Notes

represented.
Generally, arguments about historical shifts in culture start from the assumption
that a major change or break has occurred and focus largely on providing evidence
and examples to support this claim, with the result that the processes and motives
involved in this shift are either ignored or explained only in the most generalized
terms. In Baudrillard's formulation, postmodernism is seen as a result of the everincreasing
effects of "simulation", but the reasons for this increased simulation are
somewhat unclear, with simulation at times presented as a technological change
(linked to technologies of reproduction) and, at others, as an ideological or
conceptual shift in perspective. Since, moreover, simulation serves both as the
reason for this change and as proof that it has occurred, the argument tends to be
circular. In Jameson's case, the shift from modernism to postmodemism is
explained largely by reference to another social-historical shift, from industrial to
late capitalism. Thus, although Jameson focuses largely on examples from the arts
and popular culture, the shift from modernism to postmodernism often seems little
more than a superstructural reflection of economic changes within capitalism (to
which he devotes almost no discussion).
My point here, however, is not to contest the idea of post-ness as a culturalhistorical
shift from one episteme or "cultural dominant" to another. I have no wish
to debate whether or not we have 'actually' entered into a postmodern or
posthuman era. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the lack of specificity and
outright confusion in 'post-' discussions about issues of historical and cultural
change, and their figuration or conceptualization. Frequently, debates about 'posttheories'
have revolved around misunderstandings concerning different types or
levels of change, so that claims about theoretical or conceptual changes, broad
cultural and epistemic changes, and even changes at the so-called material level
(e.g., technological and physical, bodily changes, which have been topics of some
importance in discussions of the posthuman) are at times cobbled together with
little regard for their specificity or relative autonomy. Thus, for example, a
common criticism of postcolonial theory has been to argue that we have not
reached a historical period of postcolonialism, that we remain in an era in which
colonialism - or at least its effects - is still dominant. Of course, no serious
formulation of postcoloniality ever claimed otherwise; postcolonial theory was,
instead, an attempt to reconceptualize the stark, invariant oppositions that had long
dominated thinking about colonialism. The 'post-' in postcoloniality marked, then,
a shift in the conception and representation of colonialist culture, not a socialhistorical
argument about the 'end' of colonialism. Similarly, post-Marxist and
post-feminist ideas arose not out of attempts to assign Marxism and feminism to the
historical dustbin, but in an effort to rethink the theoretical frameworks that have
gone under these names, to shift the conceptual terms of debate. As Ernesto Laclau
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Mutation, history, and fantasy in the posthuman
and Chantal Mouffe note in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, their notion of postMarxism
may indeed imply a break with traditional Marxist ideas, but it also
suggests an intellectual continuity that draws from the plurality of Marxist
discourse: "But if our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is
evidently also post-Marxisf' (4). 1 Here again, 'post-' designates a theoretical shift,
a change in the conceptual and representational framework through which culture
and history are to be understood. While such a shift is certainly historical in some
sense, it takes place at an entirely different level from claims about a shift from one
social-historical stage to another, from a Marxist to a post-Marxist world.
There is, of course, nothing that prevents authors from using terms such as postMarxist
or post-feminist, or for that matter postmodern or posthuman, to mean
whatever they choose, regardless of the history of these terms. Thus, it has been
quite common to see popular uses that take these terms to refer unambiguously to a
literal historical 'after': to, for example, a supposedly post-Marxist, post-feminist,
postmodern, or posthuman world. Yet, even among scholars who have presumably
read the texts in question, there is - as I have suggested - sometimes a tendency to
confuse claims about changes in how cultural and historical conditions are
represented with statements about changes in those conditions. To do so is to
confuse historiography with history, representational changes with changes in the
object represented (ironically, something that post-theories are frequently accused
of doing).
While it is perfectly possible to trace historical shifts in cultural ideas or
representational practices, it is quite another thing to assume a corresponding
change in, for example, economic conditions, world events, technology, or
biotechnology. This is not to deny that a correspondence may exist; it is merely to
argue that there is no necessary correspondence between these levels; any such
claim would require, at a minimum, a concerted attempt to articulate the relations
between these levels. This is an articulation that Jameson, for example, does not
provide: instead of detailing how or why postmodern cultural representation might
be related to (or the product of) late-capitalist economics, he simply asserts an
analogy between them. This issue of correspondence applies all the stronger when
conceptual and representational changes become the basis for claims that an
epochal shift or epistemic break in history has occurred, claims that are by no
means limited to Jameson or to notions of postmodern culture (on the uses and
abuses of history, see Cohen 2006).
Yet, while popular usages of 'post-' often start from the assumption of a broad
historical break or new historical era, the majority of theoretical formulations of
post-ness have not, in fact, made this claim. Indeed, in Jean-Franr,;ois Lyotard's
influential formulation of postmodernism, he dispenses altogether with the notion
of a historical succession from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that