The mechanical hermeneut attacks!, part 1

Three posts will move somewhat quickly from an explanation of the reasons behind a suggestion regarding Derrida's mode of reading I made a while ago (which will make up the concerns of this first post here), to a discussion of Ricoeur and the hermeneutic strategies of of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (post 2), to a consideration of the mechanical hermeneut or reading machine that is, I confess, more appropriately identified with Jeremy Bentham than Derrida (post 3).
I confess this because my suggestion to consider Derrida as a reading machine (for this is what it was), even if it was only for the purposes of orienting oneself towards him, was somewhat unjustified and risked being very misleading. I think about it as an overemphasis, one that forced things in a particular direction so as to avoid another route that was clearly (to me) worse. This other route was, as any reader of the blog in the past few months knows, that of considering Derrida a close reader, a reader that spends a lengthy amount of time with a work, gets incredibly intimate with it, and with unbelievable rigor reveals all its ins and outs, its meanings and attempts at meaning; in other words, as one who generally sees his task as submitting philosophical texts to literary analysis. Instead, I said that Derrida might be considered first and foremost a sort of distant reader, a computer, a person indexing words like "pharmakon," someone who skims, who reads quickly, who needs a Cliffnotes to really get anything we consider meaningful; in short, as someone who resisted and escaped hermeneutics, not by being even more and more rigorous, but by falling back into meaningless, repetitive, mechanical calculation. As if he considered texts as documents to be searched, or as math problems to be solved.
My aim was to show that this was just as valid a way of approaching Derrida as the other because it is just as untenable--it requires just as much interruption in its application to Derrida in order to be able to apply. In fact--and to show this is the more radical aim--this reveals that the first approach, despite all its mystification of the act of reading (primarily by asserting that it resists science and reason, thereby securing its power for the humanities only--an old thesis that Gadamer radicalizes and that Foucault, in The Order of Things, destroys) is the same thing as the second, mechanical approach. But this is only so if it is also the case that the second approach is the same thing as the first: mechanical reading must somehow be close. In short, as I often said as I suggested all this, duplicating a formula from Margins of Philosophy that I have explicated elsewhere, the reading machine must break down for it to work: reading mechanically or cursorily has to be, at some point, close reading. (In this explication, I say: "If there is a machine that works, in order to be working it must at some point not even be that working that it is.")
This all means that what needs to be stressed is that the mechanical or mechanist understanding of reading is strategic, and thus only pragmatic at a certain point: it tries to combat how, at this moment in the history of reading, and in America, I should say, for I can only speak with any authority of events here where I am--here and now cursory, mechanical reading has not been understood. In other words, Derrida's reading, which is just as cursory as close, has always only been understood as close reading--albeit qualified as more intense, more intimate, than the average close reading. Thus, we very much need to understand precisely how far we are contradicting ourselves when we characterize his reading in particular and any reading more generally as good because it is rigorous. We need to understand that this is contradictory because what would seem to be, despite an entire tradition of notions of rigor, most rigorous would have to be a program, a formula, a mechanical procedure. This leads us to what needs to be thought, since it has never been conceived as such, though always presupposed: what would this mechanical rigor actually look like? Thus, what is necessary is that we begin to hypothesize a machine that would do something like reading, and work out its operation in all its aspects.
Getting a feel for this first problem, however, requires that we must get to the point that we are emphasizing now, the second or supplementary problem--the problem that indeed makes our understanding a misunderstanding if we leave it out: we must so thoroughly understand close reading as contradictory if it is not also mechanical or cursory reading, that we understand how we contradict ourselves without also thinking, conversely, that this machine itself produces closeness. In other words, if we conceive rigor as such, and indeed conceive it as a machine, we must then also show how this machine breaks down to become something like intimate, non-distant reading.
Now, the strategy lies in asserting this: we cannot get to this second problem without getting to the former--even if we somehow understand this latter problem first. This is the strategic element of our emphasis on the mechanical: we must get a handle on how this contradiction--viewed from the side of close reading being confronted with its own cursory double, the machine--currently only appears to us as a a danger, as a threat to our concept of rigor. In short, we must understand how, as Derrida says famously in the exergue to Grammatology, "the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger." More radically, we must understand what Derrida means in the following, after he has just recapitulated Leroi-Gourhan's description of the emergence of writing:

In all these descriptions, it is difficult to avoid the mechanist, technicist, and teleological language at the very moment when it is precisely a question of retrieving the origin and the possibility of movement, of the machine, of the technê, of orientation in general.
-Of Grammatology, 84-5.

That is, we must understand how, in order to acclimate oneself to what is required by our anticipation of this future, in order to describe it so it can be understood, the recourse to a mechanical language and the thinking of a purely mechanical act of reading--while never able to be justified--is on some level oddly necessary. Necessary not because it allows some pragmatic form of acclimation, something that would allow us to anticipate anticipation, to practice it--and this is crucial--but because it keeps hitting home the impossibility of acclimation, of anticipation. In short, the necessity lies in how this act of working out a interpretative machine somehow works to retrieve the possibility of absoluteness in the absolute danger of which Derrida speaks--that is, what cannot be anticipated. Derrida will later call this possibility hospitality, and its structure is the same as that breaking down which is required for a reading machine to work (that is, the opening up of our second aspect of our question).
Now, at least, it is clear that the danger appears to our close reading because it is possible that in the future rigor in reading might indeed be ensured mechanically, via indexing or cataloguing and search-engine type algorithms. But if we look through history, indeed similar forms of this same danger appear--we are always on this horizon where rigor can be ensured mechanically or by technology. In other words, the reading machine is continually considered throughout history as what produces cursory readings--which, as we remarked above, is a completely unjustified characterization. But rather than tracing the genesis and structure of this characterization, which is what would be required to get some sense of the necessity we are talking about, we might expand upon it as a strategy. This is an act of expansion which requires going more into depth about what a machine is and does.
To lead us into the next post, we can at least begin to think of what a machine that would interpret could look like, and how it could indeed be rigorous despite our worries and the historical characterization of it as sloppy. Searle's famous Chinese-room argument actually provides a good illustration of this very point, emphasizing it albeit indirectly (because, of course, its concerns lie elsewhere): what makes interpretation (in the example, a complex act of translation) conscious or human is not the same thing as what makes proficient and even rigorous interpretation. The output from the room may be excellent without being able to be sure whether it came from a human or a machine. And while this is a problem for certain notions of consciousness, it isn't for certain notions of interpretation. Or is it? And how? We will pick this up again in the next post.

The hyperbole of Nietzsche, and Heidegger

The title of the post here brings out a contrast, a difference made visible by the ambivalence of the additive or supplementary: the comma with the conjunction counting Heidegger, tacking him on like an afterthought, in a set philosophers in which there exists hyperbole. In sum, the title announces a problem, rather than a solution. It is a question about the correctness of its formula, and it is accomplished already in its formulation. Hyperbole, it says, Is it also in Heidegger? Is there hyperbole in Heidegger? And this question, we already know, risks proving something that seems itself hyperbolic: Heidegger never ever used hyperbole. If he did, it was a million times less remarkable than any regular use of hyperbole.
But in a way this is already a miscalculation: to ask if there is hyperbole also in Heidegger risks presupposing that Nietzsche is hyperbolic. Is this true? In fact, it presupposes more than this: if it is possible for Heidegger to be hyperbolic here, as it were, along with Nietzsche, Nietzsche must be himself hyperbole--that is, 100% hyperbolic, some standard of real, authentic, total use of hyperbole--since Heidegger comes afterwards to measure himself against Nietzsche. But is this the case? To understand all this about hyperbole, then--and it should be obvious that we're talking about hyperbole in a wide sense, about the figure and the logic that makes it up--we must be vigilant enough to pose this question of Heidegger (Is there hyperbole in Heidegger?) and, at the same time, question this question, which is to question Nietzsche (Does there exist the hyperbole of Nietzsche?)--that is, to add (Heidegger) and subtract (him) at the same time.
Working out the formula, checking for mistakes, we nevertheless seem to see that this odd operation it forces us to perform has its basis in the extreme nature of the Nietzschian task. As we said, Nietzsche isn't prompting us to ask just whether he is (also) hyperbolic, like Heidegger, but whether hyperbole exists. Nietzsche makes us ask, first and foremost, whether there is such a thing as hyperbole at all, whether hyperbole is such a thing that could be used in Nietzsche to the extent that he can be said to be a standard, some sort of authentic user of hyperbole, in comparison to Heidegger. Thus, like the question of Heidegger, this risks proving something hyperbolic as well: in the entirety of Western discourse there never was any hyperbole. Hyperbole never existed. Until Heidegger's poor use of hyperbole, that is a million times easier to miss than any normal use of hyperbole, hyperbole was completely nonexistent.
Let's note that this more extreme of the two claims--more extreme, more hyperbolic, because it questions whether there exists at all what is the basis of its very question--already touches upon the question of madness, which seems to be inextricably bound up with hyperbole. Must we be mad to question whether there is such a thing as the hyperbolic? Before we answer yes, we must reflect: isn't this question--whether we can hurl ourselves (ballein) above ourselves (húper) at all--not the sanest question of our current status, of our being, of our self-identity, of whether we are what we are (because it is questionable whether we can be higher than we are)? Another way to put this would be to say it touches upon the question of the overman.
But, to return to the question, is there hyperbole? Is it in Nietzsche at all? Let's simply try to prove this--regardless of whether this might end up disproving things. To prove this, many are tempted to simply look at the title of Nietzsche's work that seems most hyperbolic (and also, incidentally, nearest madness): Ecce Homo. Already, there it is. But we also know, from Nietzsche's letters (October 30, 1888), that the title was chosen to test the censors. Regardless of whether this is true, it is clear that it could just basic, pointless blasphemy, rather than hyperbole. Already, then, we have a sense of what will be so troubling to our efforts to point to hyperbole: Nietzsche's hyperbole is, at the same time as it is hyperbole, dishonest. And while this describes perfectly just what hyperbole is--dishonesty, being above oneself--it also hints that there is no such thing as "pure" hyperbole--a hyperbole that would honestly just be hyperbole.
We have already disproven things then. This, it would seem, is what is so disturbing and disarming about the hyperbole in Nietzsche: at the same time as it is hyperbole, we sense that it isn't. This forces us to look at it as truth, however, which is just as disarming, since the claim is so grand. There is no way to get around the problem: either Nietzsche is boasting, or he is merely being descriptive. The two acts map onto each other so well that we are not left with any alternative between true and false. And thus with no hyperbole: the extreme or hyperbolic nature of his task is then to show that hyperbole actually outlines a structure of truth.
But, given what we know about Nietzsche, this seems itself problematic. For we might just as well think that hyperbole would actually be something very contrary to the rest of Nietzsche's claims. Why? Simply because hyperbole seems to make a qualitative claim. And Nietzsche, we know, is the thinker of the quantitative par excellence. How do we reconcile this emphasis upon hyperbole with the emphasis upon quantitative relations of force? How do we see one as the other? Can we see one as the other?
Let's look at a passage to outline the problem more clearly:

I am an evangelist the like of which there has never been; I know tasks so lofty that there has not yet been a concept for them; I am the first to give rise to new hopes.
-Ecce Homo, "Why I Am a Destiny," 1.

Isn't this a claim similar to that claim of Heidegger, the qualitative claim?

If a thinking question is not so simple and so outstanding as to determine the will and the style of thinking for centuries--by yielding to them what is the most profound issue to think--then it is best that it not be asked.
-Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), #5: "For the Few and the Rare."

Isn't the claim of Nietzsche a claim that says: it is almost better if the rest (of the evangelists, of those who thought they knew lofty tasks, of those who hoped) were dispensed with? In other words, that what makes up the hyperbole--the lump of that which Nietzsche is greater than (in a more normal hyperbole, "I could sleep for a zillion hours," it would be the hours)--is, despite its makeup, simply a set of identical things? Things that, because they are that set, can be dispensed with, compared to Nietzsche, who has more value? The question already arises, then, of whether this is indeed what Heidegger is here saying as well. And the more basic question of the relation of Heidegger to hyperbole. Perhaps we can address that now, in order to come back to Nietzsche.
Is Heidegger really saying that it is better for us if an unthinking question is never asked? In other words, is he serious? We would be mistaken if we said either yes or no. And yet, I maintain this is a qualitative claim, one which Nietzsche's claim, which should be quantitative and not qualitative, is in danger of approaching. How can this sentence of Heidegger be qualitative and not be serious? And, then, how can it not be unserious? And is either of these hyperbole?
It is just as much a mistake to say yes as to say no, because the particular type of qualitative claim does not move on the level here of identity. When Heidegger is saying that there is such a thing as a question, and that it is better off that a particular kind of question not be asked, he isn't talking about the existence of the question. He's not saying that a certain set of existent things have a particular quality--let's call it, being unthinking, or simply not being determinative enough of the will and style of thinking--which does not make them worthy of existence. The unthinking questions do not all exist such that they are identical in this respect. They do not have, that is, a relationship of identity with respect to each other. Their relation is, for Heidegger, that of sameness. Which means that a certain set of questions are unthinking in the sense that they all would not heavily participate in the determination of the will and style of thinking--even if they do not exist in the sense of just being present there. Thus, a question that is not yet on someone's lips, but is deep and unformulated in their mind, or scattered in notes somewhere, yet still ready to come together to become a question that is unthinking, that does not determine the will and the style of thinking immensely--this is what makes up the type of question that is better off not asked. This is what constitutes the quality of unthinkingness: essentially, what a piece of a question will do when it is eventually a question.
It is hard not to explain this in terms that are teleological (though Gadamer rightly calls this, and similar reasonings by Heidegger, only a "teleology in reverse"), but it is clear from this that when the question is better off being not asked, it does not mean that burning the pieces of paper with unthinking thoughts or silencing all the people who would only ask unthinking thoughts would not get rid of the quality here of unthinkingness. So, if Heidegger is not totally serious about what he is saying, it is not to be unserious or false. It is to be serious in a different way--and hyperbolic in a different way.
What is clear, however, is that this does not totally make a claim about truth or falsity in the way we found Nietzsche to be doing already. Heidegger is actually dismissing both alternatives--as we saw when neither saying yes or no would characterize his statement. What Heidegger is doing, then, is finding a different type of a claim to truth. Its relationship to hyperbole will have to be, then, ambivalent, insofar as hyperbole is not determined with respect to this new conception of truth. In essence, what Heidegger is doing here, on the level of our inquiry, is trying to show that hyperbole hits a limit with a conception of truth that is based on identities and things that are existent. What should we get out of this? Not that Heidegger lacks a certain ironic, jocular willingness to use hyperbole, or that his hyperboles are indeed serious, but that what he is in search for--if this were a concern for him--is a way of being hyperbolic that is precisely what we have already sensed Nietzsche resists: a way of being purely hyperbolic, hyperbolic in a way that is not at the same time a bit dishonest. What would this hyperbole look like? Would it still be hyperbole? This is where critiques of Heidegger may be launched.
But now we can return to Nietzsche and make more sense of the type of qualitative claim he is in danger of approaching. For there are actually two types of qualitative claim that we distinguished: the type that lumps things together based on their identity with respect to each other, that is, based on their existence, and the Heideggerian type, which lumps things together in terms of their possibility, in terms of their essence (that is, when we understand essence as the same or sameness). Is Nietzsche, then, in claiming that he is an evangelist the likes of which has never been actually claiming that it is better off if the whole set of previous evangelists are better off not existing? Or is he claiming that all other evangelists weren't really evangelists, wouldn't be evangelists when they came to be evangelists, and thus we would be better off if they never came to be this? Obviously, the answer is closer to the second: this is what Nietzsche comes close to claiming. But this is so only because we can't admit that this is a qualitative claim.
When Nietzsche is saying he is the first to give rise to new hopes, he is in danger of claiming that there is a particular quality that he has which others don't: that of being able to give rise to hope. But we can understand this in a different way: Nietzsche is so hopeful, so more hopeful than those who have been hopeful, so much more of a quantity of force, that to do any justice to the quantity, we have to make a qualitative shift. The shift isn't qualitative, however, since it is just to mark anew a qualitative difference. This is what it means to revalue in Nietzsche: to collect energy along a different distribution so that it gives rise to what seem to be qualitative shifts, shifts which actually can only really be described--can only really be--quantitative. In other words, suddenly there is so much more hope, that all the previous people who hoped look like they are less--to the extent that the phenomenon of hope that they exhibit seems different. What this does is not only make the phenomenon appear reversed or overturned, it determines the scale on which phenomena are compared upon quantity. Hope looks different because it is more, and thus also because it is not a quality.
The reason why this comes close to what Heidegger is claiming is actually, then, because it is closer to the first situation: really, the previous people who hoped should not exist--as people who exhibited the quality and not quantity of hope. Nietzsche isn't denying their right to exist as well. He is transforming, however, everything that centers around what right means. This transformation, then, is different than that effort of Heidegger's--it is precisely the reverse of that. This hyperbole of Nietzsche does not strive to make hyperbole pure: it seeks to infect the entire range of what is not considered hyperbolic with its hyperbole. One could say, then, that to read Nietzsche right, one has to take every word as hyperbolic--which means taking it as both true and false--whereas with Heidegger one has to look for another level at which hyperbole and truth would be more originary.
So, to return to our formula: Heidegger would be ambivalent with respect to the hyperbole of Nietzsche, precisely because Nietzsche's hyperbole would be dishonest--that is, would not be hyperbole. He would also be ambivalent because we could not be sure whether his hyperbole had any relationship to what seems like hyperbole in Nietzsche. Which makes the ambivalence into a reversal or opposition.

"Not less, but more theory:" Jameson and pragmatism

Fredric Jameson has an excellent article in the Spring (2008) issue of Critical Inquiry which I just got around to reading, and it makes a lot of points that I have been trying to orient myself towards accepting here on this blog. While the article "How Not to Historicize Theory" responds mainly to Ian Hunter, its concerns actually never leave that of Jameson's continuing task: trying to extend the theses advanced in his work on postmodernism and utopia into the most pressing concerns of theory at this moment. This culminates in an amazing look at Bourdieu and a clear-headed rebuttal of the impetus behind pragmatism (which is anything but pragmatic).
If I have been hard here occasionally on people like Spivak and deconstruction, on the one hand, and, on the other, people like Jerome McGann or Stanley Fish and historicism (and the people don't exactly have a direct relationship to the movements here--as I will explain), it is because they all end up arguing from within theory for less of it, a position that Jameson shows here to be quite wrongheaded. This position is not wrongheaded because it is contradictory or hypocritical, as I have (I now see somewhat mistakenly) put it. It is wrongheaded because it makes theoretical endeavors attempt to do away with the types of conversation that theory valuably has started. In other words, this position is pragmatic, if not nihilistic. Now, I don't mean that pragmatism is nihilistic--far from it (I think its one of the most idealistic discourses). I mean that pragmatism--which can be summed up crudely as an effort to find and work within limits, to refine discourse by disabusing its pretensions to truth as correctness--too quickly gets confused with a nihilistic bent which is not pragmatic that nevertheless underwrites pragmatism's efforts. To be a bit clearer: what is desired by people like Spivak or Fish is, at the same time, to set an effective limit for discourse beyond which it is fanciful and has no relation to forceful, meaningful activity (including its own), and to somehow counteract the tendency in theoretical discourse to extend itself out into those fanciful areas. The first effort is pragmatic, the second is nihilistic. And while it is not necessary at all that the second effort occurs at the same time as the first--Rorty is a good example of someone who rigorously keeps the two separate--it usually, in the area of theory, does. It is no mistake that all these recent conferences on "The Death of Queer Theory" or "The Death of Post-Colonialism," in seeking primarily to limit a discourse healthily cannot do so except by talking about its being over with, its being ineffective--and not in the sense of being simply inaccurate, but somehow not even worth anyone's letting it exist anymore. Jameson distinguishes between these two well I think by calling this pragmatism conspiracy theory, and this nihilism cynical reason. The two have a methodological commonality, which is a hermeneutics of suspicion: they think that the effort of interpreting actions or documents or whatever boils down to looking for the pretension to truth at work. This pretension is what gets limited by conspiracy theory or taken away to be killed off by cynical reason.
The threat that makes these people and these discourses do this, as Jameson makes clear, is historicity, or what he calls historicizing. This should be rigorously distinguished from historicism, which tends to be in Jameson's eyes (but does not have to be, like deconstruction) one of those pragmatic conspiracy theories. When a discourse becomes capable of having its conversation recede into the past, and has to confront the fact that it has contributed to the larger structures of the institutions and fields that constitute the position from which it speaks--that is, when it begins to have to take into account how it ensures for itself the right to a discourse, it becomes very skeptical as to whether it can still remain pure. What is problematic for both historicism and deconstruction is that their purity was ensured by their anti-intellectual stance--that is, their critique of the continuous and homogenous narratives and knowledges that dominated their discipline before they arrived. Historicism's solution to this is to generally fall back upon the disciplinary framework itself--which usually makes it appear less cynical or nihilistic than it is--while deconstruction's solution is to insist more and more on the rigor of its method or the radical nature of its politics--which is the same thing as falling back upon the disciplinary framework. Now, this isn't as simple as merely claiming that these discourses are getting a taste of their own medicine--which is to say, that they are confronting the fact that they as discourses only have impetus because they are founded on what they oppose. It is showing that faced with a contradiction, both these discourses don't think that expanding their theoretical practice more and more would produce anything worthwhile--namely, a collective discussion. In short, Jameson's claim is that both these positions have the effect of advocating a sort of resurgence of the individual intellectual, the scholar-hero, the expert. Now, there is nothing wrong with being an expert, except that in the effort to diligently become one, the expert or hero sacrifices the collective interest, the fact that scholarship is also about discussion. That is, what is advocated by these positions is that each of us recede back into our own projects and confront each other when we are done with them, which is, in Jameson's view (and I agree with him wholly here), precisely what is not needed in scholarship that will have to confront the 21st century and its demands. What we need is some sense that we are all speaking, as a discipline, some similar language. What both of these discourses--and mostly these people at the front of them (we should be sensitive to the fact that at this level there are so many exceptions to anything anyone says that the generalizations are usually always unfair--though I don't think this renders them illegitimate, precisely for the reasons I'm outlining now)--what both of these discourses advocate is stepping back into our own private vocabulary.
And this is what is really confusing about them as positions and what makes them more than just instances of hypocrisy or self-hating or getting-a-taste-of-one's-own-medicine. For these discourses started out closer to the pragmatism of conspiracy theory. As such, they usually took the form of identifying large collective interests at work in individual decisions or in the determination of the individual. What this allowed was some sense that there were larger forces at play in all our actions. Thus, there was a hope at least that one could work at the level of this larger collective interest to make things better. The exposure of a collective interest was made in the spirit of changing collective interest. What happens in the sort of cynical use of pragmatism is that we think that we can critique these collective interests by ourselves. Indeed, these acts of exposure (deconstruction, historicism) were, it is now clear to us, not themselves disinterested. So why not face up to the fact that the best work we can do is going to be on the level of individual interest, dictated by the demands of the profession we have now--alas--shaped in our direction? This is what Jameson is describing in his conclusion:

Insofar as conspiracy theory celebrates... collective dynamic and seeks to replace the categories of individual agency with collective ones, it marks the first imperfect step in that direction. Cynical reason, meanwhile, while seeming to strip acts and events of their appearance of disinterestedness, might well pave the way for some ultimate awareness of collective self-interest as such.
-"How Not to Historicize Theory," Critical Inquiry, Spring 2008, 582.

This is not a happy prospect. It describes a crisis. For we should not have to recede back into our own individual works of scholarship in order to see that, in the end, what we really need is some sense of collectivity. This is why we need more theory, precisely in the time in which theory itself is being historicized. We can discuss, together, the historicization, which would give us a sense of where we are. The idea that theory is confused is probably a myth still perpetuated by cynics: it has an immense vocabulary to deal with all sorts of novel ideas--and if there is confusion, why can't it be discussed? Or at least, why not risk that this is the case? We have to dispel, perhaps, first and foremost the idea that theory is muddled. That it is not rigorous, that it is not a legitimate way to think about things. It presupposes precisely that we are all speaking languages no one else can understand. Or at least these misunderstandings, this muddledness itself, would not be able to take place collectively and prove to be useful. The time of wondering whether theory is legitimate or rigorous--of finding ways of making it seem so--has been long over with. To dispel this myth that we're muddled and to rid ourselves of this fear of becoming muddled seems actually more in the spirit of pragmatism, in fact, as well as in the spirit of anti-professionalization--one that does not take up at the same time a crass anti-intellectualism or a discourse against the university itself or indeed the (very) beneficial aspects of professionalization. It would be in fact, as Jameson says, more of a rebellion of professionalization against the commodification of knowledge that the sciences have suffered and yet continued to collude with--that is, the joining of research to R&D departments of businesses--and, which, in the future, will surely pose a threat to all intellectual life at the university whatsoever (who will look justified then?). Ultimately, what is not needed is the idea that theory is done with and we now need to wait for the next new approach to research and writing that will unify us. The unification must be brought about by us--and probably is easier to accomplish than everyone thinks since, actually, most of us are already on the same page.