Back to the Future: Kojin Karatani'S Conjectural World History of the Twenty-First Century

In a blurb on the back of Kojin Karatani's insightfully original The Structure of World History, Frederic Jameson describes the book as a "monumental and provocative synthesis" that "testifies to a dramatic rebirth of universal history in recent times." Karatani's work is certainly monumental and provocative, but to call it a synthesis of any extant literature is to completely misrepresent the distinctive originality of Karatani's achievement. Jameson may also have a different corpus of universal history in mind, but from my perspective within but also inescapably in between the professional academic historical disciplines, Karatani's work is less a condensation of current trends than a novel departure from them. Overall, The Structure of World History deserves to be read not because it synthesizes current thinking about universal history but because of its refreshing break from the status quo. It is also compelling because of Karatani's radical reconceptualization of the very foundations of universal history in light of twenty-first-century concerns.

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The Structure of World History is not really a universal history in the traditional sense, and it is out of step with recent writing in this genre, which has indeed experienced a resurgence in recent decades. One key difference is that by and large the new universal history published over the past two decades is reactionary in nature and in a double sense. It is first reactionary in the literal, etymological sense of being a springlike recoil against a set of recent intellectual trends, but it is also reactionary in the more familiar political sense of being opposed to progressive political agendas. Regarding the first, much recent universal history is motivated by a frustration with and at times an outright hostility toward the intellectual movements of the final decades of the twentieth century, that loose assemblage of authors, artists, and ideas that usually circulates under the epithet "postmodernism." Lyotard's famous definition of the postmodern condition as "incredulity in the face of all metanarratives" could stand, in fact, as the general provocation for much of the new work. For the recent universal history is nothing if not an enthusiastic assertion of the historian as grand narrator and comprehensive explainer.¹

Hayden White, however, is also an enemy of the new universal historians, for while it is true that history as comprehensive storytelling is emblematic of the most recent trends, the new universal history is not grounded in tropological understandings of history as text and narrative. Quite the contrary, most of the new work springs from a desire to roll back the late twentieth-century preoccupations with textuality, language, contingency, and the instability of historical knowledge, themes that White did so much to expose. Foucault's Nietzschean genealogies of power-knowledge; Derrida's grammatology and diagnoses of archive fever; Carlo Ginzburg's perspectival microhistory; the critical reflexive ethnography of Geertzian thick description; the feminist and queer destabilization of the human subject and its coherencies of mind-body and sex; and the meta-historical peregrinations of Michel de Certeau—these are the noteworthy projects that the new universal historians seek to bury. Also in their crosshairs are the various millennial turns—linguistic, cultural, anthropological, affective—associated with the work of these and other "postmodern" thinkers. In their place, the new universal historians seek to affirm (they would say reestablish) a notion of history as science that induces real representations of the past through positivistic empirical analysis of the grand causal forces underlying world historical change.

Professional historians as a whole seem to be clambering to don white lab coats,² and one of the features of the new universal history is its vigorous participation in the broader project to ground (its advocates would say reground) history upon clear natural scientific footings. One cluster of writing takes its cue directly from the natural sciences. David Christian's conception of "Big History," to take one visible example, derives from situating the development of human history within the chronologies and natural processes of planetary geology.³ Bill Gates has become an ardent champion of...