Notes from the Ground

Teresa de Lauretis’s resistance to the request for assistance in imagining an agenda forCritical Inquiry in the twenty-first century seems exactly right to me both in its refusal to engage in what she characterizes as a form of commodity speculation and also because of her insistence that “the time for theory is always now” (p. 365). Speculating about the future can be a useful enterprise, but it seems tome that the primary reasonCritical Inquiry has enjoyed a very long and unusually successful run has been the special gifts and sensitivities of its chief editors (we have had only two in nearly thirty years of publication), its executive editor (tomy delight, this remains a class of one), and, too, of its coeditors (at present numbering seven).Managing Critical Inquiry requires an editor to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground of the present, with one eye focused sharply on the open transom—the skylight that has traditionally served as ourwindowonthe future. It also requires a willingness to take risks, and in this regard TomMitchell has repeatedly shown remarkable shrewdness combined with something akin to valor—most especially at those often hilarious editorialmeetings in which he casts the sole vote favoring the publication ofwork hefindspromising, challenging, useful, a step into the future he wants to make happen. The practice of editing Critical Inquiry, then, has been one that has carefully avoided setting agendas or making predictions about the future. We might wish to imagine the shape of things to come (for example, the configurations of theory and critical practice in 2033), but our owncriticalpractices tell us that we can’t and with good reason—theory and practice stand to each other in reciprocal relation; each assumes and responds to theother. Absent themotivation of having to come to termswith changes takingplace on the ground (or of projecting effective means for bringing off such