Disagreement Over Difference: Why Ideology Matters More Than Identity

I've spent much of the last 24 hours reading The Shape of the Signifier, the forthcoming book by Walter Benn Michaels, who is the Head of UIC's English Department, and, it so happens, one of my advisors. The book isn't in stores yet, though you can order copies direct from its publisher, Princeton University Press. I've borrowed a copy from Walter himself, which I promised to return after the weekend, and am struggling to refrain from marking it up.

Although I've heard Walter rehearse most of the arguments advanced in The Shape of the Signifier on multiple occasions--in seminars, meetings, and especially our department's weekly colloquia, where Walter's inquisitive presence make most any talk worth attending, regardless of the topic--and have read the bulk of the journal articles that were revised and reshaped into this book, the book itself is an invigorating read. It's a true intellectual tour de force.

As anyone familiar with Michaels's criticism knows, Walter would scoff at my remarks thus far, because they are merely an experiential report on how I was affected by the text. Such a report, as Walter will tell you, may be of interest to people with whom you are particularly intimate (close friends & immediate family members) but, unless you have acquired celebrity status, will be of negligible interest to the vast majority of people (including anonymous blog readers). Causal accounts of one's personal tastes and responses, that is, descriptions of how one happens to be affected by various experiences, are not (and generally should not be) of interest to people outside of one's immediate social network. Rule one for critics is "Thou shall most definitely not try to pass off one's affective responses as criticism."

So, to explain why I've found Walter's book so difficult to put down, here's a brief account of the argument made in the The Shape of the Signifier. Basically, the book is a polemic against the logic of identitarian difference as it has played out in various discourses--literary, philosophical, political--over the past third of a century or so. Michaels's core claim is that this logic of identitarian difference (i.e., the primacy of one's subject position--body, language, history) has supplanted the logic of ideological difference (i.e., the primacy of one's reasons for believing certain things) and that this tendency, which postmodernism, is a serious mistake.

A key lesson that Michaels would have us learn is that when responding to texts (novels, political manifestoes, philosophical treatises) we must not confuse the author's intended meaning with either the author's or the audience's experiences or subject position(s). Another way of putting this is to say that we should first and foremost concern ourselves with the question of what people believe (which involves assessing the validity of the reasons they give for their beliefs) rather than who they are (or understand themselves to be). A common mistake that people often make is to confuse a text's significance, that is, the generally unpredicatable impact that it makes in the world as it is disseminated, with it's meaning, which can and must originate solely in the creator of the text.

Michaels's argument about intentionality (which he and Steven Knapp in the essay "Against Theory") is not to suggest that the author is ever fully in control of the text's meaning, or even that she is aware of its meaning (as psychoanalysis teaches us, we can have unconscious intentions); rather, it is to suggest that for a set of words to count as a meaningful utterance or speech act, we must attribute them to an orginary source who intentionally produced them. Moreover, the interpretation of a text, correctly understood, entails an attempt to discern the author's intentions, i.e. what she believed herself to be saying when producing a text. This isn't to say that interpretation isn't, at times, an extremely complicated task (though it needn't be) or to suggest that a text's true meaning can ever be fully understood. It's simply the claim that if you are the business of textual interpretation, ultimately you are in the business of understanding what someone or some people intended when the made an utterance. While this might sound like common sense, the argument for intentionality is widely regarded as erroneous by many literary critics. One of Walter's key insights is that the denial of intentional meaning and the elision of "conflict over which interpretation of an utterance is incorrect" results from a theoretical conception of language that reduces "the sign to the mark, the utterance to its shape" and thereby prodcues an "allegiance to the primacy of the subject position" (63).

The remarks I've just quoted come from a passage discussing Judith Bulter's commitment to "resignification," but, as the reference to the sign reduced to a mark suggests, the theoretical model of language being critiqued here is deconstructionist. Walter's book isn't so much concerned with rejecting deconstruction (indeed, you might describe Walter's accounts of how the logic of various texts is frequently at odds with their explicit ideological message as deconstructionist) as it is with demonstrating how versions of its radical materialism--e.g., language as meaningless marks (Paul de Man) or trace inscriptions (Derrida)--inform and in some cases directly contribute to two common errors. One is the widespread tendency to treat all disputes as forms of identitarian difference. The second is the tendency to confuse accounts a text's significance, i.e., the plurality of responses different people have to a text, with a text's meaning, which, again, are a function of the author's beliefs and intentions.

What's particularly illuminating about Walter's work is his ability to trace the impulse to replace ideological disagreement with identitarian differences in a range of texts, written by authors whose affiliations and commitments are all over the political spectrum. So, while Kathy Acker and Samuel Huntington obviously hold opposing views about topics such as U.S. foreign policy, Michaels reads both Acker's 'radical' novel Empire of the Senseless and Huntington's 'neoconservative' political treatise The Clash of Civilizations as being committed to a posthistoricist world view in which beliefs are irrelevant and what ultimately matters most are identities.

It's a bravura argument, and a convincing one that, if taken seriously, should shake things up, inside the academy and out. Many people will find Michaels's argument disagreeable, but if they do so because they think it's claims are false (rather than because, say, it's written by a white, male, Jewish professor) they will be, in a sense, acting out the books's argument. Here's hoping this book finds a wide audience.