The Shape of the Signifier or, The

Ontology of Argument
8:2 | 2005 Davide Panagia

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).
1.

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
1.

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
 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 end, is what
contemporary political theory has become: 3 "a vision of
the future inhabited by people with different bodies rather
than different beliefs." (Shape, 171).
1.

Such a vision of different identities rather than

different beliefs is the crux of Michaels polemical
point. What Fukuyama and Huntington got right, and
what thinkers from Agamben to Zizek share, is a
commitment to a world where identity replaces ideology.
This deleterious shift, Michaels argues, is what it means
to be post-structural. As Fukuyama argued in the
infamous "End of History" piece, what ended with 1989
was not so much a political system, but an ideal of social
organization. Extending this claim Michaels argues that
what ends with the end of history is not simply an ideal
of social organization, but the possibility of disagreement
itself. This is the promise of our "post-political" era not
simply announced by Fukuyama but theorized by
post-structural theorists. With the substitution of identity
for ideology, there is nothing left over which to argue.
We no longer disagree about ideas; we simply see things
differently.
1.

Put thusly, the dispute seems trite. But it isn't, as

Michaels' engagement with contemporary theory evinces.
The book begins with a discussion of Susan Howe's The
Birth Mark and the claim that the materiality of a book
matters to its meaning. Howe is merely a straw person to
get at the real target of Shape's introduction, de Man's
deconstruction and his "material vision"4 approach to
reading texts. De Man's literary criticism and its emphasis
on polysemy, like Derrida's 'marks' (another target), is
committed to the experience of the text rather than its
meaning; and this implies a commitment to the subject
position of the reader rather than to the interpretation of
the text. Thus, Michaels asserts, "readers for whom the
same text can have different meanings are not readers
 same text can have different meanings are not readers
who have different beliefs about what the text means;
they are readers who have different responses to the text,
whatever it means. They do not, that is, have different
interpretations of the text, they have different experiences
of the text." (Shape, 8) If you're interested in the text's
materiality, you find yourself committed to its ontology
but also, by way of that ontological commitment, to the
subjectivity of the reader. And, if you are thusly
committed, then you cannot be an anti-essentialist as de
Man and Derrida claim they are.
1.

The difference between experience and interpretation is

the difference between identity and ideology which is the
difference between 'difference-as-such' and disagreement.
In other words, the theoretical insights of the past forty
years have brought us to a point where we cannot
disagree with one another in principle because we believe
that difference or culture (the material source of
difference) matters to who we are. Culture has thus
become "the primary technology for disarticulating
difference from disagreement" (Shape, 16) and, thanks to
thinkers like Rorty and novelists like Orson Scott Card,
that has resulted in a way of thinking about politics a
political program without political beliefs. This
because if we think that identity matters in politics, then
our beliefs don't matter and if our beliefs don't matter
then the only thing that can matter is the position from
which we experience the world. But, if that position is
relevant to our way of being, then when we interact with
others and they tell us that they see things differently
(i.e., the all too common 'that's just my opinion' retort) we
cannot be disagreeing with them (or they with us)
because all we are doing is asserting different
perspectives. At stake in such assertions is not an
ideology or a belief but a subject position. And, as any
seventeenth century anamorphic painter might tell you,
the shifting of perspective might make it so that you see
the same painting differently but that doesn't make it so
that you disagree with what you previously experienced.
1.

As I suggested in my introductory remarks, these claims

and accusations are not mild. Nor is the ultimate and
most startling accusation of the book: that the politics of
identity/difference has made it so that, through a series of
tactics whereby 'the poor' emerge as an identity category
worthy of our admiration, economic inequalities are no
longer a problem. "It is hard to see," Michaels
 longer a problem. "It is hard to see," Michaels
off-handedly punctuates, "how appreciating the poor
as opposed to, say, eliminating them can count as a
contribution toward progressive politics." (Shape, 180)
Indeed, for Michaels the failure of the American Left
(and we should insist in a way that Michaels doesn't
on 'American' as a qualifier) is that it is obsessively
interested in a series of liberal issues like gay
marriages, racism, etc. while disinterested in the
problem of economic inequality. He repeats this
accusation in a recent New York Times article on diversity
admission policies in today's universities: "Race-based
affirmative action," he asserts, "is a kind of collective
bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic
inequality."5
1.

While engaged in the depths of Shape's argument, I was

vividly reminded of John Goodman's character, Walter
Sobchak, in The Big Lebowski. Upon reflecting on the
absurd happenings of that day's travails at the bowling
alley, which included encounters with nihilists and a
disappearing rug, Walter turns to the Dude (Jeff Bridges)
and declares: "Say what you like about the tenets of
National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." It is
perhaps the funniest line of the movie, especially coming
from a Vietnam vet, recently converted to Judaism, who
won't bowl on the Sabbath; to wit, a character who
personifies 'identity.' But it is a line that I think also
speaks to the thrust of Michaels' book. Our problem, as
Michaels sees it, is the prevalence of nihilism that casts
its shadow in academic debates about culture, as well as
science fiction novels, the war on terrorism, and
university admissions policies. And the extension of this
problem, implied and sustained in the claim that
postmodern politics is committed to "a political program
without political beliefs" (Shape 16), is that we need to
rethink our political principles and practices in order to
avoid a politics of nihilism.
1.

This, I think, is the force of Michaels' 'against' form of

argumentation I described in my opening remarks. He is
not simply a co-author of "Against Theory" the article
he is, first and foremost, an 'against theorist;' in Shape
Michaels obsessively performs the "taking of a position"
not only as an argument against his opponents but also to
show what it means to argue. In putting the point thusly I,
of course, perpetuate Michaels' principal concern: I
substitute an ontology of argument with an ontology of
 substitute an ontology of argument with an ontology of
identity (i.e., Michaels' argument with Michaels, the one
who argues). But this may not be entirely off the mark
because the one form of ontologizing that Michaels does
not examine is the one derived from his own form of
argument.
1.

The quotes I enlist in this review are not simply examples

of Michaels' argument, they are exemplary of the style of
argumentation Michaels uses. To call him the most
analytic of contemporary literary critics is an
understatement. Michaels is also the one most committed
to refutation through reductio ad absurdum.6 For him
there is a compellent 'must' in any claim that takes the
claimant down a logical path as rigorous as that of an
actuarial table: 'If you say X, then you must also endorse
Y, which commits you to Z.' And this, in the end, might
be what Shape is all about: a return to the trivium, a
lesson in how to argue.
1.

This is both the strength of his intellect and, ultimately,

its limitation. There is an ethos to this form of thinking
that insists on the apodictic stature of argument per se so
that the moment someone makes any kind of claim, a
whole series of consequences must follow that they must,
in principle, sustain. Thus when he makes the
"implausible (but nonetheless accurate)" suggestion that
"if you hold, say, Judith Butler's views on resignification,
you will also be required to hold, say, George W. Bush's
views on terrorism and, scarier still, if you hold Bush's
views on terrorism you must hold Butler's views on
resignification" (Shape 13-14) we are left asking: why
must we? That is, isn't the compellent force that leads me
down that absurd path nothing other than a commitment
to the force of absurdity (or, in his terms, "an empire of
the senseless" 7 ) that is at the root of what's wrong with
theory from A to Z?
1.

What's ultimately interesting about the reductio ad

absurdum as a style of argument is that, like Walter
Sobchak's claim about the ethos of National Socialism, it
is funny. It is amusing to think of what a person who
would retain such a seemingly impossible position as to
argue that Butlerian resignification and Bush's war on
terrorism are mutually compatible is like, just like it is
hilarious to see Walter Sobchak stumble his way through
The Big Lebowski. But its humorous tone also helps
 The Big Lebowski. But its humorous tone also helps
mask a commitment to credentialing standards of
argument (which I would suspect Michaels would not
deny he sustains) that are grounded in the philosophical
principle of non-contradiction. And here is where I think
things get tricky because, though the apodictic stature of
non-contradiction may be a sound theoretical point, it is a
difficult (if not absurdly impossible) standard to sustain
in the turbulent world of politics. 8
1.

The point I want to make is that though it may be

logically consistent for a Judith Butler to sustain George
W.'s war on terrorism, politically it will never happen
because no human being qua citizen can be (or should be)
expected to commit to that level of consistency. It is a
burden of citizenship that no one imagines reasonable,
possible, or even desirable because, as sustainers of
democratic principles of government, we tend to believe
that altering our positions is both a skill and a right worth
having.
1.

To put this point in a more direct manner, the force of the

reductio ad absurdum as an apodictic principle of
refutation lies in making argument itself a style of
political engagement not up for debate. This, in fact, is
what Kant means by 'apodictic' and, though Michaels
never uses the term in the book, he endorses apodicticity
as the ethical basis of his project. Thus, while Michaels
laments the transformation of terrorists into criminals,
and blames this on the refusal to engage terrorism as an
ideology (and hence a belief with which we might argue)
"so that the war on terrorism puts into place not only a
global citizenship but a global ethics" (Shape 172), what
he doesn't lament is his own way of making an ethics of
apodictic argument equally globalist.
1.

It is worth noting that at the heart of the identity/ideology

distinction is a methodological distinction between
ontology and epistemology. Michaels wants us to eschew
ontological forms of argument in favor of epistemological
ones: Ideas should be the focus of our analytic attention
in matters of political import, not who we are. But in
making this theoretical claim, Michaels is also insisting
on a more robust ethico-political point: rather than
individuals enacting identity, we should become
individuals enacting arguments. This version of the
Rawlsian "political, not metaphysical" claim is by now
 Rawlsian "political, not metaphysical" claim is by now
familiar to most readers of political theory. However,
what remains unfamiliar (because undefended) is why
political agents ought not to appeal to their cultural
identities, especially when, in times of duress, that is all
they have? Or, to re-propose the question, why should
individuals be expected to occupy the subject position of
'arguer' and not any other subject position with which
they might feel more comfortable? This is simply to
suggest that (a) the ability to argue the veracity of one's
epistemological position and have that count as a
legitimate political act requires the acceptance of a
subject position (an identity) grounded in a
post-Enlightenment culture of liberal proceduralism and
(b) in politics, identities matter.9
1.

From a political perspective, then, the anti-empiricist

strain of Michaels' thought becomes suspect. For, if we
are being asked to rethink our Leftist commitments and
reconsider the problem of economic inequality (rather
than racial inequality) it seems difficult to imagine how
we might go about that without also considering the
experience of hunger, for instance. Yet, the moment we
turn to such empirical considerations, we inevitably
'ontologize' the body on Michaels' account. Or, even if it
is not inevitable, at the very least we are endorsing a
"materialist vision" of political experience. But then,
even if you think that aesthetic experience (like reading a
book or viewing a painting) should be something other
than materialist, it seems difficult and unprofitable to
deny the materiality of political life.
1.

Any book that compels us to examine our theoretical and

political commitments is worth reading. In the case of
Michaels' book, this is especially true. What Michaels
leaves us with is a challenging and admirable call to
rethink the status of our current modes of political
thinking, especially with regards to issues of economic
inequality. Yet, the Kantian constructivist strain in
Michaels' form of argumentation is never put to the same
kind of scrutiny as Michaels holds for others. This is
something that The Shape of the Signifier notably lacks
and it's a lack that begs the question, 'why?' For, by
simply endorsing and not defending an ontology of
argument, it makes it seem as if Michaels does not want
us to disagree with him.
1.
Davide Panagia is Canada Research Chair in Cultural
Studies at Trent University (Peterborough, Canada)
where he teaches aesthetics and politics. His forthcoming
book, "The Poetics of Political Thinking" (Duke UP),
inquires into contemporary accounts of the nature of
political argument from the perspective of modern
political and aesthetic thought. He can be reached at
davidepanagia@trentu.ca

NOTES
1See "Critical Inquiry," Volume 8, Number 4 (Chicago:
Chicago University Press).

2 There is an interesting omission in Michaels' Pantheon

of post-structural theory: Michel Foucault. Though I do
not discuss it in these pages, it is an absence that speaks
volumes and Michaels' relationship to Foucault's thinking
would be an avenue of inquiry worth exploring in greater
depth.

3 "Political Science Fictions" is a subsection of Shape's

"Posthistoricism" chapter that originally appeared (along
with sections of the "Coda" in New Literary History
(2000, 31) 649-664.

4 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 82.

5 Walter Benn Michaels, "Diversity's False Solace" in

The New York Times (April 11, 2004). His main concern
in this piece is how universities use race-based initiatives
to comfort themselves in thinking that they've dealt with
the problem of cultural inequality at the expense of the
problem of economic inequality. "But the real value of
diversity," Michaels explains, "is not primarily in the
contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real
value is in the contribution it makes to the collective
fantasy that institutions ranging from U.I.C. to Harvard
are meritocracies that reward individuals for their own
efforts and abilities -- as opposed to rewarding them for
the advantages of their birth." And further: "In the end,
we like policies like affirmative action not so much
because they solve the problem of racism but because
they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve.
And the reason we like the problem of racism is that
solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices,
whereas solving the problem of economic inequality
whereas solving the problem of economic inequality
might require something more -- it might require us to
give up our money. It's not surprising that universities of
the upper middle class should want their students to feel
comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should
have become the hallmark of liberalism."

6 The reductio ad absurdum has a long history in

political treatises but its greatest example is John Locke's
refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha in the first part of
Two Treatises of Civil Government.

7 This is the title of Michaels' "Coda" to the book where

his critique of post-structural political theory comes out
strongest.

8 It is, in a strange way, precisely what was at stake in the

recent U.S. Presidential campaign, making The Shape of
the Signifier even more timely than Michaels might have
imagined. On the one hand there is a Democratic
candidate John Kerry accused of flip-flopping on
various political issues (especially the war on Iraq); on
the other hand, there is President Bush who is consistent
in his beliefs, actions and practices despite the fact that
these beliefs, actions, and practices are ones most
reasonable people wouldn't sustain.

9 Take the example of the sans papier: They lack a name

because they lack papers and hence, lack any form of
signification that might allow them legitimate access to a
system of representation; they are, literally, the residue of
non-sense' of modern political life. To be sure, this does
not mean that they are insignificant or their status is
meaningless, nor am I suggesting that we should embrace
the sans papier as an ideal political category. It does
mean, however, that epistemological arguments will not
suffice when dealing with such forms alienation and
disenfranchisement. And this, it seems, is the ideological
flip side of the post-structuralist coin that remains
unaddressed in Michaels' book; that is, though identity
claims may turn out to be ontological claims, they are
also claims about alienation and disenfranchisement.
Davide Panagia is Canada Research Chair in Cultural
Studies at Trent University (Peterborough, Canada)
where he teaches aesthetics and politics. His
forthcoming book, "The Poetics of Political Thinking"
(Duke Univ. Press) inquires into contemporary accounts
of the nature of political argument from the perspective
of modern political and aesthetic thought. Currently he
is finishing a second book manuscript, a genealogy of
 is finishing a second book manuscript, a genealogy of
political reflection that examines the modes by which
individuals constitute themselves as subject of
perception through sensation. He may be contacted at:
http://www.trentu.ca/culturalstudies/faculty_panag.htm.

Copyright 2005, Davide Panagia and The Johns Hopkins University

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