these objects help us achieve it. Both identity and its objects are constructs, illusions created by culture and language.
This type of fall shakes the foundations of “meaning” (or truth) sustaining identity, deeming such concepts obsolete. This is, as critics of postmodernism pointed out, not new at all. The Platonic thesis/antithesis pattern of debate was already de-emphasizing meaning, not to mention the Sophists themselves. The one aspect of the critique leveled against postmodern thought that I happen to agree with is that, when it focuses on the negation of meaning and of identity (as in the case of several thinkers and writers), this creates a new problem, as the negation of these essential concepts reveals that the social and individual identities are a function of language and there is nothing outside of it. Derrida himself very carefully avoided this trap by making it clear that there is a danger in simplifying a complex world by reducing it to a set of binaries, which is why he continuously revised his own theories so they would not be easy to simplify.
The temptation, when one exposes the constructed nature of language, is to feel as if something has been lost, once meaning is abandoned as a unifying concept. Let us suppose that identity and meaning (social or individual) are, in fact, constructed inside of language, and that there is no real behind these constructions: it is tempting to think that another meaning, another identity can be acquired in actuality, or “really” acquired (if traditional meaning is gone). The emphasis on identity and meaning as somehow “missing” creates the need for a new meaning and a new identity.
Many critics may find Derrida frustrating, because he refuses to offer “new meaning” in the place of the one he apparently made disappear like a magician. To him, however, meaning is no longer the point. The questioning of identity itself is the point, instead of offering another identity. This is how postmodernism got itself into trouble (and with it, its theoretical counterparts, the misunderstood versions of poststructuralism and deconstruction): it did not always manage to make this point strongly enough: challenging and deconstructing meaning were advanced primarily to show how dangerous fixed meaning can be, not because there was another, better meaning out there waiting to replace it. It is then unavoidable that, in some variants of postmodern thought, loss of meaning brings about a desire to retrieve it.
Postmodern thought often comes across as throwing the world into a non-centered space where everything is “contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations.”28 This is, of course, Eagleton’s understanding and subsequent critique of postmodernism. When unified meaning is seen as lost, it becomes a stake all the more. Eagleton, Jameson, Satya Mohanty, Richard Rorty, and others have urged the world to return to law and authority, or some kind of center (whether a traditional center, or one more open and community-oriented), or new values or humanisms. It may be true that certain problems within the postmodern age have proven insurmountable: the apparent openness of a pluralistic society does not solve the issues of social inequality because it does not, in fact, include everybody in the space of power, but perpetuates the center-margin dichotomy, where “political correctness,” for instance, is the new (yet still white) master. A shift in the terms used to address a different race does not change the fact of racial oppression; the exclusion of violence from schoolbooks29 does not prevent schools from becoming more and more the ground where violence is perpetuated.
It appears that, although social structures, along with the terminology used to describe them, have changed on the surface, some kind of center has been preserved in a more subtle way. This is why, years after Eagleton’s angry criticism has made itself heard, it became obvious that much of the world was all too eager to return to the reliable, old fashioned good and evil rhetoric, instead of hiding behind politically correct words. Take, for instance, the support that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq found in 2002 and 2003; fast forward to 2016–17 and note the enthusiasm with parts of the population are cheering the attacks on political correctness and are taking off the gloves in relation to other cultures. It appears that, in the 21st Century, advocating for the destruction of an evil Other has brought back the lost joy to those who were feeling deprived of meaning by having to accept too much “diversity.” Such frustration explains why a large number of Americans are so eager to see the return of “telling it like it is,” or speaking freely against the pesky Other.
The loss of meaning is a problem created by diverse, complex, deconstructive thought, though such a problem was never the intention of poststructuralism or deconstruction. It was, true enough, an unavoidable byproduct of these thinkers’ efforts: how could one expect, or even conceive, that everyone would feel comfortable not having the grounding that cultural and social spaces had always offered? That is why the voices that protested the loss, or fall from meaning have been loud and persistent to this day, and now and then have been known to win elections. To them, theory is just the emperor’s new clothes and has nothing useful to offer.
When the desire for the lost meaning is coupled with the discourses of power, it becomes all the more dangerous. To reiterate, following the attack on the United States in 2001, identity (as “freedom”) gained new ground; meaning reasserted itself as a powerful stake in the social system. Let us look again at the shockingly loud and bold proposition in that New York Times article by Rothstein. Rothstein was expressing relief when he imagined that postmodern thinking had taken a serious blow, and “Empire” had returned. He was crying out for a return to a transcendent ethical perspective, since “differences, say, between democracies and absolutist societies or between types of armed conflict are essential now.”30 Based on Rothstein’s example, it looks as though there is a perception that someone is denying us the right to meaning, which leads to a revival of the need for meaning and the return to the violence of the system, by making meaning as a stake. This stake in itself can become destructive.
If loss of meaning is perceived as a void, this void is the new space where identity will be forged. Non-meaning can become oppressive and subvert any attempt to reconcile with previous perspectives, leaving little room for relationality and interaction. Satya Mohanty is an adherent to the idea that postmodern thought is pure relativism, and for this reason he argues that postmodernism obscures the very real social contexts in which people relate, where “otherness appears not as insular or merely contiguous but as a complex historical phenomenon.”31
Other thinkers, such as Lyotard or Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, try to find, and believe to have found, an outside of language where they envision a new identity in the pagan, in art, in the schizophrenic flow, and so on. These alternatives can create a new type of violence: the one that, in the name of non-identity, is directed toward any identity that is conceived inside of language. For example, as atheism is, functionally, a religion (it works by elimination or by creating outsiders of its boundaries), so is non-identity still an identity, still a delimitation that closes off communication. I hope this idea will become clearer in Chapter Five, where I examine Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and I show how the void of meaninglessness estranges people from each other and even from themselves; in effect, despite the positive critiques of structure, the emphasis on meaninglessness undermines poststructuralism’s extremely important steps against traditionalist thought, and at the same time it hinders human interaction. To stay true to the non-finite “event” that Derrida wanted deconstruction to be, there is a need for a new way to communicate that does not become re-inscribed in binary extremes, in this case those of identity and non-identity.
Identity can allow for non-competitive, non-destructive relationality only if we understand it as necessarily contaminated at every step by living with others. The main purpose of offering a new approach to theory in this book is to show that our identities do not have to be spoken or reified (read: fought for at our expense and at the expense of others). We would be better off seeing it as the secret that we keep from the others and from ourselves until it can reveal itself in a harmless way. The energy employed in self-definition
