Keith Jenkins 
Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality 
But Outside Ethics 
Postmodernism, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth 
In those Sophist days before the 'start' of the Western Tradition, the 
suspicion that the finite and the contingent was all that there was; the idea 
that the phenomenal world was the only actual world; the understanding 
that the basis for living finite lives was the aleatory and the ludic, led to 
attitudes and theorisations expressed in varieties of ontological, episte-
mological and ethical relativisms vis a vis the significances and meanings 
conferred on the 'metaphysics of existence'. And why not? If from the 'facts' 
of the 'evidence ' no non-cont ingent , absolute 'ought ' unequivocally 
emerged, if individual and political life - past, present and future - seemed 
interpetable interminably (you can talk about politics forever...); if there 
seemed no rhyme nor reason to anything or anybody in themselves (indeed, 
if it was realised that the 'secret' of the essence of the 'thing in itself was that 
there was no such essence) then no other viable conclusion seemed available 
other than a relativistic 'anything goes' coupled with the ultimate acceptance 
of the idea that 'might is right ' . Consequently it is here, against these 
conclusions, that the Western Tradition begins; in the refusal, by Plato, to 
see sophist scepticism and relativism not as solutions to the problem of the 
finite, the contingent and the aleatory (a way to live with these actualities, to 
put your feet up and be relaxed about them) but rather as continuing problems 
(seen now precisely as ' the problems of scepticism and relativism') still to 
be solved. Accordingly, because sophists and, later and differently, 
pyrrhonists and other sceptical solutions for living life 'here and now' were 
not deemed to be solutions at all, so the finite world - whose anti-logic 
articulations Plato well recognised as providing no basis for anything other 
than various relativisms - had to be supplemented/supplanted by something 
'beyond the reach of time and chance', an 'infinitive fix' to bring temporary/ 
temporal chaos into permanent and absolute order. Living in the shadows 
of Plato, the history of the Western Tradition has thus overwhelmingly been 
the history of various articulations of this apparently necessary, stabilising 
fantasy - this infinite fix - in the guise of eternal verities expressed either in 
the anglicised upper case (Forms, God, Essence, Nature, Human Nature, 
The Categorical Imperative, Spirit, Class Struggle, Dialectic, Market Forces, 
Reason, History...) a n d / o r in older linguistic expressions all suggesting 
Filozofski vestnik, XVIII (2/1997), pp. 213-232. 213 
Keith Jenkins 
immanence and centerings that had an invariable presence: eidos, arche, telos, 
energeia ousia etc., imaginaries all bearing down upon us wearing the insignia 
of Truth.1 
It is a curious fact, but a fact nevertheless, that such a variety of infinite 
fixes was not immediately regarded with widespread incredulity (as opposed 
to local, marginalised and shadowy scepticisms and relativisms - critiques 
overwhelmingly recuperated by the dominant tradition to be construed as 
its ever-threatening 'other'). One might have thought that the very fact that, 
'historically speaking',there have been so many expressions of such upper 
case demards, would have made people immediately consider such eternal 
imperatives as mere reified projections of their own interpretive (relative) 
desires and that to obey such chimeras was to chase themselves back into 
their own logically tautological and solipsistic lairs. But again, historically 
speaking, this fact - of one thing to be expressed but so many narrative/ 
metanarrative expressions - seems only to have convinced adherents of them 
that, strange though it may seem, their own preferred interpretations were 
not really interpretations at all but the Truth. Thus we have witnessed -
restricting ourselves now to fairly recent historical articulations of this 
'existential metaphysic' though one very obviously based on much 'older 
f rames of mind ' - various founda t iona l progressivisms, positivisms, 
Marxisms, Whiggism, Fascisms, etc., metanarrative fixes ultimately of the 
'endsjustify the means' type. To banish the finite and contigent and to turn 
such phenomena into some kind of demanding necessity, these formulations 
we have died for. 
Contemporary postmodernism is a phase - however hesitatingly and 
qualifyingly specified as non-teleological, non-stagist, and as merely a 
'different' moment/condition from and /o r after modernity - postmodernism 
has finally, I think, ended the plausability of such metanarratives. Today 
there seems to be everywhere that incredulity towards them which Lyotard 
famously essayed: few if any of us believe in such fantasies any more. Through 
the efforts of various linguistic, narrative, deconstructive and discursive turns, 
we now realise that there never has been, and there never will be, any 
'knowable ' forms, essences, na tura l na tures , histories, etc., beyond 
contingency. That we will never have access to a founding originary, and 
hence to no inevitable destinations, teleological trajectories or dialectics of 
closure; that we have no conduit to any kind of extra-discursive transcendental 
signifier, full-presence or omniscient na r ra to r /na r ra t ive . In fact, we 
postmodernists have now just about unpacked the imaginaries of the non-
1 J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, Routledge, London 1978, p. 289. 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
relativist Western Tradition so that we are effectively 'back at the beginning': 
rhetorical neo-sophists. For we /wrf-modernists are, in an interesting reversal, 
also pre Western Traditionalists, pre modernists. In a very precise way we 
are now ^re-platonic, pre-christian, jbre-kantian, jbre-hegelian, /?re-marxist, pre-
market, pre-fascist, in the sense that these attempts to put us in touch with 
various foundations having failed, then we now have to face - at the end of 
the Western Tradition - the same existential/metaphysical problems the 
sophists faced before it began. Accordingly, we now have the chance to 
consider contemporary takes on sophist-type sceptical and relativistic solutions 
to the metaphysics of existence precisely as solutions and not at all as 
problems 'still to be solved' Such solutions to finiteness and the endless 
equivalences of anti-logic may not be the same type of solutions as Plato's or 
Kant's or Marx's or contemporary 'certaintists', but they are solutions 
nevertheless - and ones which the actuality of living in postmodernity is forcing 
upon us whether we like it or not.2 These solutions suggest - at least to me 
- that we can now live p re /pos t modern lives in ways which have no need 
for any infinite fix to stabilise contingency and chance; no need for any upper 
case, metanarrative history (or lower case professional/academic histories 
- but that is another story)3 to stabilise time in a particular temporality, and 
n o n e e d for a capi ta l i sed Ethics - an Ethical System - to stabilise 
'disinterestedly' the 'interested' tastes and styles of our own personal and 
public morality: that we can forget these sorts of history and ethics altogether. 
To any remaining non-sophists, this may seem to be a rash move to 
make, but my thinking on the non-rashness of it might seem less reckless if 
I briefly reformulate some of what I have just said and so further prepare 
the ground for what all these preliminary remarks are actually leading up 
to; namely, an examination (expository much more than critical) of a text 
by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth - Sequel to History : Postmodernism and the Crisis 
of Representational Time4 - wherein she essays, in what I will argue is one of 
the most important considerations of postmodernism, history and ethics/ 
morality available, what I construe as ways of living in time but outside history; 
2 I am indebted to Peter Brickley for convincing me that relativism was the solution to, 
and not the problem of, existence and morality; also to Philip Jenkins whose various 
arguments on Baudrillard I have drawn on in passing. 
3 See the Introduction to my The Postmodernism History Reader, Routledge, London 
1997. 
4 E. D. Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and The Crisis of Representational Time, 
Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992. Rather than footnoting my references to 
Ermarth, I have inserted them parenthetically in the paper. 
215 
Keith Jenkins 
in morality but outside ethics. My reformulation of our current condition -
my further stage setting for Ermarth - can be put as follows. 
It still seems rather obvious and commonsensical to say that perhaps 
the main reason why historians study the past is because they think that what 
this work may produce - a historical consciousness - is a good thing. Yet 
beyond this minimalist intention common endeavour and agreement tend 
to collapse. For given that it is the idea of the good which defines the desired 
type of consciousness; that is to say, if a good historical consciousness is 
anything the definer so stipulates - which it is - then because 'we' live amongst 
so many competing notions of the good with no universally acceptable/ 
neutral criteria for adjudication between them, so not only does any ultimate 
closure become endlessly deferred, but the very idea of a good historical 
consciousness is similarly affected: we now have no clear sense of what a good 
history/historical consciousness is. The re are various con tempora ry 
reactions to this 'relativist' conclusion, but perhaps the most popular is not 
to try - and keep on trying - to find a 'real' history/historical consciousness 
beyond constitutive interests, but to admit one's position (one's interests) 
so to be as reflexive, ironic (apres, say, Richard Rorty) and as 'open about 
one's closures' as one can be. Thus we witness increasingly historians quite 
openly flagging their positions - feminists and post-feminists, post-marxists, 
post-colonialists, neo-phenomenologists, neo-pragmatists, etc. - and, at the 
level of the lower case, umpteen 'revisionists'. But my argument is that this 
positional explicitness is still 'too historical'. For I think that we are now at 
a moment when we might forget history altogether and live our lives without 
reference back to a past tense articulated in ways which we are historically 
familiar with. Maybe we can forget the historicised past and - because we 
do still have to (temporarily) live together - j u s t talk about that : ethics talk. 
And yet, this alternative may also be, in turn, too ethical. Why can't we forget 
ethics too? 
Here, in distinguishing ethics from morality, a little bit of arbitrary 
defining (there is no other) may be useful. For the problem with ethics is 
that normally we link up that notion with the idea of a system : an ethical 
system. Such an idea of an ethical system - say Kant's - has, at its centre, the 
further notion of universalism; that is, an ethical system is one which, if 
universalised, would allow ethical judgements to be made about all and every 
contingent situation when one has to make a choice - when one has to decide 
what one ought to do. But such a total, t r anscenden ta l system is an 
impossibility and, in the event that this should be held not to be so, actually 
not ethical anyway. For if there was such a thing as a total ethic so that in 
every situation one only had to apply it, then one would not be making a 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
choice at all but merely applying a rule - in which case the implementation 
of such a ru le absolves the subject f rom actually making a decision. 
Consequently, there is no morality (choice) involved here, but just the 
application of a necessity. But if, as I am assuming, morality involves choice 
in such a way that a system of 'ethical necessities' would not be moral at all, 
then free choice, untramalled by reference back to any 'system', would just 
have to be subjective, contingent, situationist, pragmatic, aleatory, and thus 
always ultimately unsystematizable and ungroundable, ie., sophist-like. It is 
this s i tua t ion , the s i tuat ion where every moral choice is ult imately 
undecidable (the aporia) but where decisions always have to be made, which 
makes Derrida talk about the 'madness of the decision', Baudrillard the 
'radical illusion of morality', Levinas the ontological violence inflicted on 
the other to make it the same, and Laclau talk about the 'philosophy of the 
undecidability of the decision'.5 The upshot of all this - to cut a long story 
very short - is that we are now all left within an unbounded space-time, with 
nothing certaintist to fall back on to underwrite our public/private self-
styling, and with no fixed horizons (common skies) to guide us...with no 
ultimate ethical stabilisers....least of all any stabilisers we may have thought 
issued from a past constructed historiographically by us but in such a way so 
to render forth the illusion that that past/history was self-constituting so to 
help us live better lives, the (historicised) past as the great pedagogue, always 
teaching us 'its' lessons as if they were not always only our own projections. 
Consequently, that illusion now transparently obvious, so the suggestion that 
we 'forget history and ethics' for 'temporality and morality', postist/sophist-
style, now forces itself upon us - or rather - we now force it upon ourselves. 
As already suggested, Ermarth addresses both facets of the postmodern 
condition I have been discussing; to recall, the question of what would it be 
like to live out of history but in time; out of ethics but in morality. As I read 
her, I think that she is much more successful arguing for the former rather 
than the latter, where she seems to perhaps not fully recognise the problems 
or, if she does, to be insufficiently relativist about them, needlessly drawing 
back from where I take the logic of her argument to be driving her. But I 
return to this criticism after my reading of Ermarth's text which, it must be 
reiterated, has a richness and suggestiveness which defies easy summary and 
which I urge readers to go to and appropriate for their own purposes, as I 
have done here. Relative to the above stage setting, then, my own take own 
on (just aspects of) Ermarth runs as follows. 
5 See the various arguments of Rorty, Derrida, Lyotard, Laclau, et al, in C. Mouffe 
(ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Routledge, London 1996. 
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Keith Jenkins 
Let us stipulate, as metaphysics, the giveness of existence (the gift of the 
world, being) as something which just existentially is (I mean, we don' t have 
a choice about unconditionally accepting these gifts). And let us say that 
this given, this thing-in-itself, is actually eternally unfathomable. Then let 
us stipulate ontology as the effort to bring this given within the closure of 
meaning, to very precisely try to make it fathomable and known (episte-
mological). Let us go on to say that this restriction, once on-going, then 
performs that constant (violent) appropriation by which we seek to enlarge 
our meanings until the metaphysical is exhausted and 'its' meaning reduced 
to 'ours'; its 'otherness' now 'corresponding' to the 'same': to us. Then let 
us say that, of course, this attempted closure can never fully occur; that what 
Bataille calls the 'general economy' of existence resists our most persistant 
cultural drives towards the production of meaning and the grounding of 
such meaning (the attempt to eliminate the excess) within our 'restrictive' 
productionist economy. And then let us recognise this struggle between the 
metaphysical and the ontological/epistemological - between the unrestricted 
(infinite) general economy and the restrictivist productive one - constitutes 
at one and the same time both the possibility of meaning and the guarantee 
that a full meaning (total presence, self-identity, etc.) is unachievable; that 
the gap between the thing-in-itself (the other, radical alterity etc.) and our 
theoretical appropriations of it remain, no matter how apparently close (d), 
infinitely and eternally apart...but that ' the rhetorical beat must go on, 
endlessly repeating the sequence by which the lure of solid g round is 
succeeded by the ensuing démystification.'6 
Now, all this can be read as simply saying that, in a culture, 'nothing is 
of a natural kind.' Everything to be meaningful and productive has to be 
within the 'productivist economy', its excess cordoned off and kept on the 
outside (from there to haunt it...haunt it with the thought of its always 
imperfect closures), an economy which, to be communicable, is necessarily 
coded. Accordingly, to be in a culture is to live in and through a code, a 
language, to be within the ( theoret ical) imaginar ies (metaphysical , 
ontological, epistemological) which constitute reality (the 'effects of the real') 
so that 'residence in a language' is residence in reality (the real is imaginary, 
the imaginary is real), this including, of course, that metaphysical imagining 
of what, theoretically outside of the productivist economy, the excess may 
be like (ie, the excess isn't any more 'really real' than the cultural inside, 
it'sjust a regulative idea, a potentially productive silence; another simulacra). 
6 S. Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989, p. 493. 
218 
Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
The imaginary which Ermarth is most interested in is the discursive 
production of Western time. We don' t know what the stuff we call time 
actually is; time, to be 'time', always has to be timed (given temporality). 
And it is the peculiar way in which Western time has been timed in what 
Ermarth calls its modern, linear, historical form (which she traces back to 
at least as far as the Renaissance), the capsizal of that (arbitrary) form in 
'postmodern times', and its replacement by a timing of time that is precisely 
not 'historical' but is rather conceived in feminist friendly, chaos friendly, 
hopscotch, figural, rhythmic timings, that is the concern of her text. 
Ermarth is of the opinion that postmodernism has just about got all 
the imaginary formulations needed to end modern linear history and begin 
rhythmic time, and she's glad. For whereas modernist discourse has got used 
to its imagining of time so to regard it as 'real time' - has forgotten its in-
ventedness (its temporal fix) so regarding it as a neutral, objective pheno-
menon - postmodernism urges us to recall that such a reality is always the 
'mediated construct of a founding subject'; that time is a function of position, 
(p. 18) For Ermarth, 'objects', including phenomenal timings, are best seem 
not as 'objectively' there but rather as the 'subject objectified' or, better still, 
as the 'subject performatively objectifying' from specific enunciative locations 
(the 'locutions of culture'), this latter construal giving impetus to the move 
away from a fixed Cartesian ego/subject in favour of a subject-in-process, 
performatively and playfully constituting then living within such consti-
tutiveness whilst interminably unsettling such temporary shelters/residences 
seen now as old metaphors congealed into the appearances of literal truths 
and awaiting dissolution by new, more pragmatically useful ones ('the beat 
goes on...'), ones opening up - as Ermarth construes postmodern potentiality 
- erotic possibilities. These possibilities, not being within the restricted 
economy of linear history, thus effectively draw on the (metaphorical) 
resources of the general economy, the metaphysical excess, it being the 
(counter) penetrat ion of that excess, imagined by Ermarth as feminist 
friendly, rhythmic time, into the male (phallologocentric) productivist 
historical economy, that potentially destabilises it, this explaining, not least, 
the opposition, fear and indeed intense hatred postmodernism often en-
genders amongst modernis ts / 'h is tor ians ' . For Ermarth, postmodern 
rhythmic critiques of modernist linear histories involve a critique of everything 
within the moribund productivist, modernist economy: 
W h a t p o s t m o d e r n i s m s u p p l a n t s , t h e n , is t h e d i s cou r se of r e p r e -
sentat ion characterist ic of the long and productive era that p roduced 
historical thinking.. . Across a broad range of cultural manifestations a 
massive re-examinat ion of Western discourse is underway: its obsession 
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Keith Jenkins 
with power and knowledge , its c o n s t r a i n t of l a n g u a g e to p r imar i ly 
symbolic func t ion , its e thic of winn ing , its ca tegor ica l a n d dual is t ic 
modes of definition; its belief in the quantat ive a n d objective, its l inear 
t ime a n d ind iv idua l sub jec t , a n d above all its c o m m o n m e d i a of 
exchange (time, space, money) which guaran tee certain political and 
social sys tems. . .There a re s o m e w h o f e a r t h a t p o s t m o d e r n i s m , by 
deprecia t ing traditional causalities, po r t ends an e n d to moral i ty itself 
[Ethics] and the fear is no t u n f o u n d e d so fa r as t rad i t iona l moral i ty 
[Ethics] is concerned , (pp. 5-9). 
Unlike so many postmodern historians, then, who, as I have noted 
already, see postmodernism as the beginning of new kinds of history (post-
feminist, post-colonial, etc.) Ermarth isn't interested in interpreting the past 
'rhythmically', rather she sees it as offering a present and a future without 
history 'as we know it' but with a new type of existential temporality. At times 
she is guarded about this, 'my intention' , she writes, 'is not to lobby for 
postmodernism at the expense of history', but to locate 'a major discursive 
shift in our unders tanding of temporali ty and to explore some of its 
implications', (p. 10) Again she writes: 'Whether or not it is meaningful to 
speak of a "new" history remains an open question, a l though the term 
"history" has become so saturated with dialectical value that it may no longer 
be very bouyant...I attend mainly to how postmodern narrative time works, 
what it offers, and what its implicit requirements, gains, and losses may be. 
The work that undermines history also opens new questions and provides 
new opportuni t ies in practice. ' (pp. 14-15). But these (unnecessary) 
qualifications noted - these bits of modernist nostalgia which will resurface 
in her hesitation over accepting the relativising logic of her position — on 
the whole Ermarth is up-beat: 
My thesis in brief is this: pos tmodern narrat ive language u n d e r m i n e s 
historical time and substitutes for it is a new const ruct ion of temporal i ty 
that I call rhythmic time. This rhythmic t ime e i ther radically modif ies 
or abandons altogether the dialectics, the teleology, the t r anscendence 
[the infinite fix] and the putative neutral i ty of historical t ime; a n d it 
r e p l a c e s t h e C a r t e s i a n cogito wi th a d i f f e r e n t sub jec t iv i ty w h o s e 
manifesto might be Cortazar's "I swing, the re fo re I am." (p. 14). 
Against this general thesis, then, Ermarth's text is composed of a series 
of densely elaborated arguments which, ironically, have the overall form of 
an old binary opposition. Ermarth's text is basically structured around the 
attempt to show (a) what is wrong with modern (ist) linear, phallologocentric 
history and (b) what is right with rhythmic time and what are its possibilities. 
Ermarth's accusations against 'history' add up to a catalogue of faults 
that is heavy indeed. Modernis t historical sequenc ing , pa t t e rn ing , 
rationalising and 'accounting for', converts chance into causality and, often, 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
into demanding necessities that justify sometime ends-mean scenarios of a 
totalising, totalitarian kind. Tamers of the contingent and the ludic, their 
(generally) narrative encased accounts function to make us feel at home in 
the existential giveness in the way that 'legends always have, as collective 
myths that confirm various primary "truths" about "the way things are"'. 
Belief in a t e m p o r a l m e d i u m that is 'd is interes tedly na tu ra l ' and 
homogeneous consequently makes possible those mutually informative 
measurements between one historical moment and another that support 
most forms of knowledge so that 'History has become a commanding 
metanarrative, perhaps themetanarrative in Western discourse.' (p. 20) It 
is here, in narrative/metanarrative that the mythical figures of 'historical 
objectivity' and ' true meaning' appear, articulated typically through the 
disinterested narrator/omniscient narrator, 'the Narrator as Nobody', issuing 
forth the illusion of 'History Speaking'. This achievement-of naturalising 
the imaginaries of realistic time and space and of a commonly recognised 
set of continuities and of neutrality - enable 'us' to 'arrive at' our hypotheses, 
fo rmula te our laws, p roduce our expermiments, 'our capital and our 
knowledge', so producing 'an invariant world'. Here, any dissenting voices, 
any excessive interpretive play, are marginalised as pathological: it is only 
the 'accidents' of language, nationality, gender and ideology, that obscure 
'objective t ru th ' and a potentially 'cosmic vision'. These conditions 
notwithstanding, 'if each individual could see all the world...all would see 
the same world...in this, perhaps, temporal realism or history betrays its 
religious origin.' (p. 30). And this tendency to go cosmic, to universalise, 
is political: 
Cons ide red historically the presen t requires a f u t u r e to complete or 
at least improve it, and consequent ly a dialectical m e t h o d for gett ing 
t h e r e jus t as this same presen t has been producal dialectically by the 
pas t . By e m p h a s i s i n g wha t is l inear, deve lopmen ta l , a n d med ia t e , 
historical th ink ing by defini t ion involves t ranscendence of a kind that 
trivialises the specific detail and finite moment . In the mobile culture 
of his tor ic ism every m o m e n t has to be part ial so tha t we can pursue 
d e v e l o p m e n t , so we can seek a comple t ion that, by de f in i t ion and 
paradoxically, we can never actually find but that has emblems along 
the way: m o r e in fo rmat ion , more clarity, more money, more prestige, 
m o r e of the const i tuents of heaven (p. 31). 
And, of course, such destinations, heavily Western and heavily male 
orientated, have just about excluded nine-tenths of the world, a fraction which 
includes most women. Consequently it is this 'fact', the exclusion of this 
fraction from history, that makes Ermarth's discarding of history not only 
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Keith Jenkins 
one to be at ease with but a necessary one : 'Is it possible to exist outside 
history? [Yes] Women know; they have existed there' , (p. 17). 
For those precisely excluded by the Western myth of history, post-
modernism thus ushers in, in its potentially new timings, potentially new 
emancipations. Unlike historical emancipations - always then not now, 
always there not here - postmodern emancipatory imaginaries are 'pre-
sentist'. Thus postmodernism, 
calls ou r at tention not to fictions of origins and ends bu t to the process 
of consciousness itself as it constructs a n d decons t ruc t s such fictions 
and, most importantly, as it enables readers to p e r f o r m those new acts 
of at tent ion required by a writing [and a practice. ..for to be in language 
is to be in 'reality'] that is going nowhere because it has already arrived, 
(p. 86) . 
As opposed to the heavy seriousness of history, then postmodern timings 
are altogether lighter and more bearable by comparison. Accordingly the 
bulk of Ermarth's text is taken up with the general possibilities of residing 
in a postmodern language/practice and, more particularly, of the possibilities 
for women: the benefits seem enormous. 
As I read her, Ermarth's positive arguments start f rom the same sort of 
assumptions that I briefly alluded to in my preparatory remarks; namely, 
that the world (and the world gone by) is neither significant or absurd: it 
just is. We kid ourselves if we think that through our 'scripture, literature, 
picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world', we've 
ever really got it taped, (p. 98). The world, the past, existence, remain 
utterly problematic, and exhileratingly so : 'All our l i terature has no t 
succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve.' 
(p. 97). For it is this sublime otherness which 'springs up before us' in those 
'exciting moments of danger' when the covers are blown. The point here is 
not simply that this destroys habitual practices, the point is now to make 'a 
deliberate action of what has heretofore been automatic, a political agenda', 
(p. 99). Such an agenda will retain its metaphorical status upfront; if we 
can never know literally what the world is 'in itself, then our appropriations 
of it are always metaphorical, rhetorical: the past as if it was history. Yet -
and I return to Ermarth's failure to happily accept any metaphors - not any 
old imaginary will do for her. After clearing the decks, a specific agenda 
which on occasion seems to suggest that it is itself a necessity (given the way 
the world actually is) is outlined. Here is a bit more of the deck clearing: 
The most subversive theory is the o n e that resists the habi t of Western 
knowledge to total ise, to go f o r f i r s t a n d f i n a l cause . In W e s t e r n 
epistemology, for example, the s t ructure of induc t ion and deduct ion. . . 
implies that theory must somehow be a d e q u a t e to prac t ice , o r tha t 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
practice mus t con fo rm to theory. The postmodern idea of theory as a 
guerri l la tactic - if you haven ' t got one make one up - flies in the face of 
t h i s . . . c en tu r i e s -o ld discurs ive hab i t . T h e prac t ice of p o s t m o d e r n 
theory., .requires a fine sense of play and a total willingness to live without 
discursive s leep . . . (p . 99) . 
So, what does playing guerilla with Ermarth theoretically entail; how 
does she carve out of an indifferent time a feminist friendly temporality? 
Put skeletally, I would portray Ermarth's near two-hundred page celebration 
in the following two or three page way. 
Rhythmic time is her favourite trope. As opposed to modernist history/ 
'tellable' time, rhythmic time has no time for transcendence : it has no 
essences, no universals, no immanence; no point. Rather rhythmic time -
parataxis on the move - depends on local arrangements whose 'ampli-
fications' are unpredictable. Rhythmic sequences fork and re-fork, ex-
foliating, proliferating thematic threads which come to arbitrary ends, a 
chaotic coming together of 'details patterned paratactically, which is to say, 
asyntactically, which is to say meaninglessly'; details are unexpectedly 
complex and rich without becoming 'information'. This way of reading the 
world is essential equipment for a postmodern at ease with herself. Ermarth 
elaborates: 
The. . .paratact ic moves forward by moving sideways. Emphasising what 
is parallel and synchronically pat terned ra ther than what is l inear and 
progressive.. .Paratactic narrative [and lives] move...in several directions 
at once . (p. 85). 
Such stylistic self-fashioning (to reside in a language is to reside in 
'reality') offers new discursive practices, multi-level thinking which makes 
available multiple beginnings and endings; which pluralises perspectives, 
mixes and remixes, dubs and redubs those interpretive frames that subjects-
in-process live through so as to make the past - including those causal powers 
which have blindly impressed thus far her behavings, bear her impress: to 
be free of the 'burden of history' is the aim: to be in control of her own 
discourse, to be a happy cronopios (p. 35) (Ermarth's text is dedicated 'to 
cronopios everywhere'), who, refusing histories of infinity and dialectics, face 
with joy f in i te lives. Pos tmodern time is thus c ronopios time : it 's 
performative, it's improvisation, it's individual and collective, it's bricolage, 
it's jazz. Forget the 'conditionings' of history; make the event. 
Drawing on the semiotic dispositions of language (after Kristeva) and 
coupling it with Derrida's notion of the endlessly ludic character of language 
(and thus life...), Ermarth extols the possibilities of that play which, in its 
endless deferments, prevents systems ever becoming closed. It is this sort of 
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Keith Jenkins 
play that ruptures modernist history, dependent as it was/is on ontological 
axioms to keep the system secure and safe from the (feminine) excess: 
Derrida's a rgument has the implications that structure itself is referential 
in t h e sense t h a t i t always d e p e n d s f o r its s tab i l i ty o n r e f e r e n c e 
elsewhere to some justifying absolute that exists 'beyond ' t he s t ruc ture 
a n d e x c e e d s it . It is this referentiality to an E l s e w h e r e - to a ' f u l l 
presence ' . . . that validates the s t ructure and just if ies its e f for t to achieve 
m a x i m u m rigidi ty or... c o m p l e t e n e s s . By r e f e r e n c e to s o m e t h i n g 
outside it... ' t ru th ' or 'natural law' or 'reality' or . . . 'history' - s t ruc ture 
depends on something. . . that limits absolutely its play of d i f ferent ia t ion . 
However , to t h e e x t e n t t h a t a s t r u c t u r e l imi t s p lay. . . i t b e c o m e s 
' ru ined ' . . .no new formulations, n o new exper iments or adventures a re 
possible. By contrast, the incompleteness of living systems guarantees. . . 
play remains open...systems that seek to exc lude play are also seeking 
death, (p. 148). 
Ermarth is seeking life. Utilising the concept of the figure {figura) 
Ermarth hints at a future of play where meanings remain open. Events may 
be congruent but they don't necessarily connect, may be adjacent but not 
related, may be sequenced but are not synthesisable. Things just don ' t add 
up, they are not aggregatable; no dialectical closure is possible. Postmodern 
figures - temporary meanings in a chaos that makes such meanings self-
referentially meaningful, makes uniquivocal truths, meanings and purposes, 
non-permanent: 
This disorientation for its own sake is very unl ike the effect of medieval 
figura, which makes t ru th only temporar i ly inaccess ible . . .Postmodern 
figure makes univocal t ru th pe rmanen t ly inaccessible. O n the ' o t h e r 
side' of a medievel f igure is a clarifiable s t ructure and a stable, cosmic 
meaning . On the 'o ther side' of pos tmode rn f igures is the marvellous 
mystery consisting of the fact that these f igures are the tangible world, 
and that the tangible word is discourse, is l anguage , is f igure . . .There 
are n o messages...only messengers , (p. 184). 
It is this endless play of a 'meaningful meaninglessness' — being on the 
edge of the abyss but not regarding this as abysmal - that arouses eroticism. 
Not, Ermarth hastens to add, eroticism in the 'narrow, shabby sense', but 
in the sense of having the capacity to surprise - forever. This is subversive. 
In a productive culture which lives in the linear, the purposeful, then play 
conjures up notions of waste : of wasting time, squandering, of time mis-
spent. Digressive, paratactic play defying dialetics, however, confers for 
Ermarth 'an exquisite pleasure by rel ieving the mind of its a l ready 
recognisable...meanings...To restore to language its electricity...its power to 
shock, to derail it from the track of convential formulas', is to be postmodern. 
This isn't easy. It involves a capability for the kinds of play 'not currently 
224 
Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
primary values of the cultural formation in which we presently operate our 
universities, watch our markets, and pursue our careers.' But it can be done: 
'Once we have given up antidotes to finitude - Kantian categories and vodka 
- w e face finitude and its opportunities.' (p. 193). 
This challenge to history, to the closure of systems, to live a life that is 
alive rather than a living death, this is what makes rhythmic, ludic time, the 
future Ermarth wants : for this you can forget history and (I think) systems 
perse - including Ethical ones: 
This maneuver of imagination in play in language [in a life] is one 
that does without history, without a millenary kingdom, without Kantian 
categories or vodka, without Marx, Freud, or 'all the religions dreamt 
up by man'...In their place this postmodern writing [living] offers its 
precision, its erotic (chance) conjunctions, its rhythmic series : the 
coloured bits or elements of kaleidoscopic arrangements, and 
whatever patterns emerge. These are the materials for the anthematic 
figure, a mandala, a polychromous rose design, a rhythmic, momentary, 
fleeting, life-affirming arrangement. Trying to give these arrangement 
fixity, or to control this rhythm in advance, would be like trying to 
redirect the arrow after it has left the bow. (p. 210). 
This essaying of existential-type, postmodern possibilities after the end 
of history seems exhilarating; if nothing else Ermarth's optimism displaces 
those more common, mournful musings on the loss of one of the West's most 
potent, organising mythologisations - history - articulated not least by those 
who have most to lose. It may therefore appear churlish to now level against 
Ermarth's 'visions' some concluding criticisms, thereby remaining trapped 
within the ritualistic (modernist) convention of the expositor turning critic 
as he or she - having lived parasitically off the text - has the 'correcting' last 
word. But I ' intend' my criticisms to be constructive. It seems to me that 
E rmar th succeeds in he r cr i t ique of moderni ty 's way of organis ing 
temporality - linear history - such that it is indeed possible to conceive of a 
life without it; to live outside that history and within a new rhymic temporality 
where 'history as we have known it' has no more relevance; is passe. This 
signals the end of history as modernists have conceptualised the past and 
thought they had 'known it'. But - and this is my 'but' - I think that it is also 
possible to live outside of Ethics (Ethical systems) and in the type of morality 
suggested by Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Rorty, Fish et al\ namely, that 
of the 'undecidibility of the decision', the force of which suggests the 
acceptance of a pragmatic, sophist-type relativism. For I think that Ermarth, 
despite the drift of her argument, draws back from this; in the end her notion 
of rhythmic time has the ring of truth about it. 
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Keith Jenkins 
At various points throughout her text, then, Ermarth draws back from 
embracing the relativism which I think her arguments propel her towards. 
Thus, for example, whilst insisting that there is nothing outside of language 
(the text, simulacra) such that 'nothing exceeds its practices or its play, 
nothing escapes its limitations, nothing acts as a cosmic or natural "ground" 
andjustification' including, obviously, the linguistically constructed concept 
of time (including, obviously, rhythmic temporality) this fact, she adds, this 
recognition,' is quite far removed from any relativist catastrophe', (p. 140) 
Again, in relation to the historicised past, whilst the idea that the past is 
invented 'threatens the moral universe with total solipsism', the reader/writer 
of the past, no more than the reader/writer of any text, cannot do what h e / 
she likes with it; in fact, its existence demands a 'disciplined' reading/writing 
because it - texts and the past as a text - 'requires new acts of attention. ' 
(pp. 71-2) Postmodernism, whatever else it is, she warns, is not some sort 
of cultural and moral bonfire. 
Now, one of the reasons why Ermarth seems to be saying these things 
is something which suggest that she is still within the grip of the Western 
Tradition where relativism is seen - and this goes back to my comments at 
the start of this paper - not as the sophist-like solution to the problems of 
living in an indifferent world, but as a problem still to be solved (hence her 
comment, above, wherein relativism is seen not as a happy solution but 
rather as a 'catastrophe'). What Ermarth seems to be seeking is a nice 
consensus around the erotic possibilities of postmodernism (basically one 
where everyone imagines reality as she does) for without 'consensus available 
as a basis for conducting affairs, what is there but force?' (p. 61). This is a 
fear which has standing behind it that typical 'modernis t ' objection to 
postmodern relativism; namely, that such a relativism leaves us helpless 
before another holocaust: 
Practically speaking, the debates about pos tmodern i sm come down to 
discussion about what, if anything, provides a reality pr inciple for any 
construct. Pos tmodern writers and theorists do no t deny the existence 
of the material world...nor, so far as I know, does anyone familiar with 
the issue seriously deny the exclusiveness of discursive l anguages to 
which we necessarily resort in o rder to say anything ' about ' e i ther the 
m a t e r i a l or t he discursive wor lds - s t a t e m e n t s t h a t inev i t ab ly a r e 
in te rpre ta t ions and, consequently, a p re - in t e rp re t a t ion of an apr ior i 
f o r m u l a t i o n . But if d i scurs ive r u l e s p r o v i d e u n t r a n s c e n d a b l e 
cons t ra in t s , what cons t ra ins the discurs ive rules? T h e q u e s t i o n is 
haun ted by the specters of holocausts which, in various nat ional forms, 
have already demonstra ted what appears to be no restraint . If anyth ing 
can be jus t i f i ed in some N a m e , is t h e r e n o way to c h o o s e b e t w e e n 
justifications? If every interpreta t ion, every system, every set of laws is 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
a c losed , i n e r t i a l system a n d if t h e r e is n o l onge r validity f o r any 
privileged posi t ion. . .how can a person or polis choose between.. . . this 
or that course except by chance? (p. 59). 
Well, chance may, Ermarth allows, have much to do with it, and she 
will go on to consider surrealist pronouncements in favour of 'objective 
chance' (basically choosing between things once such things have been put 
'under a description'), but, leaving that aside in this paper (as Ermarth herself 
does at this point in her text) I want to concentrate, as she does, as to whether 
there are any general grounds for constraint. Here, Ermarth reviews and 
rejects 'answers' given by, variously, Rorty, Jameson, Lyotard, Katherine 
Hayes and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, the reason for their failure seeming 
to lie in the fact that they don' t comprehend the way postmodernism has 
changed our understanding of 'reality'; like the concept of history, 'reality' 
doesn't mean what it used to. Classically, explains Ermarth, reality implied 
something stable and self-identical, but 'physical reality' (which non-idealist 
postmodernists do not doubt) has been redescribed in postmodern idioms 
by people like Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, whose treatment of reality 
as 'chaos as a phase of order ' means 'reality' is in a 'constant process of 
fundamental redefinition, so that the term "fundamental" does not even 
really apply.' (p. 62) Consequently, to give up on 'classical' reality does 
not mean we give up on postmodern 'chaotic' notions of reality as things 
which actually constrain us : 
T h e fears of mora l catas t rophe that postmodernism raises in some are 
usual ly pos i t ed o n classical assumpt ions . . . [But ] n o b o d y denies the 
p r e s e n c e of c o n d i t i o n s e x t e r n a l to o u r descr ip t ive a n d l inguis t ic 
systems, n o b o d y h o p e s fo r comple te solipsism of the kind that some 
ascribe, completely wrongheadedly, to postmodernism and that would 
in any case only be possible in a classical system...To give u p the 'reality' 
or 'realit ies ' tha t constrain behaviour and inscribe value does not mean 
anarch ic [sic] relativism in which 'everything is pe rmi t ted ' and b ru te 
power ru les . . .The fa i lu re of a totalising absolute like historical t ime 
may raise the fear [sic] that 'everything is permit ted ' but . . . there is no 
such th ing [as that] , (p. 62). 
Rather, the chaos theory and the 'dissipative structures' described by 
Prigogine and Stengers introduce us to a 'new concept of matter' that suggest 
a 'new conception of order that is independent of the closures and finalities 
of classical dynamics and that permit us to see how "nonequilibrium brings 
order out of chaos".' (p. 63) Thus, for example, the element of chance in a 
stochastic (probabilistic) process - where an 'end' becomes the possibility 
of a new 'beginning' which is not controlled in the classical sense by that 
' end ' - opens up new sources of life, new rhythms of continuance in ever-
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Keith Jenkins 
new states and modes: 'The more determinist laws appear limited, the more 
open the universe is to fluctuation and innovation.' (p. 63). Without wanting, 
as Ermarth puts it, to draw 'facile political analogies' from Prigogine and 
Stenger, this is what she does indeed go on to draw. In a probabalistic 
process, she argues, things must be considered in the context of the moment 
when individual behaviour can be decisive or ineffectual but not predictable: 
Even small f luctuations may grow and change the overall s t ructure . As 
a resul t individual activity is no t d o o m e d to ins igni f icance . O n the 
o ther hand, this is also a threat [sic] since in our universe the security 
of stable, p e r m a n e n t rules seems g o n e forever. W h a t social ( tha t is, 
moral) implications this may have remains to be seen, bu t it is n o t clear 
that there is any greater threat of moral catastrophe [sic] in probabalistic 
social descriptions than has already b e e n shown in logocent r ic ones , 
(p. 65). 
Postmodernism thus acknowledges not single but multiple constraints; 
postmodern time and space are warped and finite by 'the play of chance 
and necessity in the processes of life themselves..."Reality"...never stays "the 
same"; it is not inert but interactive...This awareness of finitude, of limit, is 
the basis of an entirely new aesthetic and provides the main restraint on 
construction that postmodernism respects', (pp. 65-6). 
Now, this seems to me to be a most peculiar argument. One can see 
why Ermarth is running it, of course, probabalistic/chaos theory seems to 
be another way of talking about rhythmic time. But whilst this certainly 
undercuts 'classical' moral foundations (ie the 'chance' to draw a stable ought 
from a stable is) we Rorties and Lyotards have given up on trying to draw 
any entailed ought from any is, stable or unstable. I mean, let us say the 
'actual' physical world is like Ermarth's (moral) rhythmic description of it 
apres Prigogine and Stenger. And say everyone accepts this : liberals, 
marxists, feminists, neo-nazis; everyone. What difference would it make? 
Is a political, constrained consensus between Ermarth and neo-nazis going 
to be arrived at because the way an (indifferent) world is in terms of physics? 
This seems unlikely, not least because, irrespective of physics, their moral 
differences remain incommensurable simply because they're 'moral' all the 
way down. Whilst views on the physical world may by chance affect politics 
it is difficult to see how they can determine them in any sort of is - ought way 
that involves entailment: Prigogine and Stengers are red herrings in this 
respect. 
There is another point here too with regard to closure. For it looks as 
if Ermarth, in following Prigogine and Stengers, is saying that chaos theory/ 
rhythmic time are somehow closer to the way 'reality' actually is than other 
metaphoric 'correspondences' are. But surely she can ' t be saying that. 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
Because if she is, her notion of rhythmic time as being nearer to actuality 
and therefore the best (true) basis for a life better than old modernist, 
historical life, is just as much a closure, albeit of a different substantive 
'content ' , as the historical was. I mean, what if we don' t want to embrace 
rhythmic time even if it can be shown to be nearer to actuality, to 'nature'; 
what if we don ' t want to embrace a 'naturalistic fallacy' but want to retain 
our freedom to choose; to choose, say, a newly constructed, emancipatory 
linearity? If Ermarth is being faithful to her own creative theorising, then 
presumably she ought not to care if anybody chooses to live non-rhythmically 
in non feminist-friendly ways. Or is she saying that we ought to be rhythmic 
because l inear t ime is somehow intrinsically repressive, intrinsically 
masculine; that rhythmic time is intrinsically feminist friendly, and that these 
connections cannot be reversed; that rhythmic time just cannot be repressive 
in its experimentat ions, as if from the activity of postmodern 'play' we 
couldn't all end up temporarily playing neo-nazi? But what could stop this? 
Something intrinsic to 'play'? It would seem that here Ermarth is simply 
substituting one closure (linear history) with another (rhythmic time) which 
we ought to follow because it is nearer actuality and thus, presumably, nearer 
to actualising emancipation. 
To be sure, Ermarth says she isn't doing this. As she writes at the end 
of her text (repeating earlier, similar disclaimers), the 'multilevel play 
described in this book belongs to an effort to renew social codes by restoring 
powers that have been repressed...not... to enforce another repression', (p. 
212). But I think that she can only say this because she ¿noziAiwhat is best for 
us and knows we won't necessarily feel it as repression. Thus, for instance, 
seeing human beings as subjects-in-process just is a better way of seeing them 
as o p p o s e d to see ing them in terms of the Cartesian cogito; thus, 
postmodernism and feminism have an affinity because of theirjoint insistence 
that the chief political problems (of language...to have residence in a 
language is to have residence in 'reality') can 'only [sic] be solved by writing 
a new language, one uncontaminated by the old, radioactive terms, so that 
one thing 'seems certain: no effort to come to terms with social agendas will 
succeed without the recognition that history itself is a representational 
construction of the first order, and that new social construction cannot [sic] 
take place until history is denaturalised' , (p. 56). These seem fairly 
certaintist, non-relativistic remarks to me, thus raising the question of how 
reflexive Ermarth has been about the status of the closures she is suggesting 
for others; I mean, for a linearist to be trapped in rhythmic time could be 
a nightmare. But maybe Ermarth has thought of that; she admits a revision 
of existing hegomonic arrangements of the type she is suggesting may hurt. 
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Keith Jenkins 
So alright. But arguably what isn't alright is where she seems to forget that 
such new arrangements are nothing more than her own personal preferences, 
ungroundable in either chaos theory or ethics in any way whatsoever. 
The reason for me saying this is because I think that this sort of personal 
relativism is the only position postmodernism makes available. This way of 
putt ing things may make it look as if I 'm commit t ing a 'per format ive 
contradiction' (of saying that you must absolutely believe me when I say that 
the only truth is relativism which then appears to be an absolute truth, etc.) 
but I think this old 'contradiction' is not a contradiction at all but a paradox 
and paradoxes, unlike contradictions, can be resolved. This particular one 
as of follows. 
In the restricted, modernist economy, it seemed that symbolic value 
was based on use value, that there really were real intrinsic needs, capacities, 
meanings and so on, and these stabilized symbolic exchange mechanisms. 
In the postmodern (restricted) economy, however, having shed every last 
notion of intrinsic value (use value) exchange takes place at the symbolic 
level only - at the level of the simulacra. Thus, unrestricted by use/intrinsic 
value, any symbolic value can be exchanged with any other, in effect, 
'anything goes'. Any-thing can be exchanged with any-thing else because 
things themselves (and certainly 'things - in - themselves') quite 'literally' 
don't enter into it; any equivalence willl do. So, for example, you can, if 
you like, exchange love and justice for Ermarthian feminism (make them 
equivalent) or, staying with her allusion to the holocoust, exchange love and 
justice for it ( make them equivalent). Again, rhythmic time is equivalent 
to a type of liberation for Ermarth which for a non-Ermarthian might be 
equivalent to, as she puts it, a catastrophe. So which is it? Well, 'it' isnt 
either; 'it' isn't anything until it is given avalué, and any value can be given 
to anything. We may wish that this was not the case, but it seems to me that 
it is. 
From my point of view, then, I think it could be said that the transcendent 
has taken its revenge on Ermarth. On the one hand it has allowed her to 
have her way with history - who knows or cares what it means any more -
letting her concentrate on organising the future in desirable, rhythmic forms. 
But, on the other hand, Ermarth seems to have been seduced into thinking 
that there could be something in rhythmic time that isn't just convenient for 
her own political desires but is actually closer to the way the world actually 
is, thus heading off relativism. But the idea 'behind' the notion of simulacra 
that we can know the gift of the world, etc., beyond endlessly interpretable 
mediations, is a radical illusion. A simulacra is not something which conceals 
the truth, it is the most plausible truth we have. Indeed, it is this ' t ruth ' 
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Living in Time But Outside History, Living in Morality But Outside Ethics... 
which hides die fact that there is no truth, so that in that sense we can say, 
paradoxically, that the simulacra is 'true'. In The Perfect Crime"1, Baudrillard 
argues that whereas the old philosophical question used to be, 'why is there 
something rather that nothing?', the postmodern question is, 'why is there 
nothing rather than something?' The acceptance of the latter formulation 
suggests to Baudril lard (and to me) that if we are bound only to the 
in te rminab ly uns tab le equivalencies of signs and appearances self-
reverentially spinning around themselves (Baudrillards 'orbital culture') then 
relative value runs - forever. Yet, this is not a problem. For maybe we can 
relax about this and agree, with Wittgenstein, that the fact that there has 
never been the sorts of foundations we once thought there were (but that 
we humans have still created moral discourses) means that we never needed 
such foundat ions in the first place, nor will we, so that the very idea of 
foundationalism is 'one well lost'. Besides, that absolutist conceit has caused 
too many problems - not least those of the certaintist holocaust, that supreme 
modernist event.8 For as Richard Rorty has pointed out: 
Ant i -pragmat i s t s [ and an t i -pos tmodern is t s a n d anti-relativists] foo l 
themselves w h e n they th ink that by insist ing. . . that mora l t ru ths a re 
'objective' - are t rue i n d é p e n d a n t of h u m a n needs, interests, history -
they have provided us with weapons against the bad guys. For the fascists 
can, a n d o f t e n do , reply tha t they entirely agree tha t mora l t ru th is 
objective, e ternal and universal... and fascist...Dewey m a d e much of a 
fact that tradit ional not ions of 'objectivity' and 'universality' were useful 
to the bad guys, and he had a point .9 
This is not to say, Rorty adds, that this inability to answer 'the bad guys', 
is the result of pragmatism or relativism being wicked or inadequate theories, 
but that philosophy is just not the right weapon to reach for when trying to 
resolve, when all discursive attemps have failed, such moral and political 
differences. Thus, the inevitability of moral 'philosophy of the decision' 
relativism needn' t be any more of a problem for us that is was for the sophists, 
and it shouldn't be one for Ermarth. But I think it is. Yet, though arguably 
'still in the grip of the tradition', Ermarth's text is nevertheless one which 
enables us to imagine the possibility of living our lives not only outside history 
and in time, but outside ethics and in morality in quite self-conscious ways. 
For in fact, if only we had knoiun it, this is the ivay lue have always had to live our 
7 J. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, Verso, London 1996, p. 2. 
8 On the holocaust as a modernist event, and the problem of its representation see, for 
example, Hayden White's, 'The Modernist Event', in V. Sobchack (ed.), ThePersistance 
of History, Routledge, London 1996, pp. 17-38. 
9 R. Rorty, 'Just One More Species Doing Its Best', London Review of Books, vol. 13, no. 
14, 25, July, 1991, pp. 3 - 7, p. 6. 
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Keith Jenkins 
lives. In this respect - and it is in this respect that postmodern reflexivity is 
so useful - we might just as well relax and say, with Baudrillard: '"Nothing" 
hasn't changed.' 
232