Garry Wills
         Message in the Deoderant Bottle: Inventing Time
         I have on my desk an artifact of wonderful contrivance. Though its
            outer skin is of flimsy cardboard standing over half a foot high,
            it is squarely based, making it nearly untippable on shelves. It is
            a deodorant product called ban a box containing a bottle
            containing a liquid. But this simple division of the artifact into
            three components gives no idea of the complex relationships
            sustained between part and part, or within each part taken
            separately.
            Study, first, the bottle. It emerges from the box a tall and
            shapely miracle of ballast. It emerges from the box a tall and
            shapely miracle of ballast. Its most prominent feature, the
            revolving-ball applicator on top, is airy enough not to destabilize
            the three-and-one-half ounces of liquid in the bottle's
            pyramidal base. It looks like one of those skirted Egyptian statues
            with no waist to speak of bulbous of headdress or hairstyle
            above, firm-footed below, pinched in the middle.
            The box, despite artfully cutout windows, gives little suggestion
            of the Nefertiti-like interior. On the contrary: the box suggests
            that the bottle is bulkier than, unclothed, it turns out to be.
            Still, one could argue that the box is almost suicidally candid. It
            not only confesses but proclaims how much of the interior is taken
            up by the applicator (leaving, obviously, less space for the stuff
            that is to be applied). The upper window space on the bottle is
            intruded on by a semicircle of cardboard the lower half of a
            full yellow circle boldly marked off from the green and white
            product colors that reign everywhere else. Inside the circle, wide
            letters boast: WIDE BALL. The circle is, in fact, exactly the size
            of the wide ball as seen in section, giving us what seems an almost
            geometrical regard for truth in advertising. The circle is
            repeated, at full size, on both ends of the box; but there it is
            white, with WIDE BALL printed in green. Why this emphasis on an
            empty ball, on the fact that one is being sold a great content of
            air? The ball is shrouded by a huge plastic cover, a screw-on cowl
            that gives the Egyptian figure its impressive headdress.
             
            Garry Wills,adjunct professor of history at Northwestern
            University, is the author of Reagan's America (1987). His
            previous contribution to was
            "Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and
            Houdon" (March 1984).
Michael Rogin
         The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual
            Indifference in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance
         A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over
            Intolerance (1916), the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph
            with The Birth of a Nation(1915). Ishtar sits above Babylon's
            royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so
            gigantic a scale that is diminishes the size of the goddess.
            Perhaps to establish Ishtar's larger-than-life proportions,
            Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the
            movie (fig. 1). The director is the same size as the sculptured
            grown man who sucks at Ishtar's breast; both males are
            dwarfed by the goddess' dimensions.
            Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power
            current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the
            New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture
            were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could
            support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will
            show us how.
             
            Michael Rogin is professor of political science at the University
            of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Subversive
            Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville(1985), and
            "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes in
            Political Demonology (1987).
Stanley Fish
         Spectacle and Evidence in Samsom Agonistes
         When the chorus at the end of Samson Agonistesdeclares that
            "all is best," what it means is that the best of all
            possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires, has
            finally happened: Samson is dead. This is, of course, not quite
            fair. What the chorus most wants is that things once more be as
            they were, and its moment of highest joy in the play involves the
            speculation that a revived Hebrew hero may "now be dealing
            dole among his foes / And over heaps of slaughtered walk his
            way" (ll. 1529-30).1 "That were a joy presumptuous to
            be through" (l. 1531), responds Manoa, indicating that he too
            wishes for nothing more than the return of the days when his son
            "walked about … / On hostile ground" "like a
            petty god" (ll. 530-31, 529). This is also what Harapha wants
            for different reasons when he says of Samson's change of
            fortune, I "wish it had not been, / Though for no friendly
            intent" (ll. 1077-78); and it is what Dalila wants for more
            reasons than Samson can shake a stick at when she laments an event
            more "perverse … than I foresaw" (l. 737) and attempts
            to mitigate if she cannot cancel the effects of her "rash but
            more unfortunate misdeed" (l. 747). Everyone, in short, wants
            to turn back the clock, and this, of course, includes Samson, who
            is obsessed with the disparity between his present and his past
            states: "Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed / … / …
            if I must die / Betrayed, captive[?]" (ll. 30-33);
            "Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke
            deliver; / Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless
            in Gaza" (ll. 38-41); "The base degree to which I now
            am fall'n" (l. 414); "I was his nursling once and
            choice delight" (l. 633).
             
            1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of John Milton,ed. John
            Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York, 1968); hereafter
            cited by line number.
             
            Stanley Fishis Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor
            of Law and chairman of the English department at Duke University.
            His most recent book is Doing What Comes Naturally: Change,
            Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal and Literary Studies.
David Van Leer
         The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the_Pathology_of_Manhood
         [Eve] Sedgwick examines from an explicitly feminist, implicitly
            Marxist perspective the relation of homosexuality to more general
            social bonds between members of the same sex ("male
            homosocial desires"). She argues that the similarity between
            (socially acceptable) homosocial desire and (socially condemned)
            homosexuality lies at the root of much homophobia. Moreover, she
            sees this tension as misogynist to the extent that battles fought
            over patriarchy within the homosocial world automatically exclude
            women from that patriarchal power. Thus she places homosexuality
            and its attendant homophobia within a wider dynamic of social
            relationships.1
            Yet even as Sedgwick invents a more sophisticated definition of
            "homophobia," she may permit misreading of a more
            elementary sort. Her use of vocabulary is troubling. In a slangy
            prose that regularly juxtaposes James Hogg and Louis Lepke,
            Tennyson and Howard Keel, references to the "campiness"
            of Thackeray's "bitchy" bachelors or the
            "feminized" cuckolds of Wycherley's The Country
            Wife seem tame enough. Yet there is a political difference between
            the jokes. One can burlesque fifties musicals or organized crime
            with impunity; to refer to sexually embattled men with feminine
            adjectives, however, is to reinforce a sexual stereotype that sees
            in the supposed effeminacy of homosexuals a sign of their deviance.
            Nor are women empowered when terms of female degradation like
            "bitch" are turned back against men: the ironic
            reversal does not challenge the terms' validity but reaffirms
            it, showing they have an even wider range of applicability than had
            been thought.
             
            1. Throughout my analysis, I use "homosexual" and
            "gay" exclusively in reference to male sexuality. I do
            so in part to echo Sedgwick's emphasis and in part because
            the logic of my own argument does not empower me to speak on female
            homosexuality.
             
            David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American
            literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author
            of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays(1986)
            and articles on American literature and popular culture.
Stanley Cavell
         Who Disappoints Whom?
         Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom's view of
            America and the American university that he hasn't already
            heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what
            we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in
            which Bloom's experience and mine differ systematically that
            are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps
            usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in
            the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two decades
            prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the
            popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove
            worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with
            his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I
            specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness (in
            Emerson's sense, which includes illustrativeness) of the
            university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the
            irreplaceability of Great Books what Thoreau calls
            scriptures in (let's call it) a humanistic education; a
            third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a
            chronically unprepared American constitution a condition that
            is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding
            American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by
            transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement
            concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping
            open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of
            the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism (Bloom
            speaks of the longing for completeness, Emerson speaks instead of a
            capacity for partiality, and of the courage to become both
            see in the goal a desire for the world's human possibilities,
            and both are aware that the aspiration is always threatening to
            turn into debased narcissism or foolish imitation); a fifth sense
            of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse
            about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom's
            book (manifestly the product of a lifetime of reading and of a
            devotion to teaching), is becoming unintelligible to the culture
            that has produced it, and not alone to the young (in my experience,
            less to them than to others).
             
            Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and
            the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent
            works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
            Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after
            Emerson after Wittgenstein
Robert J. Griffin
         Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said
         The gist of Edward Said's attack on Israel ("An
            Ideology of Difference,"  12 [Autumn 1985]:
            38-58) is that Zionism is racism. The very appearance of his essay
            in a special issue devoted to racism is an interesting fact in
            itself. But the fact that the editors up until now received no
            responses to Said carries special significance. It signals, or can
            be read as signaling, that the literary-critical establishment has
            reached a consensus and that liberal supporters of Israel in our
            discipline have retreated from the field.
            I may be wrong about this, of course, for other explanations are
            possible, but Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s observations a year
            later on that special issue would seem to reinforce my view. Baker
            describes Said's (and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's)
            method as aiming "to prove that &lsquo;A' is as good
            as&lsquo;B' and to induce shame in defenders of
            &lsquo;B' who have made other axiological choices."
            Baker protests against this method, however, since it gives too
            much play to "B," so that "it is difficult to
            hear a Palestinian voice separate from the world of Jewish
            discourse." Then he adds in parentheses: "(Of course,
            Jews are not likely to feel this way, and will probably call for
            Said's head on a platter. But that is the necessary reaction
            of well-financed client states.)"2 In Baker's language,
            only Jews are likely to disagree, and these "Jews,"
            conceived as a unitary group, are a client state (no doubt of some
            evil empire) and are compared by means of allusion to the corrupt,
            libidinous king who executed the true prophet (in this case, Said),
            the herald of Jesus. These comments are remarkable in any context,
            but especially so in a forum on racism.
             
            Robert J. Griffin is a lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University.
            He is currently working on two books, one on Samuel Johnson and one
            on literary historiography.
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin
         Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said
         As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in
            which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human
            desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the
            leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical
            dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with
            several points in Edward Said's paper, "An Ideology of
            Difference" ( 12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), our
            critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual
            empathy. We in no way wish to deny Said's claims regarding
            the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said
            and other Palestinian intellectuals' efforts to counter the
            destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand
            in the way of the Palestinians' achievement and self-
            determination. Said's critiques of the idea that Israel is
            somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians
            from "Western" discourse, are both valid.2
            We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both
            Jewish nationalists. We believe that it's a good thing to be
            Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to
            explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves.
            We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of
            the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our
            views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day,
            nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those
            of many or most other people who would define themselves in that
            way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said's
            paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes
            at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into
            one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion
            of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were
            obviated by genocide or Soviet repression.
             
            2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring
            with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish
            leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:
            In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that
            silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and
            injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you
            think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study
            and restudy teach the contrary.
            (Arthur Hertzberg, "Open Letter to Elie Wiesel," New
            York Review of Books,18 Aug. 1988, 14.)
             
            Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan
            University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in
            Poetics Today and Representations,and a monograph on the subject is
            forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max
            Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He
            edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden:
            The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry,and is currently completing an
            ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the
            International Jewish Peace Union.
Edward W. Said
         Response
         Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals
            seriously with what I said in "An Ideology of
            Difference" (written in 1984, published in 
            12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), both the Boyarins and Griffin are made
            even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The
            Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military
            occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the
            intifadah,surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial
            insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The
            daily killings of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers
            and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more
            Palestinians were killed, the day before (7 October 1988) four were
            killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments,
            the closure of schools and universities, as well as the
            imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a
            concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young
            Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can
            get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel
            Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee
            you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or
            community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put
            in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable,
            for any offense, which needn't be revealed to him or her. For
            non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and
            Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews
            are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a
            state of apartheid so named by most honest Israelis the
            intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly
            attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance.
             
            Edward W. Saidis Parr Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to
             is "Representing the Colonized:
            Anthropology's Interlocutors" (Winter 1989).
Robert Markley
         What Isn't History: The Snares of Demystifying Ideological
            Criticism
         Oscar Kenshur's "Demystifying the Demystifiers:
            Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism" (Critical
            Inquiry14 [Winter 1988]: 335-53) should go a long way toward
            convincing most readers that the cure for "ideological"
            (or Marxist) criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to
            uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes'
            Leviathan and Michael Ryan's Marxism and Deconstruction
            belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the
            "more-historical-than-thou" offensive against Marxists
            and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1
            There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about
            the nature of ideological analysis that should be debated. However,
            he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about
            seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor
            convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong
            in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur's argument
            is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants
            to tile most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion
            of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By
            accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a
            "corrective" to overzealous claims for the significance
            of ideological criticism that has the effect not of "sav[ing
            history] from its friends" (p. 353) but of returning it to
            the status of "background" or "context"
            that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The
            terms in which he casts his argument epistemology and/or (but
            not as) ideology redefine "ideological criticism"
            in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from
            wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save
            "history" from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate
            his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological
            virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises
            would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and
            political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-
            century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes
            and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length
            study of the various discourses in which and against which their
            works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I
            shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur's
            argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of
            the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and
            his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for
            ideological analysis.
             
            1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and
            Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," PMLA 102
            (May 1987): 292-303.
             
            Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University
            of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
            Interpretation.He is the author of Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style
            and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve
            (1988) and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the
            Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the
            Discourses of Natural Philosophy (forthcoming).
Oscar Kenshur
         (Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles
         The subtitle of the essay that Robert Markley attacks had, in its
            penultimate version, a parenthetical word that was ultimately
            dropped. It read, "(Avoidable) Metaphysical Snares of
            Ideological Criticism." The editor of ,W. J.
            T. Mitchell, politely suggested that my subtitle was redundant:
            snares, he observed, are by nature avoidable. Indeed they are. In
            fact, my parentheses were intended to indicate that the word
            didn't really need to be there. The self-conscious redundancy
            was intended to underlines the fact that the essay was not
            attacking ideological criticism in general, but only certain
            tendencies that seemed especially prevalent in ideological
            critiques of abstract ideas. Seeking support for my redundancy, I
            appealed to a sagacious friend, who promptly urged me to follow
            Mitchell's suggestion and drop the "avoidable,"
            parentheses or no parentheses. I was asking my title to do too
            much, he observed; the essay itself would make it quite clear that
            I was undertaking to refine and strengthen the techniques of
            ideological criticism by urging that its pitfalls be avoided.
            If I had declined to follow this eminently reasonable advice and
            had retained the word "avoidable," would that have kept
            Markley from so radically misconstruing my project? After all, near
            the end of his rebuttal, he acknowledges that "Kenshur is
            right … in one respect," that there is a "lot of not
            particularly interesting pseudo-Marxist criticism being
            written" (p. 656). If I had underscored my own sympathy
            toward and links with the new historicism something that I
            could have done in all good conscience would that have
            disarmed him? Or if I now undertook, after the fact, to offer
            assurances that I, like Markley, was working from within the
            capacious and self-critical Marxist tradition and trying to
            distinguish its strengths from its weaknesses, would that impel
            him, like Gilda Radner's Emily Litella (another launcher of
            overheated attacks based on misapprehensions), meekly to say,
            "Never mind"? Perhaps, but somehow I doubt it.
             
            Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at
            Indiana University. He is author of Open Form and the Shape of
            Ideas (1986) and is completing Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a study
            that traces shifts in the ideological significance of early modern
            ideas about intellectual method, religious toleration, and female
            chastity.
