The Ruins of Difference

We’re being asked by Bill Readings to both rethink thought—not “economic” but instead as belonging instead “to an economy of waste” (488)—and space—the ruin and debris of an institution now long dead—in the university today. The payoff, on Readings’ account, has something to do with “liberat[ing] new spaces and break[ing] down existing structures of defense against thought even as it [the "system"] seeks to submit thought to the exclusive rule of exchange value (like all bourgeois revolutions)” (489). He earlier names the technologies through which such a liberation might be thinkable: dereferentializaiton; community of dissensus; and a movement through (university) space characterized as détournement. So far so good. The resistance to a “result, a different end” (489)—that is, what he claims “is not a move of ‘big politics’” (489)—tempers the real force of the project, however. His would be a university that takes difference and ruins it—that is, undoes disciplinary borders and commitments in exchange for and “arphipelago of minor activities” (490); but it seems to me like we can go a step further in historicizing and sublating what was announced to be the death of difference (alondside the death of distance) in and around 1989. Difference in the ruined academy is not, or should not be an object among objects, as has been and is with little question the case today, but rather the thing that enables the kinds of conversations and questions excised with what MacIntyre calls the professionalization of the academy.

It makes little sense, in other words, to respect difference and disagreement as an object among objects in the academy today, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests in “Political Science Fictions”, “for if identity politics is nothing more than the politics of the subject position and if, every time we disagree, we make the subject position irrelevant”—i.e, we refuse to recognize it as the end of the conversation—“then, in every moment that we disagree…we produce the blueprint for a world without identity” (662). An “indifference to difference” (662)— or a disavowal that differences in opinion are reducible to an essentialized subject position, that is, the understanding that what you think has less to do with who you are and more to do with where you are in posthistorical geo-cultural space—means not valuing disagreement as the horizon of interaction but as rather the thing to overcome. Disagreement, here, does not ratify difference but instead seeks to eliminate it (which is not the same thing as saying a universalizing process towards sameness). If we take seriously that the end of the Cold War was the end of a certain version of ideology (the version where there are two and they are incompatible, and thus essentially different)—and folks on the left and the right for different reasons, to be sure, take this very seriously—then what we’re left with, Michaels and Readings seem to agree, is not “identity politics” but politics as such, where politics’ object is not the identify of difference but the discordance of dissensus.

So if we run with this claim for a bit longer, taking into account Readings’ call for and commitment to a “reimagine[d] notion of community” (478) alongside a radical movement—“détournement” (480)—through the ruins of the university, we’re forced to rethink not just misguided commitments to difference in our research but to also amass a hostile, or at least antagonistic, posture towards differences in discipline and what Ian Angus called different “forms of knowledge.” On the level of the institution, in other words, we are still very much committed to differences—say, the difference between data collection for the sake of data collection in cognitive science versus a hermeneutics tailored for narratives irreducible to individuals or individual bits of information in an English department—not because these differences are more or less right but because they are accepted as self-evidently necessary under the rubric of disciplinarity. Readings, to be sure, is not insisting we respect these difference; rather, his is a call to walk spontaneously and disrespectfully through “the spaces willed to us by a history whose temporality we no longer inhabit” (480)—that is, the dead and dying ruins of an institution designed for one thing but functioning as another, today. “Détournement” is the opposite of a respect for difference, and a disavowal of difference is the opposite of agreeing to disagree (which we do, in my experience of the academy, every single day). But at this point I would add an addendum: what we do here has never been restricted to the institutional “here”—though it more often than not feels like that—which is another way of saying that we are, or should be beholden if not to publics than to interests (political, archival, cultural, economic?) and that even producing ‘disinterested’ work with critical distance is wrapped up in systems (funding, an epistemology) that never were and never can be contained in the university. It is not merely the university that has been ruined. We should act accordingly.