Walter Benn Michaels (born 1948) is an Americanliterary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature (particularly19th-century to20th-century),critical theory,identity politics, andvisual arts.[1]
Known for challenging the "prevailing trends ofpostmodernist theory," Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism,neoliberal capitalism, andsocioeconomic inequality.[2] Two of his best-known books areOur America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) andThe Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004)[3]—the latter being adopted from his 2001 essay of the same name.[2]
Michaels earned his BA from theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara in 1970 and his PhD from the same institution in 1975. He taught atJohns Hopkins University from 1974 to 1977 and again from 1987 to 2001, and at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1987. Since 2001, he has taught in the Department of English at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago. He was head of the department from 2001 to 2007.
"Against Theory", an article co-written by Michaels andSteven Knapp, is included in theNorton Anthology of Literary Criticism. His study ofAmerican Naturalism,The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, was published in 1988.
Michaels realized that three phenomena were happening around the same time, from 1967 onward. First, what was becoming fashionable in academia was apostmodernist current inliterary theory. Following French theoristRoland Barthes, it asserted the "death of the author" and, in turn, the death of intended meaning. Second, a new form ofliberal ideology, perhaps best expressed inFrancis Fukuyama’sThe End of History and the Last Man (1992), proclaimed the eternal victory ofneoliberal capitalism. Lastly, social conditions in neoliberalcapitalist economies were increasingly characterized by staggeringinequality, whereby almost all gains were captured by an elite minority while themiddle andworking classes saw theirreal wages decline.[2] These insights were first explored in his 2004 book,The Shape of the Signifier,[3] adapted from his 2001 article inCritical Inquiry. Michaels claims that the death of "intentional meaning" as a result of the postmodern shift in literary theory has had the effect of depoliticizing the economic impoverishment that characterizes the modern era.[2]
InThe Beauty of a Social Problem,[4][5] Michaels argues that there is a major disconnect between what neoliberalism is purportedly dedicated to — the equality of people’s various identities — and theeconomic inequality produced by capitalism, while postmodernism makes it impossible to criticize such outcomes as choices:[2]
For once we think of the beholder as playing a role in the production of the work’s meaning, we replace the question of what the work means with the question of how it affects us. That is, we are no longer concerned with our interpretation of the work — our beliefs about what it says or does — we are concerned instead with our responses to the work, the effect it has on us or, in a more pragmatic vein, what we can do with it.…The transformation of differing interpretations into differing responses is thus one form of the effort to disarticulate difference from inequality. Correct interpretations are better than incorrect ones, but there is no such thing as a correct response and no (legitimate) reason therefore to think of any response as better than any other. And (as I argue inShape), we can see in this refusal of disagreement the theoretical apparatus of an emerging politics of difference in which what becomes central is not the inequality of differing ideologies (i.e., different beliefs about what is true) but the equality of differing subject positions.
