Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Future Perfect

Why is it that only the modern could have produced the postmodern? More specifically, what were the conditions of possibility that fostered the production of such a concept, and how are these conditions inscribed within it? In order to answer this question, we must start backwards, as it were, by defining exactly what it is that the modern produced, that is, by defining the postmodern. This, of course, is a task of unusually daunting proportions, not only because of the sheer volume of material devoted to the subject, but also because it is the inconstancy of the "postmodern" (in whatever form: "-ity," "-ist," or "-ism") that is generally held up as its primary characteristic. Hans Bertens, for example, finds that it ". . . is several things at once" and that, furthermore, "the term [has been] deeply problematical almost right from the start." ² Equally, David Harvey damns the term as "a mine-field of conflicting notions," ³ while Terry Eagleton declares that it "is such a portmanteau phenomenon that anything you assert of one piece of it is almost bound to be untrue of another." ⁴ Openly declaring his agitation with the problem, Alex Callinicos opines the slipperiness of leading definitions of the postmodern, definitions which he condemns as "mutually inconsistent, internally contradictory and/or hopelessly vague." ⁵ Adding to this list of unhappy epithets, Walter Truett Anderson bemoans the fact that it is "a puzzling, uppity term." ⁶ Perhaps with such assertions in mind, Linda Hutcheon notes that "[f]ew words are more used and abused," but then adds as a caveat that "this is an appropriate condition for . . . a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory." ⁷ Suitably wary of the pitfalls of this mode, Fredric Jameson tentatively ventures the claim that "[i]t is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place." ⁸ With a surety of nerve that Jameson must envy, Thomas Docherty admits only of a secret knowledge when he observes that "it is a term which has often been used with a great deal of imprecision." ⁹ For Edmund Smyth, however, "[i]t is evident that no consensus exists regarding either the parameters of postmodernism or the precise meaning of the term." ¹⁰ In the light of such bewilderment, it falls to Brian McHale, finally, to propose that while "[n]o doubt there is no such 'thing' as postmodernism," it does, at least, "exist discursively in the discourses we produce about it and using it." ¹¹

What, then, is the source of all this confusion? We might begin to trace it back to a series of subtle and interrelated conflations between subject and object. It is these conflations which, for Patricia Waugh, condemn much of postmodernism to "'bootstrapping' self-contradictions where it discovers itself forever implicated in that which it seeks to proclaim as inauthentic and exhausted" (PR 4). In this respect, perhaps the most disturbing of all the circularities produced by the conflationary whirl of the postmodern is that of history itself. The autoreferentiality involved here is at least twofold. First, as Jameson insists, there is a sense in which whatever position we adopt towards an historical object, especially the postmodern, it will "not [be] an empirically justifiable or philosophically arguable one, since it is itself the inaugural narrative act that grounds the perception and interpretation of the events to be narrated" (PC xiii). Second, and following on from this, these "narrative acts," or processes of emplotment, are necessarily of their time and will find that contemporaneity inscribed within their structures and effects. The problem with this, of course, is that if we are so thoroughly nailed to the "now," and thereby compelled to deploy contemporary conceptualizations, how can we tear ourselves free of the present and render, even approximately, the stories and experiences of the past? It is a problem coeval, we might say, with the...