Jerry Varsava, University of Alberta
The good intentions, and good deeds, of liberalism and the contemporary liberal state notwithstanding, there have been myriad countervailing pressures working against the formation of communities in postmodern America, and it is on two of these that I wish to focus here: first, assaults on community formation by governmental and corporate entities; and, second, assaults on community formation by the ever-accelerating embourgeoisement of American culture. The novels of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Norman Mailer, John Edgar Wideman, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, and Richard Ford, among a number of others, provide rich illustrations of the entropy of community in contemporary America, and the analyses offered here will draw from this important body of literature as well as from contemporary political theory.
In The End of History (1992), Francis Fukuyama advances the view that history is "directional," and that its directional bias in the late twentieth century leads inexorably to political liberalism.(1) Fukuyama claims that liberalism has proven more adept than any other political system at satisfying "the whole man simultaneously, his reason, his desire, and thymos."(2) A term drawn from Plato's Republic, "thymos" refers to people's self-esteem, to their "innate sense of justice." Thymos creates in people a "desire for recognition."(3)
Even if Fukuyama is correct and liberalism can be said to have vanquished its ideological antagonists--notably communitarianism, in both its right- and left-wing modalities, and libertarianism--those countries that unambiguously embrace this political form are hardly utopias, and the United States is clearly not one. Indeed, no less a student of contemporary American society than William Jefferson Clinton has called attention to the fragmentation of the national soul. Addressing party delegates at the 1996 Democratic National Convention in his nomination acceptance speech, Clinton issued a challenge to himself and all Americans: "We must make the basic bargain of responsibility and opportunity real for all Americans and we must build a strong and united American community."(4)
One might be tempted to see this call for a refurbished notion of American community or, better, "alliance of communities," as Peter Simpson calls the liberal state, as nothing more than hollow, self-promotional political oratory.(5) Taken in isolation, and cynically, Clinton's hortatory sentiments might well be summarily dismissed on these grounds alone. Yet, in these early years of the twenty-first century, the United States is indeed preoccupied with community, with its loss, with the need for its conceptual and social renovation, and Clinton's concern is also the nation's. Certainly, in postmodern America, the thymos of many social theorists, philosophers, and novelists is affronted by historical circumstance. As Fukuyama himself is well aware, the "end of history" has not been marked by the end of human suffering. Consequently, several questions come immediately to the fore here. How can what is arguably the best "actually existent" political system that humankind has ever conjured up be so demonstrably imperfect, even dystopian in the minds of some? Is a system that has, again arguably, won the endgame of a complex and protracted ideological match capable of metacritical reflection, of self-correctional gesture? Is justice itself an inherently contestable concept under liberalism and hence not subject to any definitive codification? Finally, and crucially, what vision of futurity does American liberalism embrace?
Robert Bellah and his colleagues provide us with what seems a serviceable definition of community in Habits of the Heart, their influential study of individualism and social morality in America: "a community is a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices … that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Such a community is not quickly formed. It almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory."(6) Still, this view of community--with its emphasis on tradition, memory, and pervasive consensus--is at odds with liberal constructions of community that focus more on the preservation of individual and group rights within a broad context of legal proceduralism and loose consensus. Consequently, the communitarianism of Bellah and his friends seeks to conflate community and society/nation while liberalism acknowledges the latter to be discreet. For a liberal, a society or a nation is large, global, and monolithic while communities are smaller, local, and diverse. One must belong to one's society, that is, one is subject to its laws (however minimal), to its distribution of goods and rights, and so forth, but in a liberal state one can belong to whatever community, or indeed communities, one wishes. In the abstract, the liberal state permits, if not tacitly encourages, the formation of communities, which is, among other things, a symptom of liberalism's relative moral neutrality, something we are inclined to term, quite simply, tolerance.
In The Malaise of Modernity, philosopher Charles Taylor has observed that "the joint operation of market and bureaucratic state has a tendency to weaken democratic initiative."(7) American life today is controlled by governmental and corporate organizations to a degree unprecedented in peacetime, and this circumstance does indeed militate against the formation of those communities that might be inclined to oppose given governmental and corporate agendas. This control has been effected through the proliferation of powerful systems whose influence is constantly felt but never fully understood, a point made throughout Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's recent Empire.(8) The complexity and operational secrecy of these systems, not to mention their sheer number, have made it very difficult for citizens of the late-twentieth-century liberal state to establish links between events and phenomena, to conceptualize any sort of integrated notion of their own historicity. And, as Fredric Jameson notes, recourse to conspiracy theory amounts to a "degraded attempt … to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system."(9)
In many postmodern novels--including such works as The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), The Names (1982), Carpenter's Gothic (1985), Vineland (1990), Harlot's Ghost (1991), and Underworld (1997)--paranoia and suspicion are the direct consequences of governmental and corporate conspiracy, and in such a sociopolitical environment the like-mindedness needed for the constitution of politically oppositional communities cannot take shape. And, as Jameson has pointed out, "the conspiracy wins … not because it has some special form of 'power' that the victim lacks, but simply because it is collective and the victims, taken one by one in their isolation, are not."(10) Otherwise stated, systems win because they have the resources and strength that come from community while the social body loses because it is infinitely divisible.
In Don DeLillo's Underworld, a magisterial reading of the sociopolitical history of the United States from the 1990s to the 1950s and back, we find a not uncharacteristic example of a community: "The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and language that were inaccessible to others."(11) The Pocket has all of the attributes of a community. Homogeneity derives from a common language, from some sort of common sense of purpose, from close physical proximity to others. Most importantly, it appears that this community satisfies the desire of its respective members for recognition, that is, it is responsive to the thymotic needs of each of its constituents. Yet, this is no ordinary community, no organically shaped union of like-minded people. No, the Pocket is a 1970s underground government research installation in New Mexico that develops, we are told, "timers, batteries, switches, actuators" and "electromagnetic locks" for military rockets.(12) And, as one character says, the Pocket is merely an extension of the Vietnam War, another part in "a vast hidden system,"(13) which in his 1961 "Farewell Address" Dwight Eisenhower famously christened the "military-industrial complex," the latter now a cliché, notwithstanding Eisenhower's perceptive cautions against this antidemocratic force in American society.(14)
We might say that DeLillo's Pocket is a morally and politically legitimate community that just happens to be doing technical work in the service of society or, more narrowly, in society's defense. Yet, throughout the forty-year period that Underworld chronicles, nonstatist, noncorporatist communities have considerable difficulty in developing. The fifties, of course, was a period of notorious conformity, of "consensus history," of "organization men," where home and family were fragile defenses from the dual threats of the Cold War--Soviet attack and domestic political repression--but conformity is not limited to this decade, notwithstanding the rise of various micropolitical groups in the sixties and seventies. This is a society that was powerfully shaped by its overt fear of nuclear annihilation in the postwar period, and hence it is a society dependent on its own government for survival.(15)
And why would people freely join a statist community such as the Pocket? What attractions might it have over informally organized associations of smaller scale bent on improving inner-city housing, for example, or on campaigning against political corruption or cleaning up the environment? In the view of Matt Shay, a morally conflicted resident of the Pocket, possible explanations are various: an "elemental need," "patriotic duty," or perhaps professional ambition. But he finally settles on another one. People join the Pocket in an attempt "to locate a higher condition," that is, to achieve a sense of community that can derive only from a wholehearted commitment to (some form of) solidarity, even if that commonality of purpose is inspired by nothing more than the fear and hatred of another nation.(16)
Throughout the Cold War period, the development of American political culture was to a considerable degree stymied by the government's carefully orchestrated (and largely unwarranted) campaign to inspire in its citizenry a fear of the Soviet Union. As Norman Mailer illustrates in Harlot's Ghost, his sprawling fictional history of the early years of the CIA, Americans were generally unaware that many of the Soviet Union's more aggressive gestures were in fact countermeasures responding to acts of aggression by their own government, and one might mention here the reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory and nuclear proliferation in Europe. Of course, subsequently, the CIA grossly exaggerated the scope and immediacy of the Soviet military threat, and fails to foresee the major event of the post-World War II period, the implosion of the Soviet system under Gorbachev. Throughout the Cold War period, most Americans were content to belong to monolithic statist and/or corporatist communities, for example, the military, its industrial partners, the main political parties, and mainstream civic organizations, or to simply acquiesce politically, rather than to develop grassroots associations that might promote alternative notions of human solidarity by targeting innumerable local and national problems.
This said, it is quite obvious that the influence of statist conceptions of political community is not restricted to those who are co-opted. In novels such as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and Harlot's Ghost, and in Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), the state actively impinges on the political freedoms of dissenting individuals and groups. As one character notes in Harlot's Ghost, "The truth, I told myself … was that in order to be free, we had to put up a building that made you feel as if you were working in a fascist state."(17) Vineland illustrates the consequences of this ethos. The government launches a "last round-up" of dissidents, seeking to destroy a loosely knit countercultural community that, though politically impotent and now mostly devoted to that Ur-community, family, and an untroubled hedonism, constitutes a vestigial political oppositionality. In a scene reminiscent of the raids on antiwar and civil rights groups of the sixties and seventies, though using that modern instrument of surveillance and suppression, the attack helicopter, government forces headed by Brock Vond plot the destruction of the Traverse-Becker family reunion: "For about a week Brock, whom colleagues were calling 'Death From Slightly Above,' had been out travelling in a tight formation of three dead-black Huey slicks … in flak jacket and Vietnam boots, posing in the gun door with a flamethrower on his hip."(18) Though Brock Vond's attempt to destroy this community is ultimately frustrated by a rather comical deus ex machina, the "perennial question" continues to haunt the countercultural community at the end of Vineland, namely, "whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist dawn, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from the millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows."(19)
The government, of course, is not solely responsible for the undermining of communities and their formation over the last half century. Corporations too have done much to fragment American society, breaking it up into market niches and distracting citizenry through its creation of what Jean Baudrillard in an early essay calls a "system of needs" that itself is the product of the "system of production": "By a system of needs we mean to imply that needs are not produced one at a time, in relation to their respective objects. Needs are produced as a force of consumption, and as a general potential reserve (disponibilité globale) within the larger framework of productive forces."(20) Don DeLillo has examined the operation of the system of needs at some length in his fiction, and in particular in White Noise (1985) and Underworld.
As we see in White Noise, the system of needs creates a bizarre, market-ordered sense of community in the protagonist. In a wonderful two-page set piece staged in a shopping mall, DeLillo demonstrates how emotional and psychological links between the protagonist Jack Gladney and others have become a function of consumer need, rather than of kinship or empathy or human solidarity, how transcendence is just an active credit card away: "I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies…. I began to grow in value and self-regard…. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly generous…. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh…. Voices rose ten stories … the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction."(21) The passage clearly shows how consumption works as a system "which ensures the regulation of signs and the integration of the group."(22) Participating in the system of needs places Gladney within a corporately defined community manqué that provides him with recognition--apparently of his moral value, but really of his net worth--and, at the same time, fills him with "self-regard" or what we can call, after Fukuyama, thymotic satisfaction. (And it is obvious that one's reception at the mall is governed by one's line of credit, for we learn that two senior citizens wander in the same mall for two days, lost in a consumer community that evidently has little enough compassion for them.) Significantly, at moments of personal crisis, various characters in the novel will invoke, mantralike, various sets of brand names--"Dacron, Orlon, Lycra, Spandex," for example, or "Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida"--offering up a prayer to the system of needs, hoping it will insulate them from life's vicissitudes.(23) Obviously, much of contemporary advertising is aimed at "brand loyalty," effectively the consumer's willingness to remain a member of a microsystem of needs, replete with its own identity narrative and semiotic markers like logos, characteristic hucksters, and even moral code. Even if Jack Gladney understands this, his need for community does not allow him to act in any meaningfully oppositional way.
At some point, in an essay such as this, it is customary to cite some of Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient remarks on American society, and I will yield to that convention, though I will approach him through Baudrillard. In America, a collection of essays written in the early eighties while he was touring the U.S., Baudrillard gives new urgency to questions already asked long ago in Democracy in America: "[C]an a nation strike a pact with greatness on the basis of each individual's banal interest alone? Can there exist a pact of equality and banality (of interests, rights, and wealth) which retains a heroic and original dimension? (for what is a society without a heroic dimension?)."(24) These are all important questions, though the answers provided to them by the fiction of William Gaddis and John Edgar Wideman, for example, are not encouraging. While the capacity of statist and corporatist structures to shape and indeed impede the development of independent communities is more than obvious, novels by these writers demonstrate that there is a willingness, if not a penchant, on the part of individual citizens to exploit for their personal material aggrandizement the freedom and legal equality that are hallmarks of a liberal state.
Common complaints against the liberal state are that it promotes a cult of individualism through its apotheosis of freedom and property rights, and that this often leads to materialism and outright greed, and, in turn, to the atomization of social life. The cult of individualism is a manifestation of what I earlier called the embourgeoisement of American society. John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990) offers a clear illustration of the conflicting demands that self and community make upon the individual in contemporary America, with special emphasis on his native African-American community.(25) Returning to his hometown of Philadelphia in the mid-eighties after a long self-imposed European exile, the protagonist, Cudjoe, a former idealistic school teacher and civil rights activist, sees a horrific urban dystopia populated by dishonest politicians, avaricious developers, murderous youth gangs, and a generally cowed population. In contrast to the sixties, the city is now run by politically empowered blacks who, like their white predecessors, have mistaken self-aggrandizement for civic virtue. "Who's zooming who," Cudjoe wonders. "A new language. New license. Niggers and dagos. Cityspeak. No secrets, no history, what you see is what you say."(26) Cudjoe's Philadelphia is a city generally devoid of any informing notion of community. Timbo, an old friend and an aide of the mayor, encapsulates for Cudjoe the mayor's priorities: "He ain't about change. He's about hanging on long enough so some who ain't ever tasted pie can have a bite before the whole shebang turns rotten. A simple, devious, practical man. A nice guy…. Love the nigger."(27) The youths of the city band together to form a kind of paramilitary organization--replete with its own manifesto--in order to wrest from the adults the only markers of self-esteem and recognition they have been taught to value--Money Power Things. In the inner city, community survives only perversely in the bastardized forms of political cabals and warring youth gangs. Both the corrupt politicians and their youthful imitators suffer from what Fukuyama calls "megalothymia," that is, in these cases, an illicit desire to be recognized as being superior to others.(28)
Preoccupied principally with the mores of wealthy white New York suburbanites, the fiction of William Gaddis looks at greed and materialism in America and the deleterious effects they have on society. Works such as Carpenter's Gothic and A Frolic of His Own (1994) depict a society in which everything is monetized. Gaddis's protagonists are people who reside in hermetic isolation in their suburban homes, captive to TV and the advice of their lawyers and doctors. Their relationships with others are merely means to achieve material gain. There is no notion of community or collective purpose. Abetting this money hysteria are well-paid professionals, particularly lawyers who, in the finest traditions of the American legal profession, pursue every legal ruse for the sake of their clients and themselves, in order to "apply the law," rather than to "do justice."(29) Some of the finest satire in Gaddis's novels does indeed relate to the behavior of professionals. As one character in A Frolic of His Own observes, "Every profession is a conspiracy against the public, every profession protects itself with a language of its own."(30) In an increasingly complex and structured society, individuals lose influence to professional guilds who, as narrowly defined and narrowly self-interested communities, pursue their own narrow agendas.
It is in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) that we see what is perhaps the endgame of corporatism and embourgeoisement in American society. A work of science fiction, Snow Crash envisions a dystopian America not too far in the future--and certainly many elements of the novel are not beyond the realm of possibility--in which the public sphere has been taken over entirely by private enterprise: the Cosa Nostra runs its own university; the CIA has become the Central Intelligence Corporation (CIC), which owns the Library of Congress; the country has fractured into autonomous city-states called "Burbclaves," that is, privately policed "suburban enclaves"; and one can buy "citizenships" in "extraterritorial, sovereign, quasi-national entities" such as Mr. Lee's "Great Hong Kong."(31) Of course, churches and drug dealing alike have become corporate franchises with names like Pearly Gates and Narcolumbia. And, in a nation devoid of all higher purpose, it is not surprising to see the minoritarian interests of various ethno-racial groups folded into those of companies as the former seek protection and identity in the latter. Citizenship has become nothing more than consumer product loyalty, and community merely a farrago of competing corporate interests.
Ultimately, invested in every complaint about lost community, not to mention every proposed solution, we find a solemn longing for a utopian resolution to the social and political woes of America. Yet, and finally, lost community in America is a problem that is overdetermined, and one that obviously resists quick or complete resolution. It is easy to say that the problem of lost community in America demands the development of a (post-)utopian imaginary sufficiently supple to address the diverse and often conflicting demands of both public and private life and the shifting context in which these demands are played out. However, to date, its rich catalogue of the causes and consequences of lost community notwithstanding, American postmodern fiction has offered only vague intimations as to what might lead to the attenuation of this problem.
Interestingly, and it reflects a view already expressed by Tocqueville, a number of people see in the functional family--ideally, its structural flexibility, its emotional resilience, its generosity of spirit--a possible model for contemporary community. A number of social scientists--Fukuyama, for example, as well as Anthony Giddens and Michael Sandel--have advanced this view, though with varying emphases.(32) Giddens sees in the family, but also in all genuine friendships, irrespective of sexual (non)expression, elements that are parallel to effective "public democracy." Equality, effective communication, transparency, equanimity, all of these characterize what he calls "pure relationships."(33) While narrative closure is not a defining trait of postmodern fiction, whatever traces we find of it in novels such as White Noise, Vineland, Philadelphia Fire, A Frolic of His Own, and Wideman's Two Cities (1998) derive from the exemplarity of familial relations. Irrespective of the conflict and moral compromise that trouble their worlds, the protagonists realize a sense of communion, a sense of commonality, of shared history and shared purpose, through a reconciliation--whether achieved or incomplete--with certain family members. And while it is not an easy thing to transfer the virtues of family qua (micro-)community to broader associations, the formation of such associations would be abetted by the application of the moral and behavioral practices of "pure relationships."(34)
Of course, other suggestions for the development of community have been put forward. Communitarians such as Robert Bellah et al., for example, suggest government intervention is needed to create "economic democracy and social responsibility," while others see identity politics as a means of achieving community.(35) For his part, as we see in The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch finds in small-town populism a workable paradigm for renovating community in America.(36) Towards the end of Richard Ford's Independence Day (1995), Frank Bascombe tenders a rather unromantic view of communities: "I think of them … as isolated, contingent groups trying to improve on an illusion of permanence, which they fully accept as an illusion."(37) Yet, Bascombe's sobering analysis notwithstanding, his own small town in New Jersey seems to have a sense of community. Racial harmony and civic cooperation are in evidence, if in modest measure. In the novel's final sentence, Bascombe celebrates a vaguely Laschian sense of community as he views a Fourth of July parade: "My heartbeat quickens. I feel the push, pull, the weave and sway of others."(38) Like Lasch's, Bascombe's evolving populism is subdued and informal, sharing with it a suspicion of materialism and the ideology of progress.
In a quote drawn earlier from America, Baudrillard wonders if the United States has lost its "heroic dimension," its capacity to undertake grand projects to improve society. It is a fair question. Perhaps the symptoms of lost community in postmodern America that are chronicled in so much of its fiction are a roundabout answer. The anomie, paranoia, social fragmentation, structural poverty, decline of civitas and civility, political corruption, and overweening corporatism that these various works depict seem to confirm that heroic agency is generally unavailable today.
In attempting to outline the basis for liberal polity, for its ongoing development and maintenance, we will probably not do much better than John Rawls. In his Political Liberalism, Rawls makes a case for what he calls "reasonable pluralism," with the latter entailing a variety of philosophical positions--"a diversity of comprehensive doctrines"--but a common conception of justice as "fairness" that is based on freedom, equality, and political, rather than cultural-religious, mediation.(39) In a strict sense, reasonable pluralism and a politically constructed view of justice give rise to a form of governance that is not synonymous with that of either "community" or "association," each of which assigns its members different rights and duties than it does its nonmembers. Otherwise stated, while the liberal state can, through its reasonable pluralism, accommodate communities and associations, the inverse is not true.
If we apply Rawls, as briefly and reductively glossed here, to the narrativization of "lost communities" that we find in such a large body of American postmodern literature, we might see the latter corpus as endorsing fundamental principles of Rawlsian liberalism that are under threat from a myriad of statist and corporatist interests in contemporary America. Thus, these novels use language--the very basis for community, as suggested in Kathy Acker's Don Quixote--to assail forces in society that illegitimately abridge the rights and freedoms of specific constituencies and therein threaten their very survival, not to mention that of the liberal state itself.(40) In one of his last publications, a saturnine Christopher Lasch laments that America has become a "nation of minorities."(41) The literature surveyed here works heroically to ensure that America remains faithful to its liberal foundations, that America remains a place in which minoritarian interests of various communities not only survive, but indeed prosper and proliferate.
Footnotes
1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992) 71-81.
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2. Fukuyama 337.
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3. Fukuyama 165, 337, and 165.
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4. William J. Clinton, "Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech," 1996 Democratic National Convention, ABC, 5 September 1996.
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5. Peter Simpson, "Liberalism, State, and Community," Critical Review 8.2 (1994): 159.
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6. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 333.
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7. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1991) 112.
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8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
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9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) 38.
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10. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) 66.
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11. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997) 412.
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12. DeLillo, Underworld 452.
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13. DeLillo, Underworld 458.
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14. Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Farewell Address," Individualism and Commitment in American Life: Readings on the Themes of 'Habits of the Heart', ed. Robert N. Bellah and Richard Madsen (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) 402. Reflecting the candor that only a retiring politician seems capable of mustering, Eisenhower's speech is entirely forthright on the palpable threat of this new phenomenon.
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15. The early Cold War period was not, of course, devoid of dissent, notwithstanding the era's powerful xenophobia and conformism. See Norman Markowitz's "The Cold War and the Culture of Resistance," An American Half-century: Postwar Culture and Politics in the USA, ed. Michael Klein (London: Pluto, 1994) 10-29, for an analysis of dissent during this time. In this essay, Markowitz demonstrates that the political dissent of the sixties and seventies had its roots in various political actions undertaken in the late forties and fifties.
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16. DeLillo, Underworld 458.
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17. Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost (New York: Random House, 1991) 991.
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18. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990) 375.
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19. Pynchon 371. See Varsava, "Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism," Canadian Review of American Studies 25.3 (1995): 63-100, for a discussion of the theory and praxis of liberalism portrayed in Pynchon's fiction.
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20. Jean Baudrillard, "Consumer Society," Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) 42.
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21. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986) 84.
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22. Baudrillard, "Consumer Society" 46.
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23. DeLillo, White Noise 52, 155.
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24. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1989) 89.
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25. For a detailed examination of this novel, see Varsava, "'Woven of many strands': Multiple Subjectivity in John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire," Critique 41.4 (2000): 425-44.
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26. John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (New York: Henry Holt, 1990) 76.
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27. Wideman 80-81.
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28. Fukuyama 182.
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29. William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (New York: Poseidon, 1994) 285.
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30. Gaddis 284.
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31. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam, 1993) 99.
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32. Fukuyama 324; Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 30-31, 33-34. For a discussion of Sandel's position, see Amy Gutmann, "Communitarian Critics of Liberalism," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14.3 (1985): 308-22.
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33. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000) 79-80.
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34. Richard Rorty sees in Wilfrid Sellars's notion of "we-intentions" the basis for the formation of "solidarity," a concept not far from "community" as used throughout this essay. Rorty suggests that solidarity/community can be achieved by extending notions of the "we" beyond, say, "our family" or "residents of our city" to include increasingly larger fractions of humanity. The potential efficacy of expanding the "we" in the construction of community seems clear; the real challenge, of course, remains in operationalizing this move. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 190 n.1.
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35. Bellah et al. 287.
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36. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991) 529-32.
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37. Richard Ford, Independence Day (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995) 386.
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38. Ford 451.
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39. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 24 n.27.
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40. Kathy Acker, Don Quixote (New York: Grove, 1986) 191, 194-95, and 202.
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41. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995) 17.
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