ABSTRACT
In 1990, at the cusp of the last decade of the second millennium, the journal New Literary History put together a special issue on recent developments in theories of history. The emphasis in most of the ensuing essays typically fell on the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ that allied contemporary historiography with postmodern scepticism. The irrecoverability of the past and the lack of isomorphism between any possible accounts of it and the experience of the events themselves produced what Michael S. Roth described as the shared view ‘that History has been undone’ (Roth 1989/ 90: 242). This alleged ‘undoing’ had implications not simply for the discipline as a scholarly enterprise but for all teleological conceptions of process and development, as Roth’s use of the capital made clear. And while some worried that the briefly topical New Historicism (arguably a by-product of a new end-of-millennium Decadence) was complicit with a retrogressive formalism characterized by ‘subtle denials of history’ (Porter 1989/90: 253), others, most notably the neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama, made the preposterous post-Hegelian claim that history itself had effectively been completed and had now come to an end by way of the triumph of freemarket capitalism and Western liberal democracy.1 In his acute analysis of various related post-histoire theses, Lutz Niethammer considers post-history to be ‘a symptomatic sensibility’ rather than ‘a developed theory’ (Niethammer 1992: 138), and he rightly describes its shared features as cultural pessimism, loss of belief in the existence or viability of any collective subject as a possible motor of history, recognition of multiple forms of life (pluralism), and emphasis on the individual’s sense of powerlessness in the face of social institutions and processes (a prevalent theme in New Historicist writing). For Niethammer, the ‘postmodern modernity’ we inhabit is marked by a reflexivity that has nonetheless dispersed the various hopes previously associated with a nascent modernity, with the result that a temporal stasis is attributed to social existence, seen now as ‘a mortal life lived without any seriousness or struggle, in the regulated boredom of a
perpetual reproduction of modernity on a world scale. The problematic of posthistory is not the end of the world but the end of meaning’ (Niethammer 1992: 3).
