Literary Ruins: On the Crisis of Contemporary Institutions

This seminar will address the question of the ruinous state of contemporary institutions which have historically upheld liberalism and, broadly speaking, the coordinates of political modernity. Furthermore, we will assess what the task of literature, as part and parcel of the institution of liberal subjectivity, is. A working assumption of this seminar is that the 21st century is characterized by a widespread crisis of faith in institutions. That is, far from successfully containing and mediating the effects of technological expansion of capital, ecological devastation, and political extremism (amongst other maladies), institutions are neither functional nor do they wither away completely. Our three-day seminar will reflect on both literary and theoretical responses to this crisis.

The ruins of institutions can be seen nearly anywhere we look. After decades of neoliberalization, institutions – amongst them the university and most prominently the arts and humanities – have undergone profound changes that have helped lead to increasing skepticism about the degree to which they can respond to contemporary challenges. Dramatic lurches to the political right in many countries have generated fears of the loss of some of the most basic freedoms supposedly guaranteed by liberal democracy. Likewise, the proliferation of fake news, social media platforms, and the fragmentation of public discourse continually undermine a shared understanding of the world around us and calls into question the ability of liberal institutions to intervene in meaningful ways. At the same time, calls by activists to abolish institutions like the police or the nuclear family aim at foundational structures that make up our world. In short, it seems that the grounds upon which institutions were built – grounds which were never very solid in the first place – have been eroding in, perhaps, irredeemable ways. 

This seminar therefore invites scholars to reflect on the ruins of institutions from a range of literary and theoretical perspectives. We suggest that literature and literary excess present a wide array of cultural products that are uniquely well-positioned to think these issues. As Derrida once argued, literature, itself in crisis, is the “ruin of an institution that never existed,” which allows us to think of institutions as inherently constituted by that which exceeds them. In other words, this seminar aims to think institutions through the lens of literature and literariness, to think them not as in crisis or defective, but rather as constitutively exceeded by that which they are supposed to control.