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Postmodernism and
History: Theory and History The term "Postmodern", fuzzy, inchoate and susceptible to several meanings, is so flexible that it has generated much controversy and even hostility. Its utility as a mode of enquiry has been questioned, but it has no doubt greatly influenced historiography during the past two decades. This small and unpretentious volume offers a broad and valuable introduction to the principal Postmodernist theory, and its impact on history-writing, a much debated issue among historians. The author, Willie Thompson, formerly Professor of contemporary history at Glasgow Caledonian University, is currently visiting Professor to Northmbria University in Newcastle. He makes it clear that he is not enthusiastic about Postmodernism, regards it a bad thing for the future of history, and is skeptical of its value as a historical discipline. He says there are elements in Postmodernism which are absurd, but some insights from its complex methodology can open up new approaches to historical investigations. The word, Postmodernism, was used by a Spanish writer, Frederico de Onisas, as a reaction to the artistic movement of the early twentieth century, called Modernism, and by 1973, postmodern had became a topic of public discourse. It was first used with reference to architecture. Initially, Postmodernism was explained as trying to get over modernism that suffers from "elitism", while emphasising the vernacular, tradition and "communal slang of the street". In other words, themes can be turned down and proven to be a "coded justification of social relationship". By focusing on the text or narrative, the postmodernists regard words as having no fixed meanings. Postmodern thinking displays a particular hostility to the 17th and 18th century enlightenment and scientific method, and forms of rationality derived from it. It is a complete rejection of meta-narrative, the presupposition that human history follows a particular line of development, whether positivist, liberal or Marxist. In other words, history has no pattern and can be interpreted in any manner. The notion of truth has no relevance, and is at best only relative. The starting point of historical reconstruction is a process of deconstruction. Deconstruction readings can make the text say the opposite of what it may mean. In the early 1980s, Michel Foucault made a decisive impact on historiography by giving it a linguistic turn. His focus of attention was prostitution, medicine and sexuality. E. P. Thompson, too, in his study, The Making of the English Working Class, contributed to the contemporary postmodernist historiography by giving a voice to the "loser" and "winner" and rescuing them from the "enormous condescension of posterity". The Annales school of historians, particularly Marc Block and Lucien Febre, by using legal and medical documents, reconstructed the life, conditions and activities of the aspirations of the marginal. Largely, postmodernist deconstruction has been a literary undertaking, and this process is appropriately referred to as the "linguistic turn". The main feature of this approach is to question the notion of accurate representation and to deny the stability of meaning. While interpreting the texts, the postmodernists assume that the creators of the sources provide them with the intention (conscious or otherwise) of concealing as much as revealing, and more emphatically, they can use the texts anyway they like. Postmodern writing lays emphasis is on the perception of event rather than the event itself, and the text is examined for its silences and giveaways as much for its observable content. Thompson insists that postmodern historiography is not merely textual, but wholly textual, though within that rubric there is a range of nuisances. This work contains a full chapter on Michel Foucault, who has inspired the current theorists of postmodern historiography. Foucault accorded an ontological primacy to language, but the author disregards him as an authentic postmodernist because he failed to assimilate historiography to literature. Foucault’s main argument is that the social and medical sciences of the modern era are, above all, the mechanism of authoritarian control and the exercise of power: the thesis he has expounded in his studies of orphanages, mental institutions and military units. The author discusses the
dimensions of representations, and passing from theoretical issues of
ontology, he focuses on the contentious ones of relativism. He explains
the notions of moral and cognitive relativism, which leads to the
discussion of Post-colonialism. The author concludes that postmodernism
is inimical to rational thought and that some of its elements are
nonsensical, but there are others that are of value to historians. |
