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I: The Antinomies of Postmodernism
In The Seeds of Time (1994), Fredric Jameson tests the possibility that the antinomy represents the characteristic habit of thought in postmodernism. In the philosophical tradition, antimony is defined as a formulation of two statements-both logical in themselves - that nevertheless negate one another. The most famous example is undoubtedly Kant's: "The world has a beginning; the world has no beginning." Kant demonstrates the validity of each conclusion, yet between them there is no middle ground, no potential for resolution of any kind. An antinomy, then, can be understood as a kind of logical "block," a closure of the dialectical possibilities inherent in other forms of contradiction. In Jameson's critique, the antinomy can be seen as a "stalled or arrested dialectic" that provides both thesis and antithesis yet which precludes synthesis.
If we extend this description to the philosophy of history, the antinomy exemplifies a failure of "the dialectic" proposed by Marxist historicism. The static oppositions of the antinomy -especially when applied to historical thinking-seem to make the structure itself symptomatic of what Jameson sees as the spatial (as opposed to narrative) logic of global capitalism (6). In this unprecedented historical situation, the antinomy would appear to counter the older, Marxian vision of a historical process driven by the emergence and resolution of contradictions. Therefore, the antinomy seems characteristic of the ideology of late capitalism, a mode of production dedicated to historical stasis that (in the 1990s, at least) gave rise to claims of the "end of history," the "end of the dialectic," and to the multifarious illusion that "there was no alternative" to so-called free market capitalism.
This essay examines the relationship between antinomy and the postmodern historical imagination. I will begin by re-stating-and affirming-Jameson's well-known argument that postmodernity itself should be defined in terms of the ideological limitations on "our" ability to think historically. At the root of this imaginative failure one finds an antinomy that delineates the relationship between the Past and the Present, and arguably any two historical periods. The thesis of this antinomy can be formulated as follows: The Past and the Present are radically different. The ontological distance between them cannot be represented (narratively). This is the logic that undergirds the "total" history of...