Leadership innovation diversity inclusiveness sharing accountability?such is the
resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What
kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive incitements undergird
such benefits? Although there are innumerable discussions of Michel Foucault in the
English-speaking academy seldom is his work used systematically to unravel the dead ends and
potentialities of humanistic inquiry as embedded in these simple but dynamic questions. Rey
Chow takes up this challenge by articulating the plight of the humanities in the age of global
finance and neoliberal mores through a resharpened focus on Foucault's concept outside.? This
general discussion is followed by a series of micro-arguments about several loosely linked
topics: the biopolitics of literary study visibilities and invisibilities race and racism
sound voice listening and confession and self-entrepreneurship. Against what she polemicizes
as the moralistic-entrepreneurial norming of knowledge production Chow foregrounds a
nonutilitarian approach stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental
to humanistic inquiry: How to process analyze and evaluate different types of texts across
languages and disciplines how to form and sustain viable arguments how to rethink familiar
problems through less known as well as very well-known sources figures and methods. Above all
she asks in an abidingly humanistic spirit how not to know all the answers before the
questions have been posed.
