Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

But what are the criteria for looking like an r? There aren't any, not because we don't have some idea of what it looks like for something to look like an r but because, even if something looks to us like an a, we don't have any argument against someone who says that the same thing looks to him like an r. How could we? If to be an r involved more than just looking like an r, we might have arguments against it actually being an r. But the fact that some shape looks to somebody like an r is a fact about that person's experience, and it's hard to see how we could argue that the shape didn't really look to him like an r. And if being an r is a matter of looking like an r, then it is an r -- at least to him. We may, in other words, disagree with someone about whether an r really is an r, but we don't disagree with him about whether it looks like an r to him. Or, to put the point in the opposite direction, we can't really disagree with someone about whether an r is an r unless we already think that being an r involves something more than looking like an r; without the appeal to something beyond shape, the difference between us is just a difference in our experience, not a difference of opinion.

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One name for this recourse to difference and (it amounts to the same thing) identity has been the end of history. Texts like Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?" and Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations" have made what we might characterize as essentially empirical arguments for the replacement of disagreement by difference. The crucial fact for them has been the end of the cold war and thus of predominantly ideological conflict. In ideological conflicts, Huntington says, the "key question was 'Which side are you on?'; in "conflicts between civilizations, the question is 'What are you?'"18 Insofar as the cold war configured the differences between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. not simply as the differences between powers but as the differences between social systems (as a disagreement over the relative merits of capitalism and communism), the question of whether or not you were a communist (the question of what your political beliefs were) could function independently of the question of whether you were an American (the question of what your identity was). The cold war, in other words, could be understood to make identity irrelevant; what mattered (in Huntington's terms) was never who you were but only which side you were on. When Huntington describes the middle of the twentieth century (from the end of World War One to the end of the cold war) as a period in which "the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies," he identifies not merely a political but a theoretical shift: conflicting nations assert the importance of their interests; conflicting ideologies assert the truth of their views.19

18. Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" The New Shape of World Politics (New York, 1997), p. 71; hereafter abbreviated "CC." See also Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. The following four paragraphs are drawn from my discussion of Huntington in "Political Science Fictions," New Literary History (forthcoming). For more on conflict in Fukuyama (and, in particular, on the similarities between Fukuyama and Richard Rorty), see Michaels, "Posthistoricism," Transition 70 (Summer 1996): 4-19.

19. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" p. 68.

Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English and the humanties at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) and Our America (1995). He is currently at work on a book called The Shape of the Signifier: American Writing from 1967 to the End of History.