Book Review

The Postmodern History Reader. Ed. by Keith Jenkins. (New York: Routledge, 1997. xiv, 443 pp. Cloth, $75.00, isbn 0-415-13903-1. Paper, $22.99, isbn 0-415-13904-X.)

The essays by Mark Poster are historiographical, built around one or more works by well-known historians and designed to reveal how those works succeed or (mostly) fail to produce a postmodern history. Equipped with a consistent and theoretically informed interpretive machinery, the essays are distinctly more than book reviews; however, even while it indicates some suggestive directions, the book as a whole does not give us an alternative analytical or conceptual framework. To be sure, several of the essays are most interesting. Consider, for instance, the essay on Lawrence Stone in which Poster shows how Stone connects past to present as continuous by asserting a common human motivational structure and subjectivity—the "rational individual." Poster appeals to Michel Foucault's notion of discontinuity and dispersal to show how subjects are differentially constructed over time and space. Although I am fully in agreement with the critique, the hard questions, it seems to me, lie in how we can tell difference and also to what extent one might reify difference. Another absorbing piece is the essay with a long section on François Furet, which reveals how he gains much acuity from poststructuralist insights but remains hobbled by his reactionary affiliations—an argument that suggests a complex relationship between epistemology and politics.	1
In the essay on history at "The End of History," Poster launches a critique of modernist historians as distant from each other as the Joyce Appleby-Lynn Hunt-Margaret Jacob trio and Francis Fukuyama. Poster seeks to imagine a new history more in sync with the postmodern conditions of our time. Where modern history is driven by the perceived gap between the past and the future, in our technological circumstances, the future and the past can be (virtually) experienced in the present itself and "canons evaporate as each researcher establishes his or her own archive." These are interesting suggestions, but we do not yet have the new history and Poster does not quite theorize the relations between the new technology and epistemology beyond these remarks, thereby leaving us with a vague impression of technological reductionism. Also, Poster does not always have a sense for the concrete, for the telling example. His discussion of Michel de Certeau's understanding of consumerism as a tactic disruptive of capitalism's instrumental rationality is not likely to convince skeptical historians (as much, for example, as de Certeau's more compelling essays in The Writing of History, 1988). Whether or not the housewife buys one brand or the other constitutes as much resistance to capitalism as does Clint Eastwood's infamous smirk.	2
My final criticism of Poster is his tendency toward a certain formalism—a checklist of dos and don'ts—that governs the judgment passed on the work: continuist, determinist, teleological, narrativist, and subject-constituting are the bad terms. Examples of where one finds—or more challenging, how one does—an alternative history of sufficient complexity and subtlety are rare indeed.	3
Despite my list of criticisms of Poster, I do believe his critiques are perceptive, clear, and justified. The absence of an exciting alternative history appears to be more general. Poster ends his book with a nice ironic discussion about authorless discourses written by authors as the history of ideas. Indeed, this may well be symptomatic of our times. Aside from Foucault (who is at best only sometimes a historian), we are mostly still in the prehistory of postmodern history. We still seem not really to be writing or doing it, only gesturing toward it.	. . .