Theory & Event

Introduction

The writings of both Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin incorporate the gesture of reaching back to an anterior location so as to project its desired fullness upon the present. The concept of a cherished, idealized past — a past that is perhaps utopian and imagined, the product of longing rather than of history — factors prominently in their respective theories, which otherwise occupy very different intellectual spheres. For these authors, not all relationships to the historical past are relationships of longing, and the importance of an anterior location does not signal our desire to regress in time. Rather, it is the withheld meanings of the present, the cryptically encoded metonymies that surround us, that render an anterior location so significant. These authors thus discern a correspondence between the surpluses of today, the overabundances of cultural convention, and an (imagined, desired) unity of the past. Kristeva herself has commented on this parallel in their work, finding in her psychoanalytic approach a point of intersection with Benjamin’s unique contribution to critical theory. From differing angles, then, both she and Benjamin discern “a flaring-up of dead meaning with a surplus of meaning,” allowing the hopeful, credulous subject to “play it again in illusions and disillusion.”[1]

Here, I wish to analyze this doubled gesture of reaching back into the past so as to redeem the present as it is taken into these authors’ employ. I do this because, at this historical moment, their writings offer insight into our nation’s malaise, our homegrown American version of angst and anomie that hardly meshes with the cheerful self-image we strive to maintain. To be sure, American society at this historical juncture is beset by questions about its self- definition, struggling to clarify the issue of who we are in this globalizing, multicultural, postmodern setting. In such a setting, meanings are admittedly, deliberately unstable, no longer adhering to an established matrix, but disengaged from a larger context in ways that can make them ironic, playful and insincere. They either enjoy the free fall of parody and pastiche or anxiously long for grounded referents to restore our nation’s moorings. And because “America’s” meanings are up for grabs, various ideological stripes respond by either reaching into the past to safeguard these meanings’ foundations, or by insisting on their contemporary flux and instability.

Yet this struggle to clarify American identity by reaching into the past did not suddenly originate at the turn of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, the quest for self-definition that engages the past today originated roughly twenty years ago, when the rise of neoconservatism announced an effort to rehabilitate traditional meanings and to stabilize what it perceived as a harmful, dissolute liberal erosion of cultural values. Numerous authors have commented on the manner in which the New Right set in motion an agenda designed to revive a Norman Rockwell vision of American life, one in step with the Founding Fathers, and to portray this life as the cultural norm. This 1980’s agenda necessarily engaged the past, and drew upon an anterior narrative (however invented, however idealized) so as to project that narrative onto the present.

Hence in the early 1980s, President Reagan and other neoconservatives touched a deep chord in our society by invoking our nation’s true originary site, one variously construed as the Founding or the Cold War era. Whether stated explicitly or presented in veiled terms, Reagan often made reference to America’s blissful, cohesive origin forever unsullied by the intervening decades, a time untouched by (what he perceived as) the damaging excesses of liberal administrations. This vision of an innocent, safe, untrammeled America — an America just emerging from a cheerful Rockwell painting and living up to the Founding’s guiding principles — keynoted an entire political agenda that found resounding favor with great numbers of Americans. Under the New Right’s direction, it was argued, our nation was “going home,” restoring, realigning, rebuilding itself according to earlier dictates. It was journeying backward in time after the harrowing entanglements of Vietnam and Watergate, the disruptive influences of feminism and gay rights...