On ‘What is History?’ - Jenkins
“Today we live within the general condition of postmodernity. We do not have a choice about this. For postmodernity is not an ‘ideology’ or a position we can choose to subscribe to or not; postmodernity is precisely our condition: it is our fate. And this condition has arguably been caused by the general failure—a general failure which can now be picked out very clearly as the dust settles over the twentieth century—of that experiment in social living which we call modernity. It is a general failure, as measured in its own terms, of the attempt, from around the eighteenth century in Europe, to bring about through the application of reason, science and technology, a level of personal and social wellbeing within social formations which, legislating for an increasingly generous emancipation of their citizens/subjects, we might characterise by saying that they were trying, at best, to become ‘human rights communities’.”
Islam has captured this empty space of future hopes.
“For, although we cannot pick and choose whether we want to live in postmodernity or not, we can (and many of us still do) exercise a bit of picking and choosing between the remaining residues of old ‘certaintist’ modernisms (objectivity, disinterestedness, the ‘facts’, unbiasedness, truth) and rhetorical, ‘postist’ discourses (readings, positionings, perspectives, constructions, verisimilitude) rather than going totally for one or the other. Consequently it is here, between old certainties and rhetorical postist discourses, that the current debates over what constitutes history and how historical knowledge is effectively constructed, live.”
A teleological history was essential to both the capitalist/liberal and Marxist wings of mordernity.
He argues dominant common sense so-called lower case history has also been undermined as a construct.