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Critical Noise
Critical Noise is the website of History of the Present’s editorial collective. It offers rigorously argued critical historical and historiographical work that is engaged with politics and ethics. It is open access and the contributions will generally be shorter than those in the journal. The aim is to expand the critical historical network of the journal through a variety of fora, including “Archives of Dissent,” “Critical Nodes in a Discursive Landscape,” and an occasional symposia on new or classic books and articles. Critical Noise and History of the Present, which is published biannually by Duke University Press, are independent of one another but share theoretical and political commitments.
“It was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? A parasite who always has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order.”
— Michel Serres, Parasite
History of the present:
Gender
In our own polarized time, we are faced with an either/or position: either you are “for gender” or you are “against gender”. How did this happen? And why is the early feminist critique of gender rarely elaborated or clarified in our contemporary feminist retellings of how gender became “ours”? Gender as an analytic category has […]
History of the present:
“Noises Off”: A critique of the Vanderbilt and Washington University, Saint Louis “Report on the Humanities”
Preface: We have chosen our title, gesturing to Michael Frayn’s comedy, which portrays a bungled attempt at a play by a group of actors not up to the task. In the first act, we see the play; in the second, the backstage shenanigans that underlie it; in the third act, what remains of the play […]
History of the present:
The Struggle to Face Forward
The Boghossian committee’s report on humanistic scholarship claims that the main disciplines have widely subordinated scholarship to politics (Boghossian, “Report”). This has led, they write, to a “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards” ( 5).[1] The report’s categorical judgments, however fudged, cast low scholarly standards as the defining feature of humanistic academia today. Standards are so […]
History of the present:
Why I Can’t Read… the State of Scholarship Report
It’s not because of the trash talk. Through a forest of caveats, and they go on for pages, the report winds its way toward its accusation. The humanities and humanistic social sciences, the report suggests, display a lack of intellectual rigor. In academic terms such accusation, no matter how eloquent and/or qualified, boils down to […]
History of the present:
Tragedy at Vanderbilt
There is a line of argument in Emmanuel Lévinas’s 1951 essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” that guides many of my assumptions about what it means to think. Lévinas is discussing Heidegger’s argument that to think is to throw oneself into history and its unfolding dramas. According to Lévinas, this launch seems to produce a rupture with […]
History of the present:
Et tu, Brute?
There’s a unique move, equal parts noble and petty, that academics have long since mastered. With utter intellectual seriousness, they assess and wade into scholarly debates, arguing with their sharpest logic and most passionate rhetoric for the side they have decided is right. Much like Cicero, they then forward their argument through smearing and undermining […]
History of the present:
Fuligo fuliginem reprehendit: on the pot calling the kettle black
Reading the “Vanderbilt Report” on the humanities, commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Wash U, is like traveling back in time to the late 1980s and the height of the culture wars, where the conservative right, accompanied by traditional old-school academics, hurled epithets at the left, centering on the crimes of postmodernism and relativism. […]
History of the present:
TRUE RELIGION: A DISS TAPE
“An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication.” Guy Debord, “All the King’s Men” (1963) Part 1: Infidelity The “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social […]
History of the present:
The Politics of Disavowing Politics
The recently released Vanderbilt–WUSTL report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences has already attracted significant attention in debates over academic freedom, the relationship between politics and research, and the state of contemporary scholarship. Praised by some commentators as a necessary defense of free inquiry and criticized by others as a politically motivated intervention, the […]
History of the present:
The Unconscious
Why do we need a theory of the unconscious? What critical and political advantages flow from such a concept? For a clinician, a theory of the unconscious is indispensable for understanding both the unhappiness of everyday life and the miseries of severe mental disturbance. Specifically, such a theory gives the clinician some guidance about how […]
Submit Your Work
Submissions from all thinkers engaged in critical history will be considered for “Critical Nodes in a Discursive Landscape,” (1000-3000 words); proposals for book symposia on a recently published work that would fit under the broad rubric of critical history are also welcome.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
All inquiries and submissions should be directed to Brian Connolly (bconnolly@usf.edu). Material for the Archives of Dissent will be primarily invited; inquiries should be directed to Anjali Arondekar (arondek@ucsc.edu).
For submission of articles to History of the Present, see guidelines at https://read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-the-present/pages/Submission_Guidelines
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Submissions are reviewed by members of the editorial collective. Only selected pieces will be published.