This document provides an overview of postmodernism and its approach to history, with a focus on the philosopher Keith Jenkins. It defines postmodernity as the condition that exists after modernity, characterized by a post-industrial world with emerging nation-states and service economies. Postmodernism is defined as a skeptical philosophy that rejects universal truths and views knowledge as localized and unstable. Postmodernists were critical of the notion of objective history, seeing it as a reconstruction shaped by those in power. Keith Jenkins takes this further, arguing that historians invent as much as they find facts, and construct history from an ideological position in the present rather than objectively representing the past as it was.

1. Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan
Postmodernism and History
A Brief Essay
with a study in Keith Jenkins and his approach to history
submitted by:
Rishiraj Bhowmick
VBU ID - 02232431904
M.Phil. History
Year 1, Semester 1
Professor Sudhi Mandloi
Paper - 1
Historical Method and Research Methodology
Dated: -

2. Introduction.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other
philosophers – William James, “Remarks at a Peace Banquet”, 1904.
The aforementioned aphorism which might seem nothing more than a statement made in a
dinner party amongst guests actually holds a certain truth to it, especially regarding the case of
the world-wide ideological phenomenon – Postmodernism.
A movement which emerged in the late 20th
century as more of a critical response to the
contemporary existing socio-politico-economic-cultural values, beliefs and knowledge had its
roots traced back as early as in 1946 by Arnold Toynbee1
where he describes post-modernism
not as the ideological statement as it stands today but more as a period; the last quarter of the
19th
century which saw some worldwide changes taking place in terms of labor, intellectual
stands, industrial necessities etc. It wasn’t until the 1970’s when the term took upon the mantle
of a theoretical criticism of the so-called old world by the likes of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault
and so forth.
But before we delve more into the idea of postmodernism, here we should take a slight detour
and define the term within its content and context and clarify certain things. We will look at
two terms, postmodernity and postmodernism. While both are somewhat identical and tempts
one to use them interchangeably, they are quite different from each other.
Defining Postmodernity and Postmodernism
While both the terms primarily deal with the idea of ‘after’ modern, we have to remember that
the concept of these terms are not necessarily entailed together, unless it has intentionally done
so. Bran Nicol has argued that “theorists have tended to portray modernity (i.e. from early to
mid- twentieth century) as increasingly industrialized, mechanized, urban and bureaucratic
while postmodernity is the era of ‘space age’, of consumerism, late capitalism and most
1
Toynbee, Arnold, “A Study of History, Vol. 1”, Oxford University Press, London, 1945, p.171

3. recently, the dominance of the virtual and the digital”.2
So far we can agree to this statement,
postmodernity is an era defined as an era of post industrialism and a post-colonial world. This
is the world where we do not see empires and factories, but a segmented world with emerging
nation states, “challenged as it is by both regionalism and transnational organizations”3
and
industries/factories being replaced with service-based economies. It surmounts to the fact that
postmodernity is a condition of life that came to be after the ‘modern’ era which was defined
by the western progressive era, the industrial revolution and the era of enlightenment and if it
is looked at from a philosophical point of view, postmodernity is the condition that exists after
modernity ends. Here we can divide the human history in 3 broad parts to understand this
distinction more clearly– the pre-modern era, the modern era and the post-modern era.
The first one generally is where religion and faith guides the human condition, there are
empires formed, conquered and expanded, society and culture follows a rigorous set belief and
tradition which although might not have a scientific or a rational backing but nonetheless will
be revered as law. Then we see the coming of the ‘Modern’ period, the age of reason; this is
the age when we see the formations of Questions and a strive in the society to answer them.
Science and rationality challenged the ancient structures of arbitrary machinations of the old
days and the endeavor to bring the world together (with or without an ulterior motive is a
different debate) brought about the industrial revolution. Post-modernity is where these two
former structures are fading out and are replaced with even newer sense of the socio-political
and economic structures. As David Harvey argues, “I broadly accept the view that the long
postwar boom, from 1945 to 1973, was built upon a certain set of labour control practices,
technological mixes, consumption habits, and configurations of political-economic power, and
that this configuration can reasonably be called Fordist-Keynesian…But the contrasts between
present political-economic practices and those of the postwar boom period are sufficiently
strong to make the hypothesis of a shift from Fordism to what might be called a 'flexible' regime
of accumulation a telling way to characterize recent history”4
.
2
Nicol, Bran, “Introduction – Postmodernity and Postmodernism”, in “The Cambridge Introduction to
Postmodern Fiction”, Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, 2009, p. 2
3
Fokkema, Douwe, “Postmodernism and postmodernity: What do these terms mean and why are they
successful?”, European Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 25-33 (1998), p. 1-2.
4
Harvey, David, “Ch – 7, Introduction” in “Part – II - The Political – Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth
Century Capitalism”, of “The Condition of Postmodernity – An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change”,
Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992, p. 124.

4. Now that we have understood the characteristic of Post-modernity as a lifestyle condition, we
can return to the idea of postmodernism, which will require a good amount of deliberation.
Bran Nicol has suggested that “Postmodernism is a notoriously slippery and indefinable term”5
,
which somehow stands to reason. Apart from being indefinable, postmodernism has oft been
ill-defined, misrepresented, and looked down upon as a philosophical theory, and there are
good reasons for that, which is a subject for later discussions; for now, we must make an
attempt to define and explain it.
Christopher Butler suggests that “A great deal of postmodernist theory depends on the
maintenance of a sceptical attitude”.6
This scepticism is targeted towards the pre-existing
notions and systems which were developed during the periods of Enlightenment and
Industrialization, Romanticism, Modernity etc. The binaries which were the products of
modernity or modernism regarding truth, knowledge, grand systems were attacked and
criticised. Terms like rationalism, capitalism, scientism, objectivism and so forth came under
extreme scrutiny. Fredric Jameson argues that, “…but the postmodern looks for breaks, for
events rather than new worlds, for the tell-tale instant after which it is no longer the same; for
the "When-it-all-changed”, or, better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the
representation of things and of the way they change…Postmodernism is
what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a
more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable
"second nature”.7
In its most simple and rawest form of definitions, postmodernism is a set of ideas which
emphasizes on instability and ‘localization’ of any form of knowledge. That the term
‘knowledge’ itself is a very dubious one, forms the very foundation of postmodern theory.
Theorists of postmodernism argue that knowledge cannot be seen in a universal, generalized
sense, the world doesn’t follow a mere straight answer to everything, it is inherently very
unstable in terms of being either certain or absolute. One of the most important theses regarding
postmodernism was put forward by Jean Francois Lyotard who, writing against the modern
absolutes and truths, suggested that “I define postmodern as incredulity toward
5
Nicol, Bran, Op. Cit., p.1.
6
Butler, Christopher,” Chapter 2 – New Ways of Seeing the World”, in “Postmodernism: A Very Short
Introduction”, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, p. 13.
7
Jameson, Fredric, “Introduction”, in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, Duke
University Press, Durham, 1991, p. ix.

5. metanarratives”8
; there is a simple form to understand this statement – a person, a ‘knower’
uses facts, language, experience, rationality etc. to build his or her ‘reality’. For this individual,
according to the enlightenment concepts and notion, the knowledge acquired by these precepts
is the representation of reality. Postmodernists challenge this whole concept – they argue that
all these precepts, these building blocks of an individual that are supposed to bring about an
absolute knowledge are unstable. As a person progresses, their beliefs, values, feelings, etc.
changes, some of it might even disappear over time. If the precepts are unstable, it stands to
reason that the acquired knowledge too will be unstable, thus falls the idea of absolutism.
Knowledge thus becomes localized, fragmented and far off from any certain notion – as
humans, knowledge and truth are fundamentally subjective.
History and Postmodernism – A Study in Keith Jenkins and his Approach to History
Postmodernists, along with other philosophical investigations, looked at history with a very
similar attitude – they did not trust it as an academic endeavour. For them, it was a product of
modernity and held their grounds on history’s objectivity as an illusion. Speaking of the
postmodernist philosophies at its initial stage, Steven Connor writes “Centrist or absolutist
notions of the state, nourished by the idea of the uniform movement of history towards a single
outcome, were beginning to weaken. It was no longer clear who had the authority to speak on
behalf of history”9
. The attack (for the lack of a better word) on history wasn’t on the academia
itself but on way how history was being written. We are aware of the positivist approach
towards history which put much weight on making the discipline as close to being scientifically
sound as possible, and that a positivist history is closer to being true and objective, we have the
Rankean model of history which suggests that that every period of history is unique and must
be understood in its own context and that the historian had to understand a period on its own
terms and seek to find only the general ideas which animated every period of history.
Postmodernists reject these notions on various grounds, most prominent one being that they
outrightly rejected the supposed progressive nature of history. There is a consensus amongst
this school of thought that the present if much more important than the past. Also, the axiom
that the idea of reality is a frail one dictates their stand on history itself! They are of the view
8
Lyotard, Jean Francois, “Introduction”, in “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Trans. by
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p.xxiv.
9
Connor, Steven ed.,” Introduction” in “The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism”, Cambridge University
Press, New York, 2004, p.2-3.

6. that since history is a reconstruction of the historians, their choice of facts and sources are the
variables which are arbitrarily chosen, it makes history itself a mere reconstruction of the past
by the said historians and should not blindly relied upon.
Regarding history, perhaps the greatest proponent in the postmodern philosophy is Michel
Foucault, who, although rejected to be labeled by any school of thought, has served as one of
the postmodern giants. He argues that “…in the disciplines that we call the history of ideas, the
history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of thought, and the history of literature
(we can ignore their specificity for the moment), in those disciplines which, despite their
names, evade very largely the work and methods of the historian, attention has been turned, on
the contrary, away from vast unities like `periods' or ` centuries' to the phenomena of rupture,
of discontinuity. Beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogeneous
manifestations of a single mind or of a collective mentality, beneath the stubborn development
of a science striving to exist and to reach completion at the very outset, beneath the persistence
of a particular genre, form, discipline, or theoretical activity, one is now trying to detect the
incidence of interruptions”10
. Foucault looks at history not as a series of events after events,
but more as a disjointed, ruptured frame of an uneven progression and it is within these ruptures
or discontinuities where one should be looking for a historical narrative and not in the ones
manufactured by professional historians. His argument stands to reason because of another
adage of his where he suggests the relation between power and knowledge – his argument is
that people who are powerful define what knowledge is. Hence it will not go amiss if we
understand this in the following way – if powerful people manufacture knowledge and history
as a discipline is a form of knowledge, then by logic, history is defined and shaped by those
who are in power and in that case, it is nothing more than a set of imposed discourse. The whole
idea of universalization of history is discarded by those of Foucault and his peers of his time.
Now that we have a general working idea of how postmodern thinkers look at history, we can
shift our gaze towards a proper historian (for Foucault wasn’t one) with a postmodern mindset
– Keith Jenkins.
If one were to put it simply, at the core of it, Jenkins’ works are based around epistemological
scepticism, which suggests that claiming or even gathering ‘knowledge’ about anything is nigh
impossible, as we have seen above. Any sort of claim towards having a concrete knowledge
10
Foucault, Michel, “Part 1 – Introduction”, in “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith,
Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p. 5.

7. are lies. Jenkins takes this maxim and adds it to the discipline of history. He was vehemently
against the coming to history through a specific way of collecting knowledge. Jenkins argue
that “…History is arguably a verbal artefact, a narrative prose discourse of which…the content
is as much invented as found, and which is constructed by present-minded, ideologically
positioned workers” 11
. He further says that “…That past, appropriated by historians, is never
the past itself, but a past evidenced by its remaining and accessible traces and transformed into
historiography through a series of theoretically and methodologically disparate procedures”12
.
Here is where we can see Jenkins’ model of postmodern history writing. For him, historians
are nothing more than negotiators of truth, someone who happen to write history with a more
self-centred agenda. There is a paradigm shift with Jenkins and his approach to history. Till
now, history’s sole concern was the subject it talked about – from kings and queens and dates
and events till a more nuanced historiography that changed with demands and trends of time
which included political, social and other histories. Jenkins was more interested in the author
of history, who although peddled truth and knowledge of the past, has always written history
from his or her point of view, a safe vantage point.
We can argue this statement again in a simpler way, to avoid unnecessary convolution and
incomprehensible jargons – a historian is a person, a person with a set of values, ideals, beliefs
and they come with their own epistemological presuppositions, as they go on and gather their
knowledge. These historians (or any historian for that matter and Jenkins himself is not out of
these labels), have used languages at their disposal as they chose to, held discourses with other
historians. All of these, they inevitably shape the history being written for the audience in the
society, who by the way have all the traits of their own, which in turn leads to a different
interpretation of the text produced. Hence, we can safely argue that what Jenkins is trying to
say is that ultimately, history isn’t just an academic work of the past, it cannot be so! Writing
history is more of an ideological act as perpetrated by the author.
Further, there’s another angle to Jenkins’ approach which is sort of an extension of a
Foucauldian thought – the dynamics of power and knowledge, which we have briefly discussed
above. Jenkins argue, much like Foucault, that the idea of history is that its interpretation and
writing of it per say, is always framed by those who are in power. That the system of knowledge
and discourse are shaped by power relations which shifts over time creating an episteme of
11
Jenkins, Keith, “Chapter 5 - Section Four : Of Loose Ends” in “On Hayden White”, of, “On ‘What is History?’
From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White”, Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005, p. 181.
12
Ibid.

8. social truth. He says – “historical construction can be seen as taking place entirely in the
present, historians et al. organizing and figuring this textual referent not as it was but as it is,
such that the cogency of historical work can be admitted without the past per se ever entering
into it—except rhetorically. In this way histories are fabricated without ‘real’ foundations
beyond the textual, and in this way, one learns to always ask of such discursive and ideological
regimes that hold in their orderings assuasive intentions—cui bono—in whose interests?”13
Even fundamentally, his scepticism seems to have attacked the very necessity of history! Like
many other postmodern thinkers, his concern wasn’t the past but the present and by and the
future as shaped by the present. He is of the view that – “The past contains nothing of intrinsic
value, nothing we have to be loyal to, no facts we have to find, no truths we have to respect,
no problems we have to solve, no projects we have to complete; it is we who decide these
things knowing – and if we know anything we know this – that there are no grounds on which
we can ever get such decisions right”.14
Now, it shouldn’t be registered as a crusade against
history but more to the point as how history is being written, how the way of thinking and
writing this justified without a second thought and perhaps this insufficiency will one day lead
to, in his own terms, “the end of history”15
, and if unchecked, the pallbearers of truth will lead
to an insurmountable philosophical and ideological abuse in the name of history, truth and
knowledge; however, it will be a grave mistake to suggest that doing away with history as he
says, is equal to abandoning the ethical stands of a historian, which is not to look at history that
stems from their epistemological commitment to identify and justify the meaning of reality
from the sources and evidences of the ‘past’ to write a history – that, for Jenkins, remains
incompetent at the core. What he ultimately is trying to project is a mindset, a focus towards
what he calls “emancipatory history”.
Conclusion
Summarizing postmodernism and Jenkins’ ideological stand in one single essay would be
equivalent to adding a bucket of water to the sea – it remains inconsequential at best, and the
least of it, it seems like a childish insolence, and yet one fails to avoid such naivete; for the
sake of the paper here it must be done.
13
Ibid.
14
Jenkins, Keith, “Opening Times”, in “Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline”, Taylor and
Francis e-Library, 2005, p.29
15
Jenkins, Keith, “The End of History”, The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 20, Autumn 2002, p. 46-48.

9. We can safely argue Jenkins’ approach to history in the following words –
Jenkins argues that the conformist or rather conventional academic history which enjoys the
benefits of some sort of effective epistemologies which enables it to determine from historical
facts some sort of historical truth, which can be conveyed to the mass of onlookers by way of
historical narrative – is fundamentally flawed. Even the most obligatory understanding of
conventional historical method, when properly analysed in a postmodern way, will show that
the historian, regardless how well trained he is, can never really know the past, as the gap
between the past and history is an ontological one, one that in the very nature of things cannot
be bridged. Further it is impossible for the historian to attain to any methodological objectivity,
free from prejudice and bias due to the conditional human traits and in this case, skill of
historians will fail them. Conventional history, despite all its astonishing pretences, is basically
just a questioned discourse, a terrain where people, classes and groups construct essentially
their own interpretations of an imagined past to suit themselves. Any contemporary agreement
can only be arrived at when one dominant voice or set of voices silences others, either by means
of overt power or covert incorporation. History, in Jenkins’s view, is not an epistemology but
an aesthetic literary genre, incapable of making claims about the truth. Debates about history
are nothing more than deliberations about meaning, and meaning is no more necessitated by
facts then values are by discourse.
I think it will be safe to look at the introductory quote used in this paper one more time, that
we can rely on philosopher to contradict other philosophers. In this this case, the
postmodernists have contradicted the previous ones and Jenkins have contradicted history as a
philosophy or otherwise.
Bibliography:
 Butler, Christopher, “Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction”, Oxford University
Press, New York, 2002.
 Connor, Steven ed., “The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism”, Cambridge
University Press, New York, 2004.
 Fokkema, Douwe, “Postmodernism and postmodernity: What do these terms mean and
why are they successful?”, European Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 25-33 (1998), p. 1-2.

10.  Foucault, Michel, “Part 1 – Introduction”, in “The Archaeology of Knowledge”, trans.
by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972.
 Harvey, David, “The Condition of Postmodernity – An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change”, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, Massachusetts,1992.
 Jameson, Fredric, “Introduction”, in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism”, Duke University Press, Durham, 1991.
 Jenkins, Keith, “On ‘What is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White”,
Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.
 Jenkins, Keith, “Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline”, Taylor and
Francis e-Library, 2005.
 Jenkins, Keith, “The End of History”, The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 20, Autumn
2002, p. 46-48.
 Lyotard, Jean Francois, “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Trans.
by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
1984.
 Nicol, Bran, “The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction”, Cambridge
University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, 2009.
 Toynbee, Arnold, “A Study of History, Vol. 1”, Oxford University Press, London,
1945.