Post Post-Identity

The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. By Walter Benn Michaels. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. 224 pages. $24.95 (cloth).

So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. By Kenneth W. Warren. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 131 pages. $15 (paper).

If the 1990s were characterized by a rich and sophisticated reconceptualization of identity—as performative, mobile, strategically essential, intersectional, incomplete, in-process, provisional, hybrid, partial, fragmentary, fluid, transitional, transnational, cosmopolitan, counterpublic, and, above all, cultural¹ —the new millennium has been frequently marked by a sense of exhaustion around the whole project of identity. The fatigue is palpable even among some of those left cultural critics most responsible for identity's ascendancy. Terry Eagleton's recent After Theory (2003) closes with a call to move on: cultural theory "cannot afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are. It needs to chance its arm, break out of a rather stifling orthodoxy and explore new topics."² An even more intense sense of identity's depletion pervades the winter 2004 special issue of Critical Inquiry dedicated to the future of criticism. In those pages Teresa de Lauretis describes herself "turn[ing] away" from the "militantly critical theories" she helped to articulate with "a vague feeling of dissatisfaction as with something gone adrift in its passage through discursive space."³ In the same issue, Homi Bhabha is haunted by an epigraph from Adrienne Rich that hangs over his contribution: "Race, class . . . all that . . . but isn't all that just history?/Aren't people bored with it all?"⁴

What is the future of identity? Does the idea of identity—which has in large part structured the field imaginary of American studies—have a future? On first encountering such a question, the answer may seem plainly obvious. Even the most cursory overview of work appearing in the leading journals of U.S. literary and cultural study or at the annual American Studies Association meeting suggests that identity, in its most sophisticated anti-essentialist, revisionist forms developed in the 1990s (those forms listed above and sometimes summed up by the term "post-identity"), is still very much a fundamental lens for knowledge production in American studies. Of course, one particular identity rubric—national identity—has long been under deep critique within the field for the ways it has distorted knowledge, but post-identitarian conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality are undoubtedly central to the questions we in American studies ask and to our political, even ethical, self-understanding. In fact, it's difficult to imagine it any other way.

Walter Benn Michaels and Kenneth W. Warren would like us to try. Michaels's The Shape of the Signifier and Warren's So Black and Blue are forceful, thoughtful, and helpfully complex challenges to a politics and ethics of cultural identity. Without doubt, there have been many critiques of identity politics—tiring but tireless critiques from the right, on one hand, and well-meaning but ultimately problematic criticisms from old-guard centralist liberals like Richard Rorty, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and even Stanley Crouch, on the other hand. Perhaps most excitingly thought provoking about Warren's and Michaels's new books is that they don't fall into either of these camps, nor are they interested in continuing the academic left's post-identitarian revisions of identity politics. Warren and Michaels hold little hope for such revisions, particularly as they pertain to future political possibilities. What all the revisionists have in common is an understanding of identity as cultural, but for Warren and Michaels it is precisely the grounding of the political in the cultural that is ill-advised from the start. Yet the Michaels and Warren critiques don't simply call for post-identity theory to expand its interest in policy politics. Instead, both argue that a cultural politics of identity presents structural limitations that block the expansion of its political effectiveness. Their arguments...