Excavating the Future of Institutionality: An Open Letter to the University

. . . we form, whether we wish to or not, an inextricable part of a terminus a quo, a radial point of emanation. Perforce, we function as envoyants rather than as destinataires, emitting envois of unpredictable consequence and indeterminate effect in a decidedly asymmetrical flow and permeability that finds our envois and formative constructs unimpeded in their penetration and diffusion, while we remain properly isolated and screened from what may be trying to flow our way.

—Djelal Kadir

. . . this would perhaps be my hypothesis (it is extremely difficult, and almost impossible, impossible to prove): it would be necessary to dissociate a certain unconditional independence of thought, of deconstruction, of justice, of the Humanities, of the University, and so forth from any phantasm of sovereign mastery.

—Jacques Derrida (55)

If discouragement were the issue, we would have precious little time to discuss it; for even if we acknowledged that there is much today to be discouraged about—and our reigning "governmentality" would certainly seem to justify much of our collective and professional disheartening—we would by the very logic of that admission be compelled to bring ourselves out of our self-enclosing, because outwardly responsive, state. Seen from this vantage point, our discouragement, though justified, appears instead as one of the mechanisms sustaining briefly our capacity for inventio, that quality of critical praxis that Edward Said associated with criticism's "worldliness" (1982, 152). In "The Future of Criticism," this "worldly aspect" of criticism, inventio, emerges as a crucial ligament linking to each other criticism's internal as well as external developments, what Said calls its "extroverted and introverted forms" (952).

The worldly aspects of criticism aspire, I think more or less uniformly, to hegemony in Gramsci's sense of the word, and if it is also true that not every critic is as ambitious as, say, Matthew Arnold or T.S. Eliot in their openly proselytizing moments, the very act of doing criticism entails a commitment to the future, more particularly, a commitment to appearing in, making a contribution to, or in various other ways forming and affecting the future.

(952, emphasis mine)

Through inventio—which subsumes and must subsume our discouragement—we ensure not only the future of this or that form of criticism, but, more importantly today, we ensure the openness of criticism to its outsides. It is through our capacity for inventio that we may yet come into (in-venire) our "worldliness."

In what follows, I unearth and expose the connections that inextricably bind this worldliness of our criticism to its own, internal development—to that which, to paraphrase Derrida, "can only happen, and happen unconditionally, in the universities"—precisely through what I have been calling its "capacity for inventio." I do so in the name of excavating and re-invigorating our "response-ability," by which I mean simply our ability to respond, our "ability to negotiate," so to speak. Elucidating the multiple aspects of this "responsibility" is a task that cannot be accomplished in the space of one essay, no matter its length.¹ For that reason, I have been concentrating my efforts on that part of our responsibility, inventio, that I now redefine as our capacity to reshape from within that externality that shapes us in turn. To delve into this aspect of criticism is to delve into the passage between its "introverted and extroverted forms." It is to archaeologize that passage's worldliness as an "auto-poetic"² or self-creative process that nevertheless simultaneously—and as part of its self-creation—fashions for its host an openly hospitable, if constantly re-negotiated, relation to the outside, the more urgently when that Outside (sic) entrenches itself in ever more exclusivist and extra-territorial logics of accumulation.

My argument holds that in times such as the present, when our responsibility is heightened by outside pressures and our sovereignty threatened by those who would turn the university into political "think-tanks" at the behest of corporate and bellicose hierarchies, that it is our institutionality-as-such that provides the most effective basis from which to reshape from within...