Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant

Evidence

This operation tends to involve conceiving Postmodernism’s break with the Enlightenment in apocalyptic terms, so that it becomes the revelation of the fundamental flaw inherent in European civilization for centuries if not millenia. Perhaps the silliest example of this mode of thinking is provided by Kroker and Cook, who claim that ‘since Augustine nothing has changed in the deep, structural code of Western experience’, so that De Trinitate offers ‘special insight into the modern project, at the very moment of its inception and from inside out’. Indeed, not simply the ‘modern project’ but the ‘postmod­ ern scene … begins in the fourth century … everything since the Augusti’nian refusal has been nothing but a fantastic and grisly implosion of experience as Western culture itself runs under the signs of passive and suicidal nihilism’. The apocalyptic ‘sense of an ending’ which postmodernism supposedly articulates loses any historical specificity, becoming instead the chronic condition of Western civi­ lization since the fall of Rome. Here indeed is the night Hegel spoke of when criticizing Schelling, in which all cows are black, in which Augustine, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Parsons, Foucault, Barthes and Baudrillard have all been analysing the same ‘postmodern scene’. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 129

Categorization

• XREF: The Hegel/Schelling ‘night in which all cows are black’ line directly parallels Jameson’s own critique of poststructuralism’s flattening of difference — useful for showing Callinicos turning that weapon against the postmodernist camp. — connects to: Postmodernism’s defining move is proclaiming a radical break in Western civilization — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 126; Postmodernism’s presentism forecloses the historical understanding needed to explain it — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 725; Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86 (+7 more)
• SEED: The self-defeating logic of apocalyptic thinkers who trace ‘rupture’ back to Augustine — an angle on how claims of radical novelty collapse into timeless sameness.
• DEFINE: Illuminates what historical specificity means as a Marxian analytical norm that postmodernism violates.

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism’s presentism forecloses the historical understanding needed to explain it #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 725
• Postmodern pastiche blurs the present into a timeless simulacral past #exemplifies (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 86