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1. Agamben, Butler, Deleuze, de Man, Derrida, Fukuyama, Hardt, Negri, Rorty, and Zizek. If you've ever considered endorsing any of these thinkers' views, you might want to read Walter Benn Michaels' latest challenge to contemporary theory and criticism, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton, 2004). For those unfamiliar with Michaels' writings, he is the one who (with Steven Knapp) wrote the "Against Theory" (1982) essay that argued - against the prevailing common wisdom of the day - that texts can only mean what the authors intend them to mean.1 This was followed by his equally compelling The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1988) and, most recently, Our America (1995). The Shape of the Signifier (hereafter Shape) is a return to the theoretical point of "Against Theory" that ties it into the larger historical and theoretical claim in Our America: a claim against the politics of identity/difference or, as Michaels describes it, "against the idea that the things you do and the beliefs you hold can be justified by a description of who you are." (Shape 10).
2. Shape is yet another of Michaels 'against' arguments and, like his colleague and friend Stanley Fish, we might say that Michaels has made a career of making 'against' claims; he is a "dismantler" (Shape, 17) which, he is quick to point out, is different from deconstruction. In fact, Shape is an attempt to do away with deconstruction as a theoretical and political project once and for all and the crystalline logic replete with "if/then" clauses is Michaels' strongest tool in his dismantling endeavors.2
3. But before we get into the formal argument of the book, a few words about its range. Michaels has the unique ability to generalize a specific line of thought into a cultural phenomenon so that his engagements with either Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series or Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama are as relevant and punctual as his engagements with the 'A to Z' Pantheon of critical theorists listed above. Thus, the kinds of problems he sees emerging in the past thirty years in contemporary academic theory are the same kinds of problems emerging in late twentieth century post-apocalyptic science fiction writing. And this is not simply a coincidence: science fiction writing, in the...