Notes

Introduction: The Blank Page

1. Susan Howe, The Birth-mark (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 57, 59, 58.

2. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1985), 35.

3. The point is a general one, by which I mean that I am not arguing here for any particular account of what makes the crucial features crucial but only for their reproducibility. If, in other words, you think that the crucial features of a work of art are not reproducible (are lost in reproduction), you must also think that there can be no edition of that work. So the question of whether Dickinson’s poems should be understood as drawings is a question about whether published versions of them will have the status of, say, the copy of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation that you have on the wall or the copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that you have on the shelf.

4. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 81.

5. Andrzej Warminski, “ ‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 18.

6. Many of de Man’s commentators (Warminski would be an important exception) treat these two phenomena (the text that has many meanings/the text that has no meaning) as if they were the same. This is in one sense a mistake but in another sense accurate; part of the point of this book will be to try to show that the apparently uncontroversial, even commonsensical, notion that texts can have more than one meaning (in the sense that they can mean something more than their authors intend) is really just a disguised form of the much more implausible idea that texts do not mean at all.

7. The difference between marks that function as evidence and marks that mean is just the difference between the physical trace left by the body and the representation made by the body: my footprints in the sand are evidence of where I was; the words that I write in the sand (“I was here”) are not only evidence of where I was but also a statement about where I was.

8. The authors of the preface to Material Events (Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen) deny the relevance of experience to de Man and, in fact, associate it with the post–de Manian “relapse” into aesthetic ideology that they argue has characterized literary theory over the last twenty years; “rhetorics of historicism, … of practicality (neo-pragmatism), of descriptive forms and empiricisms, … retro-humanist appeals to representation, the subject (identity politics), or experience more generally … are examples of this relapse” (xi). But my point here is that de Man’s commitment to what he calls “sensory appearance,” to “the eye” which, “left to itself,” “ignores understanding” and “notices appearance” (127) has the appeal to experience (and hence also to the subject) built into it.

9. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” in The New Shape of World Politics, edited with an introduction by Fareed Zakaria (New York: Norton, 1997), 2. The original essay was published in the summer 1989 issue of the National Interest.

10. This is why, to get a bit ahead of the argument, the critique of identity that takes the form of suggesting that we “supplant the language of ‘being’—with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral positioning—with the language of ‘wanting,’ ” with its potential to “destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position,” actually functions as a refinement rather than a critique of the primacy of the subject position (Wendy Brown, “Injury, Identity, Politics,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 163–64). The relevant alternative to being is believing, not wanting.

11. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 110. The essay in which this remark appears was originally published in 1982.

12. On the one hand, then, I understand the end of the Cold War—or, rather, the description of the end of the Cold War as the end of history—as an occasion to assert at the level of politics what literary theorists of the text and social theorists of identity have also been asserting: the end of or the irrelevance of or, in its purest form, the impossibility of disagreement. On the other hand, I am not arguing and I do not in fact believe that while the Cold War was ongoing everyone was really much more interested in ideological disagreement than in identitarian difference (how then explain, just for starters, the House Un-American Activities Committee?). And I obviously do not believe that the currently widespread effort to redescribe all differences as identitarian is itself undisputed. What I believe instead is that the set of debates around identity and ideology have—albeit in different forms and with different stakes and different consequences—been constitutive of the modernist problematic, and that what we call modernism and postmodernism are different ways of negotiating that problematic.

13. It can also be posed in such a way that the reciprocity—the way in which a certain account of the object calls for a certain account of the subject and vice versa—gets obscured. Thus, for example, Clement Greenberg’s foundational account of modernism as the requirement that “each art” “determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself” and his claim that the “flatness of the surface” emerged as essential to the “medium” of painting (“Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 86) might be described as entirely concerned with the question of the ontology of painting and at the same time as almost completely uninterested in the relation between the painting as an object and the subject who beholds it. It’s as if his interest in painting as a medium misdescribes for him his interest in paintings as objects and as if his orientation toward the relation between painting and the other arts directs him away from the problem of the painting’s relation to the beholder—the problem that Minimalism would make crucial for Fried.

And Fredric Jameson’s equally brilliant and important account of postmodernism performs this operation in reverse. If, in other words, Greenberg renders invisible the degree to which the problem of the subject is foundational for modernism, Jameson makes the problem of the object in postmodernism equally invisible. One need here think only of the pride of place conferred by Postmodernism on architecture, which not only is at the cutting edge of the integration of “aesthetic production” into “commodity production” (5) but also is paradigmatic in its ambition to create a “new” kind of “space,” a “new mode in which individuals move and congregate” (Postmodernism [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 5, 40). Here the question of the reader’s or the beholder’s experience is paramount except, of course, that the moving and congregating individuals aren’t really readers or beholders—they don’t interpret the building, they use it. So if the question about the ontology of the text in Howe, for example, is a question about whether it matters where you are when you read or see it, there is no equivalent problem about buildings—it always matters where you are. One way, then, to describe architecture is as exemplary of the postmodern because it requires the participation of the subject, but a better way would be to describe it as neither modern nor postmodern for the same reason—it requires the participation of the subject. Because the building can’t ignore the subject, it can’t acknowledge the subject either. There is thus no problem about the ontology of buildings, and modernism and postmodernism in architecture are essentially questions of style.

My point here is not, of course, to denigrate architecture, or even to insist on the impossibility of making the ontological status of the building into a problem. It is only to suggest that the commitment to the organization of space isn’t enough for postmodernism, any more than the commitment to the medium is enough for modernism. I want, in other words, to insist on the specificity of the ontological problem as a problem about the object and for the subject.

14. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 85.

15. Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000), 130.

16. The relevant point here is that the logic of class is just as incompatible with the logic of identity as the logic of belief is. For accounts of why class is not an identity, see, among others, John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Walter Benn Michaels, “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction,” Transition 73, 7 (1998): 122–43, reprinted in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 231–47. It should be obvious here that I am not using the term “ideological” in its Marxist sense; if I were, then ideology and class position would, of course, be inextricably connected.

17. For discussion of Žižek’s own rather complicated relation to this project, see the “Coda.”

One: Posthistoricism

1. Francis Fukuyama, “Second Thoughts,” National Interest, summer 1999, 16.

2. The point here is that the recent redeployment of the example of the Cold War in the form of the war against terrorism makes sense along Fukuyama’s lines not only because terrorism, unlike socialism, is not an ideology but also because the idea that the terrorism might be motivated by an ideology is denied by a discourse that understands the terrorists only as criminals, motivated only by a “perversion” of an ideology (Islam) or essentially unmotivated (i.e., “evil”).

3. This particular formulation is Judith Butler’s (“Competing Universalities,” in Contingency Hegemony, Universality, 178), and, since the body is here invoked in the context of writing (“It is not easy, as a writer, to put one’s body on the line, for the line is usually the line that is written, the one that bears only an indirect trace of the body that is its condition”), it points not only toward the political eagerness to give up their bodies that we will see in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Richard Rorty, and Slavoj Žižek but also to their literary equivalent—the imagination of writing as above all the trace of the body—in Howe and in Kathy Acker or even Don DeLillo.

4. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992), 9–10.

5. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, 1991), 513.

6. Fukuyama’s views are here identical to Randall Robinson’s (in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks [New York: Plume, 2000]) and to those of the reparations movement more generally. For a critique of those views, see the section “Forgetting” in chapter 3.

7. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York: Free Press, 1995), 3.

8. Thus, although the best writers on Silko, Caren Irr and Sharon Holland, emphasize what Holland calls “her challenge to existing paradigms” of “narrative, memory, history” (Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000], 98), my own reading emphasizes her participation in the formation of those paradigms.

9. This commitment to seeing Marx as above all a Jew is anticipated in William L. Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (Arlington, Va.: National Vanguard Books, 1978) and his later, less influential (i.e., Timothy McVeigh never read it) Hunter (Hillsboro, W.V.: National Vanguard Books, 1989) (both published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald). In both texts, Jews are characterized à la Silko as “a notoriously tribal people” (Hunter, 100). But where Silko distinguishes between Marx’s Jewishness and his communism, Pierce treats the communism as irrelevant, a mere ploy: “the whole communist movement was simply a Jewish power grab” (125). For Pierce, the fundamental opposition is between identities (Jews and whites), not ideologies (communists and capitalists) or even nations (Russia and the United States); in fact, The Turner Diaries refers to Russians as “racial kinsmen” (191). Inasmuch as communism had stopped worrying Pierce and his colleagues long before the “Evil Empire” stopped worrying Fukuyama, the radical Right ought to be understood as early adopters of posthistoricist identitarianism.

10. Howard Winant provides a more programmatic statement of this position in Racial Conditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) when he criticizes the “subordination of race to class” and insists that the goal of a truly “radical democracy” should be to attack racism not by attacking the reality of race but by “accept[ing] and celebrat[ing]” “racial difference” (31).

11. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in The New Shape of World Politics, with an introduction by Fareed Zakaria (New York: Norton, 1997), 69.

12. Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1986), 3. The other volumes of the quartet are Ender’s Game (1985), Xenocide (1991), and Children of the Mind (1996).

13. George Kennan as Mr. “X,” “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947): 567.

14. I don’t mean to suggest here that the Cold War was invariably thought of as ideological; indeed, as my later discussion of the imagination of nuclear holocaust indicates, I don’t believe that it was. But, although sustained attention to the representation of conflict in the period itself would doubtless reveal many fascinating variations, my focus here is only on representations of Cold War conflict at what was announced as its end. The idea, in other words, is that, whatever the Cold War actually was, its end became the occasion for announcing the end of ideological conflict.

15. Thus Judith Butler comments on the difficulty of grounding “a theory or politics” in a “subject position which is ‘universal,’ when the very category of the universal has only begun to be exposed for its own highly ethnocentric biases” (Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott [New York: Routledge, 1992], 7). There are two mistakes here, or perhaps two versions of the same mistake: the universal cannot function as a ground (even the “permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent” [8] ground that Butler hopes for), and it is not a kind of subject position. Universality cannot be invoked to ground our theories because the claim to universality is built into the very possibility of having a theory, and, rather than being a kind of subject position, it marks the irrelevance of the subject position—to disagree with someone is to think that the truth or falsehood of our theory has nothing to do with the fact that it is ours.

16. The point, in other words, is not the Habermasian one that “what we hold to be true has to be defendable on the basis of good reasons … in all possible contexts, that is, at any time and against any one” (Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 46). It is instead, if we are citing philosophical authority, the Davidsonian one that “it is possible to have a belief only if one knows that beliefs may be true or false” and that the truth of my belief “does not depend on whether I believe it, or everyone believes it, or it is useful to believe it” (Donald Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated,” in Rorty and His Critics, 72). The idea that our beliefs are true or false regardless of whether we believe them is not an “ideal” toward which some of us strive but a presumption to which all of us are already committed. And it may also be worth pointing out that my interest in argument, here and later, does not involve a commitment to rationality on the model of what Habermas calls “good reasons.” Our reasons always seem good to us; that’s what makes them our reasons. My commitment is, rather, to the difference between those things (beliefs, interpretations) that seem to us true or false and for which we can give some reasons and those things that seem to us to require no justification

17. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 169. We read different poems, Fish writes, because we belong to different “interpretive communities,” which is to say, we have “different strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions” (171). In his subsequent writings, however, the idealism of this account gives way to a more sociological approach; the effort to explain different interpretations is disarticulated from the claim that the interpretations create the text.

18. Hence the difference between losing a game and losing an argument: you don’t lose at chess when you are convinced that you cannot move your king out of check; you lose when, whatever your views, you cannot, within the rules of the game, move him. The point can be put more generally by saying that in any game the players’ moves have a force that is utterly undetermined by their beliefs about them. Beating someone at chess has nothing to do with changing his or her mind. And it can be put more generally still by saying that just as two players in a game cannot be described as disagreeing, two players playing two different games can’t be described as disagreeing either, not because they have the same beliefs but because, once again, their beliefs are irrelevant. Chess isn’t a set of beliefs; it’s a set of rules. That’s why the redescription—in philosophers like Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard—of people who have different beliefs as people who are playing different “language games” amounts to a repudiation of the idea that people actually have any beliefs. The point here is not a skeptical or even a relativist one about the possibility of having true beliefs; postmodernism, properly understood, is required to be just as skeptical about the possibility of having false beliefs as it is about the possibility of having true ones.

And the analogy of the game is just as problematic for language as it is for ideology. No one cares what you meant by moving your rook four spaces to the left—you don’t need to mean to checkmate your opponent in order to do it. (You can just as effectively, although not just as easily, do it by accident.) And if the meaning of your move is irrelevant to the question of whether your opponent has been checkmated, your opponent’s understanding of the meaning is equally irrelevant. Indeed, this point can be put more generally just by saying that the moves in a game don’t have any meaning. Which is just to say, what I’ve already said, that they have force. So redescribing ideologies as language games makes the mistake of leaving out beliefs, and redescribing speech acts as moves in a language game makes the mistake of leaving out meaning. Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition, a classic, makes both these mistakes.

19. Differences in height and weight are not, of course, intrinsically insignificant; in fact, for many purposes they are crucial. It is only with respect to the determination of identity that they don’t matter. Which is why, absent some appeal to utility or aesthetics, no one is committed to appreciating differences of height and weight. Of course, in a society as committed to the production of identity as ours is, there have been efforts to treat these physical features along the lines of skin color and thus turn them into markers of identity. But, as I have argued elsewhere (“Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction”), identity on the model of race (or culture) requires that our bodies (or beliefs and actions) represent rather than constitute our identity, and while it’s easy to see how having a certain skin color can represent (or misrepresent) your race, it’s hard to see how the height you are can be thought of as representing (or misrepresenting) rather than simply determining your tallness.

20. Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Popular Library, 1987), 36–37, 6. The succeeding volumes of the trilogy are Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989).

21. In this sense, there is something a little misleading about my description of nuclear holocaust fantasies as characteristic of the Cold War. It would be more accurate to insist on a certain tension between that war and the technology that was imagined as its most likely end. For although the war might be understood to be about ideology, its nuclear climax would involve not the defeat of one ideology by another but the defeat of humanity itself, Butler’s “humanicide.” The nuclear scenario thus functions to make a war between ideologies into a war against humanity—against, that is, an identity.

22. Dershowitz tends to describe the difference as that between Jews “as individuals,” who have never been better off, and Jews “as a people” who “have never been in greater danger” (The Vanishing American Jew [New York: Little, Brown, 1997], 1), but this somewhat misrepresents his point. The relevant opposition is not between Jews as individuals and Jews as a group but between Jews and their Jewishness.

23. Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 80.

24. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 226.

25. In this connection, it’s probably worth pointing out that the recent interest in cosmopolitanism as (alongside hybridity) a kind of corrective to what are understood as the excesses of identitarianism is just another way saving the primacy of the subject position. Universalism makes the subject irrelevant; cosmopolitanism just makes her more widely traveled.

26. Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars (New York: Bantam, 1996), 23, 3. Blue Mars is the third volume in the trilogy; it’s preceded by Red Mars (1993) and Green Mars (1994). The Mars trilogy as a whole is, among other things, a tribute to the success of postcolonial studies and, more generally, to the replacement of oppositions like true/false, just/unjust with self/other and same/different. The idea, of course, is that peoples’ beliefs about what is just are really just expressions of their identity; the problem with the idea is that it confuses the conditions under which people come to believe something with their reasons for believing it. For a non-Martian equivalent, see Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, with its hope for “suggestions about how to make us wonderfully different from anything that has been” (Rorty, Achieving Our Country [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 24).

27. It’s striking that the characters of the Mars trilogy understand themselves as inhabiting “the postcapitalist era” (77), that the trilogy attempts to imagine postcapitalism at the moment when Earth is beginning to understand itself as postsocialist. In fact, however, Robinson’s postcapitalism looks a lot like postsocialism—everything is corporations, everything is private property, it’s just that corporations are “employee-owned.” And this appeal to corporate difference is widespread in the science fiction of the period. Sometimes it takes the form of analogizing corporations to countries; sometimes it takes the form of replacing countries by corporations. Both forms, however, make possible the rewriting of political difference as economic competition, and hence the transformation of social visions into corporate interests. Corporations, in other words, are more like bodies and cultures than like ideologies; their competition involves only the question of who is stronger or more successful, not the question of who is right. At the same time, however, there is something weirdly postcapitalist about the corporate world imagined in posthistoricist science fiction—it also seems to be posteconomic; it’s impossible to tell in these novels how the corporations make their money or even what they produce. Instead of nation-states being imagined as corporations, the corporations are imagined as nation-states. Various economists have criticized the analogy between the corporation and the state on the grounds that the state has no product to sell; posthistoricist science fiction replaces the state with the corporation by imagining the corporation as if it were a state, by imagining it without any commodity to sell. And even when this effort to imagine corporations as if they were states is compromised by the appearance of some product, the product turns out to be something to which the state is more likely to be committed than is any corporation—the antiracist black skin dye marketed by the good corporation in Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net is more like an antidiscrimination law or affirmative action program than a commodity.

28. Native American Council of New York City, Voice of Indigenous Peoples, edited by Alexander Ewen, with a preface by Rigoberta Menchu and a foreward by Boutros Boutrous-Ghali (Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 1994), 21, 19.

29. The fact that we can sometimes replace blood ties with legal ones—say, by adoption—doesn’t really alter the point. The idea of the nation as family is meant to capture your ties to people whom you don’t actually know but who nonetheless have some privileged relation to you. But however intense your feelings might be for the sister you never met, it’s hard to imagine feeling very strongly about the adopted sister you never met.

30. Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5.

31. Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 203.

32. Charles Taylor, Muticulturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 40.

33. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 36.

34. Ibid., 105. Yael Tamir makes this point with precision, as Kymlicka notes, when she describes cultures and national communities as being “outside the normative sphere” (Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993], 90). It’s for this reason that, as Tamir says, such groups can “accommodate normative diversity”—since membership is not determined by values, people with very different values can be members. But it’s for this same reason, of course, that membership can neither require nor justify normative diversity. Cultures, according to Kymlicka and Tamir, are entitled to respect; values, insofar as they have been disconnected from cultures, are not.

35. Kymlicka is explicitly opposed to the idea that the “national groups” whose rights he means to defend can be “defined by race or descent” (22); he insists rather that “national membership should be open in principle to anyone, regardless of race or colour, who is willing to learn the language and history of the society and participate in its social and political institutions” (23). But, with respect at least to minority rights based on past treaties, descent is clearly essential (people can’t become aborigines). And it’s hard to see how learning its history can make you a member of the culture whose history you’re learning; knowing the history of Quebec doesn’t make you Quebecois. For that matter, knowing the history of Quebec and also being able to speak the language of Quebec doesn’t make you Quebecois. What’s left, then, is the participation in the social and political institutions. But the commitment to political institutions seems problematic from the standpoint of multiculturalism. The whole idea of one country with different cultures (i.e., the whole idea of multiculturalism) seems to rest on the political institutions not being distinctive—if they are, then what’s separate isn’t merely the culture but the state.

36. John Edwards, Multilingualism (London: Penguin, 1995), 90, 92.

37. We might, of course, think of ourselves as wanting our language to survive because of the great works of literature that have been produced in it. If, however, this is our reason, then we’ve actually lost our interest in the survival of languages as such and become interested instead in the survival of great works of literature. And this interest would not, of course, commit us to the survival of those languages in which we thought there were no great works. Or we might be interested in preserving languages as objects of antiquarian interest, for linguists to study. But it wouldn’t matter for this purpose whether anyone actually spoke the language; a dictionary and a grammar would suffice, or a tape made by the last speaker. In fact, the most common arguments for the survival of languages rest on an analogy between languages and species. For example, Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine (in Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000] describe a language called Taiap, spoken only by about one hundred people in Papua New Guinea and apparently, since the children of Taiap speakers now tend to speak Tok Pisin (pidgin English), on the verge of dying out. “If Taiap were a rare species of bird,” say Nettle and Romaine, people would be “concerned.” “Yet in Papua New Guinea and all over the world, many unique local languages are dying at an unparalleled rate,” and “few people know or care” (13–14). The question of why people should care about the extinction of the rare bird is, of course, itself a complicated one—answers tend to oscillate between the anthropocentric instrumentalist (extinction of other species is bad for us) and the deeper ecological (extinction of other species is bad for them). But it’s notoriously hard to see why we should feel any moral obligations to the abstract entity that is a species: as Joel Feinberg (quoted in Eric Katz, Nature as Subject [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997]) puts it, “A whole collection, as such, cannot have beliefs, expectations, wants or desires … individual elephants can have interests, but the species elephant cannot” (20). And it’s that much harder to see how languages can be worthy of moral consideration, since a language is not only not itself a living entity, it’s not even (like a species) a collection of living entities. We can at least feel bad about the rare birds that we imagine dying as the species dies out, but it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for Taiap, which was never alive and didn’t really die—it just stopped being used.

38. Gordon and Newfield, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” 80, 86, 84.

39. I recognize that this is exactly the kind of formulation that will lead some readers to complain (as some readers of my earlier work already have) that my characterizations of what people can and cannot coherently care about miss what Douglas Mao calls “the crucial point that we don’t live in a world in which all parties exercise reason all the time” (“Culture Clubs,” Modernism/Modernity 8 [2001]: 1710). Such complaints seem to me, however, to rely on a mistaken idealization of “reason,” what might be described as the elevation of reason over reasons. The fact that people have lots of false beliefs and do lots of stupid things based on those false beliefs doesn’t mean they don’t have any reasons—it just means they have bad reasons. And having bad reasons is one way (having good reasons is the other) of exercising reason. So if my argument against caring about the culture of our descendants fails to convince people, it’s not because the question of whether we should care about their culture is somehow immune to (above or below) reason; it’s because my reasons don’t seem good enough.

40. Ben Bova, Mars (New York: Bantam, 1992), 11.

41. Ibid., 107, 247, 12.

42. William M. Ferguson and Arthur H. Rohn, Anasazi Ruins of the Southwest (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 1.

43. The locus classicus would be Willa Cather’s extraordinary novel The Professor’s House. For an account of this and related texts, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).

44. The point here is not to identify indigenous peoples with nature as opposed to culture but to imagine instead that nature has a culture and, identifying the cultures of indigenous peoples with nature’s culture, to make the commitment to the cultural rights of indigenous people identical to the commitment to preserving nature.

45. As Robert Markley’s exceptionally informative essay, “Falling into Theory: Simulation, Terraformation, and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy,” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997): 773–99, makes clear, however, Robinson’s interest in Mars is at least as much a function of the new knowledge generated by the Mariner voyages and of the late 1980s and early 1990s scholarly debates about the possibility and/or desirability of remaking the Martian atmosphere to support human life. My point here in emphasizing the Columbus quinquecentennial is just to highlight the way in which questions about what to do with Martian nature get rearticulated as questions about what to do with Martian culture.

46. Native American Council of New York City, Voice of Indigenous Peoples, 9. Many of those involved in the project had wanted 1992 to be the International Year of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, but, according to the anonymous authors of the introduction to Voice, “pressure from Spain, Brazil, and the United States, among others” (21), made that impossible.

47. Ibid., 26, 115, 60, 115.

48. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996), 80–81.

49. It is, of course, possible to articulate a commitment to rights independent of the question of language, and at least one important strain of deep ecology—that represented, for example, by the legal writer Christopher Stone—has been interested in the “legal rights” of what he calls “natural objects” without being interested in their language or, for that matter, even feeling compelled to assert that they speak a language (Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? [Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1996], 1). Subsequent references to Stone’s writings are to this book and are cited in parentheses in the text. Stone’s original essay (“Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects”) was published in 1972; perhaps, putting the point a little too crudely and anticipating an argument that will need to be made at greater length, one could say that as deep ecology’s interest in the natural world has modulated from an interest in respecting the rights of objects to an interest in respecting their differences, it has made the question of language increasingly central.

50. Bova, Mars, 272, 245, 258, 247.

51. Also on Richard C. Hoagland’s Mars. Hoagland thinks there is a “bizarre object” on Mars that he and other believers call the “Face” and that, they say, could not have been caused by either “wind” or “tectonics” (Hoagland, The Monuments of Mars [Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1992], 8). Their updated version of Lowell’s canals is no doubt mistaken, but their theoretical position has a certain force: “There is no middle ground” about the Face, Hoagland says. “It either is or is not artificial,” and “If it’s not, it is not worth worrying about” (16).

52. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8 (summer 1982): 728.

53. John R. Searle, “Literary Theory and Its Discontents,” New Literary History 25 (summer 1994): 649–50.

54. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 95.

55. In response to an earlier version of this argument, Searle suggested that, confronted with such departures from “orthographic norms,” one would “appeal to the producer of the sentence to find out what he or she intended” (“Literary Theory and Its Discontents,” 680). But if the letters have been produced by natural accident, then, of course, there is no possibility of such an appeal, and, more important, if the letters are defined as purely formal entities, there can be no point to such an appeal. For to define them purely formally is to define them without reference to any particular account of how they were produced. So if the letters really are purely formal entities, which is to say, if they are whatever letters they are independent of any causal account of their production, what good will it do to appeal to the person who produced them? She can, at best, tell you what letters she was trying to write, not what letters she has actually written.

56. For a powerful and sustained account of the empiricism of deconstruction’s relation to the materiality of the signifier, and especially of what she calls its commitment to “the prelinguistic rather than the linguistic” (170 n. 7), see Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 1992).

57. Ibid., 159, 165.

58. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 66. Derrida couples the substitution of the mark for the sign with the “substitution of intentional effect for intention,” and although a fuller discussion of the notion of effect in deconstruction will follow, it may be worth noting here the appeal to the subject position intrinsic to it: the meaning of a sign will not depend on its readers; the effect of a mark will.

59. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 40.

60. Actually, this formulation is a little unfair to Fukuyama, since his point, of course, is that the end of contradiction (aka the triumph of liberalism) marks an end to politics. Butler’s particular contribution is to turn the end into the beginning.

61. The thing there can be a right (or, for that matter, wrong) answer about is what someone means by it, which is why the argument for intentionalism here is just that it is the only way of accounting for conflicts that really are conflicts of interpretation.

62. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 154.

63. Native American Council of New York City, Voice of Indigenous Peoples, 13, 15.

64. Derrida, Limited Inc, 61.

65. Ibid., 91.

66. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991), 112.

67. Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove, 1988), 210.

68. And not quite even in the way that the condemned men of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony understand the judgments inscribed on their bodies by the writing machine. The condemned man “deciphers” the “script” “with his wounds” (Franz Kafka, The Great Short Works, translated Joachim Neugrochel [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000], 205), but it’s precisely this deciphering that Ellis’s and Acker’s notions of writing (not to mention Stephenson’s notion of code) will make irrelevant. Their readers will not exactly need to know the meaning of the texts they feel.

69. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1992), 395.

70. Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 86.

71. Ibid., 518.

72. The equivalent in Empire of the Senseless is the tattoo that counts for Acker, as Patrick O’Donnell rightly says, as “a force in the war on representation because it is a ‘direct’ writing … that cuts out the representational middleman” (Latent Destinies [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000], 106). Once, however, you cut out the “representational middleman,” what you get is not direct writing but no writing at all.

73. Which is to say not that pain can’t be faked but only that it’s impossible to think of someone being shot by a nail gun as faking.

74. The difference between the two texts would be that Butler celebrates her aliens’ integrity while Bateman’s demands for honesty are obviously a little over the top.

75. A corollary would be that it doesn’t make sense to think of understanding a text as sharing the experience of the person who wrote it. Butler is fascinated by the idea of the empath, and her Parable series (written after Xenogenesis) is built around someone who can feel people’s pain (or their pleasure) just by looking at them. Thus the “sharer” heroine of Parable of the Talents (1998) is tortured by the sight of a rape because she experiences both the pain of the victim and the pleasure of the rapist, an experience that is made even more disconcerting when Butler ingeniously (albeit creepily) makes the empath herself the victim. But where in science fiction it is seeing people rather then understanding them that sets the empath off, in literary criticism it works a little differently. In Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, for example, the difference between experiencing and interpreting is completely elided. For Nelson, understanding what people mean is above all a matter of feeling what they feel, so readers who completely understand, say, Ezra Pound’s “economic and social views” are imagined as being “fully at one” with them (Repression and Recovery [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 140). And if this were true, it would certainly make one nervous, as it makes Nelson nervous, about intentionalist readings of literary texts. “It is worth recognizing,” he remarks, “just how appalling it would be to recover such authorial intentionality so thoroughly as to lose ourselves in it.” But, of course, it isn’t true; understanding what people mean is not the same as feeling what they feel, much less becoming who they are. That’s the difference between the empath and the literary critic. The empath will surely find the “subject position” of the rapist “intolerable”; the literary critic runs no risk of losing herself in the world of even the most obnoxious author—since understanding what people mean has nothing to do with occupying their subject position. It’s only the empath who starts to shiver when she hears you say you’re cold.

76. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 27. Their assessment of Coleridge’s and the tourist’s response is, as they point out, derived from C. S. Lewis, and it should be clear that what matters to their argument (and to mine) is not the accuracy of his understanding of the sublime but the inevitability of his distinction between feeling bad and being mistaken.

77. Why isn’t the meaning of the text just the intended effect, its making you think of what the producer of the text wanted you to think of? If this were true, then the opposition between the normal and the normative would be irrelevant, since it would be turned into the difference between what people mainly did and what someone wanted them to do. But insofar as we could (only) disagree about what someone wanted us to do, the idea of the desired effect restores normativity. It is, in other words, the possibility of being mistaken (as opposed to being, say, unusual) that is crucial here.

78. The point here is not that there’s anything wrong with talking about the effects that texts have on their readers—there’s nothing problematic about describing Acker’s depiction of Thivai’s love for Abhor as, say, deeply moving. Just as there’s nothing problematic about someone agreeing with you that the text does indeed depict Thivai’s love for Abhor but recording that he or she is not deeply moved by it. The effect here is a consequence of the meaning but is separate from it. The problem is, rather, when the effect is conflated with the meaning. And the minute you deny that an interpretation of a text can be—must be—accurate or inaccurate, the sort of thing two readers could disagree about it, you replace the meaning of the text with the effect it has on you.

79. Rorty’s own version of this point is that he is “happier with uses than with meanings” (Rorty and His Critics, 74), a way of putting it that is admirably consistent but hard to believe, since in order for uses to make you happier, you have to understand the difference between them and meanings, and if you do understand the difference between uses and meanings, you’ve already chosen meanings. From this perspective, however, it is at least easy to see why criticisms of Rorty as a kind of skeptic, denying the possibility that we can have knowledge of the world in the sense of having true beliefs about it, completely miss the mark. What he’s denying is not that we can have true beliefs and true interpretations but that we do things like believing and interpreting. And, more generally, we might say that neither postmodernism nor poststructuralism should be understood—even when this is their self-description—as challenges to the independent reality of an external world. What they are instead is a particular description of the way that world affects us—as events that have effects rather than as texts that have meanings.

80. Thus David Palumbo-Liu gets it exactly wrong when he claims that “the key move” in Rorty’s recent work, “the move from contingency and poeisis to an ethnos that is stratified precisely as ‘American,’ ” involves a lapse “from his antifoundationalism”—it is his antifoundationalism (Palumbo-Liu, “Awful Patriotism: Richard Rorty and the Politics of Knowing,” Diacritics 29 [1999]: 49, 45). The mistake is, of course, a plausible one; there isn’t, as Palumbo-Liu rightly observes, a lot of enthusiasm for “new vocabularies” in Achieving Our Country. But Rortyan antifoundationalism doesn’t really require enthusiasm for new vocabularies; it just requires that the relevant choice be between vocabularies (rather than beliefs) and that whatever you’re enthusiastic about, you be enthusiastic about it because it’s new or old (rather than true or false). And the fact that Palumbo-Liu likes the “new voices” where Rorty likes the old ones doesn’t make much difference between them. It is true, however, that Palumbo-Liu is more consistent than Rorty; where Rorty occasionally does lapse into worrying about issues that are not structured on the vocabulary/identity/culture model—like economic inequality—Palumbo-Liu converts that very worry into the expression of an identity: it’s the sort of thing that “heterosexual, white, middle-class male progressives” (50) resort to.

81. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), acknowledgments.

Two: Prehistoricism

1. J. G. Ballard, The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (New York: Holt, 1995), 244, 97.

2. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 151.

3. Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 184.

4. Fried puts this point as criticism when he says of works by Judd and Larry Bell that they “cannot be said to acknowledge literalness; they simply are literal” (88). More generally, the point would be that for Fried, as for Smithson, there can be no such thing as abstract painting, a point that will become crucial in the next generation when the photographer James Welling, characterizing abstraction as “too hard” for painting, comes to see it as “built into” photography.

5. Hal Foster is thus at least partially right when he describes Fried’s turn to conviction as an effort to counter Judd’s “subjectivism” with “an appeal to quasi-objective standards of taste” and when he, in effect, criticizes that appeal by historicizing it, linking it to the “disciplinary underpinnings” of “Greenbergian formalism” (Foster, The Return of the Real [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996], 52, 57). The problem, obviously, is that our thinking a work of art good may well seem as subjective as our finding it interesting. Insofar, however, as Fried is asking not simply whether the work of art is good but also whether it really is a work of art, the situation is somewhat different; the kind of mistake we might make in taking nonart for art is not the same as the kind of mistake we would make in taking a minor work for a masterpiece. One of the great complications of Fried’s writing in this period is its persistent imbrication of the question about whether something is art with the question about whether it is good art. But while the overlapping of these questions is certainly an important moment in the history of art, the questions can still be separated; otherwise there would be no such thing as bad art.

6. Because they are designed to do only what they (what all objects) already do.

7. It’s often said the impulse to site specificity was motivated by the desire to resist commodification, to resist, that is, the production of works of art that could be bought or, in the more sophisticated variant of this argument, consumed. Thus Douglas Crimp says that “the whole point” of Richard Serra’s sculpture is to defeat the “consumption of art, indeed to defeat consumption altogether and to replace it with the experience of art in its material reality” (Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993], 167). But it’s hard to see how the commitment to the primacy of experience can in itself count as resistance to commodification and consumption—what else is the tourist industry?

8. It might be argued that the idea that the meaning of a text can change was already a consequence of New Critical theory, even though it was not a consequence the New Critics recognized or that, in the main, they would have welcomed. And, along the same lines (as will become clear), it might be argued (in fact, I will argue) that theorists who do think of themselves as committed to the idea that the meaning of a text can change are in fact committed to the idea that texts have no meaning. Or, to put it another way, that theorists who think there can be many (correct) interpretations of the same text are in fact committed to the idea that there can be no correct interpretations of the same text and, indeed, to the idea that there is no such thing as interpretation. When I say, “in fact committed,” I do not mean, of course, that these commitments are the hidden meaning of the theoretical texts I discuss: to say that an argument has consequences different from those its author intends is not to say that it has a meaning different from the one its author intends. My point will be, rather, that if you set out to imagine a text that can mean something other than what its author intends, you will end up (whether you mean to or not and whether you realize it or not) imagining a text that means nothing—that isn’t a text.

9. Thus Smithson will describe the Non-Site as a “three dimensional logical picture,” both representational and abstract—the technology through which “one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus The Non-Site” (364).

10. The following discussion is about the practice of straight photography, since it’s only straight photography that has this particular ontological interest.

11. Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984): 246–77.

12. Robert Demachy, “On the Straight Print,” Camera Work, July 1907, reprinted in A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography, 1889–1923, ed. Peter C. Bunnell (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1980), 172.

13. Sadakichi Hartmann, “A Plea for Straight Photography,” American Amateur Photographer 16, no. 3 (march 1904), reprinted in A Photographic Vision, 166.

14. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 114, 118.

15. Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990), 120.

16. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 84.

17. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 23.

18. Wellek and Warren wondered whether the “retention” of the word’s “modern association” could be “defended as an enrichment of [the poem’s] meanings,” as if the crucial question were whether the later associations made the poem better (Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature [New Haven, Conn.: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956], 177). As I have already begun to suggest, however, and as I argue in some detail later, the question of what different readers (those of the seventeenth century and the twenty-first) are made to think when they read the poem is a question about its effect, not its meaning, and so it’s their experience and not the poem’s meaning that will be either enriched or impoverished.

19. First published in Glyph I in 1977, “The Purloined Ribbon” was reproduced as the concluding chapter of Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). The reference to the “illusion of meaning” is on page 298.

20. And there is also, of course, a continuity just as complete between these formal concerns (about what kind of object the work of art is and what kind of subject its beholder must be) and the politics of posthistoricism—the end of the Cold War and the replacement of ideological disagreement by identitarian difference. Indeed, this continuity is explicitly thematized in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), which, marking the beginning of the Cold War with the first Soviet explosion of a nuclear device, marks its end with the transformation of the B-52s that “used to carry nuclear bombs” (70) into an “art project,” a “landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself.” The desert on which the planes are located is “the framing device,” which means not exactly that there is no frame but instead that there is nothing outside the frame, that the limits of the work of art are identical to the limits of the beholder’s experience. And it is this identification of the experience of the work of art with the beholder’s experience as such that, in Tony Smith’s words, “makes most painting look pretty pictorial.” Furthermore, DeLillo not only identifies the emergence of the beholder’s experience with the end of the Cold War but also identifies it with the transformation of the difference between ideologies into the difference between identities. His desert is the site also of a gasoline commercial: two cars, one white, one black, filled with different brands of gas—“First car to get to the Trinity site wins” (530). The ad is meant to identify the competition between the cars with the competition between the United States and the USSR, but the white car’s victory sets off a “firestorm of protest” not from the Soviets but from the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Congress of Racial Equality.

21. Hence the continuity between Fish’s very early “affective stylistics” (which claimed that the meaning of the text consisted in the reader’s response to it) and his turn to the new “perspective” announced in Is There a Text in This Class? (which described the reader as producing rather than responding to the text). On the second account, as we have already seen, readers cannot disagree because they are producing different texts. On the first account, they are responding to the same text, but because their response to the text is their experience of it, they still can’t disagree—they can just have different experiences.

22. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 298.

23. Of course, it’s possible to rescue meaning from illusion (i.e., from the reduction to information) but only through extreme measures, like David Chalmers’s panpsychism, where, even though the information (the difference one physical state makes to another) is doing all the work, our sense that we are meaning things and understanding what others mean is preserved by locating it in a parallel and not (or not exactly) physical world. But, as Chalmers himself acknowledges, his effort to preserve consciousness in humans by identifying it as the inevitable accompaniment of information systems requires him to believe that not only humans and other animals have consciousness but that every information system does: since “one can find information states in a rock—when it expands and contracts, for example,” the rock must be understood to have “experience” and hence to be conscious (Chalmers, The Conscious Mind [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 297).

24. Which is why it makes sense for Cary Wolfe—arguing in Animal Rites (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) for a critique of “speciesism” that he thinks should follow from what he understands as postmodernism’s “posthumanism”—to invoke Derrida and to cite not only his essay “The Animal I Am” but also a passage from “Eating Well” in which he insists that the phenomenon of “the mark in general” (including “ ‘animal languages,’ genetic coding,” and “all forms of marking within … so-called human language” [73]) makes a clean “cut” between the human and the animal, or even between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic, impossible. Wolfe’s point here is not just to claim that some animals (e.g., the “higher” apes) have language but that, following Derrida, we need to rethink our idea of what a language is. And it is certainly true that once the signifier is converted into the mark, or what Derrida calls “the inhuman trace,” then our notion of language must be changed, since language has now become information, and not just animals but everything (from computers to thermostats to stones) is involved in exchanging it.

25. “Il n’y a pas de hors texte” is usually understood as something like a declaration of idealist skepticism, and, more generally, nothing is more usual than to identify poststructuralism in particular and postmodernism more generally as a kind of relativism, foregrounding the primacy of the interpreter. But its supposed idealism is really only a by-product of postmodernism’s actual materialism. The transformation of sign to mark also transforms interpretation to experience and thus makes the position of the subject relevant, since although the meaning of the sign doesn’t change, the subject’s experience of the mark certainly does.

26. A parallel claim for posthistoricist avant-garde poetry would be Steve McCaffery’s description (in North of Intention [New York: Roof Books, 1986]) of the text in Language Writing as “affording both author and reader the possibility of producing endless meanings and relationships” (149). For McCaffery, the recognition that language’s “uncontestable graphic, phonic or gestural materiality” is “a necessary condition of, yet insubsumable to, the ideality of meaning” (204) marks the impossibility of what he sometimes calls “absolute” (205) and sometimes calls “unitary” (207) meaning. But the alternative to unitary meaning is not simply multiple meanings, since, as McCaffery recognizes, a text that means, say, four or five things will have just as absolute a meaning as a text that means only one. What’s distinctive about Language Writing is, rather, its commitment to “the loss of meaning” (211). And the text that ceases to be a meaningful object of interpretation (McCaffery says it “resists interpretive depth”) “comes closer to being an experience” (24) and thus to achieving the “endlessness” that, as we have already seen, is built into experience.

Three: Historicism

1. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 399.

2. As has been widely noted, the great Latino immigration of recent years may pose a serious threat to the American racial system, since Latinos as a group cannot be considered either black or white. To the extent, however, that Latinos can instead be broken down into two groups, the black/white binary might still survive.

3. Art Spiegelman, Maus II (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 99. The black dog is a hitchhiker picked up, much to Vladek’s horror, by Art’s wife, Françoise. The point of the scene is to criticize Jewish exceptionalism of the kind articulated when Vladek, in response to Françoise’s charge that he talks about blacks “the way the Nazis talked about Jews,” replies, “I thought really you are much more smart than this, Françoise…. It’s not even to compare, the shvartsers and the Jews.” But the iconography of the novel—the fact that American Jews remain mice—reproduces rather than criticizes that exceptionalism.

4. See Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

5. In his informative and incisive book The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), Peter Novick cites this text, remarking that he can “celebrate” his “birthday” and his “Jewish identity” by “learning that on that date in 1298 nineteen Jews were killed in Krautheim, Germany; in 1648 Chmielnicki’s men massacred 600 Jews in Ostrog, Ukraine; in 1941 the SS killed 250 in Brianska Gora, Belorussian SSR” (328).

6. Whitley Strieber, Communion (New York: Avon, 1987), 123.

7. Greg Bear, Blood Music (New York: Ace, 1985), 111–12.

8. Toni Morrison, “The Pain of Being Black,” Tme, May 22, 1989, quoted in Mae G. Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text.” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, edited, with an introduction by Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 83.

9. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 13.

10. Valerie Smith, “ ‘Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 345.

11. Which is not, of course, to say that enslavement is the only or, necessarily, the defining racial experience; indeed, Paul Gilroy follows Morrison in claiming that too often slavery “gets forgotten,” and he explicitly opposes Morrison’s memory of slavery to the memories of Kemet, the “black civilization anterior to modernity” that Afrocentrists sometimes invoke “in its place” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 190). The difference matters to Gilroy because he associates the appeal to Kemet with the attempt to “recover hermetically sealed and culturally absolute racial traditions,” and he thinks of the appeal to slavery “as a means to figure the inescapability and legitimate value of mutation, hybridity and intermixture” (223). Gilroy prefers hybridity to purity, and so, for the purposes of “identity construction,” he would rather remember slavery than Egypt, but from the standpoint of the argument developed here, the questions of which past you choose to remember and of what kind of identity you choose to construct obviously matter less than the commitment to constructing identity by remembering the past in the first place.

12. Smith, “ ‘Circling the Subject,’ ” 350.

13. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.

14. Caroline Rody accurately describes the appeal of Beloved’s historicism when she observes that “writing that bears witness to an inherited tragedy approaches the past with an interest much more urgent than historical curiosity or even political revisionism” and goes on to contrast what she calls an “objective ‘prehistory of the present’ ” to “the subjective, ethnic possession of history understood as the prehistory of the self” (Caroline Rody, “Tony Morrison’s Beloved: History, ‘Rememory,’ and a ‘Clamor for a Kiss,’ ” American Literary History 7 [1995]: 97). Insofar as to inherit a tragedy involves something more than living with its consequences (as, of course, it must, since everybody is already living with the consequences of past events), it is only through some mechanism of “possession” that any tragedy can count as an inherited one. The sense of urgency, in other words, is entirely dependent on the claim to possession.

15. Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 47.

16. Claude Lanzmann, “An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” May 4, 1986, quoted in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 213–14.

17. Claude Lanzmann, “Seminar on Shoah,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 85. Berel Lang makes a slightly different ethical argument against the representation of the Holocaust when he says that any way of representing something suggests the possibility of other ways of representing the same thing and thus that representing the Holocaust is inevitably the first step toward misrepresenting it. He recommends that the Holocaust be treated the way that the Exodus is in the Hagadah: “As the Hagadah places every Jew at Sinai, instructed to recount the events of the Exodus as though they had been part of his own life, the presence of all Jews is also fixed within the events of the genocide—those born after it [‘you who never was there’] as well as those who died in it or who lived despite it” (Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], xiii). But although pretending you are a victim of slavery or the Holocaust might have some identitarian value (might make you feel more black or Jewish), it’s hard to see its epistemological utility. Not even the most fervent empiricists think we have more accurate accounts of events we have pretended to experience.

18. Claude Lanzmann, “The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann,” American Imago 48 (winter 1991): 481.

19. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 6.

20. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).

21. Where Lanzmann privileges a language that cannot be understood by its hearers, Cathy Caruth takes the argument in a more radically de Manian direction by introducing a language than cannot be understood by its speaker. Of Eiji Okada, the Japanese actor who appeared in Hiroshima mon amour and whose character spoke French although he himself did not, Caruth says that he introduces “a specificity and singularity into the film that exceeds what it is able to convey on the level of its representation” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 52). We have already seen how the language a hearer cannot understand may be imagined to convey a presence precisely because it does not convey a meaning. Here the fact that Okada does not understand the language he himself speaks (he just memorized the French phonemes) is imagined to preserve the “difference” that his French-speaking character has begun to lose. For the “assumption of a foreign language,” Caruth writes, involves a “forgetting,” “a loss of culture and history.” And it is this forgetting that Okada has saved himself from. But not only has he saved himself from being understood (and hence losing his cultural difference), he has saved himself from being understandable. The point, in other words, is not just that other people can’t understand what he means; it is instead that he doesn’t mean anything: “he does not represent, but rather voices his difference quite literally and untranslatably” (51). The speaker no one understands has not yet succumbed to translation; the speaker who doesn’t mean can never succumb to translation. The way to preserve one’s specificity, then, is to refuse language, and Caruth’s trauma thus provides a psychoanalytic supplement to de Man’s deconstructive refusal of meaning and Rorty’s pragmatist refusal of understanding. (For a devastating critique of Caruth from a psychoanalytic perspective, however, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000].)

22. Geoffrey Hartman, “Introduction: Darkness Visible,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7.

23. Michael Krausz, “On Being Jewish,” in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1993), 272. Subsequent references to this essay and to other essays from this volume are cited in parentheses in the text.

24. One could, of course, claim the Holocaust as part of one’s history not because one had oneself experienced it but because one’s parents or grandparents had. But to make this claim would be, of course, to relocate one’s Jewishness in one’s blood, which is to say, in the genetic material that connects you to your relatives. You cannot, in other words, as Anthony Appiah has pointed out, invoke your history to determine your identity because you can’t tell which history is yours unless you already know your identity (Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986]).

25. Yisrael Gutman, “On the Character of Nazi Antisemitism,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 359.

26. This is, of course, different from saying that the individual Jew is subsumed by the group of Jews. The issue in cultural (as in racial) identity, despite the assertions of polemicists on both sides, has nothing to do with the relative priority of the group over the individual; it has to do instead with the identification of a certain set of beliefs and practices as appropriate for a person or persons in virtue of the fact that those beliefs and practices are his, hers, or theirs. What’s wrong with cultural identity, in other words, is not that it privileges the group over the individual but that it (incoherently) derives what you do from what you are.

27. This is, to some extent, implicit in the very idea of genocide, inasmuch as genocide is understood as the extermination of a people rather than as mass murder. In genocide, it is what makes the people a people that is the ultimate object of destruction, so the murder of persons is in a strict sense only incidental to the elimination of the people. If, of course, the people are understood as a race, then genocide will require that they be killed or sterilized; if the people are understood as a culture, then genocide will require only that they be assimilated. From this standpoint, even writers who have not lost sight of the fact that Hitler’s goal was physical extermination rather than cultural assimilation may find themselves subordinating the death of persons to the destruction of a people. Thus Berel Lang describes Nazi genocide as worse than cultural genocide because, “Where life remains, as in cultural genocide or ethnocide, the possibility also remains of group revival; but this is not the case where genocide involves physical annihilation” (13). The point here is that physical destruction is the worst kind of genocide because, unlike cultural genocide, it is in principle irreversible. The relevant difference between physical and cultural genocide is not, in other words, the fact that, in cultural genocide, no persons may be killed, which is to say that what’s worse about physical genocide is not, on this account, the fact that so many persons must die. For genocide involves the extermination not of persons but of a people. So cultural genocide is less bad than physical genocide not because no persons have been killed but because the people (“the genos”) may still be revived. It is not less murderous (in both cases, the group dies); it is less irreversibly murderous (in the second case, the group may live again).

28. Ellis makes sure that even when Bateman commits what looks like a truly racial assault—attacking a Japanese delivery boy—the attack has an economic trigger, a “tirade” by one of his friends about the Japanese buying “the Empire State Building and Nell’s. Nell’s, can you believe it?” that “moves something inside me, it sets something off” (180). And when, tearing open “the cartons of Japanese food” to dump their contents on the dying body, Bateman sees that they contain beef chow mein and mushu pork instead of sushi and soba noodles and that he has “accidentally kill[ed] the wrong kind of Asian” (181), he finds himself apologizing—“Uh, sorry”—to the corpse; the Chinese haven’t bought Nell’s.

29. Edith Wharton, Novels (New York: Library of America, 1985), 1021.

30. Which is also why the only interest it has in culture is in mass culture; the commitment to Phil Collins and Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston is the commitment to a culture that everyone can have whether or not they have any money or any taste. Culture in Ellis is the fantasy of equality produced by the reality of inequality. And it is this persistent economization of culture that links him to Wharton and to Theodore Dreiser rather than to their successors, for whom cultures became expressions of identities.

31. Samuel R. Delany, Return to Nevèrÿon (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 19.

32. A more plausible candidate for a sexual identity that could be understood on the model of the people would be homosexuals, although homosexuality too—for reasons given in “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man”—cannot finally count as an identity, and, in any event, homosexuality as a distinctive practice doesn’t seem to exist in Nevèrÿon, which is to say, no one is much interested in and nothing much follows from whether you sleep with men or women—“It makes a great deal of difference to you now. But I think shortly that you’ll find that it seems a less and less important distinction” (175). Masochism, however, is marked.

33. Gayle Rubin, “The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M,” in Coming to Power, ed. members of SAMOIS (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1987), 220. SAMOIS, named after the estate in The Story of O, described itself as a lesbian/feminist S/M organization. One of Pat Califia’s contributions to Coming to Power (“A Personal View”) gives a good account of the context out of which SAMOIS emerged, and Califia is also the author of Macho Sluts (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1988), a collection of erotic fiction vividly committed to the pornography of consent.

34. It might, of course, be argued on Kantian grounds that the masochistic contract—the choice of slavery—is no contract at all. No one, according to Kant, “can voluntarily renounce his rights by a contract or legal transaction to the effect that he has no rights but only duties, for such a contract would deprive him of the right to make a contract, and would thus invalidate the one he had already made” (Kant, Political Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited with an introduction and notes by Hans Reiss [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 75). The response to this criticism has been a commitment to the safe words (“And always be sure to agree on some sign to let you know when the game is over: a word, a gesture—that need be all” [175]) that are the hallmark of postmodern masochism. The safe word is in part a protection against someone getting hurt in a way that or to a degree that they don’t want but it is also an effort to rescue rights from duties (i.e. to redescribe duties as rights). What the safe word does is guarantee the continual presence of consent; you can’t, in a moment of freedom, give up your future freedom because the safe word guarantees you the opportunity to withdraw your consent. The safe word makes masochism the utopian form of liberalism—all consent all the time

35. Samuel Delany, Silent Interviews (Hanover N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 137.

36. Robinson, The Debt, 13.

37. If we say that black people are people whose ancestors were black, we leave open the question of what made them black; presumably some other physiological marker, which we’re now required to name. But if we invoke the basic social construction line—black people are people who are treated as black—then the argument is obviously false. Black people were sometimes treated as less than human; did that make them less than human? For the full version of the argument against race as a social construction, see Michaels, “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.” It may, however, be worth noting here that my point is not that treating people as something can never make them the thing you treat them as; an outcast, for example, is an outcast because he is treated as an outcast.

38. Orson Scott Card, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1996), 28.

39. Chorzoi Factory Case, Germany v. Poland, 1928, quoted in Lord Anthony Gifford, “The Legal Basis of the Claims for Reparations” (paper presented at the First Pan-African Conference of Reparations, Abuja, Federal Republic of Nigeria, April 27–29, 1993); reproduced on the Africa Reparations Movement Web site, www.arm.arc.co.uk/home.html.

40. Carolyn Porter, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988): 783.

41. Reluctant not only because she has to go back and run the risks of life as a black person in antebellum Maryland but because the white ancestor she must, if she is to save herself, rescue is a brutal and deceitful slaveholder.

42. David Horowitz, “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Are a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too,” FrontPageMagazine.com., January 3, 2001.

43. The most serious and intelligent critical reading of Kindred is the chapter devoted to it in Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s Remembering Generations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), but Rushdy is so committed to current orthodoxy about race (its meaning is social rather than biological) that he thinks its heroine, Dana, must be more committed to “symbolically disrelat[ing] herself from her biological kin” (115) (because they’re cruel white slave owners) than she is to the project of stopping people (even black people) from “killing my ancestor” (117) at least until he’s forced the black woman who will become Dana’s great-grandmother to sleep with him (Kindred [Boston: Beacon Press, 1988]). The “past,” Rushdy says, “must be confronted if it is to be altered” (117), but what gives Kindred its bite is the requirement that Dana confront the past in order to keep it unaltered and therefore “assure [her] family’s survival, [her] own birth” (29).

44. Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), 477 and passim.

45. These figures are extrapolated from Table 663, Money Income of Households—Distribution by Income Level and Selected Characteristics: 1999 of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States (2001).

46. Because the social (but not biological, since the idea of deserving has no place in evolutionary theory) Darwinism invoked by the effort to distinguish between those who do and those who don’t deserve their poverty opens up dismaying avenues of justification for every form of inequality, it would be cleaner to insist that no one, no matter how feckless, deserves his or her poverty. But once, of course, one adopts this position—once, that is, one becomes committed to absolute equality—the whole question of reparations becomes irrelevant (since everybody should have as much or as little as everyone else).

47. What exactly equal opportunity is and what the criteria for success might be are, of course, vexed and much discussed questions, absolutely central to post-Rawlsian liberalism. For a useful and extremely influential discussion of these issues, see Amartya Sen’s Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and for an excellent survey of contemporary thinking about them, see Alex Callinicos, Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

48. Hence the irrelevance also of Ashraf Rushdy’s appeal to a distinction between two different ways of understanding responsibility—one that relies on narrative and on the insight that past social practices like slavery have “enduring material effects that significantly determine life chances in contemporary society” (144) and one that insists that it is the present, not the past, that is (in Steven Knapp’s words) the “locus of authority” in determining our obligations. This, as I’ve been arguing, is a false antithesis. It doesn’t at all follow from the fact that the past has what Knapp (in Literary Interest [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993]) calls “explanatory relevance” (116) to the present that anyone in the present can coherently be held responsible for things that they didn’t do. Knapp, of course, goes farther and criticizes the idea that they can be held (metaphysically, at least) responsible for things they did do.

Coda: Empires of the Senseless

1. Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (New York: Vintage, 1998), n.p.

2. Don De Lillo, Mao II (New York: Penguin, 1991), 123, 129.

3. The obvious exception to these remarks is, of course, those evangelical Christians who might be said, from my point of view, to have their theology wrong but their theory right. As implausible as their beliefs may be, the commitment of, say, the Southern Baptist Convention to converting Jews and Muslims makes it clear that they at least understand what it means to have them. The exact opposite set of implausible but theoretically defensible views is held by the tiny and otherwise insignificant (Eric Rudolph’s affiliation with them is their only claim to fame) Christian Identity movement who understand themselves (coherently if incredibly) as belonging to the Christian race and whose religion therefore really is what they say it is, an identity.

4. Or, à la Huntington, like a “civilization.” Insofar as commentators regard the post-9/11 world as fulfilling Huntington’s predictions, they must regard it also as embodying the posthistoricist fantasy—the clash of civilizations is, as we have already seen, understood as a clash of identities rather than of ideologies. As I suggest later, however, the current discussion tends to convert the valorization of the difference between identities—different ways of being—into the valorization of being as such.

5. It’s also why the Bush administration got itself so quickly frozen into support of virtually anything Ariel Sharon did in response to suicide bombings, despite its desire to cultivate the support of Arab nations for the attack on Iraq—as long as the enemy is terrorism, even goals that the administration actually supports (like the establishment of a Palestinian state) must be subordinated to the war against the terrorist means used to achieve those goals. Not only do the ends not justify the means; the means make the ends irrelevant.

6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13.

7. Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 215.

8. Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove, 1988), 210.

9. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso, 2002), 89.

10. The theoretical apparatus for this commitment to the act is established in one of Žižek’s contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, where he argues that the fundamental distinction is between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic” act. The “authentic” (and hence truly revolutionary) act is one that does not “simply express/actualize my inner nature” but “redefine[s] … the very core of my identity” (124); the inauthentic act produces only a “pseudo-change” (125). So the mark of the true revolutionary is (just like it says in Glamorama!) that he’s not afraid of change.

11. It “makes very little sense to posit an affirmative lower-class identity,” John Guillory says in Cultural Capital, since “such an identity [has] to be grounded in the experience of deprivation per se” (13). But once the goal of equality is reconfigured as the goal of sainthood, the obstacle (“deprivation per se”) becomes an opportunity.