Roderick A. Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things
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Julie Pavlick
Dr. Lothian
ENGL 985
9/3/13
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Roderick A. Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things
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- Begins with Adrian Piper’s Self-Portrait 2000.
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- Left side is contemporary America
- Right side is more artistic, letter to God
- Bottom is the plane crash that JFK Jr. died in.
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- Piper Aircraft Co. was founded by Piper’s Great Uncle- He owned the plane.
- Piper’s mother was employed with the Kennedys in 1960.
- 1960-2000 Have we come so far?
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- 1960 “A period noted for its historic promise of minority incorporation into social, political, economic, an academic realm” (4).
- “Past promises of recognition and present-day catastrophies” (4).
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- The piece seems to measure the failure of the promises.
- An academy reborn from the protests and agitation of the sixties was supposed to make good on its promises.
- “The collage asks us to rethink the presumption that the major institutions of civil society –the academy, the state, and capital—have fostered institutional concepts that protect and shelter minoritized differences and cultures” (16).
- “It [the collage[ asks us to consider how those differences and cultures have been archived in power’s newest arrangement and how they have attempted to close critical universities established in the name of new formations around race, gender, and sexuality” (16).
- The academy “allows” the change.
- The Essay Answers: “Humanity as supposed to keep faith with that promise and with the people of color to whom the promise was made; Adrien Piper was supposed to land safely and come to intellectual and institutional fulfillment” (4).
- The title is a play on Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things
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- Foucault says “there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives.”
- “The Reorder of Things builds on this element of Foucault’s theorization by looking at how state, capital, and academy saw minority insurgence as a site of calculation and strategy, how those institutions began to see minority difference and culture as positivities that could be part of their own ‘series of aims and objectives’” (6).
- “Hence, this book looks at the diverse but interlocking ways in which state, capital, and academy produced an adaptive hegemony where minority difference was concerned” (6).
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- Uses Foucault’s notion of power by avoiding the idea that power is individual, but a social formation.
- The book also tries to show how, in the 1960’s, the government attempted to charm minorities with promises that they did not intend to keep.
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- Derrida
- “Derrida argues that the university has been constituted by a series of analogies, a constitution in which ‘one would treat knowledge a little like an industry…; professors would be like trustees…; together they would form a kind of essence or collective scholarly entity that would have its won autonomy’”(9).
- “The university is no longer authorized by itself. It is authorized… by a non-university instance or agency—here, by the State” (9).
- “The academy has always been an eco-nomic domain; that is, it has simultaneously determined who gets admitted while establishing the rules for membership and participation” (12).
- Introduction of women and people of color did not change the character of the American academy
- “The academy would begin to put, keep in reserve, and save minoritized subjects and knowledges in an archival fashion, that is, by devising ways to make those subjects and knowledges respect power and its ‘laws’” (12).
- Thus- “…the American academy would help inform the archival agendas of state and capital—how best to institute new peoples, new knowledges, and cultures and at the same time discipline and exclude those subjects according to a new order” (12)
- Kant
- Faculties
- Lower Faculty=the division of the faculty that looks after the interests of science. They cannot command, but they have an ethical and intellectual obligation to evaluate.
- Higher Faculty= Can issue commands to its agents—the clerics, lawyers, and theologians.
- HENCE: The government and state is always involved with education. It perpetuates patriarchy.
- Government-State-School-Professors-Students
- Interdisciplines
- A group of institutions that offered enticements in order to gain the power. “Your dreams are also mine” (13).
- Allowed for a new form of power, yet with the same rules.
- Who has fought back against this?
- “…powerful strains of women-of-color feminism have historically offered a critical suspicion to bourgeois, cultural, and revolutionary nationalist desires for recognition and intuitional legitimacy” (15).
- So what? Where do we go from here?
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- “We need a critical itinerary that can outline and interrogate the constitutive contradictions of minoritized formations in the years after the sixties social movements, contradictions that have to do with the simultaneous identifications with and antagonisms to the institutional embodiments of power, a deconstructive meditation that can assess power’s calculus as one that both estranges and entices” (17).
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- Questions:
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- What do we think about Adrian Piper’s Self-Portrait 2000?
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- Why are there no minorities in the piece? What is it trying to say?
- Why does Ferguson use Piper’s work in his essay?
- “In the context of the academy, how are modes of power exercised upon the daily lives of minoritized subjects and knowedges and how was that exercise prepared for in histories that are supposedly no more?” (4)
- Institutions are not simply “things.” What is it that happens in a classroom, and what should we be are of?
- How is Ferguson’s essay relevant to your own teaching and research?
“Critical universes”