Lee Spinks

Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh
elilss@srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk

1. The Problem of “Genesis” and “Structure”

This paper began as an attempt to make sense of the enigma presented by two sentences in a postscript and a paragraph in an interview. In an addendum to his influential The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard answers the question “What is Postmodernism?” by declaring “a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (Postmodern Condition 79). Two pages later he expands on this statement in a passage which retains, in many quarters, a certain doxological authority:

 

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization… always begin too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future… anterior.

 

Several aspects of these statements are puzzling. Why, for example, does Lyotard insist, here as elsewhere, upon a distinction between “the postmodern” and postmodernism and what governs the relationship between these forces? How can the “nascent state” of postmodernism be “constant” rather than the consequence of a particular interplay of historical forces, and what transcendental or quasi-transcendental determination lies behind this claim? What, finally, does it mean to say that a work must be postmodern before and after it is modern, and what effect does this perception have upon our idea of the historical transition between the two? Lyotard’s insistence that the postmodern artist occupies the contradictory temporal and cognitive space of the “future anterior” is unexpected since it arrives at the conclusion of an analysis that begins from a specifically periodizing hypothesis.¹ For The Postmodern Condition describes the “postmodern age” as the historical effect of a shift in the status of knowledge, evident “since at least the end of the 1950s,” in which the “open system” of postmodern science has, “by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control… ‘fracta,’ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes,” redefined knowledge in terms of paralogy and the heterogeneity of language games (60). The radical character of these new postmodern scientific epistemologies lies in their rejection of a “general metalanguage in which all other languages can be translated and evaluated.” They therefore stand opposed to those philosophical meta-narratives such as the Hegelian “dialectic of Spirit” or the “hermeneutics of meaning” that Lyotard identifies with the effacement of difference within the logic of the same and, in political terms, with “terror” in general (xxiii).

 

What is clear, even at this early stage, is that “the postmodern” and “postmodernism” are problematic terms for Lyotard insofar as they are defined both in terms of a genetic movement (or process of historicity) and as the necessary structural inscription of postmodernity within modernity. Lyotard’s focus upon the complex relationship between genesis and structure as somehow constitutive of the “postmodern condition” immediately suggests that to understand his work we must forestall any simple identification of the “postmodern” with the “contemporary” and situate it instead within the epistemic shift inaugurated by Kant and brought to prominence by modern structuralist analysis. The importance of this movement of thought to Lyotard’s philosophy is that it raises the formal question of how a term within a totality could act as a representation of that totality. To think in historical and critical terms after Kant is inevitably to be confronted with the question: how can a concept aim to explore conceptuality in general? This question appears forcefully in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the point where he considers how concepts within time and space such as “freedom” enable us to think that which cannot be spatio-temporal in character. Kant argues that there are certain pure concepts that make experience possible and that we structure or synthesize our intuitions according to their causal order. When this synthesis is applied empirically to what we experience it is as a pure concept, rather than an empirical object, because it is not some thing that we experience but the form of experience itself. If we take this pure concept and think it independently of any object, then we get what Kant calls an “idea.” Experience, in the Kantian sense, is causal and we can never experience freedom within this causal order. But we can take the form or synthesis of this empirical order and think it as an idea. In this way we can extend the synthesis beyond experience to a first cause (freedom) or to a substance of infinite magnitude (God) or of eternal existence (immortality). Thus we begin from the order that we apply to the world, and then take this pure form to think (but not know) what cannot be given in the world:

 

We are dealing with something which does not allow of being confined within experience, since it concerns a knowledge of which any empirical knowledge (perhaps even the whole of possible experience or of its empirical synthesis) is only a part. No actual experience has ever been completely adequate to it, yet to it every actual experience belongs. Concepts of reason enable us to conceive, concepts of understanding to understand… perceptions. If the concepts of reason contain the unconditioned, they are concerned with something to which all experience is subordinate, but which is never itself an object of experience–something to which reason leads in its inferences from experience, and in accordance with which it estimates and gauges the degree of its empirical employment, but which is never itself a member of the empirical synthesis…. so we shall give a new name to the concepts of pure reason, calling them transcendental ideas. (Critique 308-309)

 

Kant’s creation of the category of “transcendental ideas” was his solution to the problem of how the thought of structure could conceive of the forces that brought structure into being. This “problem” of genesis and structure has haunted Western thought ever since. It resurfaces powerfully in two modern theories of meaning–structuralism and post-structuralism–that have exerted a profound influence on Lyotard’s account of the “postmodern.” According to structuralist analysis an individual speech (parole) can only exist within an already constituted system of signs (langue). A sign has no meaning in itself; it only becomes meaningful in its differential relation to the total signifying structure. But as Jacques Derrida noted in a series of works that marked a movement beyond or “post” structuralism, this thought of total structure exposes a crucial contradiction within structuralist axiomatics. For if the meaning of a sign is produced by the play of structural difference, then this differential play must also constitute the system or totality that seeks to explain it. Derrida’s critique proceeds from the insight that every signifying structure is produced by a play of differences that can never be accounted for or explained from within the system itself (“Structure” 292). Instead, the structure of meaning and conceptuality (such as law, culture, history, and representation) reproduces the logic of the future anterior because it will “always have to be based on a certain determination which, because it produces the text, cannot be exhaustively known by the text itself” (Colebrook 223).

 

The work of Kant and Derrida offers two important contexts for Lyotard’s work on genesis, structure, and postmodernity. His fascination with this subject, as well as his difficulty in thinking through the relationship between its constituent terms, becomes particularly evident in another of his works of the 1970s, Just Gaming (a collaboration with Jean-Loup Thébaud), in which he advances a theory of the modern as pagan (“I believe that modernity is pagan”) where paganism is defined as the “denomination of a situation in which one judges without criteria” (16). The description of “modernity” here, we should note, is identical to the description of postmodern artistic practice in The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard’s acute discomfort on this point is displayed in a remarkable retrospective footnote to a passage from Just Gaming, the principal function of which is to readdress the relation between genesis and structure:

 

[Jean-François Lyotard] believes that he can dissipate today some of the confusion that prevails in this conversation on modernity by introducing a distinction between the modern and the postmodern within that which is confused here under the first term. The modern addressee would be the “people,” an idea whose referent oscillates between the romantics’ Volk and the fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie. Romanticism would be modern as would the project, even if it turns out to be impossible, of elaborating a taste, even a “bad” one, that permits an evaluation of works. Postmodern (or pagan) would be the condition of the literatures and arts that have no assigned addressee and no regulating ideal, yet in which value is regularly measured on the stick of experimentation. Or, to put it dramatically, in which it is measured by the distortion that is inflicted upon the materials, the forms and the structures of sensibility and thought. Postmodern is not to be taken in a periodizing sense. (Gaming 16)

 

It is questionable how much confusion is dissipated by this statement. On the one hand we have The Postmodern Condition, published in French in 1979, which cheerfully accepts the designation “postmodern” to describe “the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts” (xxiii); on the other hand we have Just Gaming, published in French in 1979, in which this designation has no periodizing force. One solution to this dilemma would be to reject Lyotard’s account of postmodern epistemology as incoherent on its own grounds. Such a stance finds unexpected support from Lyotard himself, who spoke about The Postmodern Condition in an interview in the following terms:

 

I told stories in the book, I referred to a quantity of books I’d never read. Apparently it impressed people, it’s all a bit of a parody…. I remember an Italian architect who bawled me out because he said the whole thing could have been done much more simply…. I wanted to say first that it’s the worst of my books, they’re almost all bad, but that one’s the worst… really that book relates to a specific circumstance, it belongs to the satirical genre. (“On the Postmodern” 17)

 

A rather more complex response, however, would be to accept the hesitations and contradictions of Lyotard’s account as symptomatic of the difficulty of thinking through a set of concepts–the postmodern, modernity, and postmodernism–that are both produced and brought to crisis by their radicalization of the relationship between the historical “event” and the discursive structures within which “history” is represented to us as an object of knowledge. Indeed, Lyotard’s reworking of the relation between genesis and structure suggests that these contradictions are inevitable whenever we try to periodize the postmodern. For the concept of periodicity presupposes a continuous horizon and structure of historical discourse against which difference can be measured; but the postmodern, for Lyotard, denotes a historical event that breaks with this idea of continuous genesis and disperses “historical” time into a multiplicity of different discursive practices.

 

The difficulty of thinking “postmodernism” as a radicalized relationship between the event of historicity and the discursive structures of discrete historical formations is also apparent in the work of Fredric Jameson. In his influential response to postmodernism entitled Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson sets himself the complex dialectical labor of conceptualizing the historical ground of postmodernity, no small task given his conviction that the postmodern exhibits a “crisis of historicity” that disables the subject from locating herself within a normative set of spatio-temporal co-ordinates (22). Elsewhere, however, Jameson makes the surprising claim that the concept of the postmodern is “an attempt to think the present historically in age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place” which figures postmodernity as a form of critique that registers the historicity of historical formations (Postmodernism ix). The effect of this declaration is to resituate his own historicizing critique back within the productive schema of postmodern culture itself, thereby offering us a deliberately ironic illustration of his claim that the force of postmodernity derives from the ability of capital to penetrate through cultural forms into the locus of representation so that critique or dissent can be transcoded as “theory” or “lifestyle” options in an almost seamless circuit of commodities (ix). This displacement therefore underscores Jameson’s assertion that “the interrelationship of culture and the economic [within postmodernism] is not a one-way street but a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop,” or a model of cultural production no longer amenable to determination or critique in terms of the base/superstructure paradigm of traditional marxian dialectics (xiv-xv). But why should Jameson bemoan the difficulty of effecting resistance to the closed circuit of postmodern production in an introduction to a series of essays that have established precisely such a hermeneutics of resistance? He does so because the paradoxical movement of his own critique produces an ironic perspective both “inside” and “outside” postmodern practice. His analysis of postmodernism then takes advantage of this ironic and doubled perspective to undertake a form of immanent critique by inhabiting “postmodern consciousness” and decoding its attempts at “theorizing its own condition of possibility” while simultaneously projecting a utopian moment of totality from which the heterogeneous and interconnected discursive practices of postmodernity might be inscribed back within a more complex form of social relation (ix).

 

Jameson’s reading of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” presents postmodernism as a new mode of production that realigns the economic and cultural according to the internal principle of a recent stage in capitalist development in which the structures of commodification and representation have become indivisible. His analysis is predicated, as he readily admits, upon Ernest Mandel’s projection beyond traditional marxian theory of a “third stage” of “monopoly capitalism”; Jameson’s version of postmodernism is his “attempt to theorize the specific logic of the cultural production of that third stage” (Postmodernism 400). This approach leads him to postulate the postmodern as an “enlarged third stage of classical capitalism” which offers a “purer” and “more homogenous” expression of capitalist principles in which “many of the hitherto surviving enclaves of socio-economic difference have been effaced (by way of their colonization and absorption by the commodity form)” (405). The functional place of “culture” within this monopoly mode of production is crucial to Jameson because it describes a contradictory and overdetermined space that cannot be wholly assimilated by the self-enclosed circuits of commodity capitalism. Indeed, there is a certain deconstructive logic to his analysis of the ambivalent position of culture within postmodern systematics, which argues both that the locus of representation enforces conformity through the structural commodification of difference (or the conversion of difference into commodities) and that this ceaseless production of difference beyond any absolute limit or point of totalization discloses a possible site of resistance to the self-representations of late capitalism. In marked contrast to Baudrillard, upon whose insights Jameson often builds, he argues that a mode of production cannot be a “total system” since it “also produces differences or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic” (406).

 

The cultural logic of “postmodernism,” in the sense that Jameson intends, is then as much a conflictual and schismatic response to the global transmission of multinational capitalism as it is the superstructural expression of these new socioeconomic conditions. Such resistance to late capitalism as Jameson is presently able to envisage is dependent upon his notion of “cognitive mapping,” which explores ways of redefining our relation to the built space of our lived environment in response to the “penetration” of capital into “hitherto uncommodified areas” (Postmodernism 410). He describes the concept as a utopian solution to the subjective crisis enforced upon the modern city dweller unable to sustain a sense of place in a metropolis devoid of all the usual demarcations of urban space. Transposing this classical modernist dilemma into postmodern terms, Jameson seeks “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (51). Jameson is attracted to the motif of cognitive mapping because the spatial metaphor that it develops enables us to trace the effects of emerging modes of production as they play themselves out in a number of cultural fields. From this perspective we can understand how the “logic of the grid” commensurate with classical or market economics and its “reorganization of some older sacred and heterogeneous space into geometrical and Cartesian homogeneity” could present the background for both Bentham’s panopticon and the realist novel as well as the subjects that these structures helped to produce (410).

 

Yet the weakness of the concept as a diagnostic tool is that, beyond the vertiginous challenge of architecture, Jameson’s reading of postmodern space describes little that could not be discerned in the culture of modernity. Doubtless it is true that phenomena such as a “perceptual barrage of immediacy,” the “saturated spaces” of representation in commodity culture and “our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities” are constitutive of the postmodern vistas of monopoly capitalism, but they are also the revolutionary co-ordinates that map the fiction of John Dos Passos (Postmodernism 413). The feeling persists that these “spatial peculiarities” are “spatial” mainly insofar as they relate to visual phenomena, which may explain Jameson’s belief that postmodernism is “essentially a visual culture” (299). But the unresolved problem of defining the cultural turn of postmodernism in spatial terms when these terms enforce no clear distinction between modern and postmodern production robs Jameson’s argument of dialectical vigor. It may well be “crippling” for the contemporary citizen no longer to be able to supply representations that might bridge the gap between phenomenological perception and (post)modern reality, but Jameson’s attempt so to do by a process of cognitive mapping that might transform a spatial problematic into a question of social relations is checked by the recognition that this metonymic displacement between spatial and social figuration is continually reabsorbed by the spatial imaginary of the map itself, which, he ruefully concedes, is “one of the most powerful of all human conceptual instruments” (416). This insight severely reduces the dialectical or “oxymoronic value” of the play between spatial and social mapping which can only find expression as a series of contradictions in Jameson’s own analysis (416). Having acknowledged that the neutralization of the cognitive displacements of this new form of mapping “cancels out its own impossible originality,” Jameson insists with Beckettian stoicism that “a secondary premise must, however, also be argued–namely, that the incapacity to map spatially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience” (416). It is one measure of the incoherence of “cognitive mapping” as a form of imaginary resolution that Jameson’s conclusion to his collection of essays on postmodernism is suspended somewhere between resignation and wish-fulfilment. For it remains surprising to be informed, after more than 400 pages, that postmodernism may well be “little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism”; while “cognitive mapping” is itself reduced to a “‘code word’ for… class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind” (417-18).

 

One of the reasons for the disquieting loss of focus in Jameson’s analysis is that it is difficult to “outflank” postmodernism by arguing that it represents something “resolutely unsystematic” and “resolutely ahistorical” while using the term simultaneously to describe the volatilization of the relationship between the modern sense of historicity and the narrative structures within which it is inscribed (Postmodernism 418). This difficulty is particularly apparent at those points where Jameson’s argument is seen to depend upon a duplicitous use of the postmodern as both an expression of the spatial reconfiguration of our historical sense within monopoly capitalist culture and as a concept that allows us to envisage the historicity of historical transitions. It appears forcefully in a remarkable passage in which he momentarily proclaims the possibility of a new spatial history within postmodernism, based upon the potentially “dialectical interrelatedness” of discrete and perspectival forms of information which the individual has to reconstruct into a discursive totality outside the supervening framework of a political or cultural metanarrative (374). “What I want to argue,” Jameson informs us, “is that the tracing of such common ‘origins’–henceforth evidently indispensable for what we normally think of as concrete historical understanding–is no longer exactly a temporal or a genealogical operation in the sense of older logics of historicity or causality” (374). This may well be true, but the problem for Jameson, as we shall see, is that this dialectical insight merely repeats the postmodern challenge to the “older logics of historicity and causality” that organized philosophical and historiographical reflection in the late nineteenth-century. Jameson’s critique of contemporary cultural production therefore appears destined to become merely the latest effect of a system of conceptuality that he wants to outflank. The only way that he can reverse this process, and reconfigure a contemporary marxian practice around the critique of postmodern production, is to transform the crisis of historical morphology that postmodernism expresses into a loss of history itself. It is for this reason that an analysis that begins with the concept of the postmodern as a critique of historical process concludes with the declaration that we can only “force a historical way” of thinking about the present by historicizing a concept that has no connection with the historical life-world at all (418).²

 

How, then, are we to begin to understand the relationship between genesis and structure that provokes such disturbance within these accounts of the postmodern condition? Let me offer a provisional response by returning to Lyotard’s work long enough to advance three propositions. First, I want to argue that we should respect Lyotard’s equivocation between “the postmodern” and postmodernism because the “postmodern” designates that radical experience of historicity or difference that conditions and exceeds a certain structure of Enlightenment critique in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then reappears at the historical limit of modernity as the defining problem for nineteenth-century historicism. Next, I want to argue that the idea of postmodernism as a distinctive ground for historical and cultural production appears as a discursive effect of a revolution in late nineteenth-century constructions of lived historical experience, and it is this postmodernist reconfiguration of the relationship between historicity, subjectivity, and truth that provides a crucial interpretative context for the products of literary modernism. And, third, I want to claim that not just postmodernism, but also post-colonialism and post-structuralism, have their critical origins in what Derrida calls the “genesis-structure problem” that resurfaces so forcefully within nineteenth-century historiography (“Genesis” 156).

 

These are three large claims. The first involves a problem that is by now familiar: how can the postmodern be thought, according to the logic of the future anterior, as the condition and the effect of the modern? My thesis will be that postmodernism emerges in the nineteenth-century as a limit-attitude to the constitution of man’s historical mode of being within modern Enlightenment practices. This limit appears across a range of disciplines as a renewed attentiveness to the movement of difference and the singularity of the event within the determinate structure of historical contexts. It is marked most profoundly by the questions Dilthey and Nietzsche pose to historical studies: to what extent is it possible to historicize the emergence of historical consciousness? And how could “we” as historical individuals conceive of a pre-historical epoch? Yet it was precisely this postmodern volatilization of the relationship between a historical event and its explanatory context that produced the structures of Renaissance and Enlightenment historiography from the sixteenth-century onwards in the first place. The seventeenth-century, in particular, was notable both for its self-consciousness about the heterogeneous and deeply provisional origins of historical discourse and the functional complicity of this discourse in the furtherance of particular political interests and values. There is accordingly a continuity, rather than a point of contradiction, between Sir Walter Raleigh’s admission at the beginning of his History of the World (1614) that such histories are based on “informations [which] are often false, records not always true, and notorious actions commonly insufficient to discover the passions, which did set them first on foot” and Thomas Heywood’s declaration two years earlier in his An Apology for Actors that the “true use” of history is “to teach the subject’s obedience to their King, to shew the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, dehorting them from all trayterous and fellonious stratagems.” For what becomes clear from statements such as these is that the seventeenth-century bears witness to the effects of a strategic reinvention of the meaning of historical “truth” that replaces its dependence upon veridical and evidential criteria with a motivated emphasis upon its role in producing representations of civic authority and unitary state power.

 

2. Rethinking the Time of Modernity

 

The realignment of the epistemological function of historiography within the general legitimating practices of state power is both an example and an effect of the process of cultural modernity that found expression in the sixteenth-century and which has been analyzed with such revisionary brilliance in the work of Michel de Certeau. Since the sixteenth-century, de Certeau argues, “historiography… ceased to be the representation of a providential time” and assumed instead “the position of the subject of action” or “prince, whose objective is to make history” through a series of purposive gestures (Writing 7). Historiography now appeared explicitly “through a policy of the state” and found its rationale in the construction of “a coherent discourse that specifies the ‘shots’ that a power is capable of making in relation to given facts, by virtue of an art of dealing with the elements imposed by an environment” (7). What makes this historiographical manipulation of facts, practices and spaces “modern” in the first instance is that it was produced through a self-conscious and strategic differentiation between the mute density of a “past” that has no existence outside the labor of exegesis and a “present” that experienced itself as the discourse of intelligibility that brought event and context into disciplined coherence. But this new kind of historiographical analysis is “modern” also and to the extent that it is born at the moment of Western colonial expansion because its intelligibility was “established through a relation with the other” and “‘progresses’ by changing what it makes of its ‘other’–the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World” (3).

 

In fact, we could argue that the modern discourse of historiography had a triple genesis. It is predicated, first, upon the production of the past as a temporal “other” discontinuous with the present, one that exists to be reassimilated and mastered by contemporary techniques of power-knowledge. Next, it is indissociable from the appearance of the colonial body as an exterior and visible limit to Western self-identity whose “primitivism” reciprocally constitutes the “West” as a homogenous body of knowledge and the purposive agent of a rational and Enlightenment history. And, third, it is disseminated though the script of a new type of print text which permits the inauguration of a written archive, and therefore new and complex modes of knowledge, enforces divisions between different orders of cultural subject based on the semantic organization of a new form of literacy, and extends the possibility for the first time of a universal or global form of cultural capital that can be “spent” anywhere without diminishing the domestic reserve. Modern history therefore came into being by means of a rupture, a limit, and a general textual economy. It was at this point that the paradox that haunts Enlightenment historiography began to emerge. For this general textual economy was the precondition for the establishment of a “world history” or a “universal” concept of “reason” in the Enlightenment period, but this new universal historiography was itself produced in turn by the strategic division between Western historical culture and a primitive “other” that lay beyond the borders of the West’s own historical consciousness.

 

de Certeau’s analysis suggests that a major and constitutive paradox of Enlightenment historiography was that its quest for the universal and transcendental structures of historical knowledge emerged as an effect of the always unstable relation between the “West” and a colonial “other” heterogeneous to the emerging forms of Western social and cultural praxis. We should be careful, however, not to take too quickly for granted the relationship between “modern” and non-Western culture as if the idea of the “modern” were able to denote a prior and determining ground of cultural exchange. The concept of Western cultural modernity was in fact produced through that reciprocal relation with an “other” that enabled the West to present itself as the condition for the possibility of modern historical production in general.

 

3. Kant and the Structure of “Universal History”

 

The fraught relationship between the general text of modern history and the particular historical forms from which such a transcendental structure might be composed is a guiding theme of Immanuel Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (1784), one of the principal documents of Enlightenment historiography. Written at a time when the West was threatened with the dispersal of its sense of providential time into the locally determined historicity of different forms of cultural life, Kant’s “Idea” sought a universal standard for historical action in what he called a “teleological theory of nature” (“Idea” 42). The difficulty presented to Kant by modern history is that it has no coherent plan or shape; and history, without proper form or structure, is merely an “aimless, random process” of violence, expropriation, and exchange (42). In response to this abyssal dilemma Kant argued that the transcendental structure of historical knowledge was to be discovered in the “rational… purpose in nature” which ordains that the “natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end” (42). Nature, reconfigured in Kantian theory as universal human nature, operates in his “universal history” as a philosophical fiction designed to supply precisely the narrative of continuity between cultures that the experience of modern history so systematically destroyed. As Kant declared in his Second Critique, it is because of the absence of any universal law that one should act as if one’s decisions could be universalized. His Third Critique extends this argument by claiming that we should act as if nature were progressing towards the good. The “as if” is a consequence of realizing that we don’t have a universal law, but we are capable of thinking the idea of it. From the given (or seemingly given) law of nature we are capable of thinking the idea or genesis of law. Since every man has the ability to conform to the supposed “will” of nature, which is to lead him towards the fulfilment of his rational capacities by “seeing that he should work his way onwards to make himself by his own conduct worthy of life and well-being,” the practices of each individual or species could be regulated by the same cultural and historical values (44). To this end, “nature” always and everywhere exploits the struggle in man between his social instincts and his individual aspirations. Against this background of struggle Kant constructed a dialectical history of individualism, social resistance, and self-transformation that leads men from torpor and self-absorption towards those general structures of ethics and universal justice upon which an enlightenment version of history depends (44-46).

 

The problem for Kant is that the dialectical relationship between the particular movement of force or historicity and the general text of an Enlightenment history constitutes simultaneously the condition for the possibility and the impossibility of any universal structure of historical reason. This aporia emerges forcefully as the question of the infinite regress and the economy of cultural exchange. Thus Nature directs man along the path towards reason and ethical self-consciousness by confronting him with a master who breaks his will and forces him to obey a “universally valid will” instead of his own selfish interests. Yet this master is also a man who needs a master to condition his own acceptance of law and society (“Idea” 46). A man will always need a master or law above him; but this highest authority “has to be just in itself and yet also a man” (46). No perfect solution can resolve this dialectic between individual force and general authority; all that Nature requires of us is that we “approximate” our conduct to the radical fiction of a universal and ethical reason (47).

 

The paradox at the heart of Kant’s reflection upon natural law appears in his argument that a worldly or human master is a representation of the law, but this historical individual must, if he is to be legitimate, also represent what lies above and beyond any particular historical epoch, otherwise what he represents would not be law but a series of relative and historically conditioned judgments. An identical aporia between genesis or historicity and structure is evident in Kant’s theory of the natural historical ground for cultural exchange. Indeed, exactly the same antagonisms that compel our unsociable natures into a dialectic of conflict and resolution recur at the cultural level in the relationships between states, which progress through the expansion of national borders, war, the resolution of conflict, and the ultimate establishment of an enlightened federation that consolidates itself “from a united power and the law-governed decisions of a united will” (“Idea” 47). Kant envisaged a dialectical progression towards a state of universal civic peace in which freedom can maintain itself naturally and automatically because the need to manage the inevitable violence of cultural exchange forces men to discover a “law of equilibrium” that could offer the basis for a “cosmopolitan system of general political security” (49). He explicitly connected the structures of Enlightenment historical reason with material prosperity: a gradual and global enlightenment is the philosophical consequence of our rulers “self-seeking schemes of expansion” which in turn provide the conditions for a “universal history of the world” (51).

 

Once again, however, the historical tensions that create the need for this general structure of historical reason bring its internal coherence into disrepute. For the movement of economic and cultural expansion that forms the precondition for Kant’s universal history can only be distinguished from “vain and violent schemes of expansion” insofar as they are accompanied by an inward process of self-cultivation that creates a “morally good attitude of mind” in each citizen of the modern state (“Idea” 49). But as we have already seen, violence in the form of a master/slave dialectic is fundamental to the constitution of the enlightened modern citizen, who cannot therefore be appealed to as a neutral ground for the establishment of natural and rational relations between cultures. Violence, war and antagonism should rather be seen in Kant’s work as metaphors for that force or radical difference that both constitutes and exceeds determinate structure, and brings the possibility of a transcendental logic into play.³ Force and structuration operate simultaneously as the ground of a universal history and human nature and as a limit and point of division between and within cultures. We do well to remember this second point when considering Enlightenment historiography, which inaugurated the project of a “universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind.” In the same historical period there was concomitantly a division between historical and technological culture on the one hand, and natural and “primitive” culture on the other, which performed a crucial function in justifying the “civilising mission” of European colonialism (51).

 

Modern historiography is, in this sense, an ex post facto rationalization of a complex cultural exchange between a series of discrete cultures. From the play of forces that governs this exchange certain terms such as “reason” and “enlightenment” emerge as dominant within the historical discourse of the time. It is the task of historiography to render these effected terms as the very agents of historical change: modernity is, in this sense, the form of historical self-realization that recuperates its own becoming. But it is here that we experience our principal difficulty in marking the limits between historical formations. For this tension between the general text of modern Western history and the particular and internal histories of specific cultural totalities which forms the discursive precondition for our Western experience of historical and philosophical modernism also reappears as the historical limit of these discourses within the structures of nineteenth-century historiography and philosophy. Indeed, the “genesis-structure” problem is postmodern in the Lyotardian sense since it precedes modernity and brings it into being and also exceeds modernity when it comes to form the crucial problem for nineteenth-century historicism and the speculative ground of the postmodernist economies of Dilthey and Nietzsche.

 

4. Dilthey, Nietzsche, and the Construction of “Postmodern” History

 

Dilthey and Nietzsche are crucial to this discussion because both these writers presented themselves as occupying a historical position beyond the limits of modernity which could not be accommodated within the totalizing narratives of Enlightenment historiography. For Dilthey, writing at the turn of our own century, the nineteenth-century constituted a crisis of historical interpretation since it was here that the “genesis-structure” question reappeared with enigmatic force. The meaning of contemporary history, he argued, now lay in the inadequation between the historical event and any transcendental ground of interpretation. This was because the nineteenth-century witnessed the emergence of a contradiction between “the increasing, historical consciousness and philosophy’s claim to universal validity” (Dilthey 134). To be “historical,” in Dilthey’s terms, was to inhabit a radical and supplementary space beyond the determinate horizon of historical understanding that he identified, in a sweeping gesture, with historiography from antiquity to the dialectics of Hegel (188).

 

It is here, with Dilthey, that the thought of postmodernity appears as the event or movement of historicity that exceeds any universal or transcendental ground. He is explicit on this point: nineteenth-century consciousness is properly historical to the extent that it moves beyond the world-view of the Enlightenment and “destroys [any residual] faith in the universal validity of any philosophy which attempts to express world order cogently through a system of concepts” (135). In an analysis that resembles an ironic commentary on Kant’s “Universal History” (which sought to unify the various historical world-views of different cultures within a teleological theory of nature underlying all historical process), Dilthey argued that the structure of Enlightenment historiography is simultaneously produced and abrogated by the process of cultural exchange. Thus the “analytical spirit” of eighteenth-century Enlightenment historiography emerged from the application of empiricist theory and methodology to what Dilthey somewhat naively termed “the most unbiased survey of primitive and foreign peoples.” However, the consequence of this empiricist “anthropology” was not a “universal history” but a new “evolutionary theory” which claimed that the meaning of cultural production was determined in its specificity by its local and particular context and “necessarily linked to the knowledge of the relativity of every historical form of life” (135).

 

Dilthey’s version of historicism therefore presents a post-Enlightenment (and anti-Hegelian) philosophy of history that understands its own time as a passage beyond modernity towards a completely new form of lived historical experience. For now, with Dilthey, the reciprocal play between genesis and structure that formed the basis for both transcendental and immanent critique within modern critical philosophy is theorized as a movement beyond the formal unity of a universal history. Western culture makes the transition from historical modernism to postmodernism at the point when the postmodern “genesis-structure” relation is relocated outside a transcendental and teleological horizon. Hegel, according to Dilthey, understood history “metaphysically” and saw different communities and cultural systems as manifestations of a “universal rational will” (Dilthey 194). Dilthey, in contrast, begins from the premise that the meaning of a historical or cultural event can only be determined by analyzing the distribution of forces within a particular cultural system. We cannot deduce a trans-historical or universal law from the endless variety of cultural phenomena to hand; all the historian can do is “analyze the given” within the determinate contexts that give it meaning and value. The shift from modern history to historical postmodernism is therefore expressed, in Diltheyan terms, by an extreme cultural relativism in which truth is produced as an effect of a particular “world view” rather than being interior to a “single, universally valid system of metaphysics” (Dilthey 143).

 

The significance of Dilthey’s Weltanschauung or world-view philosophy is that it presents the postmodern force relation (or the non-dialectical relationship between genesis and structure) as the new discursive matrix in which the meaning of historical and cultural production will be determined. The transition from the postmodern to postmodernism occurs when the absence of a “world-ground” that could provide a point of order for the relative historical time of particular cultures becomes the positive principle that will organize Western reflection upon historical change and cultural value (Dilthey 154). If we accept that there is no universal history within which epochs might be located, Dilthey argued, then we also have to abandon the terms “history” or “historicism” as ways of describing difference. Instead, “history” would merely denote a particular epoch’s way of understanding its own specificity. To embrace this positive principle is to move beyond the paralysis of modern historical consciousness which attempts to explain cultural difference in terms of the general structure of a world history:

 

We cannot think how world unity can give rise to multiplicity, the eternal to change; logically this is incomprehensible. The relationship of being and thought, of extension and thinking, does not become more comprehensible through the magic word identity. So these metaphysical systems, too, leave only a frame of mind and a world-view behind them. (154)

 

Dilthey writes in the wake of the collapse of the “world-view” of modernity where there is no longer any general ground of interpretation that could understand “multiplicity” or difference in terms of a Universal History or system of cultural practices. Nor is it possible to see expressive structures like “culture” and “history” as reflections of a universal concept of Mind since man is himself a historical being. “Man” cannot be used as a ground to explain historical process because our understanding of ourselves and others is itself an effect of the historical context in which we live: “The individual person in this independent existence is a historical being,” Dilthey reminds us, “he is determined in his position in time and space and in the interaction of cultural systems and communities” (181). Human beings can relate to each other, at a certain level, because they are all historical beings. But because the character of these beliefs and practices is “determined by their horizon” we cannot use one particular cultural form or set of values to explain other types of cultural production (183). The meaning of a cultural practice or historical formation is produced by its own internal rules, norms and values.

 

The function of historiography, in this situation, is not to promulgate universal laws or rules of progression but to develop “empathy” in order to reconstruct the particular historical context in which a culture or a “mental state” developed (Dilthey 181). The primary virtue of empathy as a diagnostic tool is that it enabled Dilthey to express the reciprocal play between identity and difference that he detected at the basis of every cultural form and historical period. For the meaning of a cultural practice is determined by its own local horizon; and yet it is also determined by the differential play between different cultural horizons. History has no object or goal; and historiography is not an Enlightenment narrative. The meaning of historiography and what Dilthey called “human studies” is to be discovered, instead, in the movement of historicity between and beyond cultural structures:

 

I find the principle for the settlement of the conflict within these studies in the understanding of the historical world as a system of interactions centred on itself; each individual system of interactions contained in it has, through the positing of values and their realization, its centre within itself, but all are structurally linked into a whole in which the meaning of the whole web of the social-historical world arises from the significance of the individual parts; thus every value-judgement and every purpose projected into the future must be based exclusively on these structural relationships. (183-84)

 

It is curious that Dilthey’s name is rarely invoked in discussions of the theory and practice of postmodernism because his work marks a crucial phase in the construction of postmodernism as a discursive category and a way of interpreting the meaning of historical experience. The meaning and status of “history” is now no longer to be discovered within a general discursive structure or a universal world-view. “History” now means a form of historical difference, and the task of the historian is to distinguish between the types of world-view produced by the internal structures of each discrete cultural totality. If the postmodern recurred as a tension between genesis and structure in Enlightenment historiography, postmodernism transforms this type of historical relation into a form of historical practice. Dilthey’s historicism moves beyond modern Enlightenment discourse through its hypersensitivity to the way different forms of historicity create different cultural structures. Historicity and difference are now firmly inscribed at the heart of cultural production, while postmodernism begins to acquire its contemporary resonance as the thought of difference-within-identity or the “groundless ground” of historical self-reflection.

 

This revaluation of the relation between event and context was also the basis upon which Nietzsche challenged the Enlightenment presuppositions of “modern” philosophy and defined the terms that brought philosophical postmodernism into being during the same period in which Dilthey was conducting his own critique. Nietzsche effected this transition by posing a new set of philosophical questions. He identified a form of Enlightenment philosophical interrogation which we might describe, following Foucault, as “one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject,” and made it the matrix for a new type of relation between subjectivity, history and truth (Foucault 312). Philosophical postmodernism, in the Nietzschean sense, undertakes a positive critique of modern thought by insisting upon the historically conditioned character of all our values. The meaning of experience is not to be found in an “origin” of value that stands before and behind the mutable forms of our beliefs and cultural practices; nor can we discover it in an essential and mute complicity between a “fact” and the “truth” that it embodies. Nietzsche challenged the claim that the interior structure of knowledge could be determined by the formal structures of transcendental critique or a “universal history,” and he scorned belief in a teleological movement of history towards a moment of revelation beyond time and contingency. On the contrary, meaning and value are produced, rather than discovered, by violence, conflict, chance, and the constant desire to enforce a world-view and a set of normative practices that enables certain individuals to develop their capacities with the utmost vigor. The role of the historian, or the “genealogist,” as Nietzsche styled himself, is to attend to the discontinuities and contradictions in the self-representation of every culture and to show how the meaning of an event is continually transformed by the historical context through which it moves. The history of reason is produced and menaced by the movement of historicity “inside” and “outside” epistemological structures. Postmodernism arrives, for Nietzsche, with the inscription of the postmodern force relation within the form of Enlightenment critique.

 

5. Rethinking the Object of Postmodernism

 

To understand the postmodern as the future anterior of the modern is to gain some insight into the reasons why so many critics experience difficulty in defining the point of transition between modernism and postmodernism. These difficulties arise because the postmodern signifies both the non-dialectical play between structure and genesis that brings modernity into being as a mode of historical self-recognition and those cultural texts produced at the historical limit of modernity from the nineteenth-century onwards and which reflect upon the incapacity of the modern to constitute itself as a universal field of knowledge. But if we understand the postmodern as both the structural precondition of modernity and as a set of imaginative and speculative responses to modernity’s failed dream of historical and conceptual totality, several new observations can be made.

 

The first concerns those nineteenth-century literary texts, such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Fyodor Dostoevesky’s Notes From Underground, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary which anticipate the style and content of literary postmodernism while occupying a historical position prior to or within literary modernism. It has proved difficult to characterize literary postmodernism as an exclusively twentieth-century phenomenon when writers like Hogg and Dostoevsky devised metafictive texts that dwelt self-consciously on the history of their own narration or which, like Flaubert, made radical use of free indirect style to destabilize the diegetic organization of realist fiction and show how the speaking self is produced through narration rather then existing as a subjectivity before and beyond the event of textuality. However, the solution to the historical enigma posed by these “rogue texts” is to see that they are always already postmodern to the extent that they take as their subject the relationship between the discourse of history and the “event” of thought, writing, and subjectivity. The structures of these works constantly gesture to their own genesis; but this genesis can only be discerned after the event of writing. They occupy, in other words, the position of the future anterior as Lyotard defines it insofar as they work without established rules to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Now, if we accept this view of the postmodern as an intensification of a type of relation between genesis and structure, then it follows that it might appear in any period when the relationship between event and context became a problem within the historical consciousness that a culture has of itself. This observation leads me to suggest, in turn, that our difficulties in thinking through the relationship between history, text, and culture are not constituted by an opacity like the “postmodern.” They are produced, instead, by our critical habit of transforming questions about structure into new structures of cultural production like “romanticism,” “modernism,” and “postmodernism” itself. Rather than disputing the borders between the modern and postmodern, then, we need to attend to the periodizing force that makes such borders meaningful.

 

One of the most baleful developments in the last thirty years, certainly within literary and cultural studies, has been the conflation of the postmodern as a critique of the structure of historical discourse with a “postmodernism” conceived as a new epoch or era of human experience. The principal problem with recent attempts to describe the culture of postmodernity is that they take the constitutive postmodern play between structure and genesis and transform it into a problem of structure or genesis within “postmodernist” representation. At its most basic level, the postmodern is even described as a pure play of differences (genesis) or the overarching dominance of a single system (structure). Consequently the so-called “postmodernism debate” has rigidified into an obsession with periodicity or the point of transition between modernism and postmodernism on the one hand and, on the other, a reading of postmodernism which identifies it as a form of structural critique whose ironic and self-reflexive style expresses its ambivalent position both “inside” and “outside” the discourse of modernism. This division licenses, in turn, a politics of postmodernism organized around a series of distinctive and regularly repeated arguments. Thus the idea of a postmodernist rupture with the Enlightenment inheritance of modernity is cited as cause for celebration or despair according to the position each critic adopts on the relationship between modern historical consciousness, the Age of Reason, and the types of social and cultural practice it legitimated. Elsewhere the hypostatization of postmodernism as an ironic mode of critique has been embraced by those who see this formal self-consciousness as a critical means to expose the construction of discourses of history and instrumental rationality by sites and systems of power. Meanwhile, the same practice has been condemned by others who view such reflexivity as a hopeless and post-historical gesture that implicates postmodernism within the modern practices it seeks to explain. Despite appearances to the contrary, however, this schismatic postmodernist politics has a profound underlying unity: the transformation of the force of the postmodern into an object, produced variously as a “culture,” a “system,” or a “historical period,” which one can be either “for” or “against” within a more general discourse of social and civic obligation.

 

From our perspective, however, we can see that any attempt to determine the postmodern as a question either of genesis or structure will miss the meaning of its object in the act of producing it. The postmodern exceeds the singular horizon of every origin because it is constituted as both the ground and the effect of the modern and emerges as what Jacques Derrida calls a “structure-genesis problem” whenever we trace the movement of historicity or the “event” of history within a determinate historical totality. For this reason we cannot answer the transcendental question of the origin, form, or meaning of the postmodern from within a discourse of “postmodernism” because this question recurs as a semantic problem that menaces the internal coherence of every discursive structure. The contemporary confusion about the “meaning” of postmodernism arises in fact because we are asking the hermeneutic question (the question of meaning) about a problematic that produces the transcendental structure of historical meaning as a question. The solution to this dilemma is to start to ask different questions. Instead of asking what the “concept” of the postmodern means we should ask how it works, consider the contexts for the relation between historicity and the structures of historical discourse it establishes, and examine the effects these contexts have upon our understanding of truth, subjectivity, meaning, and the production of a historical “real.”

 

Let me conclude by noting two ways in which the “genesis-structure problem” has been retrospectively reconfigured in our own time in order to produce a certain world-view, a form of politics, and a version of disciplinary practice. It is a commonplace that many people have difficulty distinguishing between those three troublesome categories “postmodernism,” “post-colonialism,” and “post-structuralism.” What is left unremarked is that this difficulty arises, in part, because these three forms of critique have a common origin in the movement of delegitimation of those universal structures of reason that Dilthey and Nietzsche detected in the 1860s and 1870s. One of the earliest uses of the term “postmodern” came in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, where it was employed to describe the paradoxical status of late nineteenth-century Western historical self-consciousness, which was both global in reach and unsettled by a nagging sense of its own relative status as it witnessed what Robert Young later called “the re-empowerment of non-Western states” (Young 19). History becomes postmodern at the point when the force of historicity both constitutes and exceeds the determinate structure of a specifically “Western” history. This tension is evident in Toynbee’s waspish description of the world-view of mid-Victorian culture. His history was written

 

against a current Late Modern Western convention of identifying a parvenue and provincial Western Society’s history with “History,” writ large, sans phrase. In the writer’s view this convention was the preposterous off-spring of a distorting egocentric illusion to which the children of a Western Civilisation had succumbed like the children of all other known civilisations and known primitive societies. (Toynbee 410)

 

The negotiation between post-colonialism as an institutional practice and the “postmodern” as a force of historical difference continues to this day, although it is worth noting that in Toynbee’s terms the two are inseparable. Robert Young’s response, we might note, is to make the post-colonial the discursive ground of postmodernism, although this tactic can only succeed if postmodernism is rigorously distinguished from the postmodern in its quasi-transcendental sense; that is, as a force that disrupts paradigmatic borders. The politics of the separation of postmodernism from the postmodern nowadays organizes much intellectual debate and deserves a study of its own.

 

But the picture becomes even more complicated when we realize that the inaugural gestures of that mode of critique that has come to be known as “post-structuralism” are also to be discovered in an attentiveness to the movement of a radical historicity within late nineteenth-century historicism that both constituted and exceeded historical structures and representations. Indeed post-structuralism, particularly that phase of its emergence consonant with Derridean “deconstruction,” properly begins in a lecture delivered by Derrida in 1959 on the problematic relation between structure and genesis in Diltheyan historicism and Husserlian phenomenology entitled “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” The undisclosed origins of post-structuralism are thus to be found in Derrida’s meditation upon a crucial problem of nineteenth-century thought that has subsequently provided a context for so much of modern hermeneutics: the question of the proper form or morphology of historical knowledge. Derrida approaches this problem by means of a critique of Husserlian phenomenology because it is that mode of thought that is attuned to both the historicity of meaning and the conditions of its emergence, and also to that which remains open within a structure in any historical or philosophical problematic. The conceptual coincidence of history and philosophy is significant because Derrida means to show that the necessarily exorbitant relation of genesis to the “speculative closure” of any determined totality produces a “difference between the (necessarily closed) minor structure and the structurality of an opening” and that this unassimilable “difference” identifies the “unlocatable site in which philosophy takes root” (“Genesis and Structure” 155). In a handful of pages Derrida’s lecture on Husserl sketches the outline of a conflict between genesis and structure that is inseparable from the internal legality of post-colonial critique and which is formed against the background of the “postmodern” critique of nineteenth-century historiography. To see what form this conflict assumes in Derrida’s hands we must attend to two different lines of argument in “Genesis and Structure”: Husserl’s reading of Dilthey, and Derrida’s critique of Husserl.

 

The first phase of phenomenological critique, Derrida notes, is structuralist in its emphasis because Husserl’s account of meaning and intentionality depends for its integrity upon avoiding a historicism (and a psychologism) based on a relativism like Dilthey’s that is incapable of insuring its own truth. The historicism of Dilthey is therefore the “other” of phenomenological critique. Husserl argues that Dilthey’s world-view philosophy, despite its pretensions to structuralist rigor, always remains a historicism (and therefore a relativism and a scepticism) because in Derrida’s words it “reduces the norm to a historical factuality and… confus[es] the truths of fact and the truths of reason” (“Genesis” 160). Husserl does not argue that Dilthey is completely mistaken: he’s right to protest against the naive naturalization of knowledge within some forms of historiography and to insist that knowledge is both culturally and structurally determined. But Dilthey’s world-view philosophy not only confuses “value and existence” and “all types of realities and all types of idealities”; it betrays its own insights into the radical historicity that constitutes the historical sense by continually providing provisional frameworks like “culture” or “structure” within which the movement of historical genesis may be arrested and named. The system of this foreclosure has momentous consequences for Husserl, and for Derrida, who argues, contra Dilthey, that “pure truth or the pretension to pure truth is missed in its meaning as soon as one attempts, as Dilthey does, to account for it from within a determined historical totality” (“Genesis” 160). Instead the “meaning of truth” and the “infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy” is produced by the inadequation of the Kantian or transcendental idea of “truth” to “every finite structure” that might accommodate it. It is at this point, where we encounter the limit of modern historicism in its attempt to account for truth from within “every determined structure,” that both post-structuralism and the postmodern Nietzschean radicalization of historical forms announce themselves; and it is here that Derrida writes the sentences which outline the genesis of post-structuralist thought: “Moreover, it is always something like an opening which will frustrate the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is that by means of which it is not closed” (“Genesis” 160).

 

If I conclude with the curious claim that what links post-colonialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism is that they are all postmodern it is because each of these discourses takes it as axiomatic that criticism is no longer going to be practiced as the search for universal value but, rather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subjects of specific determinations of truth and responsibility. What is in question is no longer the universal structure of all knowledge but a recontextualization of those instances of discourse that articulate what we can think, say, and do as so many historical events. The value of the postmodern, in my reading, is that it is a force that both constitutes and exceeds determinate historical structures and therefore enables us to mark the limits of those forms of discourse that produce us as subjects of particular kinds of knowledge. But if the postmodern is to yield us both “the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of moving beyond them”–if, that is, it is to retain an ethical opening to the future–it must be rigorously distinguished from a postmodernism that has too frequently been constituted as merely a type of cultural structure or mode of historical knowledge (Foucault 319). To think the postmodern, in this radical sense, is to preserve and endlessly reconfigure the idea of the historical limit or the relation between thought and thought’s exterior condition of possibility. This is a difficult inheritance, to be sure. But then, as Derrida reminds us, “if the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it” (Specters 16). This thought, and the unforeseeable dislocation it guarantees in our relation to our own modes of knowledge, is one of the many things at stake, for us, in literary and cultural studies today.

 

Notes

 

1. It is interesting to note that Lyotard’s remarks on the future anterior find an echo in another body of work which, although not specifically concerned with an analysis of postmodernity, attempts to radicalize the relationship between historicity, ethics, and writing: Jacques Derrida’s reading of the “hauntology” and “spectropoetics” of conceptual formations. In the “exordium” to Specters of Marx Derrida writes:

 

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice–let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws–seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” (xix)

 

Historicity, Derrida argues here, is constituted by a dialectical play between the texts of the past and the movement of the future-to-come. It is constituted, in fact, by what Derrida calls elsewhere the logic of iterability

 

in which a sign becomes meaningful only so far as it can be repeated in a series of supplementary contexts. The claim that the meaning of a historical event is not self-identical or immediately present is underscored by the phrase “this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present,” which insists that every event becomes meaningful only as an effect of its futural movement towards its context of reception. We might say, in keeping with the paradoxical logic of Derrida’s argument, that the meaning of an event comes from the future.

 

“The future is its memory,” Derrida remarks in response to Marx’s preoccupation with spectres and revenants, and this phrase inscribes the logic of the future anterior within the structure of every historical formation (37).

 

2. The difficulty that Jameson’s re-negotitation of the postmodern bequeaths him, of course, is to identify the point at which “history” was evacuated from the timeless system of postmodern commodity culture. As we might expect with an assertion that was pragmatic rather than analytic in origin, this clarification has proved difficult to establish. He begins with the confident assertion that the “strange new landscape” of postmodernity emerged in concert with “the great shock of the crisis of 1973” which brought “the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of ‘wars of national liberation’ and the beginning of the end of traditional communism” (Postmodernism xx-xxi). The choice of date is not arbitrary: both Mandel and David Harvey point to the period between 1973-5 as inaugurating a revolutionary new phase in global economic production. This periodization is not unproblematic for Jameson since, as we have seen, Mandel’s Late Capitalism makes a distinction between late capitalism (a mode of production which commences in about 1945) and socio-economic postmodernism (which is born from the slump of 1974-5) which Jameson’s argument frequently occludes. Leaving this problem to one side, it is notable that the epochal rupture with our traditional conception of historical time apparently designated by postmodernism is continually relocated according to the tactical needs of Jameson’s argument. It is first to be found in the cultural torpor engendered by the “canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s” (Postmodernism 4); it next resurfaces as an effect of the perception of an “end of ideology” produced by the discursive hegemony of American capitalism throughout the 1950s more generally (398); and it reappears to be named as the loss of critical distance between appearance and reality accompanying the “gradual and seemingly natural mediatization of North American society in the 1960s” (399-400). The crisis of historicity that Jameson claims to be a structural feature of postmodernism is evident within the logic of his own argument which eventually conflates historicity and structure in order to situate the postmodern as a general disturbance “in the area of the media.”

 

3. It is only from the conflict within life, that is, that one is led to think of a concept higher than life and not reducible to life. Such an “end” can be thought but never known or located within this world.

Works Cited

 

• de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
• Colebrook, Claire. New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.
• Derrida, Jacques. “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 154-168.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994.
• —. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
• Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Writings. Trans. H. P. Rickman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.
• Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Trans. Robert Hurley. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997.
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