This is not the place to launch a full historical-genetic investigation of the anti-political, anti-institutional tendency within American culture. Yet it seems clear that one effect of the terrible defeats dealt out here throughout the 1980s to every potentially progressive constituency has been to deepen widely held libertarian-individualist suspicions that no structural or institutional transformations for the better are possible, that nothing political can be done. Such an increased and self-confirming hopelessness has, I think, had much to do with the putatively radical theory we have produced over the past decade. What is most absent from the present moment of confusion and dejection all along the left, and most necessary for its redemption, is the confidence that individuals can come together in collective action to transform societies structurally and institutionally for the better. In this respect, the rebelling/conserving schizophrenia of radical theory is at one with the pleasures of the rebelling-but-conserving cinematic texts we have examined: both being not so much about that absence of confidence as presupposing it, and offering us pleasures that can only appear within an asocial kingdom from which such confidence must have been banished a long time ago.

The more general form or methodological implication of this same point might run as follows. If the political events and theoretical critiques of the past decade or so have inoculated us - feminists, people of colour, gays and lesbians, 'post-Marxist' socialists, all of us - against any low-grade Hegelian fever and its chief associated symptom, the chronic assumption of a progressive dialectic chugging away somewhere, anywhere in the social universe, they ought not to blind us to the various non teleological ways in which social desires and social realities continue to work themselves out dialectically nor to our responsibility to do what we can to make those dialectics utopian again. It is in the service of precisely such insights and responsibilities that Aujhebung, that corny old concept of 'cancelled yet preserved in a higher synthesis', must itself be cancelled as a natural endowment of any group , or tendency of any social force - yet preserved, at least as the possibility that radical practice can connect with socially constructed desire in such a way as to make a difference. Otherwise, whatever the principal locus of its engagement may be, radical social and cultural theory is all too likely to be condemned to an interminable shuttling quite similar to that we have seen in our two films, between the thrilling sublime of one or another form of 'permanent revolution' and the desperate catch-up of attempting to restore and strengthen old identities and game rules feared lost.