Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 20:05:07 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Meaning of "Postmodernism" Submitted by: Thomas Schmitz In reply to John Conway's question concerning 'Postmodernism': A good account, written by a historian, may be Allan Megill: 'What does the Term 'Postmodernism' mean?", in Annals of Scholarship, vol. 6 (1989), pp. 129-151. The most important source for postmodern thinking is not anything medieval, but rather the writings of Michel Foucault. For us historians probably his "Archeology of Knowledge" is most important, especially since that book signifies the break in between the early and the late Foucault. For all those who shun reading a long volume of Foucault, I would suggest his 25-page booklet: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (there should be an English translation), in order to get a glimpse of what the later Foucault might have had in mind. However, I understand that John Conway rather wants to see a very short statement about the meaning of postmodernism. Well, Michael Geyer was answering several questions raised by other participants of H-German and had consequently to address several issues in detail. But here it is, a statement that most postmodern historians should be prepared to subscribe to (and just as Jonathan Sperber has feared in his e-mail): "There is no past." To be sure: They do not deny that there was something in the past, however, they deny that there still IS something "out there", something that scholars trained in Weberian and Rankean reasoning might call "the historical reality" or even "the objective historical reality". I don't know what Gerald Feldman had in mind, when he referred in his e-mail to "the real world" - the only real world I know of is the world of the here and now, the world of present archives and libraries, the world of texts and other symbols; the latter may be old, but they certainly do not simply constitute "the past". The postmodern historian rather questions exactly this all-too easy assumption, that one can go directly from presently available old texts to a uniform past; they focus on the intermediary forces, the chronists and the language used; they believe that there was not one single past out there, but rather that there were just as many perceptions of things past as there were human beings - with the historian adding yet another version. And they are very sceptical about the meanings hidden "behind" the text; they focus - probably more than other historians tend to do - on the changes in meaning that all words undergo in the course of time, and consequently attempt to recapture (as much as it is possible) the original meanings of old vocabulary and to apply (as much as it is possible) the values and "Weltanschauung" of former times - not in order to spread the word of ancient gospels in a romanticist fit, but rather to help the modern reader in better understanding past cultures and in realizing the gap in between our way of life and theirs. In short: Postmodern historians do not write linear histories of something, but rather multiple histories of human experiences (of something) on the one hand, as well as "crooked" histories of the interpretations of symbols (language, paintings, etc.), and consequently come to question hitherto held general assumptions and semantic boundaries. Thomas Schmitz (Munich/Duesseldorf) .