Spinks, Genesis and Structure and the Object of Postmodernism

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Genesis and Structure and the Object of Postmodernism

Lee Spinks

©

2001

PMC 11.3

1. The Problem of "Genesis" and "Structure"

1.

     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.

2.

     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

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(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).

3.

     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)

4.

     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

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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).

5.

     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)

6.

     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

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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.

7.

     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).

8.

     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

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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).

9.

     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).

10.

     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

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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).

11.

     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

12.

     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"

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156).

13.

     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

14.

     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).

15.

     In fact, we could argue that the modern discourse of historiography had a

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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.

16.

     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"

17.

     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

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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).

18.

     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).

19.

     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).

20.

     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

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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).

21.

     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

22.

     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).

23.

     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

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relativity of every historical form of life" (135).

24.

     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).

25.

     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)

26.

     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.

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     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.

28.

     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

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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

29.

     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.

30.

     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.

31.

     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

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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.

32.

     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."

33.

     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

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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.

34.

     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.

35.

     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

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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).

36.

     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.

Department of English Literature

University of Edinburgh

[e-mail]

Copyright © 2001 Lee Spinks

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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

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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,

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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

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Derrida, Jacques. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology."

Writing

and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
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---.

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---. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."
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