Why the past and continued contestation, asks Susan Stanford Friedman in "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism," over the ground of modernism? On exhausting grammatical and philosophical explanations, Friedman turns to a series of reflexive questions that allow her to probe "issues of power and the institutionalization of knowledge in the definitional project itself" (Chapter 1 , 24–25). Yet while her essay successfully engages the problem of disciplines and knowledge production, it overlooks the very structure of disciplinarity to include those whom disciplinarity actively serves. What escapes notice is the simple fact that to succeed and persist disciplines need disciples as much as they need knowledge objects and a public to instruct. This sociological truism may seem too obvious a genealogy to warrant further comment except that it is precisely those structures hidden in plain sight, if you will, that most enable the formation of disciplines and the reproduction of agents and, yet, most often come to operate without acknowledgment. If we agree with Foucault that what characterizes modernity is "a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task," then, in the case of modernism, it makes much critical sense to query the structural reproduction of its knowledge brokers, their relation to and task of belonging (Foucault 39).