Postmodernism’s claim of historical closure is itself an ideological eternalizing move.

Evidence

So I would say postmodernism is the current name we give to how these old certainties began to run into trouble from the 1900s onward. In that sense, I don’t refuse some of the new things the postmodernists point to. They are extremely important, and the traditional Habermasian defense won’t do. But the attempt to gather them all under a singular sign—which suggests a kind of final rupture or break with the modern era—is the point at which the operation of postmodernism becomes ideological in a very specific way. What it says is: this is the end of the world. History stops with us and there is no place to go after this. But whenever it is said that this is the last thing that will ever happen in history, that is the sign of the functioning, in the narrow sense, of the ideological—what Marx called the “eternalizing” effect. Since most of the world has not yet properly entered the modern era, who is it who “has no future left”? … If the bomb has already gone off, can it go on “going off” forever? You can’t be another century constantly confronting the end of the world. You can live this as a metaphor, suggesting that certain contemporary positions and ideas are now deeply undermined, rendered increasingly fragile as it were, by having the fact of the world’s end as one of their imminent possibilities. That is a radically new historical fact and, I think, it has decentered us all. In that sense love and human relationships in the postmodern period feel very different—more temporary, provisional, contingent. But what we are looking at here is the tempering and elongation of the very same profound cultural and historical tendencies which constructed that break with “the modern” which we call “mod ernism.” And I want to be able to retain the term “modernity” to refer to the long history—the longue dur é e —of those tendencies. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 720

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘eternalizing effect’ — Marx’s term for rendering the present as the end of history — and deploys it against postmodernism.
• DEEPTHINKING: The whole argument — that declaring ‘the end of history’ is itself the ideological move, and that postmodernism is the elongation of modernism rather than a rupture — resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern subjectivity loses active historical consciousness and lives in a perpetual present. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 152