Cultural studies of the second kind may
also deal with earlier periods, as in Siegert’s tracing of changes in the mode of information
back to the rise of the postal service in the eighteenth century. But its informing ideology
of economistic thinking and technological domination—itself a symptom of reification
that one could psychoanalyze—is equally contemporary: it does not reflect on itself
within a historical framework so as to recognize that there are other ways of thinking
culture, let alone interdisciplines that mediate humans’ relationship to their world
differently.

A second feature of both cultural studies is their emergence in the shadow of the

social sciences. Cultural Studies is the humanities’ simulacrum of the social sciences.

9. For an analysis of liberal governmentality see Poovey, who distinguishes it from “sover-

eignty.” Whereas the latter rules by numbers, the former rules consensually by fashion and taste
[Making 31–32; History 147–49].

diacritics / fall 2001

73

74

Its dominance reflects the humanities’ insecure attempt to claim the same material ground
as the social sciences, while making themselves a soft-sell for, and a personalization of,
the social sciences. Whether we are speaking of the “orthopedic” and corporatist, or the
“critical” and leftist, social sciences—to borrow a distinction made by the Sorbonne
students in 1968 [Fisera 247–48]—the social is now the unquestioned ground of the
humanities. Nor do the humanities even want to claim a way of thinking the social from
the outside, as theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio do, when they engage
in a phenomenological analysis of technosocial virtuality that is tellingly elided in
characterizations of Baudrillard as a technotheorist. Thus in Cultural Studies in its current
form the chameleon literature survives, albeit at the cost of the close reading once
associated with the discipline [Miller 75–79]. But other areas—psychoanalysis and
notably philosophy—cease to matter in the reconfigured humanities. Or should we
perhaps say in the “human sciences”—the umbrella term that gathers up the humanities
into a social scientific culture?

This reconfiguration is by no means recent and is linked to a third aspect of Cultural

Studies: its teleology of “absolute self-transparency” based on total communicability.
As Gianni Vattimo points out, the “society of communication” and mass media produced
by an “intensification in the exchange of information” can be traced back to the rise of
the human sciences much earlier in the twentieth century, which also developed from
changes in individual and collective life “shaped directly by forms of modern
communication” [12–14]. Both in turn go back to Kant’s notion of pragmatic
anthropology, which is concerned with man as “his own ultimate purpose,” and thus
with a kind of governmentality or political economy first introduced by the Scottish
Enlightenment. “All cultural progress,” Kant writes, “aims at putting acquired skill and
knowledge to use in the world,” the “most important object of culture” being the
“knowledge of Man as a citizen of the world” [Anthropology 3–4]. Pragmatic
anthropology thus comprises those disciplines, in Vattimo’s words, that “give a ‘positive,’
as opposed to transcendental-philosophical, description of humanity, taking as their basis
not what humanity is by nature, but rather what it has made of itself . . . its institutions,
culture and symbolic forms”—in short its “technology” in Heidegger’s sense [Vattimo
14]. Cultural Studies is the latest version of what Vattimo calls the “transparent” society:
a term to whose critical undertones he is sensitive, but about which he remains reassuring
inasmuch as the literary—in the form of narrative and irony—is still there to protect us
from absolute transparency [36–39].

Though Cultural Studies had not been named as a field when Vattimo wrote in

1987, the term consolidates the emphasis he places on “the positivity of the [social]
phenomenon” in which everything can be communicated and given its code. As well,
the term accommodates the slippage in his argument between transparency as the
recognition of minorities and transparency as the expansion of the reach of the media.
At the same time, Vattimo’s genealogy masks the radicality of this new intellectual
configuration centered in media and information, by giving it a conventional paternity
in Kant and the “human sciences.” Indeed, in terms of my argument here, his
reintroduction of “narrative” as a way of restoring “opacity” and depth to the transparent
society comfortably reabsorbs the society of communication into the academic
postmodern. But in actuality, the development Vattimo traces has been far more radical.
For the current near-absolute hegemony of the pragmatic human sciences is a major
change from Kant’s time. It has led to an unprecedented structural transformation of the
academic sphere of which Cultural Studies is both cause and symptom. Given the
environment described by Vattimo—of multiple “others” and “local rationalities” [8–9]
that serve as a legitimation device for Cultural Studies and a palliative for its
industrialization of scholarship—Cultural Studies is no longer just one area of academic

diacritics / fall 2001

75

inquiry like Simmel’s sociology, at a time when there was also a place for philosophy.

10

Everything in publishers’ catalogs for the humanities is now “studies,” so that even if
“Cultural Studies” is separately indexed (as in a recent catalog from Duke University
Press), “American,” “Medieval” and “Literary” studies are all really Cultural Studies.
Moreover, because it includes all its others, Cultural Studies claims a certain universality
as what Hegel called Objective Spirit, indeed as the synthesis of Objective and Subjective
in Absolute Spirit, through the artificial coordination of cultural studies as identity politics
with cultural studies as techno-domination. The resulting complex is the organizational
structure for the transparent society, or rather for the academic globalization of this
society.

A fourth aspect of Cultural Studies is thus the way its syncresis of its differences

produces a specifically capitalist integration of knowledge into commodity production.
Cultural Studies, I have been suggesting, operates on two levels: it allows a limited play
to humanistic analyses of social subjectivity, on condition of making economics and
technology the metadisciplines for such analysis. As John Frow notes with satisfaction,
in Cultural Studies one no longer analyzes texts or artifacts in terms of their intrinsic
qualities but in terms of their mode of production (Beethoven is the same as the Rolling
Stones because both are recorded on compact discs), or the mode of their consumption
(reading, strolling, in short “the uses of representations rather than representations in
their own right”). The element of demographic revenge at work here is betrayed by
Frow’s comment that “consumption is that set of tactics by which the weak make use of
the strong” [23, 47–48]. Cultural Studies is apparently the empowerment of consumers
over authors. Nor is this just a version of reader-response theory, since in the latter
author and reader had a common ground in the text, whereas in Cultural Studies the
consumer triumphantly substitutes the economic for the authority of the aesthetic. Yet
under this illusion of taking back our lives vicariously through culture, we overlook the
way we too are rationalized and instrumentalized: in Cultural Studies readers and
spectators too are entirely economic creatures.

Economics, moreover, is not history. As Frow notes, conceding the tensions between

Cultural Studies and Marxism, “class analysis” has become irrelevant in advanced
capitalism, because the mass media and mass education, which “construct heterogeneous
global audiences,” “rather than being directly tied to the reproduction of an élite,” now
have “the more diffuse function of the differential formation of cultural capital” [97,
86]. The fascination with “capital” is telling. Moreover, “heterogeneous global audiences”
is an oxymoron that conceals a deep contradiction in claiming the synchronicity of the
unique and the universal, and the global reach of Western notions of “heterogeneity.”
That Cultural Studies has emerged into prominence after the end of the Cold War, as we
attain the end of history and geography, is surely no accident.

As these comments imply, the new Cultural Studies is involved in the globalizing

of academe. In a recent issue of PMLA on Globalizing Literary Studies, Paul Jay,
following Roland Robertson’s view that globalization is not new, concludes that its
extension to literary studies involves teaching postcolonial texts as part of “English [as]
a transnational mode of writing.” Cultural Studies as a “globalized (and globalizing)
practice” is part of this general expansion since it no longer confines the text to literature
[43-45]. On the one hand Jay exemplifies Guillory’s point about the self-consoling
resilience of literature departments that seemingly survive change simply by expanding
their corpus, even as he ignores the deep-structural shifts actually wrought by
globalization. On the other hand Jay’s Aufhebung of “postcolonialism” in a utopically

10. Indeed the post-Hegelian aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer in 1948 describes Simmel as a

“philosopher” [Worringer ix–xii].

76

Deleuzian “world literature in English”

11

is itself inscribed in one of these shifts. Inasmuch

as everything is inside “English,” inasmuch as English “contains multitudes,” this new
formation forecloses the metaphoric potential of postcolonialism—by way of Bhabha’s
concepts of alterity and migrancy—to be a more general “thought from outside.”

12

This

loss of a (political) unconscious is only one effect of globalization. Among its other
archeological shifts are the very study of literature under the sign of the economic; the
requirement that all sectors be economically represented in the curriculum, which is
most efficiently managed by reducing texts to cultural soundbites; and thus the
disappearance—symptomatically reflected in the turn away from poetry—of literature,
not as a corpus but as a discipline of slow thought.

This brings me to my final point, that Cultural Studies develops from Enlightenment

concepts of civil society, as an attempt to maintain this society transnationally in the era
of globalization. It thus purports to resolve a problem Hegel recognizes: that civil society
creates rather than ends colonialism [Philosophy of Right #243–46]. The term “civil
society” was developed by Locke, Ferguson, and Hegel, it being Hegel who distinguishes
it from the state and the family. Bürgerliche Gesellschaft implies both a distinctively
bourgeois formation and an association based on self-interest rather than an organic
community (or Gemeinschaft in Weber’s terms). As Hegel explains it, this association
follows the “system of atomistic . . . a general system of adjustments to connect self-
subsisting extremes and their particular interests” [Philosophy of Mind #523]. We shall
leave aside Hegel’s reservations about civil society which—unlike Ferguson—he saw
as an artificial accommodation, a symbolic resolution in Jameson’s terms. Hegel’s sense
of the structure of civil society is modeled on his account of the plant, which, unlike
Goethe, he saw as a collection of parts and which he opposed to the more genuine
organicity of the animal [Philosophy of Nature #343]. But the point is that though civil
society contains diverse subgroups, it mediates their antagonisms, holding together
different classes and interests by providing their members with recognition. Culture
plays a crucial role in this adjustment. In Hegel’s proto-Althusserian analysis, civility is
maintained by the police and judiciary, but most importantly for our purposes by
“Corporation”: guilds and learned societies that mitigate competitive individualism and
educate their members for life in the state [Philosophy of Mind #523–24].

It is this idea of Corporation that allows Ernest Gellner to identify it with freedom.

Gellner sees civil society as a modular structure, put together out of “non-suffocating,
optional yet effective segments”—a mobile arrangement in which an outmoded module
can be replaced without any change to the structure of society [93]. Political
“centralization with accountability” is thus limited by “economic pluralism,” resulting
in civil society as “a set of diverse non-governmental institutions” counterbalancing yet
not interfering with the state [5]. But as attractive as this sounds, Gellner’s civil society
is invisibly inflected by the shift from Habermas’s classical public sphere to the sphere
of publicity. For a condition of this society as shared culture is homogenization: “One of
the most important general traits of a modern society” is “cultural homogeneity: the
capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and
comprehension . . . in an anonymous mass society.” As Gellner continues, but without
irony, this standardization is the condition of possibility for the “mobility and thus the

11. In a manner typical of the current American pragmatist fashion for Deleuze, Jay rhapso-

dizes about how contemporary writing “is produced in a postnational, global flow of
deterritorialized cultural products appropriated, translated, and recirculated worldwide” [44].
While he limits himself to literature in English, world literature in English could easily also
include comparative literature in translation. On globalization and the decline of language study
see Miller [79–81].

12. I refer to Foucault’s phrase in Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside.

diacritics / fall 2001

77

substitutability of men” [104]. Though he claims that the result is an unprecedented
extension of “High Culture” as “the operational culture of an entire society” rather than
the “badge of a restricted social stratum,” it is more likely a gentrified mass culture that
provides the social glue against anarchy [106].

Cultural Studies is the epitome of this society: a pragmatic use of the humanities

within a modular structure that appears to promote dissidence. Its tiered architecture
accommodates what has long been a point of contention in Marxist theory between
agency and a more pessimistic sense of the social as the epiphenomenon of decentered
(super)structures [Milner 46–48]. Seeming to resolve this aporia, Cultural Studies
interpellates minority identities and localisms into a disciplinary complex which, in its
upper reaches (a refurbished New Historicism, hypertext theory, globalization studies)
does not criticize structure and reification but rather reprojects the affect of identity
onto a specular identification—either ascetic or jubilant—with technology and
economics. Cultural Studies is, in this sense, the end of Marxism no less than of
philosophy, but in a more profound way than Eagleton and Simpson realize.

13

The value of civil society consists in its permitting a continued conflict of the

faculties, as Kant put it, including a conflict of the pragmatic and the speculative. But
the liberal arts today, insofar as they make Cultural Studies their flagship discipline, risk
taking on some of the more ominous aspects of civil society as it has evolved within the
sphere of publicity. For despite the value of individual cultural studies, their para-
academic consolidation—within a common market of academic goods in which new
studies are additions to society’s common wealth—has coincided with an incipient
privatizing (and globalizing) of academic publishing.

14

Global civility is not politically

authoritarian and may be structurally decentralized, but its openness to dissidence has
subtle limits. Civility works through the forms of association, cooperation, and
Corporation. Civil discourse, moreover, requires a context-free language purged of
difficult terminology; it is thus a form of academic “society” at odds with what Jean-
Luc Nancy calls “community” and “singularity.” While society absorbs singularities
into a “common substance” or at least a democracy in which one is represented by an
ethnic or other group identity, community “has nothing to do with . . . fusion into a
body.” It occurs around a questioning of identifications, whether consenting or resistant,
such that “being in common means . . . no longer having . . . in any empirical or ideal
place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this ‘lack of identity’” [xxxviii].

3

What should be the nature of metadisciplinarity in a university not synonymous with
society, remembering that “university” originally meant a group of people and not a
place or institution? Given the limits of the current culturalist organization of knowledge,
it is now all the more necessary to keep a place for Theory, both in itself and through a
larger reflection on epistemic organizations that is itself inflected by Theory. Among the

13. Though criticizing it for promoting the social without the political, Eagleton does not

deal with technoculturalism but only with cultures as ways of life [30, 33, 85]. Simpson, while
critical of identity politics, sees in cybercultural theory a potential source of emancipation [166-
68].

14. I refer here to American university presses’ loss of their subsidies, a situation that is

somewhat different in Canada, where publication is still funded by the government in combina-
tion with the individual scholar or her university. In the UK Cambridge UP’s sensitivity to the
pressures of globalization is evident in the fact that it cancelled its Theory series because it was
not marketable throughout the former commonwealth.

78

more debatable conclusions he reaches,

15

Readings importantly argues that a university

of “dissensus” might take up the question of disciplinarity. He suggests that rather than
promoting an amorphous interdisciplinarity, in abandoning disciplinary grounding we
should retain “as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be
given to knowledges” [176]. In other words, the borders of disciplines, the outside that
opens inside disciplines, must be our way of working both inside and outside the
institution. Disciplinarity in this sense would be an ontological question and not simply
a question of governmentality. Readings also suggests that we should think from the
ruins of knowledge [169], an idea that echoes Nancy’s insistence that community is not
a nostalgic form of Gemeinschaft. “Society was not built on the ruins of a community”;
rather, community “is what happens to us . . . in the wake of society” [Nancy 11].

In this space I can do no more than gesture toward a larger genealogy of knowledge-

forms by noting two alternatives to the current organization: (post-)Kantian Idealism
read in the context of Romanticism, and deconstruction. Each emerged partly in response
to attempts to reorganize knowledge on the ground of the social: first through the Scottish
Enlightenment’s reconstitution of knowledge around political economy and anthropology
[Crawford 28], which produced an idea of the university very different from what
developed at Jena and Berlin; and then through the rise of the social sciences and the
decline of academic philosophy, which resulted in the French university crisis of the
sixties. It is also appropriate that neither knowledge-form is any longer part of the
dominant discourse. For this allows us to consider them in their own wake, as a thought
that comes after itself because it never quite achieved self-identity. As Orrin Wang notes,
Theory has not been free of its own resistance to theory: an “internal self-hypostatization
[and] self-anamorphosis into a human science” of which Guillory once accused Yale
deconstruction [Wang 36, 38]. Dwelling in the ruins involves probing those junctures
where past systems have gone against this hypostasis. Arguably this is what is happening
in the current deconstructive diaspora.

16

And it had already happened in the history of

Idealism, whose self-dissolution was the condition of possibility for a Theory still
involved in “transcendental reflection” [Foucault, Order 323] in the particular sense
that Schlegel uses the term [Philosophical Fragments #22]. In the course of this history
Hegel’s philosophical encyclopedia becomes a “literary” encyclopedia in the early work
of Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Lukács. For The Birth of Tragedy shifts the center of
knowledge from philosophy to aesthetics: a source of impossible, unavowable problems
for Hegel. In so doing it discloses a dissensus already present in Idealism and the pedagogy
modeled by an encyclopedia of the philosophical “sciences,” given the aporia between
science as certain knowledge and science as perpetual inquiry.

This aporia can be traced to the increasingly encyclopedic claims made for

philosophy between Kant and Hegel. Kant inherited from the medieval university an
arrangement of four faculties in which “philosophy” was both the general name for
liberal arts and a specific discipline within this “lower” faculty. Professors of philosophy

15. Arguably Readings oversimplifies the Romantic university by identifying it with Fichte

and Humboldt but not Schelling and Hegel, and with the Idealists’ writings on the university but
not their larger, encyclopedic work. He also too easily identifies literature departments with the
nation-state, thus ignoring other concepts of “literature” (from Schlegel to Blanchot) and con-
densing the entire period from David Masson to the New Criticism into a single paradigm.

16. Thus in response to the formalization of de Man’s work as a literary critical technique,

Gasché has tried to return to a sense of the uncanniness of his writing as a form of philosophy in
no way convertible into criticism. Also moving away from this institutionalization of deconstruction
as literary criticism, the de Manian diaspora in North America has tried to return to the roots of
deconstruction by turning from analysis of texts to work on trauma, community, history, and so
on, so as to take in the cultural, but differently from Cultural Studies.

diacritics / fall 2001

79

were therefore not attached to specific departments as we know them. Kant himself
taught anthropology and geography. Hegel did not just write the Phenomenology and
Logic but also lectured on anthropology, history, the history of philosophy, the natural
sciences, art, and comparative religion. Beginning a revaluation of its role, Kant tried to
make this coexistence of several disciplines in “philosophy” a cognitive as well as
administrative arrangement. The philosophy faculty was distinguished from the
professional faculties of law, medicine, and theology in terms of a principle of inquiry:
that of “science” or “the free play of reason” not subject to state control [Conflict 35,
43]. What Kant ironically but realistically accepted as the lower faculty thus had as its
domain all speculative knowledge as well as the epistemological relationships between
its branches.

17

But since this meant that the philosophy faculty included the empirical as well as

the theoretical,

18

Hegel sought to make philosophy more than method. The encyclopedia

of the philosophical sciences aimed to introduce “Idealism” into “all the sciences”
[Schelling, Ideas 272n]. It could thus include “positive” sciences, but not in regard to
their positive, “empirical” content [Hegel, Encyclopedia 53–54]. Idealizing the sciences
meant placing them in a continuum that led from nature to spirit. The encyclopedia was
thus the circle of learning traversed by consciousness as it proceeded from the sciences
of nature to those of spirit, trying to know itself through the disciplines in which it
produced itself, and often tarrying with the negative in its pursuit of the heuristic fiction
of absolute knowledge. With this “Idea” of a university in mind, Hegel developed both
encyclopedias of individual disciplines (such as the fine arts and nature), and the
Encyclopedia itself, which tried to comprehend (if not unify) all disciplines amenable to
philosophical reading.

It would be easy to see this encyclopedia as an imperialism of Philosophy, given

that Hegel makes Philosophy the macrosystem within which microsystems of other
disciplines are contained like wheels within wheels. But this encyclopedism, I would
suggest, is rather what makes Idealism a first form of Theory, or makes Theory an
organization of knowledge that emerges from the ruins of Idealism. For Hegel builds a
profound reflexiveness into his system through the doubling of “levels” as “spheres.” In
the subsumptive logic of the encyclopedia (which is by no means confined to the materials
in the Encyclopedia) each discipline is merely a level in the whole. Mechanics and
biology are levels in the sphere of natural science, which itself is a level leading to the
sciences of spirit. But conversely each level is also a sphere in its own right, made up of
further levels that must be understood on their own terms as spheres. The embedding of
micro- within macro- thus leads to sub-versions of the macrosystem by its components
that expose Philosophy to its margins and these fields to each other.

19

In the long term

the encyclopedism of philosophy thus effects a dereferentialization in the positive sense
of “break[ing] down existing structures of defense against Thought” [Readings 178].
For although philosophy for Hegel goes beyond Kant’s inscription of it as a form of

17. Kant writes that the “philosophy faculty consists of two departments: a department of

historical knowledge (including history, geography, philology and the humanities, along with all
the empirical knowledge contained in the natural sciences), and a department of pure, rational
knowledge (pure mathematics and pure philosophy, the metaphysics of nature and of morals).
And it also studies the relation of these two divisions of learning to each other. It therefore extends
to all parts of human knowledge. . . . The philosophy faculty can, therefore, lay claim to any
teaching” [45].

18. Thus Kant’s Physical Geography (lectures given from 1756–96) is far more empirical

than Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.

19. I discuss the self-reflection of the post-Kantian encyclopedia further in “(In)digestible

Material.”

80

thinking and acquires a content (an ideology of the emergence of Spirit), this content is
subject to the form of philosophy as “science” or the free play of thought. In this sense
philosophy remains, in the larger matrix of Romanticism, the asystasy that unworks the
Idealism (and imperialism) of Philosophy.

I shall return to the term “asystasy,” which Schelling uses to radicalize the Kantian

organization of knowledge as a conflict (Streit) of faculties. Philosophy for Hegel and
Schelling becomes a form of asystasy, not only because as “science” thought cannot
achieve closure, but also because of the very diversity of its materials. This same asystasy
is produced for Schlegel by “literature,” not as an empirical corpus but as a category of
thought. Indeed the fact that Romanticism looks for a principle of organization in two
such different forms as philosophy and literature is evidence of its asystasy. For just as
philosophy is the containing environment for Hegel to remember, repeat, and work
through other disciplines, so for Schlegel it is within literature that disciplines such as
history develop and rethink each other. It follows also that Schlegel’s literature, far from
being an Absolute as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy suppose, is as antidisciplinary as
Hegelian philosophy is interdisciplinary.

Schelling—Hegel’s friend, subsequent opponent, and always his dark interpreter—

used the word “asystasy” to describe the ambivalence of his own relation to systematic
thought. He too started by yearning for a system that would unify all knowledge.
Abandoning this idea, he borrowed the Greek word asystaton —which he glosses as
inner conflict and Widerstreit—to describe an organization of knowledge whose logic
consists in self-disruption [“On the Nature” 210]. Schelling compares knowledge to an
organism in which “doctors distinguish different systems,” nervous, digestive, and so
forth. Healthy subjects are unaware of this singularity of the body’s subsystems, since
the parts “live only in the whole” [213]. Yet Schelling questions this “health.” Kant’s
unfavorable comparison of metaphysics to mathematics because of its asystasy privileges
a crystal over the human body because it never falls ill, “while the latter hosts germs
[Keimen] of every possible illness” which are seeds of the future [212–13]. Given that
the corpus academicus is made up of disparate systems, Schelling asks how a single
individual can live “in the different elements of an organism,” if these parts are all
different. He answers that it is “one subject” who proceeds through the different areas
of knowledge, but the fact that the same subject thinks about art, religion, and physiology
does not mean that these thought environments are the same. Thus the subject is different
from itself: it cannot remain “in anything,” for if it did “life and evolution would be
inhibited” [215].

Schelling’s dissolution of the encyclopedia into a site for asystasy marks the

proximity of Idealism to Romanticism. For Idealism is no more than a project within
Romanticism. Idealism as the attempt to achieve Absolute Knowledge, the transformation
of consciousness into Spirit, and the systematization of knowledge through Philosophy,
is never anything but an “Idea” in the sense used by many Romantics. The Idea falls
short because it is undertaken in the spirit of a Romanticism that always unworks itself:
a thought of fragments, supplements, and massive works that were never published. We
miss this point, made in “The Earliest Systematic Program of German Idealism,”

20

if we

study Idealism only exegetically and not also as literature. “Projects,” Schlegel writes,
are “fragments of the future.” Projects and fragments comprise “the transcendental
element of the historical spirit,” in the unusual sense in which Schlegel uses the word
“transcendental” to suggest a simultaneous “joining [and] separating of the real and the
ideal” [Philosophical Fragments #22].

20. The anonymous author of this fragment (variously thought to be Hölderlin, Hegel, or

Schelling, but also reminiscent of Schlegel) writes: “The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic
philosophy” [162].

diacritics / fall 2001

81

Romanticism is the beginning of an episteme in which philosophy and literature

provide general economies (in Bataille’s terms) for the reorganization of knowledge
and for a certain unsettling of “disciplinary reason.”

21

The genealogy of such asystatic

systems runs from the post-Kantians, through their extension by post-Hegelian cultural
philosophers such as Simmel, through the ruins of the idealist project in Benjamin, and
its post-Nietzschean reformulation in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966). For The
Order of Things is both a history of the structure of systems of knowledge, and itself a
decentering of disciplines that articulates a community of knowledge in response to the
crisis of university society in the sixties. As such Foucault’s early work provides an
epistemic rationale for deconstruction: the second reorganization of knowledge on which
I touch here.

Elsewhere I have tried to construct a genealogy of deconstruction that disentangles

it both from “poststructuralism”—a term with which it is often conflated—and from its
assimilation into literary criticism when it crossed over to North America. Briefly,
deconstruction is a widely interdisciplinary movement that emerged from the way
phenomenology after Husserl had to reestablish its relevance to a broader range of
knowledges. It is thus a movement in philosophy before it is a form of literary analysis:
an attempt by philosophy to respond to the challenge of the social sciences as renewed
and reconceived by structuralism. Deconstruction’s interdisciplinarity is evident in
Foucault’s early studies of medicine and psychology, or Baudrillard’s analyses of
consumer society in philosophical terms foreclosed by the positivism of much social
scientific analysis. Poststructuralism, mobilized by the rediscovery of Saussure, entails
a narrowed focus on sign, structure, and language. In the negative, ascetic version of
Lacan and Althusser, it becomes a form of culture as domination. In the emancipatory
post-1968 version exemplified by Tel Quel and Deleuze/Guattari, particularly as these
thinkers have been “applied” in North America, it has paradoxically become the enabling
pre-text for a “theory” that escapes critical negativity to become a form of culture as
praxis. In both forms, poststructuralism disavows any concern with consciousness or
being: whether to submit subjectivity to structure, or to forget ethics in a Levinasian
sense and to pragmatize theory as the innovative technology of the future. In the long
run, the second version has been more influential in North America, and has taken us
toward a presentism, an end of history, that is one element in the current Cultural Studies
power complex. Deconstruction, by contrast, is a rethinking of the epistemic forms in
which man posits himself, through a focus on ontological questions that opens ontology
to problems of knowledge and disciplinarity. It is also deeply conscious of its own
intellectual history, not as a self-validating lineage, but in terms of what Foucault in The
Order of Things calls the “retreat and return of the origin” [328–35].

My key text here is The Order of Things, which culminates in a criticism of the

“human sciences”: the modern academy’s bridging of the humanities and social sciences
under the form of a corporate merger, rather than an asystatic deployment of fields of
knowledge to unsettle one another. I will return later to Foucault and to this section of
his text. For now let me suggest only that his early deconstructive work along with that
of Derrida, Baudrillard, and others remains unusually resonant today. For the disciplinary
crisis of the sixties, which itself goes back to the emergence of a society of communication
at the start of the twentieth century, is still with us in technologically intensified form at
the beginning of the twenty-first century. Thus Lyotard’s comments in 1962 on the
human sciences might well apply to the current university:

21. The term is used by Mowitt in his analysis of Tel Quel’s theorization of the “text” [23, 1–

47].

82

given the failings of the Faculty of Letters, we now have a Faculty of Human
Sciences. . . . Has humanism not caught up with its times by becoming
anthropology? . . . From being retrospective, culture becomes “forward-
looking.” . . . Industrial labour, religiosity in boardinghouses, adolescent crises
. . . film studies—all enter the portals of the university . . . the science of humanity,
however pure the intentions of its protagonists, is destined to endow the social
apparatuses with a supplement of power. . . . [37–38]

In the sixties the university crisis took the form of a silent debate between the

humanities and social sciences. In the nineties, reflecting the increasingly anxious position
of the former, it has been internalized in the humanities themselves as a debate between
Cultural Studies, and on the other side literature and philosophy. The sixties crisis was
highly overdetermined in that it brought the humanities and social sciences closer, yet
opened a profound difference between them. On the one hand deconstruction was the
humanities’ attempt to rethink the positivism of the social sciences while exposing
philosophy to its own “margins.” On the other hand May 1968, as an assertion of the
“critical” rather than “orthopaedic” social sciences, was an example of precisely that
positivism—in the form of activism—that deconstruction questions. But if the nineties
have seen a continuation of the sixties debate, deconstruction dealt with it very differently
from Cultural Studies, by attempting a large-scale reorganization of knowledge oriented
by the humanistic categories of philosophy and literature. It is worth repeating that
these interdisciplines should not be narrowed in ways that are parochial and anachronistic.
Philosophy should not be thought of only as “continental philosophy,” a label that
regionalizes it, confines it to a single department, and tacitly excludes much of the
corpus of Theory. Literature, as developed from Schlegel to contemporary concepts of
“text and “writing,” is also quite different from the socially restrictive activity it connotes
in British thought from the Scottish Enlightenment to Arnold, which has now become
the object of various cultural critiques [Siskin, Duncan, Crawford]. Indeed the conflation
of the two “Literatures” is a symptomatic neutralization of Theory by a new disciplinary
complex that continues what it critiques by also organizing knowledge solely on the
ground of culture. If Cultural Studies contains and reduces “literature” as a resistance to
the social, deconstruction on the contrary inscribes the cultural within questions of
ontology and writing. Thus it is not inappropriate to return to the very different things
deconstruction can tell us, including different ways of approaching our relation to culture.

Foucault provides an interesting case, since the influence of Discipline and Punish

(1977) and The History of Sexuality (1976–84) on Cultural Studies is matched only by
the neglect of his deconstructive work up to The Order of Things (1966), or its assimilation
into The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) treated as a foundation for his later theory of
governmentality. Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic (1963) is, on the surface, a structural
study of medicine, its technology and institutions—albeit more abstract than today’s
context-free critical language would permit, and structural or form-based rather than
cultural or content-based. But while Foucault’s later work institutionalizes structure
through discourse, this earlier text deconstructs the gaze as an unhappy consciousness
produced by medical positivism’s inability to achieve identity with itself in its language.
For the early Foucault, who does not identify language with discourse, language is that
which (dis)closes what remains unsaid in it, while discourse reduces the saying to the
said. In The Birth of the Clinic, which dwells extensively on the difference between
“sign” and “symptom,” Foucault is far more concerned than subsequently with language
as the gap between saying and an obscure(d) showing. Moreover, The Birth of the Clinic
recalls nothing more strongly than Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in its concern with
“counter-nature, death, [and] the whole dark underside of disease . . . offered to the

diacritics / fall 2001

83

brightness of the gaze” [195]. Even as it uses structuralism to displace us from any self-
identification through experience or consciousness, it also unsettles any sense that we
can grasp the meaning of disease through structural, still less cultural, analysis. Such a
positing of disease would simply replicate the positivism of the medical gaze itself.
Interestingly Foucault took great care to issue The Birth of the Clinic on the same day as
Raymond Roussel, which studies the pathology of structuralism from within the space
of Literature. He thus allows social history to (un)conceal ontological questions foreclosed
by the later Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which places cultural practices
wholly in the realm of the social.

The Birth of the Clinic is a limited case-study for an approach Foucault expands in

The Order of Things, which traces the organization of knowledge across the entire
Geisteswissenschaften from the Renaissance onward. Anchoring his analysis in a
Nietzschean dialectic of the narrowing of “language” into classical “discourse” and its
return as “literature” in the nineteenth century, Foucault uses this history of the relations
between language and “being” to rethink knowledge in terms of a philosophical
(psycho)analytic. But he also rethinks philosophy, through a “quadrilateral” of four
self-reflexive figures: the phenomenological figures of the empirical and the
transcendental, the analytic of finitude, the cogito and its unthought, and the return and
the retreat of the origin. Foucault’s history culminates in a critique of the modern
university’s promotion of the “human sciences” in emulation of the technological project
of science: technological in the broadly Heideggerian sense of insisting on knowledge
as a pragmatic anthropology committed to (social) productivity. By contrast, the last
section of The Order of Things hints at a new interdisciplinary curriculum for the
university in ruins anchored in a reconfiguration of philosophy.

Briefly, in this last section Foucault provides an “encyclopedia” of the disciplines

that recalls Hegel’s project, but in the form of a Nietzschean antiscience [Habermas,
Philosophical Discourse 248–49]. The architecture of this encyclopedia can be discerned:
it consists of triadic series that organize knowledge within the three orders of the sciences,
the human sciences, and the countersciences. Thus each of the sciences (already split
into empirical and theoretical sciences) has a contiguous human science. The sciences
dealing with “life, labor and language” are biology, economics, and linguistics; the human
sciences that exist in their “vicinity” include psychology, sociology, and “the study of
literature and myths” conceived as a pedagogically transmissible science [Order 351–
55]. Each human science also has its corresponding counterscience. Underwriting this
arrangement are Literature and a philosophy based on the four figures. These latter are
not so much countersciences (which would still contain an element of “science”) but
ways of thinking. Thus Literature, as Foucault says, following Blanchot, is a form that
returns into itself and into “the enigma of its own origin.” It “curve[s] back in a perpetual
return upon itself” as if seeking out “the movement that brought it into being” [300].

22

The project behind Foucault’s arrangement is also clear: it is the unraveling of

knowledge as “science” by its own finitude, through the aporia of sciences that are
“human” but claim a false positivity. In this regard the human sciences occupy a pivotal
position as the object of Foucault’s criticism. They lead a double and doubled life. On
the one hand they try to duplicate or imitate the sciences; on the other hand they are
structurally different from their model [366, 355]. For the sciences are objective: they

22. This recursively ontological definition, which would also apply to Literature as a cat-

egory of thought in the work of de Man, is, as Foucault concedes, a historically specific, post–
nineteenth-century version of Literature. For Schlegel Literature as a category of thought, while
equally reflexive, functions differently: perhaps in ways that are closer to “language” in the
Renaissance as Foucault sees it.

84

either do not deal with man at all, or if they do, they treat man as an object or function.
But the human sciences make man the object of his own knowledge: they are “an analysis
that extends from what man is in his positivity (living, speaking, laboring being) to
what enables this same being to know (or seek to know) what life is” [353]. For these
reasons they are “dangerous intermediaries in the space of knowledge” [348]: dangerous
because they simulate the sciences and their technological application, but also dangerous,
despite themselves, to the very identity of science. The human sciences “surreptititously”
lead the sciences back to their “finitude” [354]. It is, however, the countersciences,
which represent a “perpetual principle of dissatisfaction,” that actually mobilize this
nonidentity of knowledge [373, 379]. Psychology, for instance, is a human science whose
counterpart is psychoanalysis: whereas “all the human sciences advance towards the
unconscious only with their back to it,” psychoanalysis “points directly towards it”
[374]. The same relationship—a countering of positivism by a certain negativity—would
also obtain between literary criticism and philology on the one hand, and analyses (such
as Foucault’s own study of Roussel) that are based on “literature.”

But if the architecture of Foucault’s project is clear, its contents remain deliberately

unsettled. At different points the triad of the human sciences includes psychology,
sociology, positivist forms of history, and forms of literary analysis that have as their
goal either science or practice. Since the series is expansible, one must understand
Foucault’s fondness for the triad less as a claim to take in the totality of the disciplines—
some of which he cannot yet imagine—than as a way of placing himself in relation to
Hegel and of articulating the systematicity of an epistemic project that Derrida calls
bricolage. Each of the human sciences has a corresponding counterscience, but the
contents of this further triad are also unclear. Because of the growing prominence of
Lévi-Strauss and Lacan in the sixties, Foucault wants to think of ethnology and
psychoanalysis as countering sociology and psychology. But he soon gives up on
ethnology in the form it was to take as the social science of anthropology and in its
tendency toward “cultural psychology” [Order 380]. Similarly his reservations about
psychoanalysis surface in his criticisms of Freud and his interest in madness as a limit
that exposes the potential positivism of psychoanalysis [374–75]. Nor is it always clear
where a discipline belongs: history as one of the new “empiricities” produced by the
nineteenth century seems to be a human science, but as what Foucault later calls
archeology it can unravel into a counterscience [Order 367]. On the other hand
philosophy—in its analytic version—could easily be a human science, but in the form
practiced by Foucault it is the condition for a radical rethinking of knowledge.

Foucault’s sometimes inter- and sometimes antidisciplinary project provides the

encyclopedic framework for a similar questioning of disciplinary positivisms in Derrida’s
analyses of linguistics, anthropology, and geometry, and in Baudrillard’s analyses of
economics, sociology, information technology, and mass culture. But it is appropriate
that in the new order Foucault intimates, the familiar disciplines cannot be precisely
located; rather they migrate from science to counterscience. For this order is not a division
by departments but a movement between disciplines that exposes them to each other.
Foucault’s interdisciplinarity involves exposure, not synthesis: the framing of knowledge
within an ongoing metareflection that unworks disciplinary identifications and what
Hegel calls “Corporation.” It is also appropriate that Foucault in this last section never
mentions the university or the crisis of the sixties. Institutions are bound to discourses,
while for Foucault knowledge happens within an “inoperative community” rather than
a society. This community—unavowable, impossible—cannot have an empirical
existence, even if it must work within society as the sense of a gap in the social.

diacritics / fall 2001

85

86

The Order of Things sets forth its unworking of knowledge elusively, “anonymously”

(in Foucault’s word), as the work of what Kant called an “unincorporated” scholar:

23

a

work seemingly abandoned by Foucault’s own later incorporation as a public intellectual.
However, Readings’s more recent call for a university of dissensus returns us to the
richness of this text and the models it offers for working both inside and outside the
university, for being at once incorporated and unincorporated—in a double life that is
the particular task of the humanities. What Readings calls a “rhythm of disciplinary
attachment and detachment” that forces us to attend to the terms “of the production and
reproduction” of knowledge [176] is at the heart of Foucault’s spacing and
(dis)arrangement of knowledges at the end, and his temporalizing of knowledge within
a history of systems of thought throughout the book. While there have been a growing
number of studies of “the organization of knowledge” in the past few years,

24

suggesting

that this might be the new meta- or interdiscipline, Foucault’s much earlier text offers a
way of (not) organizing knowledge on the ground of Theory rather than Cultural Studies:
an asystasy that is specifically inflected by philosophy and literature rather than political
economy. The interdisciplinarity it exemplifies is thus specifically humanistic, a difference
we should not foreclose if interdisciplinarity itself is not to become a form of global
communicative rationalization.

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