It's the end of the world as we know it

The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History

by Walter Benn Michaels

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 224 pages

At least since the eighteenth century, when Vico asserted that we can best know humanity by studying its products and things by studying their origins, one potential way to study literature has been the historical. The study of literature and history has of course taken many different forms as different ideas about the ontology of the text, hermeneutics, history, culture, and epistemology have waxed and waned. In fact, one way to talk about the twists and turns of criticism and theory over the course of the twentieth century is in terms of the effect of these changes in the way we think about history and literature on the ways we study the latter in the light of the former (or choose not to). While the task of reading literature historically has become more difficult, the job is harder still for those who would read contemporary works against a world still in flux around them; even if the present can be read historically, as novels have done since Balzac and critics have done since the zeitgeist got jumped by the dialectic, it's hard to do.

Walter Benn Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier is a learned, impressive, wide-ranging, but ultimately frustrating book. It is learned and impressive in the range of subjects it takes on--poststructuralism, post-modernism, the impact of European theory on American theory and criticism, the nature of interpretation, the end of the Cold War--and in the knowledge it brings to bear on those subjects. Like his previous books The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) and Our America (1995), it marshals an impressive array of sources and builds a formidable theoretical scaffolding, all in a fluid and deceptively forceful style. It is frustrating for at least two reasons, both related to the question of the historical study of literature. The ahistoricism of his historical arguments--something that a number of people noticed in Our America (and others have raised as a general criticism of the New Historicism with which Michaels has sometimes been identified)--is one of the reasons. (1) Michaels asserts in The Shape of the Signifier that "the end of history is just another name for the end of interpretation" (81). (2) In this characteristic statement--characteristic for its parallelism, for its isn't-it-obvious use of "just," and for its claim of identity for phenomena that may be argued to have only structural similarity--Michaels both does and doesn't claim that the end of the Cold War caused the death of belief in ideology and its replacement by identity. The felicity of the pairing of "ideology" and "identity" in Michaels's argument, like that of "history" and "interpretation" in the phrase quoted above, perhaps unfairly draws suspicious attention to its content. While it is true that just because something is well put does not mean it is false, it can make you wonder. This hallmark of Michaels's style--the neat oppositional pairing of terms--embodies a central, repeated move in his arguments, the pointing out of parallels. When he argues that disparate phenomena "belong to the same formation," as he says the work of Samuel Huntington and Toni Morrison do, as do the "commitment to the materiality of the text" and the "commitment to the primacy of identity" (13), he is practicing what might be called argument by parallelism.

The significance of this observation is that it makes plain that Michaels's method is structuralist. As in the cases of earlier books, this method is a problematic one to employ in the service of making ostensibly historical claims. To restate, he is using homology to argue for historical causation--using the synchronic to argue the diachronic. In doing so, he again takes his place in a distinguished line of critics who have encountered the problem of using structural similarities as building blocks in the construction of historical narrative, often from a Marxist orientation (such as Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser, and Fredric Jameson). The problem is that whether you're talking base and superstructure or using more sophisticated models of the relation of the material and the cultural, what the metaphors reveal is that blocks are for buildings, and historical narratives, unlike buildings, don't stand still.

Another reason the book is frustrating is the set of conclusions to which these arguments lead. It is not just the historical conclusions that rankle--that belief in ideas died with the end of the Cold War or that the end of the Cold War led to the ascendancy of identity that has distracted us from attention to economic inequality (his real beef here)--but also the willful contrariness of the book's narrative of literary history and the readings of individual literary works that support that narrative. The latter is highlighted by his juxtaposition of his argument (originally made in "Against Theory") that authorial intention is the only ground for interpretation with readings so plainly at odds with what the works' authors seem to have intended. (3) When these readings are then used to bolster a general claim about a moment in literary and social history, it begins to feel like bad faith.