1. Introduction: Historism and Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a great many things. It originates in the rejection of modernist architecture as exemplified by Bauhaus or by Le Corbusier.^[1] A decade later this most elusive concept was used for referring to deconstructivist theories of literary criticism^[2] and to so-called "antifoundationalist" conceptions in the philosophy of language and meaning.^[3] Over the same period we may witness the development of a postmodernist political philosophy attempting to deconstruct traditional notions of the political center and its periphery;^[4] postmodernist philosophy of culture, in its turn, rejoiced in the elimination of the border between high and low culture

and in the aestheticization of contemporary society.^[5] Lastly, postmodernist reflection on art—the domain where postmodernism has been most influential—took the form of a rejection of avant-gardism. Whereas almost every previous new development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art began by proudly announcing itself to be the "modernist" avant-garde that would pitilessly condemn older styles to obsolescence, postmodernism struck another and quite different note by presenting itself as not being the latest attempt to overcome the history of art.^[6] The modernist avant-garde, by describing itself as the last and ultimate development in art, always firmly and confidently placed itself in a history of art; postmodernism, however, only carried on this tradition of contestation in a curiously paradoxical way by presenting itself as the first form of art that was not interested in locating itself in the history of art.^[7]

But, as this postmodernist circumvention of the historical pretensions of the avant-garde already suggests, postmodernism is also a theory of and about history. It is a theory of history insofar as postmodernism claims to be the first historical period (since the modernist Enlightenment) to avoid periodization successfully.^[8] Next, as a theory about history, postmodernism is a theory rejecting the claims of so-called "metanarratives." The locus classicus of the rejection of metanarrative is, of course, Lyotard's La Condition Postmoderne. As everybody knows, this pamphlet has, for better or for worse (rather for worse than for better, I would say), acquired a central place in the discussion of the pros and cons of postmodernism. Within Lyotard's presentation of metanarrative, its primary function, then, is to legitimate science. "Le savoir scientifique," writes Lyotard, "ne peut savoir et faire savoir qu'il est le vrai savoir sans recourir a l'autre savoir, le récit." (Scientific knowledge cannot justify its pretension to be true knowledge without having recourse to that other form of knowing, the story.)^[9] The legitimacy of science—that is, the answer to the question of why we are justified in placing our hopes and confidence in scientific progress—can only

be proven by having recourse to the metanarratives of the Bildungsroman of the history of the human mind.^[10] Examples of Lyotard's metanarratives are: the story that the Enlightenment liked to tell itself about the liberating effects of the progress of scientific knowledge; the story of how such progress can foster the moral and spiritual formation of the nation; and, lastly, Marxism. According to Lyotard, these metanarratives have in recent times dissolved into an infinite number of petits récits, that is, of self-sufficient, "local" language games that are in use in the various scientific subsocieties that populate the contemporary intellectual world.^[11] Henceforward an attempt to organize these social and cultural fragments into a larger and more comprehensive whole or to arrange them into a hierarchy is doomed to fail.^[12] Thus, as a theory about history Lyotard's account is a criticism of customary conceptions of the fundamental unity of the past: the past is broken up by him into a number of disparate fragments and the fragmentation of the contemporary intellectual world is the mirror image of that dissolution of the past.

There are a number of oddities in Lyotard's deplorably sketchy tale of the life and death of metanarratives. First, it may strike one as strange that metanarratives should ever have claimed to "legitimate" science since ordinarily such claims belong to the domains of the epistemologist and the philosopher of science. Worse still, metanarratives were always a source of irritation to philosophers of science since they effected a historicization of science and thus gave rise to the particularly thorny problems of relativism. Metanarratives traditionally served rather to delegitimize science than to legitimize it. However, although Lyotard's own argument does not encourage such an interpretation,^[13] he may have had in mind a historical or social rather than an epistemological legitimation of science. However, Enlightenment modernism always argued the other way round. Modernists always saw scientific progress as the model and condition for social and political progress and to argue the other way round—as Lyotard does—they would condemn as a confusion of cause and effect.

Second, Lyotard is far from being the first to attack metanarrative. It will be obvious to anyone that Lyotard's metanarratives are identical to so-called speculative philosophies of history. Speculative philosophies of history, the kind of systems that were built by Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and many others, were fiercely criticized in the fifties by philosophers

like Popper, Mandelbaum, and Hayek—a critique from which, despite several attempts to answer it, speculative philosophy of history has never recovered.^[14] It is frustrating that Lyotard restricts his clarification of why metanarratives have fallen into disrepute to the casual remark: "Ces recherches des causes sont toujours décevantes." (These searches for causes are always disappointing.)^[15] Yet it would seem that a criticism along the lines of that of Popper and others would have been of little help to Lyotard. For their criticism always had the form of an argument proving that metanarratives fell short of criteria for scientific acceptability. Evidently this type of argument is not open to Lyotard since by making use of it he would entangle himself in the self-defeating strategy of a scientific argument for delegitimizing science. Admittedly, the position is not completely impossible since the legitimacy of science is still a different matter from science itself; nevertheless, the odor of the self-contradiction would remain in the air.

But there has been an older, even more effective and intellectually more interesting critique of metanarrative. I am thinking here of historism, that immensely influential theory of historical thought that was developed at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century and that, despite the quasi-positivist disguise under which it now often hides itself, is still the major source of contemporary historical consciousness. When Lyotard writes that "le recours aux grands récits est exclu. . ., le 'petit récit' reste la forme par excellence comme validation du discours scientifique" (the return to metanarrative is not open to us. . ., the small narrative remains the best option for the justification of scientific discourse),^[16] this shift from the modernist "grand récit" to the postmodernist "petit récit" has its exact analogue in the historist rejection of speculative historical systems like Hegel's, a rejection which has become the hallmark of historist historical thought. In a fragment in which Ranke rejects speculative philosophy (he had the Hegelian system in mind), it is said that the historian has two ways to acquire knowledge of human affairs. Such knowledge can be attained by abstraction (this is the philosopher's method) or by focusing on what Goethe has called the "rebus particularibus."^[17] The latter, the historian's method, Ranke characterized as originating in "a feeling for and a joy in the particular in and by itself." The general is only derivative, for the historian

will not have preconceived ideas as does the philosopher, but rather while he observes the particular, the course which the development of the world in general has taken will be revealed to him. . . . He will try to comprehend all—also the kings under whom the generations have lived, the sequence of events, and the development of major enterprises—without any purpose other than joy in individual life, as one takes joy in flowers without thinking to which of Linné's classes or of Oken's families they belong; briefly put, without thinking how the whole appears in the particular.^[18]

So what Lyotard refers to as our contemporary cultural predicament was already realized a long time ago in the world of historist historical thought. And it is to historism and historists like Ranke that we owe this achievement of fragmenting the whole of history into independence entities or particulars. History gave way, to paraphrase Koselleck, to histories.

But if we can argue from postmodernism to historism, the opposite route is open to us as well. Historism was mainly a theory of so-called "historical forms" or "ideas." These forms or ideas embodied the unalienable individuality of historical epochs or phenomena. And they can only be known in terms of their differences: historical forms demonstrate their contours only insofar as they are distinct from each other and not in what is common to several or all of them. In so far as postmodernist theory can be seen as a set of variations of the Saussurian theme of "difference," we find here a first indication for how to argue from historism to postmodernism. The historist emphasis on difference was strongly reinforced by the historist conviction that everything is what it is as a result of a historical evolution. The essence of a nation, people, or institution could be found in its past.^[19] Needless to say this intuition invited the historist to define the historical form or idea of a people, nation, et cetera, in terms of its differences with what it was at an earlier or later phase. Differences in history result in differences in the essences of historical phenomena. Suppose now that we have one historical work for each historical phenomenon or period. In that case it seems natural to suppose that the differences between these historical works are taken to correspond to or reflect differences in historical forms or ideas insofar as these characterize historical reality itself. So far, so good. But suppose, next, that we have a great

and ever-increasing number of competing historical interpretations for each historical period or phenomenon. It will then become impossible to tell mere differences in interpretation apart from differences in historical forms or ideas, insofar as these are part of historical reality itself. For we could only do this if we knew which interpretation was the "correct" account of a historical form or idea. However, precisely because of the ever-increasing number of interpretations, it becomes more and more difficult to have clear and definite ideas of what is the "correct" historical interpretation or the one that comes closest to that idea. To put it provocatively, the more high-quality interpretations we have, the more the ideal of the "correct" interpretation becomes compromised. To the extent, then, that it becomes ever more difficult to be confident about the "correct" interpretation (in order to prevent an all-too-premature surrender to relativism, I deliberately avoid saying that it has become impossible), we will be unable to distinguish between differences in historical reality (or historical forms or ideas) and mere differences in interpretation. And, since in accordance with historist methodology, differences are what is at stake in our understanding of the past, we may expect that the distinction between the historical text and historical reality (both to be defined in terms of differences) will tend to get blurred. If, therefore, contemporary history has a scholarly production that dwarfs the total sum of all previous historical scholarship, both in quantity and in quality, we may expect a shift from historical reality itself (the natural focus of interest in the happy period of scarce historical scholarship) to the printed page.

But let me be clear about the nature of this shift. This is not a shift within some eternally valid epistemology for the writing of history. Rather, we have to do here with a disruption of epistemological standards themselves. One must conceive of epistemology as the most thorough and the most intelligent articulation of our cognitive prejudices—and as such, epistemology may at times serve an important cultural purpose. It is what one might call a psychoanalysis of science and of scientific practice. As such, epistemology is not so much a foundation as an interpretation of scientific practice and scientific prejudice, so that when practice and prejudices change for whatever reason, epistemology has no other choice than to follow and reflect such a change. Hence, if the dramatic increase in scholarly production one may observe in history over the last few decades suggests the emergence of a new regime in the relation between historical reality and its representation in historical writing, epistemology should not stubbornly resist this evolution as a deviance from what logic or commonsense requires, but should instead provide us with a more up-to-date "psychoanalysis" of the new state of mind of the historical discipline.

If considerations like these justify the expectation that the historist's fascination with difference will result in a gradual dissolution of the notion

of historical reality in times of historical overproduction and in a blurring of the distinction between reality and text, a rapprochement between historism and postmodernism is most likely. For if there is one thing for which postmodernism is notorious in the contemporary intellectual world, it is undoubtedly postmodernism's problematization of the referent and its insistence upon deconstructing the modernist distinction between language and the world. Moreover, postmodernism relies just as much as history upon a logic of difference for its attack on the distinction between words and things. Postmodernist speculations about difference in many cases result in the thesis that "there is nothing outside the text" and in the textual-ism or lingualism which, in Rorty's opinion, is the contemporary equivalent of nineteenth-century idealism.^[20] So if postmodernism, as presented by Lyotard, strongly reminds us of historism, historism in its turn possesses an innate talent for developing into postmodernism.

However, what clearly distinguishes the two is the ease with which they are prepared to problematize our conception of an objective (historical) reality in the manner we have just seen. One cannot, for example, doubt Ranke's robust confidence in the unproblematic existence of a past reality which is the object of historical research: "We merely observe one figure (Gestalt ) arising side by side with another figure; life, side by side with life; effect, side by side with countereffect. Our task is to penetrate them to the bottom of their existence and to portray them with complete objectivity."^[21] What is in historism merely a disquieting and paradoxical tendency—the subsumption of the historical world in language—is almost the postmodernist's point of departure. Obviously, we may expect that this tension between historism and postmodernism will provide us with the best clue for drawing up an inventory of the similarities and the dissimilarities of historism and postmodernism. Consequently, the question of the nature of historical reality and historical experience will be the main themes in the remainder of this essay. These notions are our best yardsticks for measuring the distance between historical reality and historical language.