ABSTRACT
To Contemplate a curative voice in the despairing silence of contemporary progressive politics in the United States is to recognize some immediate and crucial limits to what we might call a politics of voice. Having a name or the ability to name is not the same thing as “having” a voice or the ability to voice objection or assent. One of the lessons learned in the swift collapse of affirmative action legislation in the 1990s is the naiveté of the hope that the ability to name an identity, to consolidate a community around race or gender, is sufficient to give such groups a strong voice, a powerful political platform from which to defend such identities. While many would point out that the Left, in focusing so exclusively on naming and selling identity categories, lost sight of the more difficult tasks of creating political voice, such an accusation would overlook again the inherent political and philosophical problem of placing faith in voice at all. Part of this may be due to the inherent formlessness of voice itself, a formlessness that is at once the beckoning lure of voice as a crucial aspect of avant-garde art, and a formlessness that is the source of its amorphous malleability and political fickleness.
