• • • low end theory

Generally speaking, in contemporary U.S. universities, the philosophy of departmental structuring, as well as the allocation of human and material resources within the humanities and the social sciences, operate on the basis of a relatively straightforward hierarchy of knowledges. On one hand, there is what are commonly understood as “traditional disciplines”; on the other, there are “identity studies,”—feminist studies, ethnic studies, queer studies”—interdisciplinary fields of study that were institutionalized beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 70s and 80s.

Yet scholars in so-called “identity studies” regularly teach, research, discover, and construct intellectual traditions that, speaking chronologically for the moment, were founded well before the emergence, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of the very intellectual traditions from which most of the “traditional disciplines” hail. My point is that the tradition to which the term “traditional disciplines” refers is not a neutral one: it is one that has been chosen over and against the possibility of other traditions. While “identity studies,” have often attempted to challenge this notion of tradition, ways in which they have been institutionalized threaten not only to reinforce but to renaturalize a Western masculinist, white supremacist order of knowledge, with “identity” as its institutional Other.

I really wanted to keep these paragraphs, but I’m probably going to have to cut them. So I’m posting them here for future reference and safe keeping.