The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

Ruptures and Specters

7 The Phantom Project Returning Ruptures and Specters Employed loosely in Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume Study of History (eight volumes of which were published between 1934 and 1954), the term “postmodern,” written “post-Modern,” was used to describe a late-nineteenth-century epochal shift: the end of a “modern” bourgeois ruling class and the growing dominance of an industrial working class. I do not wish to get lost in the early history of the term, but Toynbee’s initial theorizing of a “post-Modern” period of Western civilization is a useful point of departure; it inaugurates a long tradition of viewing the postmodern as an ultimately unsuccessful break with the motivating assumptions of (a) modernity. According to Perry Anderson in The Origins of Postmodernity (perhaps the most recent and most comprehensive history of the term), Toynbee “was scathing of the hubristic illusions of the late imperial West” (6), which saw the culmination of the Victorian period as the end of history itself. For Toynbee, “the Modern Age of Western history had been wound up only to inaugurate a post-Modern Age pregnant with imminent experiences that were to be at least as tragic as any tragedies yet on record” (Vol. 9, 421). The Western world—which, for Toynbee, primarily included France, Britain, Germany, and America—had come to believe that “a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present. ‘History is now at an end’ was the inaudible slogan of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in A.D. 1887” (421). What is interesting about Toynbee’s discussion of a post-Modern period is his willingness to chastise the assumptions of such a period. Toynbee ultimately demonstrates that the very conception of an “end of history” is ironically animated by a desire for an as yet unrealized end of history. The end of history is only possible, Toynbee seems to suggest (in a manner that will echo in the following discussion of Derridean spectrality), because it is never fully actualized in any real sense. As Toynbee points out, the desire for an end of history necessarily persisted even as the Western ruling class announced, or assumed, the arrival of a finally posthistoric epoch: German, British, and North American bourgeoisie were nursing national grievances and national aspirations which did not permit them to acquiesce in a comfortable belief that “History” was “at an end”; indeed they could not have continued, as they did continue, to keep alight the flickering flame of a forlorn hope if they had succumbed to a Weltanschauung which, for them, would have spelled, not security, but despair. (423) 8 The Passing of Postmodernism A far cry from the current, now virtually institutionalized, parameters of the term, Toynbee’s concept of a post-Modern introduces an issue that has never ceased to inform the modern/postmodern debate: the issue of historical breaks and the culmination of history itself. Toynbee seems to anticipate the recent claim that postmodernism has been as unsuccessful as modernism in terms of heralding, or representing, a final break with the past. Of course, Toynbee’s modern/postmodern periodizations are essentially equivalent to what literary critics conventionally identify as Victorian/modern (or what, in economic terms, someone like Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, might associate with market/monopoly stages of capitalism). After all, Toynbee marks the postmodern epoch as beginning with the Franco-Prussian war. Nevertheless , his discussion of a post-Modern is of considerable interest. The attempt to theorize a postcontemporary moment that is, in some regard, an unsuccessful or incomplete break with the ideology of a past modernity or historical trajectory is a useful segue to a discussion of the specter that informed modernism long before it was inherited by postmodernism. In fact, Toynbee’s discussion of a post-Modern period can be neatly tied to the current understanding of modernism. In a manner that recalls the typically accepted date for a postmodern break with modernism, Toynbee seems to mark the 1950s as the end of a distinctly post-Modern period. Not only does Toynbee seemingly view the “Modern and postmodern chapters of Western history” as now past, he suggests that, by “A.D. 1950, the expansion of the Western Society and the radiation of the Western culture had brought all other extant civilizations and all extant primitive societies within a worldencompassing Western Civilization’s ambit” (413–14). Pointing to the reality of an apparently emergent multinational period of cultural and economic growth—that is, a...