“WE NEED THE STARS”

Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Mathias Nilges

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God
Is Change.
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great

importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to
add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.
—Karl Marx

It is in her treatment of the concept of change that many critics locate the most acces-
sible basis for an examination of the politics of Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of
the Talents—and rightly so. The Parable novels, spanning a time frame of over sixty-five
years (from 2024 to 2090), revolve around the attempts of Lauren Oya Olamina, a young
African American woman, to overcome the loss of her family in the destruction of her
former home Robledo, a small Californian walled-community. Central in Lauren’s effort
is the attempt to form a new community, based upon a new understanding of individual
and collective existence, which is designed to accept the fact that the post-apocalyptic
world surrounding them lacks any form of permanence or stability. The expression “God
is Change” becomes the central credo of this new community and forms the philosophical
cornerstone of a quasi-religious system Lauren creates. “All that you touch/You Change./
All that you Change/Changes you./The only lasting truth/Is Change./God/Is Change”
(Sower 3). This excerpt from the “Book of the Living,” the collection of “truths” Lauren
writes down and advertises as the basis for her vision of a progressive community, is
commonly considered evidence that supports readings of Butler’s novels as arguments

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for the necessity to leave behind outdated conceptions of community and society, trading
them in for the progressive ideal of change. Such readings of the Parable novels frequently
refer to classic postmodern arguments regarding the liberatory potential contained in
concepts such as diversity, pluralism, the incredulity toward repressive “meta-narratives,”
or the embrace of difference.1 From this perspective, the Parable novels can seemingly be
construed as postmodern visions of a progressive politics of community and identity.
Yet, such a reading of Butler’s novels, especially of Butler’s treatment of the concept of
change in the context of a destabilized and deregulated world, quickly reveals itself as one-
dimensional, undervaluing the true scope of Butler’s critical intervention. Furthermore,
labeling Butler’s novels postmodern misses a crucial shift in literary history. As we shall
see, Butler’s Parable novels are not postmodern but post-Fordist novels.2
Despite the fact that the terms “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” are becoming more
prevalent in critical discourse, it appears prudent to begin this analysis by establishing
the ways in which these terms will methodologically and analytically operate in what
follows. By post-Fordism I do not merely designate a shift in the dominant mechanisms
of production of Western capitalism over the course of the last few decades. Instead, I
assign the term a more expansive descriptive force, rooted in its conceptual antecedent:
Fordism. Fordism is not just defined by the assembly line. More importantly, the term
Fordism describes a mode of production that for the first time in history invades, standard-
izes, and regulates virtually every aspect of the lives of its subjects—their social, political,
cultural, geographical, and even medical lives. By extension, the term post-Fordism, as I
use it in this essay, does not just describe the shift in production from national, regulated,
industrial economies to globalized, deregulated service and immaterial economies, but
also a vast shift in the entirety of social and political life, including politics of the state,
nations, and, notably for the purposes of this essay, cultural and intellectual production.
Methodologically, I base the following inquiry on the writings of the French Regulation
School, whose insistence on the importance of analyzing the ways in which capitalism
progresses and changes depending on its “social regulation” provide an invaluable tool
for contemporary cultural critics. Regulation theory insists that we can arrive at a fuller
understanding of the material dynamics behind the progress of history by studying the
perpetual dialectical struggle between capital and its social dimension, which understands
history a heterogeneous process of perpetual change with only moments of relative stabil-
ity that correspond to moments of structural dominance (such as full post-Fordism).3 In
what follows, I extend this analytical model and focus on the central role culture takes
on in capitalism’s social regulation, which in turn becomes an invaluable tool for under-
standing recent literary history.
Culture, therefore, can be understood as the battlefield upon which the social regulation
of contemporary capitalism is carried out, where new sociopolitical and socioeconomic
arrangements, attitudes, and beliefs are born and buried, contested and disseminated.
It is also here that we can locate the intervention of Butler’s novels: a finely nuanced
mediation of the psychological and political pressures arising out of the transition into
post-Fordism. Furthermore, we will see that Butler’s treatment of the concept of change
indicates a necessary periodizing distinction between postmodernism and post-Fordist
culture. Postmodernism, usually simply defined as the cultural expression of postmo-
dernity, is from this perspective more accurately understood as the culture of emergent

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postmodernity or as the culture of Fordism in crisis and must be clearly differentiated

from post-Fordist culture, the culture of full postmodernity or of the completed transition
into post-Fordism. Unlike postmodernism, which is centrally marked by the celebration
of change, progress, and supersession of traditional sociopolitical structures, post-Fordist
culture, as Butler’s novels forcefully illustrate, is marked by a much more complicated
relationship to full postmodernity or post-Fordism. Butler’s treatment of the concept of
change in post-Fordism focuses on the social and political consequences arising from
rejections of post-Fordism that produce nostalgic desires for the resurrection of lost meta-
narratives. Through her presentation of the changed significance of the concept of change
in a post-Fordist context, Butler is able to capture the complexity surrounding the present
socioeconomic significance of this concept, consequently producing a narrative about the
tragic consequences of rejecting change by means of restoring paternalistic structures.
As Butler’s novels illustrate, within the desire to restore the idealized protective father,
a desire that appears to be an inevitable byproduct of the transition into post-Fordism,
lurks the potential to revive his shadowy double, the punitive father. In other words, the
value of closely examining the concept of change in Butler’s novels is twofold: we get an
insight into elements of the periodizing distinction between postmodernism and post-
Fordist culture and into Butler’s contribution to contemporary political art that locates
within the struggle with post-Fordism the potential for the resurrection of Fordist and
even totalitarian structures.

Nostalgia for the Future

Critics frequently read Butler’s description of Lauren’s politico-philosophical project as

the basis for a utopian society, which rejects, as Peter G. Stillman claims, sociopolitically
problematic ideas such as individualism, private property, and discrimination based upon
race or gender. Instead, he argues, the ideal upon which Lauren founds a new, progressive
community is the “the conscious interdependence and agreement of its members, who
must know, trust, and be able to work with each other for shared purposes” (Stillman
22–23). Similarly, Butler is often lauded for her extraordinary ability to grasp the social
complexities of the present and envision necessary political and social solutions in her
narratives of the future. Jerry Phillips praises Butler for her affirmation of the centrality of
change that reveals a crucial awareness of the dialectical progress of history and envisions
future potentiality without resorting to “simple determinisms,” producing a new “ethics
of Being” (302). However, while critics locate the force of the Parable novels correctly in
Butler’s extraordinary ability to grasp the complex interrelation between the forces that
have throughout the last few decades radically transformed the constitution of the United
States socioeconomic system and the need to reformulate ideas of community and selfhood,
analyses of the Parable novels have thus far failed to capture the complexity of Butler’s
examination of the significance of the concept of change itself. By truly situating Butler’s
critique within the present, analyzing the ways in which the concept of change functions
within contemporary American society and the ways in which this function is represented
in Butler’s Parable novels, it is possible to appreciate Butler’s novels as a significant me-

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diation of what is not an embrace of the ideal of change but indeed its widespread rejec-
tion. Butler does not consider the concept of change purely in its potential for the future.
Rather, the Parable novels explore the concept of change as centrally connected to the logic
of post-Fordist capitalism’s sociocultural regulation in the present.
In their analyses of the concept of change as it functions within the novels as a basis for
ideologically structuring a community, critics tend to treat change as a progressive alter-
native to repressive and segregating social structures that need to be overcome. Patricia
Melzer, for example, argues that,

One of Butler’s contributions to this discourse [utilizing the concept

of “difference” in an attempt to formulate progressive utopian narra-
tives] is her concept of change that lies at the basis of every political
interaction. Instead of “freezing” the manifestations of difference
within the theoretical conceptualizations (i.e. “gender,” “race,”
“class”), she emphasizes the fluid and transforming aspect behind
the term. At the same time, she makes these manifestations concrete
and rams them into a moment of agency by claiming that they can
be “shaped.” Change and its implications inject a transformative
element into the conceptualizations of difference that enables not
only a new perception of difference, such as Audre Lorde calls for
in Sister Outsider, but that demands a constant redefinition of its
categories. It is especially in this respect that Butler’s utopian desire
contributes to the feminist discourse on difference. (36)

Melzer’s article is indicative of what I consider to be a lack of historical specificity regard-

ing Butler’s project of locating Lauren’s struggle and her engagement with the concept of
change in direct relation to the present, a lack of specificity that has direct consequences
for our ability to grasp the full complexity of Butler’s critical analysis of contemporary
American society. What I would like to suggest is that change does not function as a uto-
pian impulse or as grounds for utopian imagination in the novels. While there is great
value in insisting on a definition of utopia as change, this is not the way in which change
functions for Lauren and her community. Change is not an alternative opposed to a gener-
ally strictly and repressively regulated society, or a progressive solution to the problems
posed by a repressive social dominant. It is clear that the critics mentioned above treat
the novels as examples of literary postmodernism, interpreting change as functioning in
a way comparable to the ways in which difference operates as a category of liberation in
postmodernism. However, as becomes clear in the novel, change is in fact the dominant
socioeconomic logic of the United States as Lauren finds it. Change is the functional norm
of the world Butler describes. In other words, it is significant to understand that Butler
does not represent change as a solution in the novel but first and foremost as society’s
central problem. Butler’s Parable novels, as indicated above, are not postmodern but post-
Fordist artifacts.
The assertion that change does not function as a solution but as a problem in the novels
may initially appear counterintuitive, or even simply wrong. After all, Lauren’s commu-
nity that is founded upon change is presented to us as fundamentally progressive in its
collective practices based upon change, in its celebration of diversity, and its acceptance
of different sexual orientations. However, if we consider the intricacies of the concept of

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change as represented by Butler it becomes clear that the true force of Butler’s critique
of the present is located in a more complex understanding of the concept of change than
merely representing it as a quasi-utopian, postmodern critique advocating the blurring
of the boundaries of traditional social norms. The post-apocalyptic setting of the novels
leaves little doubt that such a departure from repressive structures is not the most direly
needed project. Instead, Butler’s novels raise a more rewarding question: what happens
to change and to the progressive politics based on the ideal of change (in other words to
the postmodern project) in a time in which change is not a utopian ideal but the logic of a
present that is precisely because of its instability perceived as scary and chaotic?
Change no longer functions as the ideal that promises liberation from repressive tra-
ditional structures. Instead, change has become the very logic of the post-Fordist present,
the period in which the liberatory demands of postmodern culture and theory have been
fulfilled, yet with a different outcome than previously imagined. The liberatory potential
postmodern culture imagined in its representation of the future and a changing present
have revealed itself in contemporary or post-Fordist culture as nothing more than the
central logic of post-Fordist capitalism. In other words, post-Fordist culture begins at the
moment at which postmodernism starts to reveal itself not as a liberatory movement but
as the cultural and socio-philosophical project that made way for a new structure of social
regulation, as the very impulse, thus, that made the transition into a post-Fordism, into a
form of capitalism based upon change and productive chaos possible. This transition, as
Butler’s novels suggest, is widely perceived as an apocalyptic one.
From the beginning of Parable of the Sower there is little doubt that the post-apocalyptic
setting of the novels is an allegorical representation of the dominant socioeconomic devel-
opments of our time. Traditional forms of stability such as the nation state begin to lose
significance (we can read Robledo as a miniaturized example of this), the government
as a regulating force is virtually nonexistent, and the country is run by corporations and
rampant free-market capitalism within which even the police force has been privatized.
Furthermore, Parable of the Talents contains a passage in which Franklin Taylor Bankole,
Lauren’s husband, provides the reader with a few clues regarding the historical events
that climaxed in the apocalyptic events that have come to be referred to as “the Pox”:

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding
climatic, economic, and sociological crises . . . . I have heard people
deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that
it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the
rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to
survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused
greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have
watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more
and more people. (Butler 8)

This description of the apocalyptic transformation is an instance where the parallels to

the socioeconomic and political problems of our present are particularly thinly veiled.
In the Parable novels, change (or “difference,” “pluralism,” “deregulation,” “decentral-
ization,” etc.) does not function as something new. It is no longer an alternative to the
socioeconomic dominant whose full implementation can be the basis for imagining future

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potential. Change is neither associated with utopian imagination, nor is it associated with
the future. Instead, change is an aspect of pragmatic realism and a central characteristic
of the present.
Lauren’s belief system (Earthseed), by extension, is Butler’s representation of a subject’s
struggle with the need to “catch up” with socioeconomic developments by attempting to
formulate an idea of selfhood and of community that accounts for the changed structural
context. The novels are less about the value of embracing change than about the struggle
with the necessity of having to do so. Lauren never claims that embracing change will
provide for a utopian alternative that stands opposed to present problems. Instead, she
realizes that the present problem is that embracing change is necessary in order to formulate
an individual and collective existence that corresponds to the world surrounding them.
It is thus impossible to read Lauren’s relation to the idea of change in a one-dimensional
manner that describes it as a positive alternative to the exterior world. Rather, the value
of Butler’s novels may lie primarily in her striking ability to represent the psychological
struggle that arises out of the confrontation with change. Lauren and her group struggle
to catch up with a world that has already left behind the forms of stability and commu-
nity they are just beginning to realize as no longer functional. The purpose of Lauren’s
religion/philosophy is to provide a basis for the articulation of forms of subjectivity that
correspond to the radically changed environment. Butler’s novels are thus primarily
interested in the psychological mechanisms that create the negative perception of change
in the context of a post-Fordist situation, as well as in the troubling social and political
consequences of this rejection of change. As we shall see, the motto “God is change” does
not constitute an embrace of change but indeed its categorical rejection. The novels’ main
critical intervention consists in the examination of the regressive sociopolitical consequences
of this rejection. However, Butler does not merely point toward the causal relationship
between change and the desire for stability within post-Fordism. In the Parable novels
she attempts to represent the complexity of the experience of post-Fordism as a situation
which simultaneously harbors the potential for both hope and tragedy, arising from the
fundamentally ambivalent relationship of the subject to change: “God is Change. I hate
God!” (Sower 131).
What, apart from this brief outburst on Lauren’s part (“I hate God!”) that voices dis-
content regarding the necessity of having to accept change, suggests that Lauren and her
community might in fact reject change? After all, the central credo of the group seems to
claim the opposite. The reader follows Lauren from the destruction of her walled com-
munity through various attempts to rebuild new communities to the final development
of an internationally powerful and affluent religious organization about to colonize new
planets. The main conflicts in the novels, as they seem to present themselves at first glance,
are those between Earthseed/Acorn and the various forms of adversity Lauren has to
overcome in her attempt to build a community and a belief system that structures this
community in a world that is dominated by chaos and disorder, in other words by change.
The function of Lauren’s new belief system, Earthseed, is to find a way to cope with the
post-apocalyptic world by providing the community with a set of beliefs that will allow
them to accept the chaos that surrounds them: “God is Change.” Members of Earthseed
must, according to Lauren, recognize that chaos, disorder, and change are central concepts
for life as they find it and cannot be fought but must be embraced. It is this belief, then,

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that seemingly becomes central to all of Lauren’s attempts to reconstitute a feeling of the
social in a post-social world, of replacing her lost community and family.
Butler’s complication of the psychological reaction to the centrality of change is con-
tained within this very credo. Through its paradoxical logical constitution, Earthseed’s
credo “God is Change” expresses the fundamental trauma of the post-Fordist situation.
While Lauren recognizes the centrality of change, she is, upon closer scrutiny, tragically
unable to think a form of subjectivity that truly responds to this situation. Rather than a
utopian imagination or solution directed at the future, the credo carries within itself what
Butler represents as the most frequent and most problematic reaction to change, namely
the desire to escape a world in which change dominates and return to a social situation
that is marked by stability and order. By turning change into God, Lauren regressively
transforms change into a religion, which, of course, makes change into as permanent a
structure as one can imagine: a religion as a strong set of rules that have ultimate truth-
value for the believer, a system of explaining and mapping one’s environment with the
ability to radically simplify and explain all complexities of an increasingly unmappable
world.4 Earthseed’s assertion that “God is Change” is thus less a way to embrace change
but to reduce complexity by transforming change into the basis for a universal system of
determination, effectively replacing complexity and difference with simplicity and cen-
tralized, stable rule/dogma. While recognizing that change is the dominant logic of the
world surrounding her, Lauren refuses to formulate a sense of self out of this situation,
remaining nostalgically attached to traditional teleological narratives that promise stabil-
ity. Earthseed’s transformation of change into a religion is the basis from which Butler
launches her exploration into the psychological struggle with post-Fordism, which contains
the potential for creating politically and socially regressive desires. Asserting that “God
is Change” is thus a radically different claim than identifying change with difference and
liberatory potential for the future. Earthseed restores a paternalistic social structure by
“shaping” change and difference into a new set of “laws of the father.”
Butler sets the stage for her representation of the struggle with post-Fordism in the first
pages of the novel, describing a recurring dream that seems to haunt Lauren. In this dream
Lauren has a conversation with her stepmother about the stars, learning that in her step-
mother’s youth it was impossible to see the stars due to the mass of city lights illuminating
the skies. “Lights, progress, growth,” her stepmother tells her, “are now all things they are
too poor to bother with any more,” hinting at the disappearance of Fordist industrialization
in Butler’s post-apocalyptic scenario. Lauren’s stepmother counters Lauren’s remark that
she would “rather have the stars” with a notably pragmatic counterargument: “the stars
are free. I’d rather have the city lights back, the sooner the better. But we can afford the
stars” (Sower 5–6). The stars, a traditional symbol of freedom, have in the Parable novels
been reduced to their purely material properties and consequently been absorbed into a
sobering account of freedom in the post-Fordist age that differs greatly from postmodern
notions of freedom and progress. The real object of desire for the society surrounding Lau-
ren, as it appears from the beginning of the novel, is not a distant idea of freedom but the
pragmatic wish to return to a Fordist, repressive, yet ordered, stable, and paternalistically
protected social arrangement that stands opposed to the chaos surrounding the walled
community. Likewise, Earthseed’s project of forming a community that, as Lauren tends
to put it, will “take root among the stars” in the future, is a project that must be primarily

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understood as aimed at filling the gap left by the disappearance of centralized paternalistic
power and rule. “We need the stars, Bankole,” Lauren explains, “We need purpose” (Talents
179). Earthseed’s teleological narrative of settling the stars, however, is not a narrative of
ultimate freedom. It is not a narrative that is directed at the stars, or at the future. Instead,
it is a narrative that locates the future in a return to the past, specifically in the return to
paternalistic structures and centered forms of subjectivity.5
It is thus not solely chaos, disorder, or other forms of adversity that present the main
obstacles to the development of a functional form of subjectivity that responds adequately
to the new historical conjuncture described in the novel. Rather, it is the reaction to com-
plexity and change, represented by Butler in the form of the fundamentally regressive,
historically escapist longing for a structure such as Earthseed itself that constitutes the
central problem for Lauren and the people of Earthseed. As already anticipated in Parable
of the Sower, what spells disaster for Lauren and Earthseed in Parable of the Talents (hence
tragically repeating the isolationism and escapism that marked the community of Rob-
ledo) is the general refusal of the group to find viable ways of dealing with the vast global
changes, which are in the narrative reduced to a mere backdrop (wars, major changes in
global power structures, an economy built upon indentured slavery, etc.). A clear indica-
tion of this is the circular structure of Parable of the Sower, which begins in Robledo and
ends in the founding of the Acorn, the new settlement of the people of Earthseed, which
in both architecture and ideology is entirely congruent with Robledo.
As the Parable novels indicate, in an era in which we have indeed departed from rigid
structures and transitioned into a society based upon change, we seem prone to developing
a regressive attachment to the structures of stability we feel we lost. Ironically, this tends
to result in the idealization of the very structures we used to oppose. The same repressive
structures postmodernism’s celebration of difference hoped to be able to unearth appear in
post-Fordist culture as antidotes to the anxiety induced by the dominance of change and
difference. The true tragedy Butler cautions us about is hence the lack of utopian narratives
and the inability to envision potentiality in the future. Hence we must understand Butler’s
description of Earthseed’s engagement with change in relation to this rejection of change
tied to a crisis of futurity. On the surface being directed toward the future (“the stars”),
Earthseed in fact seeks its answers in the past, transforms change into God and thereby
into a traditional, universalizing, teleological narrative that revives with it all repressive
structures that characterized such narratives in the past. It appears thus that the regres-
sive return to an idealized past is motivated by the nostalgic longing for stable narratives
of the future, for teleological narratives that offer an escape from a present dominated by
change that is unable to offer a sense of purpose or stable forms of subjectivity.
Rather than presenting itself as hostile to individual and individual needs, contemporary
capitalism champions the explosion of various identities and needs. Post-Fordist surplus
production rests on the deregulation and diversification of identities and ideological struc-
tures. Yet, it is precisely the increasing negative perception of change and the association
of post-Fordist deregulation not with freedom but with repressive desublimation that
underlies the various forms of discontent characteristic of contemporary cultural produc-
tion. In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson anticipates precisely this paralyzing effect of
“absolute change” on theoretical discourse. It is not surprising, Jameson argues, that a
society resting upon the standardization of difference in which seemingly “nothing can

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change any longer” would create fatalist proclamations such as “the end of ideology” or
“the end of history” (Seeds 18). This is precisely the context within which we witness the
exhaustion of the postmodern project. Out of this point of exhaustion, as Butler’s novels
illustrate, emerges post-Fordist culture, part literature of exhaustion and part literature of
replenishment. Change in the novels is not interesting because it is utopian, but precisely
because it no longer primarily functions as the basis for utopian impulses. It is from the
grip of the standardization of change and progress that Butler’s critique of post-Fordism
tries to wrest the idea of replenishment, clearly differentiating between “good” and “bad”
utopia. Within this project the desire for the restoration of paternalistic structures Lauren
and Earthseed are invested in reveals itself as the bad utopian desire obscuring a truly
progressive, dialectical formulation of future possibility.
Out of the post-Fordist situation emerges what Butler represents as a distinct nostalgia
for the future. This form of nostalgia for a time in which it was still possible to formulate
stable individual and collective life narratives typifies contemporary cultural production.
However, Butler leaves little doubt that this logical operation is not only flawed but also
that it must lead to tragedy. Locating the future in a reactionary return to an idealized
form of the past cannot provide a truly progressive narrative of the future. Butler’s novels
hence can be read as cautionary tales, warning us of the regressive nature of nostalgia for
the future frequently produced out of the confrontation with post-Fordism. The regressive
desire to restore lost paternalistic structures finds expression in contemporary narratives
of weak or absent fathers, which stand in for the nostalgically idealized lost structures of
(Fordist) paternalism. Butler’s representation of Lauren’s development as a religious leader
and of Lauren’s attempts to respond to change by the reactionary desire to avoid it and
return to a stable, centralized social situation hence foregrounds nostalgia for the future
as one of the most significant escapist desires produced by the post-Fordist condition.
Notably, however, Butler understands that the regressive desiring mechanisms created
out of post-Fordism are fundamentally connected to totalitarian tendencies. In fact, the
true tragedy represented in the novels, as will be illustrated, is that the “new totalitarian-
ism” of a decentralized society in fact creates a form of nostalgia for the restoration of
past paternalistic structures that are romanticized to the degree that they possess the force
to convince large parts of the population that paternalistic totalitarianism is not only the
lesser evil compared to the chaotic totalitarianism of post-Fordism, but comparably even
desirable. Following Lauren’s struggle with the absence of a centralized struggle, told
through the narrative of the absent father, will help explore this point in detail. After all, as
Jameson notes in Archaeologies of the Future, especially in the present historical conjuncture
the increasingly difficult search for utopia raises an old question: “what if one misguided
group embraces patriarchy, or something even worse?” (219).

Are You There God? It’s Me, the Post-Fordist Subject

Butler quickly establishes the figure of the father as one of the guiding metaphors
that structure the novels. From the beginning of Parable of the Sower it is clear that three
terms form the motor of the novels’ plot: (Lauren’s) subjectivity, change, and the father/

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paternalism. The novel opens with a scene set the day before Lauren’s birthday, which
coincidentally is also her father’s birthday, establishing immediately the parallel between
Lauren and her father we will follow for the rest of the narrative. Lauren is plagued by a
recurring nightmare. “It comes to me,” she explains, “when I am my father’s daughter”
(Sower 3). In this dream she sees the wall that protects her city burning, foreshadowing
the tragic fall of her city that is to come. Following the father’s rule, being “her father’s
daughter,” is hence immediately associated with tragedy, with an existence that is doomed
to fail. Furthermore, Lauren herself discusses father figures in the tripartite form that will
inform her future struggle:

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-

God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of superperson. A
few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out
to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel
in control of . . . . So what is God? Just another name for whatever
makes you feel special and protected. (15)

The father is associated with three main structures: the father of the family, the religious
father, and the state. In all three variations, as Lauren understands, the father represents
control and a protective structure people long for, especially in times of insecurity and
instability. However, Lauren also realizes clearly that this longing for the father presents a
form of escapism, of avoiding confrontation with the actual complexity of her situation.
From the beginning, thus, the Parable novels are concerned with the interrelation be-
tween the subject’s reaction to change and the role of those structures that contain change,
that erase difference and instability or “protect” people from it. What also becomes clear
is that this way of avoiding change is clearly a regressive desire, which not only lacks any
concrete future potential but in fact leads to tragedy. Consequently, as Lauren anticipates
throughout the entirety of the narrative, the fall of Robledo cannot be avoided, since it
is a structure that clings to the logic of paternalism and centralized protectionism. The
actual fall of the city is foreshadowed by the disappearance of Lauren’s father, notably
also the city’s priest. Within a short period of time Lauren loses the father structure in
all three manifestations: she loses her actual father, she loses her priest as father who en-
dowed the community within the city with a stable framework of social and moral rules,
and she loses the city as protective father itself, standing in for the disappearance of the
protective nation state as a whole. As we learn throughout the novel, the fall of Robledo
is by no means an isolated incident. Rather, it is the norm, marking the desire to avoid
the chaos of the surrounding world as a futile attachment to outdated logic, as a social
arrangement that cannot but fall in the face of the dominance of instability and change.
In fact, in the novels the United States nation state as a whole is subject to the same forces
that erode traditional structures of stability, lacking a social support system overseen by
a strong president.
Channeling an examination of the nation state, religion, and collectivity through the
figure of the father, Butler also introduces another plot line that will run through the nar-
rative, namely that following the events leading up to the election of President Jarret. In
the beginning of Parable of the Sower the United States is run by President Donner. Lauren
accurately attributes the widespread attachment to a president who does not wield a lot

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of power to people’s need for what she calls a “human banister,” “a symbol of the past
for us to hold on to as we are pushed into the future” (56). The persistent attachment to
the figure of the president appears to Lauren to be motivated by the same reason that
people remained invested in Robledo or in the idea of a protective God: the confrontation
with change creates anxiety, which again creates a nostalgic desire for clearly outdated
structures of stability. It is this form of a “banister” that the populace misses after the
disappearance of the father representing stable and protective law and it is precisely this
idealization of the past that marks one of the main psychological reactions to a future
that is not a future of choice but a future of insecurity forced upon a populace that still
idealizes stable life narratives.
Furthermore, Lauren recognizes clearly that this desire cannot present the basis for the
future: “things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by the plague so
they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things
have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing” (Sower 57).
David Harvey presents a similar argument about contemporary tendencies to resort to
traditional structures of stability as a response to the confrontation with change:

It is also at such times of fragmentation and economic insecurity that

the desire for stable values leads to a heightened emphasis upon the
authority of basic institutions—the family, religion, the state. And
there is abundant evidence of a revival of support for such institu-
tions and the values they represent throughout the Western world
since about 1970. (Harvey 171)6

Metaphorically connected to the centralized law of the father, the desire to respond to a
situation of socioeconomic instability by idealizing the return to the three areas Harvey
identifies has become a common concern in contemporary American literary and cultural
production. Rather than merely considering change to be a solution to social problems,
Butler displays an extraordinary sensitivity to the ways in which change itself can produce
quite the opposite of liberation from repressive structures. Paradoxically, as she seems to
caution us, at the precise point at which change has become the functional logic of post-
Fordism it begins to contain within itself the potential for its own undoing.
As she displays such great insight into this politically regressive potential that arises
out of a situation of social instability, we expect Lauren to avoid the pitfalls of this desire
and be able to think selfhood and collectivity in ways that do not replicate this nostalgic
form of escapism. Yet, Butler’s account of the complex social existence of change and the
problems it creates would not be as finely nuanced if she readily granted us an easy solu-
tion to the problem. Rather, Lauren’s Bildung indicates to us that even the ability to spot
the nature of the social problem may not guarantee the ability to find adequate answers
to it and so, despite Lauren’s best intentions, Earthseed ultimately “evolves” merely into
another facet of the all-pervasive nostalgia for the future. Doubtlessly, Lauren’s intentions,
as we will see, are far more progressive than those of President Jarret, who utilizes the
widespread social instability to seize power by providing the nation with the rigorous
and repressive form of centralized paternalistic order it appears to long for. Yet, if we truly
examine the (ideo)logical constitution of both communities, that of Earthseed and that of
Jarret’s Christian America movement, we cannot help but conclude that they are structur-

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ally and logically closely related and that both exploit the same psychological condition
in order to advance their agendas.
As the lack of “fathering” becomes the central extended metaphor of Lauren’s expe-
rience, the recreation of fathering becomes the central logic of Earthseed and Lauren’s
solution to the problem of chaos and change. Melzer reads the structure of Earthseed as
fundamentally characterized by mothering, noting, however, that Butler seems to reject
the “white stereotypical ideal of the nurturing, self-sacrificing mother within patriarchal
society” (Melzer 43). Rather than reading Earthseed as a progressive version of a matriarchal
arrangement that stands opposed to a patriarchal structure, analyzing Earthseed’s structure
and function in relation to change, that is, in relation to a situation of “fatherlessness,”
reveals that it contains all the characteristics of a traditional paternalistic arrangement.
Earthseed’s project of forming a community that, as Lauren tends to put it, will “take root
among the stars” in the future, is a project that aims to fill the gap left by the disappearance
of centralized paternalistic power and rule. Earthseed’s teleological narrative of settling
the stars, hence, is not a narrative of ultimate freedom. It is not a narrative that is directed
at the stars as a promise of freedom, or at a future built upon the acceptance of change.
Instead it is a narrative that channels change into a quite traditional teleological narrative
that locates the future in a regressive return to paternalistic structures, most importantly in
a return to organized religion. Identifying Jarret as a totalitarian, paternalistic leader whose
Christian America movement attempts to restore lost order and control is relatively easy.
Butler, however, once again does not allow us to take pleasure in seemingly easy answers
and an analysis of the novel that clearly distinguishes between good and bad, regressive
and progressive characters and sociopolitical projects. As we see in her novels, regressive
patriarchal structures can seemingly paradoxically be justified and re-created out of an
anti-paternalistic sentiment. Lauren is not exempt from the psychological influence of
post-Fordism and while she may not recreate a paternalistic structure in relation to gender
politics, the figure of the father, as indicated already in the beginning pages of Parable of the
Sower, can be recreated in many forms and functions. After all, as we all know, possession
of a penis is not a requirement for the re-creation of paternalistic structures.7
Nevertheless, Lauren’s quest to found a new community poignantly begins with an act
of cross-dressing, which initially serves the purpose of utilizing Lauren’s rather masculine
physical proportions as a deterrent for potential attackers. However, whereas Lauren
eventually sheds the disguise and with it the masculine role physically, she remains the
leader of the group, filling the role of the absent father herself. As the leader of the group,
Lauren makes decisions, assigns roles, and provides the group with structure and order.
Even after meeting Bankole, a medical doctor Lauren falls in love with (who, being al-
most forty years older than Lauren, hence the age of her father, clearly presents another
example of her desire to fill the lacking father role), Lauren maintains her position as the
group’s religious guide. Soon after Lauren establishes herself as the “father” of the group
and her belief system as the father’s “law” that provides the group with rules and order,
she begins to display the signs of a deep investment in traditional paternalistic logic.
Gradually, the belief system Earthseed becomes to Lauren the most important aspect of her
existence and the rationale for her decisions regarding the future of the group—the group
must fulfill Earthseed’s “Destiny” and “take root among the stars” (Sower 222). Quickly,
Lauren’s construction of Earthseed begins to replicate not only the positive function of a

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traditional belief system—offering hope through stability and a teleological narrative—

but also its evils, such as the need for expansion and conversion. During their northward
migration, Lauren begins to transform the group into a stable identity based upon her
teachings and begins to refer to it collectively as Earthseed. Wandering on Highway 101
Lauren notices that the highway has become “a river of the poor” that flows north (223).
Lauren’s realization that she should be “fishing the river” as she “follows its current”
displays a decidedly new attitude toward change and instability (229). Whereas it was
previously clear to her that change creates within people a form of existential anxiety that
produces the regressive desire to return to lost paternalistic structures (“human banisters”),
Lauren now sees in the flow of people subject to instability and change the potential for
expanding her community by means of conversion. Hence, her previous insight into the
social and political effects of change that made Lauren criticize the desire to return to the
past has given way to the positive perception of widespread existential anxiety as an op-
portunity to spread Earthseed.
Similarly, one cannot help but note the degree to which Lauren is suddenly willing to
justify repression as a necessary component of the project of establishing Earthseed as a pa-
ternalistic structure. However, it is also clear that Lauren never identifies it as a paternalistic
structure, which suggests that she does not intentionally bring about this transformation.
According to her perspective, she judges Earthseed’s structure to be free and progressive.
Regarding the future plans of Earthseed, Lauren writes in a journal entry:

And then what? Find a place to squat and take over? Act as a kind
of gang? Not quite a gang. We aren’t gang types. I don’t want gang
types with their need to dominate, rob, and terrorize. And yet we
might have to dominate. We might have to rob to survive, and even
terrorize to scare off or kill enemies. We’ll have to be very careful
how we allow our needs to shape us. But we must have arable land,
a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let us
establish ourselves and grow . . . . We might be able to do it—grow
our own food, grow ourselves and our neighbors into something
brand new. Into Earthseed. (223–24)

In this remarkable scene Butler movingly captures Lauren’s interior struggle as she ex-
plores the limits of being able to justify her logic and her desires. She clearly does not
want to recreate repressive paternalistic structures. She clearly does not want to become
another group of “gang types,” and yet she seems unable to completely convince even
herself that Earthseed is not fundamentally and inevitably connected to repressive logic.
Moreover, Lauren realizes that in order for Earthseed to flourish she must be able to justify
actions that are clearly reminiscent of the logic of religiously motivated colonialism, which
historically also was often motivated by what appeared to the colonizers to be the best of
intentions. Part of Earthseed will inevitably be the fight for property and land, as well as
its expansion through conversion. By the end of the first novel, Lauren and the members
of Earthseed have settled in the northwest of the United States and founded a community
that (apart from the absence of proper walls that have been replaced by geographical
isolation) is structurally and in its logical constitution virtually indistinguishable from
Robledo, foreshadowing another inevitable downfall.

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Nostalgia for the Meta-Narrative: Re-Filiation and Totalitarianism

Whereas Parable of the Sower primarily functions as a means of introducing the psycho-
logical struggle resulting out of a chaotic social arrangement, Parable of the Talents must
be read as an exploration of the potential outcome of this situation. It is in Parable of the
Talents, thus, that Butler’s critique of the nostalgic reaction to the concept of change appears
the most urgent and timely. The second novel illustrates to us the potentially terrifying
consequences of acting upon the politically regressive desires identified in the first novel.
Parable of the Talents is a novel about the potential for totalitarianism that lurks within
the post-Fordist situation. Butler continues her analysis of the social and political effect
of change by channeling it through the narrative of the absent father, whose restoration
guides the plot of the second novel. The novel continues to be marked by the refusal to
seek answers to chaos in the future, displaying a widespread, nostalgic turn to the past.
Butler, however, does not merely point out that this form of nostalgia obscures prior
moments in history. Instead, Butler stresses the degree to which post-Fordist nostalgia is
connected to the re-creation of outdated structures that are envisioned to provide stability
and protection. It is in this idealization of the past that Butler locates a tragic misrecognition.
As famously argued by Freud in his “The Uncanny,” the father never singularly appears
as the “good” father. Since all aspects of the good father are connected to the logic of a
centrally regulating law of the father, the father must at times also be “bad.”8 Put differ-
ently, in order to uphold his centralized rule that can provide protection, a certain degree
of repression is logically and structurally unavoidable. It is this dialogic relation between
the “protective” and the “punitive” father that produces the structures of paternalism with
which Lauren struggles. What Lauren begins to sense and what the people surrounding
her tragically leave unaccounted for is the fact that the restoration of the protective father
will inevitably carry with it the restoration of the punitive father.
Lauren herself is quite aware that the return of the father cannot be associated with a
return to a “golden-age,” as her analysis of Jarret’s political project illustrates:

Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time.

Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The
current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us
all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same
God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their
safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious
rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never
such a time in this country. (Talents 19)

The force of Jarret’s political project is that he is aware of the ways in which he can take
advantage of the widespread existential anxiety that is created out of chaos. To Lauren
his project clearly appears to be founded upon repression and exclusion, resurrecting a
centralized father-God whose law everyone is subjected to. She understands that this
project stands in polar opposition to the celebration of difference, of change, instead
celebrating safety based on structure, order, and sameness. The restored father-God once
more returns to the center of a binary mechanism of identification that is based upon
negative opposition. Yet, whereas Lauren clearly sees the danger within this desire, the

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people portrayed in the novel appear to be strongly invested in the idea of forming a
stable sense of self and returning to a protected existence. Consequently, Jarret is elected
president and soon establishes what logically must follow the restoration of the father: an
authoritarian state, a theocratic dictatorship that seeks to restore order through frequently
violent repression, resurrecting the greatest of all evils of the twentieth century: fascism
and the prison camp.
As indicated before, Lauren’s insight into the problems associated with the return to a
paternalistic social order seems to suggest that she should be able to avoid making the same
mistakes. Once again, however, Butler does not grant us the ability to easily distinguish
between the “bad” political project of Jarret and what we want to be the “good” political
project of Earthseed. Instead, Butler seems to suggest, distinctions may not always be this
clear. The ability to see the problems of one political project may not directly translate
into the ability to avoid replicating them in a different form. A few years after the group
has settled into their new community of Acorn, Lauren is surprised by the return of her
brother Marc whom she had up to this point believed to be dead. While she is initially
overjoyed by this reunification, the relationship between Lauren and Marc quickly becomes
strained. Marc, who now wants to be referred to as Marcos, has during the time of their
separation become a Christian preacher and takes offense to Lauren’s newly invented
religion. Lauren’s reaction to Marc’s skepticism and his desire to preach his own beliefs
at the gatherings of the community is telling. Following her previously expressed belief in
the need to tolerate other beliefs, a conviction she finds lacking in Jarret’s politics, Lauren
allows Marc to speak to her community. Lauren intentionally sets Marc up for failure,
knowing that the people of Acorn will challenge his Christian rhetoric by referring to the
logic that underlies Earthseed. In these gatherings Lauren does not speak to Marc herself
and leaves the questioning to the rest of the community, illustrating once more the ways
in which Earthseed has become a dogmatic structure, its laws internalized by its follow-
ers, operating independently from the father and, as Freud and Lacan famously suggest,
ever more strongly in the absence of the father.
As a result of this repeated humiliation and frustration, Marc leaves the community
without saying good-bye to Lauren, an act that completely severs the ties between Lau-
ren and Marc. Lauren’s analysis of the situation clearly illustrates her function not as the
mother but as the father of Acorn:

But now, instead of feeling important and proud, he feels angry

and embarrassed. I had to let him inflict those feelings on himself. I
couldn’t let him begin to divide Acorn. More important—I couldn’t
let him divide Earthseed. (152)

While Lauren is clearly distraught by the repeated loss of her brother, she also leaves no
doubt where her priorities lie. In fact, Lauren displays the classic psychological struggle of
a paternalistic leader who is forced to choose between sympathy for a justifiable action of
a person close to him that might destabilize his rule and the stability of his society and his
commitment to the structure. Much like King Creon is forced to sentence Antigone to death
in order to uphold the law in one of literature’s most famous explorations of this struggle,
an action which, despite the fact that it will lead to personal tragedy, he must prioritize

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as the paternalistic leader, Lauren realizes that she cannot choose mothering (prioritizing
Marc) over fathering (prioritizing paternal law and Earthseed) without undermining the
very structure that provides Acorn with stability and coherence.
Ultimately, Parable of the Talents cannot be read as separable into three clearly distin-
guishable sets of ideological positions—that of Lauren Olamina and Earthseed, that of
her counterpart Jarret and his “Christian America,” and that of Lauren’s daughter Larkin.
Instead, Larkin’s frame-tale sections function as another mechanism designed to force the
reader to shift perspectives. Larkin’s point of view reveals that the logical structures of
Earthseed and Christian America, albeit different in their practical implementation, are
ultimately not distinguishable. Larkin identifies her mother’s sociopolitical project as well
as that of Jarret and her uncle Marc as the dangerous work of “would-be world-fixers”
(110). Presenting a finely nuanced account of the regressive desiring structures arising out
of the post-Fordist situation, Butler’s Parable novels remind us of Marx’s description of the
progress of history. All important personages in history, writes Marx, appear twice: the
first time as a tragedy and the second time as a farce. Post-Fordism, as Butler illustrates,
contains the potential for a farcical revival of the figure of the father as the nostalgically
idealized antidote to the chaotic present. The changed perception of categories such as
change and difference hence indicates one of the internal contradictions of the post-Fordist
condition. Rather than leading us toward the future as postmodern theorists imagined,
difference and change under post-Fordism tend to create the desire to turn toward the past
and toward the same meta-narratives postmodernism sought to leave behind. However,
as Marx points out, this kind of repetition constitutes a historically farcical development.
Fordism, under which paternalistic structures were the dominant socioeconomic logic,
spawned tragic historical events such as new forms of alienation, domination, economic
exploitation, and social segregation. The desire to revive the superseded structures of
Fordism constitutes a historical absurdity, as paternalistic rule becomes nostalgically dis-
sociated from its historical effects.
After having talked a lot about nostalgia, it seems possible to formulate a somewhat
stable definition of the concept in times of post-Fordism. To be sure, it is not my argument
that nostalgia interferes with the project of arriving at an accurate or true understanding
of history. Rather, nostalgia conflicts with the project of articulating a dialectical account
of history, as well as using it in a dialectical manner. Walter Benjamin’s famous descrip-
tion of the project of historical materialism hence gains a special significance in times of
post-Fordism:

To articulate the past does not mean to recognize it “the way it was”
(Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a mo-
ment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of
the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history
at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the
tradition and its receivers. (255)

Butler’s work can thus be located in the context of such a moment of danger that both
authors acutely recognize, necessitating a self-conscious attitude regarding culture’s central
function in the regulation of capitalism.

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Without a doubt the most influential examination of the significance of nostalgia within
the context of postmodernism is contained in Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. For Jameson, one of the most important characteristics
of postmodernity is its tendency to not only “bracket,” but in fact completely “efface . . .
the past as ‘referent’,” which manifests itself in postmodern architecture that “randomly
and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past”
(19). This tendency to empty out the past of its historical content, as further described by
Jameson in his by now famous reading of American Graffiti, which for him is the prime
example of what he calls “nostalgia films,” indicates “the desperate attempt to appropriate
a missing past” (Postmodernism 19). What characterizes postmodern culture for Jameson
is that it accesses the past exclusively through its own cultural images, transforming
history into a de-historicized assortment of simulacra.9 Yet, according to Jameson, we
seem to feel as though we have lost touch with our past, with history; in a present that
seems confined to its innate “presentness,” we simulate what Jameson calls “pastness,”
represented through postmodern pastiche, resulting in the “insensible colonization of the
present by the nostalgia mode” (Postmodernism 19–20).
While Jameson mainly discusses nostalgia in relation to what he considers to be a form
of depthlessness characteristic of postmodernism, we must extend Jameson’s analysis and
examine the political implications of this form of nostalgia, which is less an aspect of post-
modernism than of post-Fordist culture, since it is a direct consequence of the completed,
not the emergent transition into post-Fordism. Jameson likens the re-creation of the past
within contemporary culture to the phenomenon of “déja vu,” or to the Freudian descrip-
tion of the “return of the repressed” (Postmodernism 24). However, as Butler illustrates in
her novels, the politically far more troubling function of nostalgia within post-Fordism is
that it results in what could be more accurately described as a return to repression itself.
The farcical nature of post-Fordist nostalgia is not only the historical doubling, but the
process of emptying historical structures and personages of their historical content in a
way that allows them to be perceived positively in contradistinction to the present situ-
ation. The danger of the nostalgia mode is not merely its failure to capture the historical
real, but more importantly, its reactionary political potential. Nostalgic simulations of
the past are consequently inherently anti-dialectical, farcical, and politically problematic
once they become the widespread imaginative means of resolving the problems posed by
post-Fordism. In its most troubling form, and this is one of the most forceful arguments
advanced by Butler’s novels, post-Fordist nostalgia ironically creates the renewed threat
of totalitarianism out of a situation that seeks to structurally supersede the repressive
structures of Fordism.
Returning once more to the figure of the father can help clarify this point. Regarding
historical progress Marx writes:

men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by them-
selves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and
transmitted from the past. (15)

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Marx’s assertion here is that historical progress is a dialectical development that moves
forward precisely due to the operations of what Hegel calls “supersession” (Aufhebung).
This means that history moves forward by superseding but at the same time preserving
that which has been negated in the process of supersession. Consequently, when Marx
writes that we do not make history as we please but under circumstances transmitted
from the past, he reminds us that each historical moment must be considered in relation
to its own complex history. In order to understand a single historical moment we must
analyze it as a product of supersession and preservation, not an isolated entity. Looking
at Freud’s analysis of the figure of the father we can see that the father at the same time
represents precisely this description of historical progress as well as the progress of a
single individual’s dialectical development toward selfhood. In “Oedipus Politicus,” José
Brunner indicates the affinity between the Hegelian dialectic and the Freudian theory of
subjection. To be sure, this does not mean that both processes are dialectical, but rather
that they complement each other in ways that allow us to illuminate different facets of a
historical development. Comparable to Hegel’s dialectic, the figure of the father in Freud
operates within a politically dialogic situation Brunner describes as a situation of “obedience
and emancipation, where dependence leads to autonomy” (87–88). Both logical systems
establish a basic conception of freedom as contingent upon dependence, hence describing
a process that “denotes a transition whereby something is simultaneously abolished and
maintained” (Brunner 87).
What, however, does this precisely mean for the problem at hand? Out of this description
of the Oedipus complex and the figure of the father, which allows us to simultaneously
talk about historical process and the psychological development of the individual, arises
the possibility of identifying a major area of political contestation within post-Fordism:
the nostalgic desire for the lost structures represented by the father while simultaneously
emptying the father figure of its historical content. As Brunner argues, Freud’s discussion
of the father has from its early stages been an attempt to account for the complexity of
interpersonal relations that stabilize a social arrangement, stressing that societies have
often been formed based on the collective submission to one centralized, dominating
structure. As Brunner argues, “it is because they [human beings] share a love for the
same father figure that they feel close to one another” (81). The social bond, according to
this argument, is contained in and made coherent by the centralized figure of the father.
It is not love for each other that bonds human beings together, but the common love for
the father. However, as Brunner himself admits, this Freudian tradition has been heavily
criticized since it “turns masculine behavior into the norm, is strongly phallocentric and
authoritarian, and slides into mythical universalization” (93). This stigma of Freudian
theory constitutes in post-Fordism the precise object of regressive desires that seek an al-
ternative to the dominant anti-Oedipal structures. It is important to assert here once again
that in post-Fordist times the important question is not whether or not Freud’s description
of human relationships and individual psychological development is correct. Instead, we
should feel obliged to follow the example of Butler and examine the effects of a form of
de-historicizing nostalgia that leads to the conviction that Freud was in fact right, that the
father is indeed the only structure that has the power to provide human existence with
stability and save it from chaos.

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The danger of post-Fordist nostalgia is thus not its tendency to obscure that past as
a referent, but to anti-dialectically simulate the past as referent and regard it as a viable
basis for political programs and social movements, transforming those elements of pater-
nalistic structures that have been aufgehoben into the regressive turn toward a hyperreal
and idealized past. Brunner quotes a famous passage from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
that reveals itself as especially relevant in times of post-Fordism:

[w]e know that in the mass of mankind there is a powerful need for
an authority who can be admired, before whom one bows down, by
whom one is ruled and perhaps even ill-treated. . . . It is a longing for
the father felt by everyone from his childhood onwards. (90–91)

Butler’s novels caution us that, regardless of whether or not this assertion has any historical
truth, it is certainly rendered true by the regressive desires sparked by post-Fordism. The
longing for the father is one of the dominant psychological conditions of post-Fordism that
at best contains the desire to return to a simpler time, at worst the willingness to restore
order by accepting the repression of a totalitarian leader-God-father.
In Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, Alain Badiou attempts to produce an
insight into the connected politics of universalism and egalitarianism via the religious
tradition of filiation within which universalism is born. By means of conclusion, it is worth
quoting a significant passage in Badiou’s work at some length:

Philosophy only knows disciples. But a son-subject is the opposite

of a disciple-subject, because he is one whose life is beginning. The
possibility of such a beginning requires that God the Father has
filiated himself, that he has assumed the form of the son. It is by
consenting to the figure of the son, as expressed by the enigmatic
term “sending,” that the Father causes us ourselves to come forth
universally as sons. The son is he for whom nothing is lacking, for
he is nothing but beginning. “So through God you are no longer
a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir” (Gal. 4.7). The father,
always particular, withdraws behind his son’s universal evidence. It
is quite true that all postevental universality equalizes sons through
the dissipation of the particularity of the fathers. Whence the way
in which every truth is marked by an indestructible youthfulness . .
. . The resurrected Son filiates all of humanity. This constitutes the
uselessness of the figure of knowledge and its transmission. For Paul,
the figure of knowledge is itself a figure of slavery, like that of the
law. The figure of mastery is in reality a fraud. One must depose the
master and found the equality of sons . . . . This is what the metaphor
of the son designates: a son is he whom an event relieves of the law
and everything related to it for the benefit of a shared egalitarian
endeavor. (59–60)

Following Badiou’s description of the connection between religious filiation and egalitar-
ian universalism, we can finally see what leads to the reversal of egalitarianism and its
regression into the totalitarian structure Butler’s novels thematize: a crucial misrecognition,
mistaking the restoration of the father for automatically leading to filiation, mistaking a

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structure that, if left unchecked by truly “deposing the master,” will inevitably lead to
paternalistic domination instead of universal egalitarianism. At the heart of this misrec-
ognition is the perceived need to first restore the father as an antidote to post-Fordism’s
decentralization of previous paternalistic structures, which seems to be the precondition
for filiation. However, this logic of restoring the father in order to preserve the possibility
of “becoming sons again” possesses the potential to stop precisely at this development,
leading Lauren’s egalitarian ideals back toward the horrors of paternalistic authoritarian-
ism that under post-Fordism become the tragic consequence of the desire for re-filiation.
Egalitarian universalism carries with it under post-Fordism a dark counterpart, namely
the restored, totalitarian meta-narrative that can appear liberatory in its potential to reduce
complexity by reviving outdated but simpler forms of cognitive mapping.
The value of contemporary cultural production is its ability to represent post-Fordist
desiring structures that contain a potentially catastrophic longing for universalism ideo-
logically connected to the figure of the father in all of its various historical manifestations.
Works such as Butler’s Parable novels allow us to trace the roots of politically and socially
reactionary developments (expressed in the current renaissance of religious fundamentalism
or militarism) that idealize re-filiation as a response to the dominance of the decentered
subject in post-Fordism. Exposing these desires and self-consciously evaluating the function
of culture in the creation of post-Fordism, thereby locating political potential within the
contradictions contained in this process of formation, may be the mark of truly progres-
sive political art within post-Fordism.

NOTES

1. The standard example of such a theoretical argument can be found in Lyotard 27–49, specifically in
his discussion of difference and meta-narratives.
2. For an extended discussion of the sociocultural regulation of capital and of the distinction between
postmodern and post-Fordist literature see Nilges.
3. For a detailed introduction to the French Regulation School and its central concepts, including the
distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism and the theory of social regulation, see Aglietta.
4. I rhetorically invoke here Fredric Jameson’s famous account of “cognitive mapping.” For a definition
of the concept see Jameson, Postmodernism 51–54.
5. It should be noted that this “crisis of futurity” also manifests itself distinctly on the level of liter-
ary and cultural form, since the inability to truly produce representations of the future that do not
merely constitute returns to past social arrangements and forms of subjectivity carries with it a situ-
ation of formal regression. Notable examples here include returns to realism and naturalism (even
though certainly not all contemporary realist form can be called regressive), the sublation of the
science-fiction genre by authors such as William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson, or the return to
post-apocalyptic and dystopian literary forms.
6. See Arrighi.
7. To be sure, throughout the Parable novels there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Lauren under-
stands the problematic history of the absent black father and her initial attempts to think a new social
arrangement are centrally informed by her awareness of the problem of (contemporary) racism.
However, Butler once more cautions us that awareness of the history of a problem is not a guaran-
tee for being able to avoid replicating the problem in the future. Lauren’s different perspective and
knowledge of the history of United States slavery is ultimately not a safeguard against arriving at
President Jarret’s version of retro-paternalism. Yet, Butler certainly illustrates the need to distinguish
between the ways in which the politics of the absent father function for white and black subjects,
simultaneously stressing that the restored black father is not automatically a progressive opposi-
tion to the history of anti-paternalism in the context of white racist domination and fragmentation

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of the black family. A detailed examination of this problem in Butler’s novels, however, warrants a
separate, future essay.
8. For his famous long footnote on the doubling of the father see Freud 938–39.
9. We can see how Jameson’s analysis of the effect of what he calls “late-capitalism” on history is
congruent with Baudrillard’s assertion of the hegemony of the hyperreal, which saturates our pos-
sibilities of accessing the past, confining us to a simulated present, forever erasing the potential to
access the past as an aspect of the Lacanian Real (see Baudrillard 1–27). The value of Baudrillard’s
description, however, is that it avoids replicating the nostalgic attachment to a time when this was
not the case, a form of nostalgia from which Jameson himself seems not entirely free.

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