ABSTRACT
One of the few common denominators among the detractors of postmodernism is the surprising, but general, agreement that the postmodern is ahistorical. It is a familiar line of attack, launched by Marxists and traditionalists alike, against not only contemporary fiction, but also today’s theory-from semiotics to deconstruction. What interests me here, however, is not the detail of the debate, but the very fact that history is now, once again, an issue-and a rather problematic one at that. It seems to be inevitably tied up with that set of challenged cultural and social assumptions that also condition our notions of both theory and art today: our beliefs in origins and ends, unity, and totalization, logic and reason, consciousness and human nature, progress and fate, representation and truth, not to mention the notions of causality and temporal homogeneity, linearity, and continuity (see J.H.Miller 1974, 460-1).
