ABSTRACT
It is the summer of 1984 in Vineland, California. The marker has been set down: a kind of “You Are Here” on a dialectical tourist map. After many strange twists and turns, we have therefore arrived at the final fragment-the last exercise in the micrological method that I have employed in each of the preceding chapters.2 Behind us, stretched out like boundary stones on the Mason-Dixon Line, is a sequence of five other fragments; fragments which both historicize and anticipate this concluding episode.3 We have reached the end game, denouement, telos, the curtain call, the final whistle, the last rites. But where are we exactly? In what company have we found ourselves? Just how far have we come-politically and otherwise-since our start point in the Enlightenment?
