Klein, Kerwin Lee.

In search of narrative mastery: Postmodernism and the people without

history.

History & Theory. 34(4):275-298. 1995 Dec.


Abstract

Klein traces the competing meanings of "master narrative" in current

theoretical debates over culture and history. New "postmodern"

distinctions between master and local narratives have carried over the

venerable antinomy of people with and without history.






When Hegel spun his epochal story of Universal History, he left little

doubt that "History" belonged to some people but not to others. It was not

just that Europeans had taken up the torch of historical destiny. As he

saw it, indigenous Americans and Africans lacked history altogether.

Without writing, the concrete manifestation of collective consciousness,

they remained "peoples without history," and in the greater tale of

Spirit's evolution they would either disappear or assimilate themselves to

the rising West. Today, decolonization has made this bit of Hegel's tale

both implausible and unappealing. Peoples "without history" have been

subjugated, colonized, and exploited, but they have neither vanished from

the story nor become European. A host of new works in cultural studies,

comparative literature, ethnography, history of anthropology, and other

fields are trying to make sense of the situation, and in our revised

scholarly discourse cultures die, disappear, assimilate, acculturate,

proliferate, reinvent themselves, and become nations in a confusing

collage. We wonder if we have lost the central thread of the narrative.

What frontiers now stand between the peoples with and without history? How

can we adjudicate tales in which the world's peoples become increasingly

alike and stories in which they differ ever more violently?



The front cover of one recent book condenses these conflicts into a single

image. It shows a black and white photograph of a dark skinned man (the

credits tell us he is an Igbo), his face covered with light cloth, and a

false-head perched on his own. The fake head is white, male, and wears a

pith helmet. The masker holds a pad and pencil. He is, we understand,

playing anthropologist, turning the imperial tables on Western academe by

taking up the icons of history. Strangely, the designer has doubled the

photograph, setting the figure back to back with his own mirror image.

Inside the book, James Clifford's justly acclaimed The Predicament of

Culture (1988), readers find this schizophrenic doubling transposed into

print: "There is no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and

comic plots of global cultural history," Clifford tells us. "Indeed,

modern ethnographic histories are perhaps condemned to oscillate between

two metanarratives: one of homogenization, the other of emergence; one of

loss, the other of invention." Usually, both are relevant, "each denying

to the other a privileged, Hegelian vision." This is a tale for a

postmodern season, one that seems to refuse the metaphysical closures of

Hegel's universal history in favor of oscillating conflicts and ironic

inversions.(1)



The idea that we have escaped universal history threatens to become an

article of academic faith. While Clifford's association of Hegel,

metanarrative, and political mastery is common enough in recent

literature, we should treat these themes with care. The desire to escape

Universal History or narrative mastery is not new. Pragmatists,

positivists, and behaviorists all derided Hegel's "speculative" philosophy

of history long before poststructuralism began showing up in American

journals. After Jean-Francois Lyotard defined postmodernism as

"incredulity toward metanarratives," academics had a new vocabulary for a

familiar position. None of us, it seems, wants to be a narrative master of

squishy metaphysics and totalitarian politics. Whether careful policing of

our storytelling habits will keep us from that fate is another question. A

genealogy of "master narrative" reveals some strange affinities. From

Levi-Strauss to Lyotard, from Clifford to Fukuyama, we remain haunted by

history, returning ever and again to the big story even as we anxiously

affirm our clean break with the evils of narrative mastery. We have

foresworn Hegelian hubris and created new forms for narrating postcolonial

histories of cultural change, and these developments are laudable. But the

continuing quest for formal principles differentiating "master" and

"local," "historical" and "nonhistorical" modes of discourse threatens to

burden our new tales with the bad, old metaphysics we claim to have

escaped. We have replaced Hegel's peoples with and without history by

scientific and savage minds, hot and cold societies, and master and local

narratives, but that deep antinomy remains, surfacing unbidden at

inopportune moments and wreaking havoc on our attempts to understand the

global world in which we live.



If we are to understand the current debates over narrative mastery, we

need to return to Claude Levi-Strauss's critique of capital-H History and

colonialism, for his writings helped to make possible such texts as The

Predicament of Culture. The French anthropologist has cast a bright shadow

across virtually all ethnographic productions undertaken in recent

America, and his ruminations over the global frontier narrative still

surface in unlikely texts far from their original source. Levi-Strauss

sought to transfigure the received Hegelian and Marxist narratives of the

evolution of historical consciousness while remaining sensitive to the

global contexts of cultural change. In place of peoples with and without

history, he divided the world into hot and cold societies, scientific and

savage minds. Those Levi-Straussian antinomies, together with his

suspicion of history as both a method and a subject, structured much

subsequent thought about postcolonial history.



Nostalgia for the vanishing primitive drove Levi-Strauss's great

confessional essay, Tristes Tropiques (1955). In a masterwork of travel

writing, autobiography, and ethnographic criticism, he limned the

significance of deteriorating memory, worried about the duplicity of the

past with its substitution of idealized images for grim reality, and drew

an unhappy comparison of the world as it had existed in his youth with the

cold war globe overrun by the homogenizing and destructive effects of

colonial capitalism. Of the pluralistic world of his youth, little

remained but "contaminated memories." As a novice ethnographer, fresh from

an abandoned career in philosophy, he had ventured into the backcountry of

Brazil to search out a proverbial lost tribe, the Nambikwara, who

reputedly lived apart from the press of modernity. What possible meaning

could their American lives have for the young scholar? Levi-Strauss hinted

the meeting had world historical significance.(3)



The encounter of French ethnographer and American informant reenacted

older dramas. Reconstructing for his readers the "highly charged

atmosphere" of period research on American prehistory, Levi-Strauss raised

the possibility of a cultural connection between the Neolithic revolution

in Europe, the event in which we find the origins of history, and the

cultures of the New World.



Is it not conceivable that this major event in the history of

mankind...may have aroused a kind of excitement among the less advanced

communities of Asia and America?...Once, we refused to allow pre-Columbian

America an historical dimension, simply because post-Columbian America had

none. We now perhaps have to correct a second mistake, which consists in

assuming that America remained cut off from the world as a whole for

twenty thousand years...Everything would seem to suggest rather that the

deep silence on the Atlantic side was offset by a buzz of activity all

along the Pacific coast.



Post-Columbian America and its native inhabitants had no historical

dimension, but this did not necessarily mean that their distant precursors

also existed in the "deep silence" of peoples without history. The stakes

were great: research might uncover hidden traces of continuity between

primitive tribes like the Nambikwara and the great literate civilizations

of the Aztec and the Maya, linkages evincing a pre-Columbian world of

historical dimensions, affiliated, either by homology or actual

transoceanic contact, with the historical cultures of Europe.(4)



Encamped in the Brazilian back-country, Levi-Strauss ruminated on the

meanings of the imperial exchange. What differentiated European self from

American other? One night, he distributed sheets of paper and pencils as

gifts and was intrigued to watch the chief, in emulation of the

ethnographer's own notetaking, lord it over his kinsmen by pretending to

read from a text of "preliterate" scribbling. From the event Levi-Strauss

drew a moral. Writing, he said, is an "artificial memory." Of the many

criteria used to distinguish "barbarism and civilization," it is

"tempting" to retain the division of literacy: "peoples with and without

writing." But the division is not so clear; some Neolithic groups built

civil life without developing literacy. The only phenomenon reliably

associated with writing is the "creation of cities and empires." From this

the structuralist derived his hypothesis: "[T]he primary function of

written communication is to facilitate slavery."(5) Writing is not only

the precondition of the artificial memory we call history, it is also the

instrument of human enslavement. The imposition of literate Western reason

on the mythic innocence of orality lies at the very heart of the historic

loss of cultural difference, the great modern tragedy.



In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss recalled having been socialized into an

educational system that immersed aspiring philosophers in a suffocating,

pseudo-Hegelian language of ascending dialectic. Little wonder that the

young intellectual found liberation in the clean lines of positivism and

the structuralist figures of radical discontinuity. And so he associated

the ahistorical vocabularies of linguistic structuralism with the

political interests of his colonized subjects. He returned again and again

to Hegel's division of the world into peoples with and without history.

Levi-Strauss offered at least three ways to circumvent or subvert the

equation and its celebration of European empire. First, one might posit a

pre-Columbian historicity for native America; perhaps, he mused in Tristes

Tropiques, one could find traces of historical consciousness in the wilds

of South America contemporaneous with Europe's Neolithic revolution. A

second possibility located the origins of historical consciousness in the

mythic thought of natives. But this threatened to reactivate the old

stories of the rise of historical consciousness as a march of progress.

The third option inverted Hegel and encoded history as evil: It was good

to be without history. Levi-Strauss's texts emplotted history-as-events as

the march of imperial oppression facilitated by literacy and science. They

depicted history-as-method as one option among others. As he noted in The

Savage Mind (1962), "History may lead to anything, provided you get out of

it." Getting out of history became a critical obsession for intellectuals

after structuralism, and many followed Levi-Strauss in not positing a

fourth option: History might be dramatically transfigured by new voices.



For Levi-Strauss, the conflict between native and European, orality and

literacy, non-history and history, echoed the thematic duality of nature

and culture which he saw as a deep structure of language and cognition,

and in The Savage Mind he expanded on the cognitive and discursive

frontiers separating savage and modern cultures. Mythic and scientific

thought were not evolutionary stages, but parallel and equally valuable

ways of thinking. Myths, rooted in orality and memory, subordinated change

to a deeper timeless order and relied on analogy, classification, and

metaphor; science, including historical knowledge, sought explanation of

change and relied on conceptions of temporal continuity and metonymy. The

book concluded with a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's existential Marxism

by denying that history had any unique central subject, such as "humanity"

or "existence." History consisted solely of method: "Even history which

claims to be universal is still only a juxtaposition of a few local

histories." The structuralist had prepared the ground for its subsequent

occupation by postmodernism. From his account of the tragic march of

literate reason and his opposing local histories to universal History,

later theorists drew the postmodern critique. Universal history is made of

"clouds of stories," said Jean-Francois Lyotard, some years later, "[I]t

is a mass of billions of local histories [historiettes]." Indeed,

Levi-Strauss's work on "savage" discourse cleared the ground for Lyotard's

influential analysis of narrative mastery, and his enthusiasm for an

authentically savage "other" glimmers through Lyotard's privileging of

"local" over "master" or "meta-narrative."(6)



II



Lyotard can hardly be described as a Levi-Straussian, nor has he shown a

great deal of interest in thematizing orality and literacy, but his

popular coinages, "master" and "local" narrative, reinscribed the older,

Levi-Straussian antinomies of science and savagism. What few critics have

noted is that Lyotard's definitions of local and master narrative have

changed dramatically over the years; indeed, his earliest accounts of

narrative mastery are not compatible with his later ones. Over the course

of a decade, Lyotard shifted from pragmatic descriptions of narrative

mastery as a matter of situation to descriptions of master narratives as

functions of form. As his analysis developed, he spun out an ever more

tenuous rationale for distinguishing local and metanarratives, and he

turned to a racial other, Native American tribal communities, to justify

his belief in different narrative kinds. His new vocabulary resonated so

strongly with the contemporary critique of traditional metaphysics that it

fairly colonized critical discourse. In the end, though, the figure of

narrative mastery proved sufficiently plastic that another "postmodern"

thinker, Richard Rorty, could turn it back against Lyotard.



In a 1971 essay, "Le 23 mars," Lyotard called for a Nietzschean

"antihistory" and radicalized the structuralist accounts of historical

narrative as a mode of mystification. Story and history, Lyotard declared,

impose continuity and closure on the gaps and silences of reality. He

associated narrative with myth, fairy-tale, teleology, and metaphysics,

and implicitly contrasted its reactionary effects with the liberating

sophistication of critical analysis. This description looked much like

that elaborated by Hayden White in America in the late 1970s and early

1980s, another thinker who found much to admire in LEvi-Strauss's

injunctions against history. But Lyotard did not entrench this position,

and by the late 1970s he was undertaking a critical recuperation of

narrative that distinguished master narratives from local narratives. The

criticism of big stories was part of a project in the validation of

oppositional tales, the little stories or histories told by "others."(7)



Lyotard's first lengthy critique of narrative mastery appeared in the

imaginary dialogue of Instructions paiennes (1977). In it, he aligned

himself with the narrators and narratives of dissent slipping out of

Peking, Budapest, and the Gulag, and he indicted "le grand recit marxiste"

and the "masters of metanarrative," namely, the intellectuals narrating

the grand history of "work" which served the communist will to power.

Against big stories or metanarratives he set "les petites histoires,"

little stories or local narratives. To the query, why petites?, he

responded, "Because they are short, because they are not the tired old

grand history, and because they are difficult to insert within it." Note,

thus far, we are speaking of pragmatics, at least as Lyotard understands

it. The metanarratives of communism are "official," "the grand

institutionalized narrative apparatus," "canonical narratives," the

"legitimations of theorists," those stories "which are supposed to rule."

(Maitre, of course, is a keyword, and on one page, Lyotard joined it with

story: "maitre-recit.") Meta or master narratives are simply those that

are canonized by party and state. Local narratives are those which are

not. Perhaps the clearest insight into what might count as a metanarrative

comes when Lyotard described its alter ego, local narrative. He associated

local narratives with their typical narrators: "abortionists, prisoners,

appellants, prostitutes, students, peasants." But he also labelled Kant's

Third Critique a local narrative because "it is not a metanarrative," but

is "itself a work of art." So little or local narratives are also

characterized by being works of artistry and imagination. But there was

more to come, as Lyotard further extended his debts to Nietzsche.(8)



His interlocutor asked him to explain how he would avoid vulgar

relativism, once he had discarded all the metanarratives and their claims

to truth. What did Lyotard want? Lyotard responded, "paganism." In place

of communist and liberal dogma he offered paganism, which is both

"impious" and "just." While paganism had its religion, it was not truly

"pious," for its gods were notoriously fallible. Pagans prayed to the

gods, but "they speak to obtain certain effects, not to utter the truth,

reveal disclosures, or confess their culpability." And this absence of

omniscience, sin, and absolution characterizes pagan narrative as well.

According to Lyotard, "The pagans do not ask themselves if stories conform

to their object; they know that reference is organized in words and that

the gods are not their guarantors, because their speech is no more

veridical than that of humans." So we may, by negation, add still more

characteristics to metanarrative: it claims omniscience, it claims to

refer to an external object, and it claims to be a veridical

representation of that object. Lyotard's own tale refused such totalizing

claims. "My story," he said, "like all stories, refers to other

stories."(9)



Still, even his tale, like the many alternative stories in circulation,

could not claim a pure, oppositional status. While les petites histoires

resisted narrative mastery, as Lyotard conceded to his interrogator, "The

master of our stories is not a pagan god, it is capital." Stories

proliferate under capital and circulate in apparent indifference, save for

one particular tale which "l'argent" privileges again and again: "[T]he

canonical story which privileges the autonomous activity of the narrator

and which subordinates to that single name those of narratee and

narrated." Here Lyotard introduced the pragmatics of naming as a key to

understanding narrative mastery. Naming illuminates the contradiction of

historical consciousness under capitalism; the story must deny that it is

a story; it must "forget" its own narrativity in order to maintain the

fiction of the autonomous self. But narrative is not created through free

acts of authorial will: "Stories are not the products of a subjective

faculty of narration which has set them going. Stories tell themselves,

they are in motion as a matter of principle, and their narrators are only

one of their conductive valences." In the event, Lyotard counseled an

openness to changing stories and denied that justice could be found in a

"formula" or canonized in law.(10)



We may abstract a thematized understanding of narrative from Instructions

paiennes: Metanarrative is institutionalized, canonical, and legitimizing.

It is in a position of intellectual mastery. It ignores the obvious pagan

truism, that stories refer to other stories. Instead it pretends to

represent an external object and then pretends not to be a narrative.

Local narrative, on the other hand, is told by the subaltern. It is never

omniscient, but always aware of its own narrative debts. It cannot easily

be "inserted" into a master narrative. It is artistic and imaginative.

Appearing as it did in the middle 1970s, Lyotard's account was original

and suggestive, although some might squirm at his description of Kantian

aesthetics as a paradigm of narrative modesty. Unfortunately, he did not

rest content with this sociohistorical account of narrative politics.



Lyotard's La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979), which

appeared in English in 1984 as The Postmodern Condition, set out his best

known definition of metanarrative and moved away from the situated

readings of Instructions paiennes toward a more codified description.



Science has always been in conflict with narratives...But to the extent

that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and

seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It

then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status,

a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any

science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this

kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the

dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the

rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth...Simplifying to

the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward master narratives.



The modern had produced diversity of experience, knowledge, and languages,

but it no longer commanded the power of belief to join them into a

meaningful whole. The liberal faith that open communication would produce

social consensus did "violence to the heterogeneity of language games."

Different cultures, different visions, could be contained or persuaded

only within what Lyotard saw as a totalitarian system of education and

information. "Consensus" meant that difference, dissent, faced one of two

choices: assimilation into the dominant language game or else complete

exclusion from the circle of rational humanity.(11)



Lyotard spun a story of the postmodern as a historical epoch. Science, as

it developed in the West, had carved out an identity for itself by

differentiating its own mode of discourse from narrative. "The scientist,"

said Lyotard, "questions the validity of narrative statements and

concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or proof." So

viewed, narratives belonged to a different mentality: "savage, primitive,

underdeveloped, backward, alienated, composed of opinions, customs,

authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology. Narratives are fables, myths,

legends, fit only for women and children." This distinction underwrote

"the entire history of cultural imperialism from the dawn of Western

civilization." The marginalization of story and oratory legitimated and

facilitated the imperial conquest of non-Western peoples. But even science

could not sustain its claims to authority without narrating an account of

its own place in the world. Those stories, modeled on Judeo-Christian

theologies of history and honed to a fine secular edge in the nineteenth

century, became the master narratives of Hegelian Spirit, Marxist

emancipation, and technical progress. But they contained internal

contradictions and produced alternate accounts and critiques. Pressed by

the twentieth century's diversity, they fractured beyond repair. Today, in

postmodernity, "the grand narrative has lost its credibility," and "most

people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative."(12)



Lyotard also cast the postmodern as a style and a politics. The postmodern

is characterized by a widening array of incommensurable language games,

such as local and master narratives, each with its own players, rules, and

ends. The account deepened the divide between local and master narrative,

and Lyotard forsook his old exemplary subalterns (abortionists,

prostitutes, prisoners in the Gulag), in favor of a racial "other," a

Native South American community, the Cashinahua. Their "local stories"

always contain as their referent or subject the tribe itself. The names of

many tribal cultures translate as "the people" or "the humans." All others

fall outside that charmed circle. By Lyotard's account, such texts as

Pueblo creation tales tell of the origins of the Pueblo alone; the stories

never weave the Pueblo and their neighbors into a single plot.

Judeo-Christian theology of history, Hegelian or Marxist universal

history, and evolutionary biology all do. The difference is crucial. Where

Instructions paiennes offered mainly functional or pragmatic descriptions

of metanarratives (master narratives were those which occupied positions

of dominance), The Postmodern Condition outlined a logic of narrative

mastery, an analytic algorithm that could routinely differentiate local

from master narratives on the basis of formal structure.(13)



In The Differend (1983), Lyotard further refined the distinction and again

invoked the Cashinahua. Of their stories, he claimed "the bond woven

around 'Cashinahua' names by these narratives procures an identity that is

solely "Cashinahua." To take them up into another narrative is to erase

their original identity: "The little stories received and bestowed names.

The great story of history has its end in the extinction of names

(particularisms). At the end of the great story, there will simply be

humanity." Hence the postmodern as politics: To denounce metanarratives

and applaud the proliferation of local narratives is to resist

totalitarian universal history and political oppression. Lyotard had moved

from Instructions paiennes's pragmatic reading of narrative mastery, which

employed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (1973) as the

preeminent example of local narrative, to the more routinized method of

The Differend and examples drawn from non-European cultures to illustrate

universal principles of narrative form. In The Differend, Lyotard could

not use Gulag Archipelago to illustrate local narrative for Solzhenitsyn

so often appealed to "humanity" or "universal human ideals" to denounce

the crimes of Soviet communism. In two short years, it seems,

Solzenitsyn's work had metamorphosed from subaltern story into yet another

instance of the totalizing humanist metanarrative. But Lyotard's new

example, the tales told by the Cashinahua, while it certainly did not

reify humanism, ran into other troubles.(14)



Lyotard's claim that the origin tales of groups like the Cashinahua name

only "one name" is highly problematic. He admitted at the time that even

these tales might have a "cosmopolitical import," but insisted that the

problem was "linkage"--what will join Cashinahua stories with a "universal

history"? Only a master narrative, associated with a European or

Euro-American genre of discourse, can create a universal frame of

reference for such tales. Since many, if not most, tribal communities do

tell stories that discuss the place and status of "others," much depends

on Lyotard's often elusive discussion of naming. In The Differend he used

Saul Kripke's analytical classic, Naming and Necessity (1980), to support

his new generic distinction between local and master narratives. Names


(proper nouns) are, in Kripke's phrase, "rigid designators." They are not

capable of infinite extension. Only one object can be the referent of a

proper name. In this way, names differ from all other potential subjects.

As Lyotard saw it, the difference between a "History of the Cashinahua" or

a "History of the Pueblo" and the "History of Humanity" is profound; one

writes the latter only by subsuming the former and effectively erasing

their names. Universal history destroys the local, the particular, the

singular, in favor of an abstract collective.(15)



Despite its appealing simplicity, the account does not hold up under

critical scrutiny. First, many tribal communities develop narrative

mechanisms for recognizing outsiders and even for assimilating them into

the community. Marriage with non-tribal members was hardly unknown in

pre-Columbian Native America. (In the Pueblo Creation tale, says Laguna

storyteller Leslie Silko, "there is even a section of the story which is a

prophecy-which describes the origin of the European race, the African, and

also remembers the Asian origins."[16]) Second, and more problematic for

Lyotard's argument, we may doubt whether "Cashinahua," or "Hopi," or other

comparable "names" truly qualify as Kripkean rigid designators. As Lyotard

and a host of ethnolinguists have told us, the names of many tribal

communities translate simply as "The People" or "The Human Beings." So far

as the Cashinahua are concerned, "The History of the Cashinahua" and "The

History of Humanity" are interchangeable phrases; there is no difference

between them. Both are "universal history," and Lyotard's designation of

such stories as "local" or centered on "rigid designators" reflects a

retrospective, ironic intervention (the Cashinahua may have believed that

they alone were truly human, but we moderns know better; humanity is a

much vaster category). "Cashinahua" and "Hopi" are rigid designators only

within a horizon of universal history; only after we have extended the

range of "humanity" beyond their frontiers may we say that they speak only

"one name."(17)



In a 1985 specialissue of Critique, Lyotard engaged in an exchange with

Richard Rorty that cast a bit more light on the topic. The philosophers

squared off over the politics of language and the legacy of Wittgenstein.

The sharpest conflict came in a disagreement about the distinctions to be

drawn between language games. Lyotard's "Missive sur l'histoire

universelle et les differences culturelles" (basically abstracted from The

Differend), described genres of discourse as so radically different that

they cannot be meaningfully intertranslated without extreme violence.

Rorty, in "Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation," countered that the idea

of languages as closed, rule-ordered systems is just heuristics and that

natural languages (unlike a game of chess or a computer program), are

never so self-contained that they cannot be interwoven. But here the

exchange faltered, and one of the sticking points, though perhaps neither

speaker realized it at the time, was Lyotard's idea of "metanarrative." In

an earlier essay, "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-modernity," Rorty had

endorsed Lyotard's "incredulity toward metanarratives." We no longer need

transcendental or final grounds for our beliefs. Social consensus,

persuasion, and pragmatic criticism are not only all that we have and all

that we are ever going to get, they are all we need. Rorty characterized

Habermas's search for a transcendent logic of discourse as a

"metanarrative." In place of this, he suggested, we simply need to keep

spinning "first order narratives" about particular places and groups that

will help us imagine a more cosmopolitan future in which all the world

might conceivably enjoy the benefits of social democracy.(18)



Rorty and Lyotard's agreement on the evils of metanarrative conceals a

deeper conflict, for they do not mean the same thing by "metanarrative."

Rorty takes metanarrative to be the sort of philosophical discourse that

grounds its claims in an unchanging universal logic of spirit, nature, or

language. Renounce this sort of dogmatic and futile philosophizing, and we

are more likely to enjoy a cosmopolitan future. For Lyotard, though, it is

"cosmopolitanism" that threatens to produce narrative mastery. The

inclusion of multiple names inside a single story erases local names and

culture differences. By Lyotard's lights, Rorty, for all his postmodern

pragmatism, is still telling a metanarrative about the progressive

emancipation of humanity from metaphysics and particular cultures.

Ironically, if we define metanarrative as Rorty does, as insistence upon

timeless rules of reason or language, then Lyotard's own explorations of

language qualify, for his account of differends and agonistics clearly

aims for something higher--more traditionally philosophical--than the mere

socialhistorical criticism that Rorty sees as the only realistic task for

philosophy. (Indeed, Rorty had elsewhere identified Kripkean theories of

reference as one of analytic philosophy's last monuments of metaphysics,

what he pejoratively called "realist epistemology.")(19) "Metanarrative"

is for both Lyotard and Rorty a word of opprobrium, a bad language game

which each sees the other playing. But the conflict illuminates the deeper

divisions in their postures toward the philosophical traditions of the

"West." For Rorty, the remnants of the metaphysical and suprahistorical

aspects of that tradition make it harder to incorporate new, opposing

voices and perspectives. For Lyotard, this very inclusiveness is suspect:

no cosmopolitanism without mastery.



III



In such recent works as James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture we can

see the emergence of a new storyline for narrating global histories, one

which employs a double plot to render the antinomies of the postcolonial

world. Lyotard's conception of "master narrative" has found a place in the

new stories, but that place is an uncertain one. Notoriously, his The

Postmodern Condition struck sparks off another famous text, Fredric

Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981), and the clash illuminates the

shift in narrative politics. For Jameson, the postmodern proliferation of

histories disguised the incorporation of all plots into the single Marxist

or "Left Hegelian" tale of the struggle between necessity and freedom

tending towards a classless tomorrow. For Lyotard, Western capitalism's

progressive obliteration of local narratives and cultures will and must be

opposed by the radical differentiation of histories. Some reader was bound

to split the difference, and Stephen Greenblatt synthesized Jameson and

Lyotard in his much read essay, "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (1986). The

general question Jameson and Lyotard meant to address simply did not have

a single satisfactory answer. Neither Marxism nor postmodernism alone, as

theoretical enterprises, could account for the contradictory effects of

late capitalism. As Greenblatt saw it, capitalism had generated discursive

regimes in which "the drive towards differentiation and the drive toward

monological organization operate simultaneously, or at least oscillate so

rapidly as to create the impression of simultaneity." The construction

prefigured Clifford's The Predicament of Culture and its oscillating

double plot: The history of European colonialism and Native cultures, in

America and elsewhere, demands dual narratives in which the tragic loss of

cultural difference and the comic creation of new ways of being Native

"oscillate," each denying Hegelian mastery to the other.(20)



Clifford's and Greenblatt's metaphor, "oscillate," does indeed, as

Clifford says, strike a very un-Hegelian tone. It suggests a rapid

mechanical movement back and forth between essentially distinct forms

rather than the more fluid moments of dialectic. The figure calls to mind

Hegel's "bad infinity": The static repetition, aimlessly into eternity, of

two separate and mutually hostile alternatives, black against white, the

two never creating any of the multifarious shades and patterns that even

so stark a contrast as black and white could achieve. Since The

Predicament of Culture describes cultures as defined by their opposition

to some imagined other, refashioning themselves in technicolored shadings

with each new context, we should be surprised by its rather mechanical

description of narrative form. Clifford posits a much greater plasticity

for culture than for narrative, thus displacing the problems of autonomy

and assimilation to the level of literature: cultures may not always

assimilate one to another, but stories (and storytellers?) do. None of his

described tribal communities are anywhere near so starkly individuated and

eternally self-identical as his opposed modes of employment. The crux is

the insistence that a story either is tragedy or comedy, but never both,

at least not at the same time. Like Greenblatt, Clifford believed that an

oscillating double plot could engage the fluidity of cultural change

without succumbing to narrative mastery.(21)



A specific intertextual reference and a brief digression can illuminate

Clifford's "oscillation" of history, for the tone and topoi of The

Predicament of Culture recall Jacques Derrida's critique of

Levi-Straussian anthropology. in Of Grammatology ( 1967) Derrida placed

Levi-Strauss's noble savagism within a history of "writing." Derrida meant

to dismantle the ancient conception of speech and writing as fundamentally

opposed ways of being. But he also commented briefly on Tristes

Tropiques's emplotment of the rise of the literate, historical West as a

tragedy of enslavement: "What is going to be called enslavement can

equally legitimately be called liberation. And it is at the moment that

this oscillation is stopped on the signification of enslavement that the

discourse is frozen into a determined ideology that we would judge

disturbing if such were our first preoccupation here." In affirming his

subjects' "lack" of writing, even while suggesting that this absence

gifted them with a certain Edenic grace, Levi-Strauss had recreated a

metaphysical tradition of ascribing radical but intelligible alterity to

another. But tragedy, the ascription of violated innocence to the observed

Natives, was not, as he believed, firmly centered on a single equation, in

this case, the erasure of orality by writing. Its meaning depended on its

implicit opposition to some other theme, some other telling, some other

plot, some other figure. As Derrida saw it, freezing discourse, culture,

or being on a presumed "center" of meaning (writing, orality, primitive,

modern, myth, science) was "classically ahistorical" and potentially

totalitarian. Derrida followed the path into regions we cannot survey

here, but the resonance with Clifford's and Greenblatt's oscillating

stories deserves comment.(22)



The Predicament of Culture appears to put the Derridean critique to work

in a new narrative that avoids simple celebrations or lamentations of the

rise of the West, but appearances are deceptive. Clifford feared that

narration of cultural change might stop on one metanarrative or the other,

and so to Levi-Strauss's tragedy of loss he attached the comedy of

cultural invention. The endless alternation of the two stories seemed to

avoid dogmatic narrative closure. But the resulting story differs from

Derrida's formulation in subtle but significant ways. For the philosopher,

both liberation and enslavement flickered through Levi-Strauss's tragedy,

despite the ethnographer's best efforts to stick to a single story.

Clifford, in assigning specific plots to enslavement and liberation,

simply goes LEvi-Strauss one better. Tragedy and comedy are not the true

alternatives. The alternative is a different combination of plot and

figure. Clifford's narrative of tragic loss and comic invention of

cultural difference is shadowed by a telling in which cultural loss is

emplotted as comedy and invention as tragedy, an assimilationist story

which narrates the incorporation of Nativesinto white society as a happy

march of progress and describes local cultural resistance as tragic

fragmentation: Europeans brought history, science, and civil reason to the

ends of the earth. Some Natives joined happily into this comically

integrated society. Others, unfortunately, resisted, and today they

tragically press factionalizing and ultimately undemocratic claims for

tribalism, quotas, and separatism. That story of comic assimilation and

tragic fragmentation remains a popular one from polemics against

multiculturalism to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man

(1992). And while Clifford's politics pointed him towards a happier

reading of cultural diversity, like LEvi-Strauss's tragedy of enslavement,

it will, in his own figure, call forth its reactionary counter narrative,

each denying to the other a "privileged Hegelian vision."(23)



Indeed, the conflict between celebrations and elegies of cultural change

surfaces in The Predicament of Culture. The book's longest essay,

"Identity in Mashpee," recounts the civil suit by the Mashpee Wampanoag

Tribal Council, Inc., for the legal right to an Indian identity and title

to "tribal" lands. At issue was "whether the group calling itself the

Mashpee was in fact an Indian tribe, and the same tribe that in the

mid-nineteenth century had lost its lands through a series of contested

legislative acts." The defendants claimed the Mashpee had assimilated and

were no longer a tribe; the plaintiffs claimed that the Mashpee had

maintained tribal identity despite years of homogenizing pressure.

Narratives of assimilation and narratives of resistance fought it out

under the watchful eye of the state. Clifford's interest, and ours, stems

from the compelling experiences of those involved, but also from the

trial's illumination of the painful collisions of divergent philosophies

of history.(24)



Clifford cast the suit and its defense as two ways of imagining the

Mashpee's and America's past: "The Mashpee were a borderline case...

Looked at one way, they were Indian; seen another way, they were not.

Powerful ways of looking thus became inescapably problematic." Ultimately

at issue was the nature of "American" and "Indian" identity. The structure

of the essay implies a Rashomon-style relativism, with the same events

retold through the eyes of different spectators; emplotted, like one of

Hayden White's neutral historical series, as tragedy or comedy depending

on one's aesthetic and political tastes. And Clifford's introduction, with

its denial of Hegelian metanarrative, seems to point toward a Derridean

subversion of centered knowledge. Yet the result thwarts expectation, for

the essay draws some straightforward morals, and even drifts quite close

to the narrative patterns of Tristes Tropiques.(25)



The contrast of plaintiff and defendants, comedy and tragedy, invention

and assimilation, at first exemplifies Clifford's oscillating stories.



The case against the plaintiffs [the Mashpee] was based on a reading of

Cape Cod history. ...The story emerged of a small mixed community fighting

for equality and citizenship while abandoning, by choice or coercion, most

of its aboriginal heritage. But a different, also coherent story was

constructed by the plaintiffs, drawing on the same documentary record. In

this account the residents of Mashpee had managed to keep alive a core of

Indian identity over three centuries against enormous odds.



For Clifford, "the trial can be seen as a struggle between history and

anthropology." History, characterized by an expert witness for the

defense, Francis Hutchins (actually trained as a political scientist),

relied on written documents to produce a "seamless monologue."

Anthropology, led by an expert witness for the plaintiffs, James Axtell

(actually a historian), relied on oral interviews and produced a babble of

"contending voices." History won out, and the jury returned a verdict

which effectively refused to recognize the Mashpee as a legal "tribe."(26)



Despite the alternation of tragedy and comedy in the expert testimony,

only one mode dominates Clifford's narration of the trial, and that is the

Levi-Straussian tragedy of history's obliteration of cultural difference.

"[T]he law," observed Clifford, "reflects a logic of literacy, of the

historical archive rather than changing collective memory...The Mashpee

trial was a contest between oral and literate forms of knowledge." On this

note, Levi-Strauss and the writing lesson with the Nambikwara creep into

Clifford's plot: "Indian life in Mashpee--something that was largely a set

of 'oral' relations, formed and reformed, remembered in new

circumstances--had to be cast in permanent, 'textual' form." Textualizing

(historicizing) oral experience brutalizes its subtle shapes. The

metanarratives of history efface local orality, collective memory, and

plural voices. Writing facilitates enslavement, erases, as Lyotard would

say, the names of the different. Few readers will be left wondering where

Clifford's sympathies lie, for "Identity in Mashpee" projects a clear

moral: We ought to reform our ways of seeing, reading, and remembering so

as to create a world of freer, more expressive collective and individual

identities. Orality, local narrative, collective memory, and

ethnography--all associated with peoples of color--come out of the story

looking very good. History, excluded from these figures and associated

with the whitened one-thing-after-another facticity of simple chronology,

looks very bad indeed.(27)



"Identity in Mashpee" emplots history's narrative enslavement of "others,"

and as Derrida warned in his reading of Tristes Tropiques, the story Of

enslavement depends on its alternative tale of liberation. Clifford

clearly hoped that the tragedy of the historicization of Mashpee identity

and their consequent courtroom "setback" would oscillate into a story of

heroic cultural invention. Perhaps the Mashpee could still find "new ways

of being Indian." But the defendants who denied the "Indianness" of the

Mashpee had not depicted the disappearance of tribal culture as a tragedy.

Instead, they emplotted the assimilation of the Natives as a happy,

progressive movement of a local group into the broader circle of modern

life, a shift from exclusive ethnic identity to inclusive American

identity. In the summation, counsel for the defense described the

Mashpee's acculturation as a "'slow but steady progress' toward 'full

participation' in American society." "Oscillating" in the courtroom with

Clifford's tragedy of homogenization and comedy of differentiation was an

assimilationist comedy and a warning that the recognition of Mashpee

identity would tragically balkanize America. The Predicament of Culture

keeps this counter-history hidden in the shadows. Of Tristes Tropiques,

Clifford noted that it captured a great truth, but "it is too neat, and it

assumes a questionable Eurocentric position at the 'end' of a unified

human history, gathering up, memorializing the world's local

historicities." The critique applies, with less force, perhaps, to

"Identity in Mashpee."(28)



The formal distinction between "meta" and "local" narrative comes apart in

"Identity in Mashpee." Trying to avoid Levi-Straussian Noble Savagism,

Clifford struggled to avoid narrative mastery.



The Mashpee were trapped by the stories that could be told about

them...Tribal life had to be emplotted, told as a coherent narrative. In

fact; only a few basic stories are told, over and over, about Native

Americans and other "tribal" peoples. These societies are always dying or

surviving, assimilating or resisting...But the familiar paths of tribal

death, survival, assimilation, or resistance do not catch the specific

ambivalences of life in places like Mashpee over four centuries of defeat,

renewal, political negotiation, and cultural innovation. Moreover most

societies that suddenly "enter the modern world" have already been in

touch with it for centuries...Indians in Mashpee lived and acted between

cultures in a series of ad hoc engagements.



The courtroom's demands for narratives of continuous authentic identity

clash with the discontinuous subjects of real life. Narrative closure

distorts our pluralistic world. For Clifford, the problems with the

stories told about Mashpee are problems of form: the law demands

metanarratives of homogeneity, when local narratives would be more

realistic.(29)



Clifford's local narratives, though, differ from those of Lyotard. Despite

similarities of vocabulary, Clifford and Lyotard are telling very

different stories about the relation of the West to the rest and the

mechanisms of enslavement. The tensions between The Postmodern Condition

and The Predicament of Culture lie partly in their different uses of

"metanarrative." For Lyotard, any narrative weaving the names of different

groups into a single story is a grand recit. For Clifford, any big story

emplotting a naively unitary subject seems to be a master narrative. In

Lyotard's account, Clifford's tale is a metanarrative; in Clifford's

usage, Lyotard's imagined stories naming a "single name" might qualify for

the insidious label. Lyotard sees the tragedy of enslavement in the

erasure of single names; Clifford sees danger in the demand for a unified

subject rigidly designated by a name like "Cashinahua" or "Mashpee."

Clifford employs Lyotard's vocabulary but his usage undercuts Lyotard's

position: The desire for authentically "local" histories contains more


than a grain of modernist nostalgia, and The Postmodern Condition's tale

of universal history's destruction of names sounds suspiciously like

LEvi-Strauss's tragedy of the vanishing Native. "Identity in Mashpee"

convincingly demonstrates the naivete of a construction that makes the

purity of "local names" the measure of narrative value: "Most societies

that suddenly 'enter the modern world' have been in touch with it for

centuries." The Mashpee lost because they were expected to produce what

Lyotard would see as an authentically "local" narrative of a subject whose

single name has not been contaminated through imaginative incorporation of

other identities. But neither the Mashpee nor most "Tribal" peoples can,

or should, construct stories of cultural purity untainted by the press of

other subjects, whether American, European, African, or Asian. "Identity

in Mashpee," with its multiple subjects and modern primitives,

demonstrates the impossibility of avoiding "meta"-narrative, at least as

defined in The Differend.



All of us, it seems, wish to be "local" subalterns rather than masters of

the narrative universe, but it is difficult to imagine a more cosmopolitan

book than The Predicament of Culture. The merits of Clifford's alternating

tale of tragedy and comedy, homogenization and differentiation, while it

may tell a better story than the simpler stories at war in the courtroom,

do not lie in its postmodern escape from master narrative or in its

triumph of anthropology over history. Disturbed that the Mashpee, and us

with them, are "trapped" by bad stories, Clifford, a good historian, tries

to tell a better one. From such acts come revision, but we need not appeal

to some magic essence to demonize the stories we critique.(30)



We do need stories of greater subtlety than either-or, all-or-nothing

tales of pure assimilation, absolute resistance, and unbroken continuity.

But Derrida's, Greenblatt's, and Clifford's metaphor, "oscillation,"

reinforces such stories. It implies an ahistorical repetition of two

distinct entities into an unchanging future, surely not the world Clifford

wishes to open up. Like cultural identities, narratives-tragedy and

comedy, "meta" and "local"--are not aesthetic monads. They define each

other through interaction, shifting meaning and morals with each new

juxtaposition, taken up into one another en route to changing aims,

reinvented with each new situation in processes not fairly captured by the

mechanical images of alternating current. Their differences, like those of

Clifford's cultures, will be anchored at our peril. "If the word 'history'

did not carry with it the theme of a final repression of differance," said

Derrida in 1968, "we could say that differences alone could be

'historical' through and though and from the start." The philosopher

wished to describe the play of language, the movement of meaning from one

sign to another, as basically historical. The differentiation of tragedy

and comedy, mastery and slavery, is not out of history, or a mechanical

representation of a more subtle historical world, but history itself. But

he could not say the word "history" without a disclaimer because he feared

that it still evoked Hegel's history as spirit. History as the "repression

of differance" refers obiquely back to the peoples without history. It

was, after all, Hegel's history and historical consciousness that the

well-meaning LEvi-Strauss denied to his Natives.(31)



Clifford's narration of the trial in Mashpee as a collision between

history (universal, written, static, and hegemonic) and anthropology

(local, oral, fluid, and subaltern) tied into that venerable division of

the world into peoples with and without history. In "Identity in Mashpee,"

the agon rested partly on the old differences drawn in scholarly and

public discourse, from Hegel to modern expert witnesses. But the divisions

no longer look so clear: A political scientist, Francis Hutchins,

testified for "history"; a historian, James Axtell, testified for

"anthropology"; and still another historian, Clifford, encoded history as

one-thing-after-another and anthropology as an inventive engagement with

multiple voices. He might as easily have described the trial as a clash

between different conceptions of history, rather than between anthropology

and history, but he did not, and his choice of narrative codes is telling.

The kernel of the trial and of The Predicament of Culture, the antagonisms

of history and counter-history, history and culture, universal histories

and local histories, literacy and orality--all those deepening borders

between people with and without history--had been carved out before

Clifford ever went to graduate school, before Lyotard radicalized

Levi-Strauss, before the Mashpee filed their suit. As Michel Foucault

warned, just when you think you have escaped Hegel, you turn the corner,

and suddenly there he is, refiguring the predicament of culture as the

cunning of history.



IV



Whatever the depth of our postmodern "incredulity" toward master

narratives, universal history has not disappeared. New secularized

varieties of world history, a la Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, and

William McNeill, now bid to replace Western Civilization courses and

texts." Indeed, Clifford's story can be read as a subtle new universal

history, which partly accounts for its power and its appeal. And the

demonic twin of his oscillating tales, the old vision of a comically

integrated universe of spirit, has found a popular voice in Fukuyama's The

End of History and the Last Man. Briefly, Fukuyama says that Hegel (or at

least Kojeve's Hegel) was right about the end of history. History has a

direction and a purpose, and once that purpose is realized, History will

end, no matter how many local wars and battles continue on into the

future. The collapse of the Soviet empire demonstrates the ultimate

triumph of liberalism. While we still argue the relative merits of more

libertarian versus more social democratic solutions to economic and social

problems, virtually everyone now agrees on the virtues of democracy; the

chief alternatives have vanished and we have reached the end of "the

ideological evolution of mankind." The End of History and the Last Man is

the very type of a postmodern "master narrative," but it shows some

suggestive homologies of structure with the tales told by vocal critics of

narrative mastery.(33)



Fukuyama, like Lyotard, acknowledges the importance of Kant in universal

historiography, and a comparison of their readings is enlightening. In the

last section of The Differend, "The Sign of History," Lyotard engaged

Kant's brief essay, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point

of View (1784). Kant had suggested that out of the apparent chaos of

nature a "Newton" or a "Bacon" of history might abstract a lawful process

of development toward a universal cosmopolitan condition. Lyotard found

two different language games at work in Kant's hypothesis: "cognitive

phrases" which recognize the "chaos of history" and "speculative phrases"

which await "the progress of freedom." But a chasm yawns between these two

genres. How will it be bridged? While we cannot empirically experience the

future and thus verify our hope that history is progressing toward a

cosmopolitan end, Kant thought we might locate a "historical sign"

(Geschichtszeichen) in a modest but accessible event that can demonstrate

or "point toward" a progressive moral tendency. He later found such a sign

in the "mode of thinking" revealed in the "universal yet disinterested

sympathy" for the French Revolution. The skeptical Lyotard, armed with two

centuries of hindsight, had his own signs in mind. The "philosophies of

history" that inspired the Romantics and the Victorians have given way

before the names of "our history." "Auschwitz" has refuted Kant and Hegel;

"Budapest 1956" has refuted Marx; and "May 1968" refutes the doctrine of

parliamentary libertarianism. Fukuyama reads the signs differently, but he

shares Lyotard's desire to find a world-historical significance in such

political watersheds.(34)



Other features of Fukuyama's text also resonate strangely with voices we

have already heard, and one is his return to Kant's instrumentalist

argument for the efficacy of universal history. If, said Kant, "one

carries through this study, a guiding thread will be revealed. It can

serve not only for clarifying the confused play of things human...but for

giving a consoling view of the future." If we smile at a pragmatic appeal

from the author of the transcendental subject, it is no less surprising to

hear it echoed by a conservative critic of relativism supported by the

Rand Corporation: "Any Universal History," says Fukuyama, is an "enormous

abstraction...A Universal History is simply an intellectual tool." The

phrase recalls Rorty's injunction that we keep on spinning edifying

histories of moral uplift: "One does not have to be particularly cheerful

or optimistic...about the likelihood of a final victory of persuasion over

force, to think that such a victory is the only plausible political goal

we have managed to envisage--or to see ever more inclusive universal

histories as useful instruments for the achievement of that goal." The end

of faith in a fixed human nature is not, both Fukuyama and Rorty agree,

the end of liberalism, but its triumph.(35)



Indeed, liberalism now stands on a pragmatic tolerance of difference. On

Rorty's view, if pragmatists have an "Idea," it is "Tolerance." As

Fukuyama puts it, for democracy to work, eventually citizens have to

imagine tolerance as more than a means to an end: "[T]olerance in

democratic societies becomes the defining virtue." And this historical

sign points toward liberalism's strong suit, its preparedness for a

cosmopolitan future. Like Greenblatt and Clifford, Fukuyama sees both an

increasing assimilation of peoples into the spirit of liberal democracy

contingently allied with capitalism and a growing diversity of local

traditions. He, too, has adopted the double plot for universal history:



In the contemporary world, we see a curious double phenomenon: both the

victory of the universal and homogenous state and the persistence of

peoples. On the one hand, there is the ever-increasing homogenization of

mankind being brought about by modern economics and technology, and by the

spread of the idea of rational recognition as the only legitimate basis of

government around the world. On the other hand, there is everywhere a

resistance to that homogenization, and a reassertion, largely on a

subpolitical level, of cultural identities that ultimately reinforce

existing barriers between people and nations.



Like Clifford and Greenblatt, Fukuyama is ambivalent, but he predicts that

competition between "different cultures," rather than "rival ideologies,"

will dominate international life in the future.(36)



The varied histories of Fukuyama, Rorty, Clifford, and Greenblatt evince

some surprising congruences of narrative structure. All wish to find

global significance in local historicities. All claim to evade

"metaphysical" philosophical foundations. And all see a world in which

differentiation and homogenization go hand in hand, a vast, new double

plot of cultural history. Their writings map new postmodern universal

histories and project worlds in which "universal" is not a synonym for

"homogenous" and in which cultural difference as cultural difference

remains real, viable, and even desirable, so long as it does not become

exclusive nationalism.



The similarities do not, however, reduce to a bland consensus. If we

return to the cover of The Predicament of Culture and think again about

the Igbo man playing Western anthropologist, we can imagine the different

readings that picture might evoke from our new universal historians. For

Levi-Strauss, the picture might tell a story of the vanishing primitive

taking up the instruments of literacy and power in pathetic imitation of

his political masters. Lyotard might read it as the embodiment of local

narrative, heroically shouting out the single name of the Igbo over the

generalized din of the West. In Clifford's tale, the picture offers an

ironic commentary on the shifting positions of observer and observed, its

cultural cross-dressing an admirable warning against assumptions of ethnic

autonomy. For Rorty, it might point toward the hope for intercultural

dialogue and a useful reminder that "our" knowledge is always contingent

and negotiated. And for Fukuyama, the Igbo assumption of the icons of

literate reason could signify the progress of spirit: What used to be a

Third World of peoples without history has become the new historical

world, a changing border rimmed round the posthistorical West. The

readings differ in instructive ways, but it would be a vain hope to

believe that we could separate out some of them as metanarratives and

describe others as local narratives. The tellings interweave, without

collapsing.



The search for eternal principles separating the discursive modes of the

West and the rest has reproduced the sort of metaphysics that so many of

us wish to escape. And that quest for narrative certainty threatens to

drag down a potentially constructive negotiation of what counts as

plausible postcolonial history or histories. We would be better served by

recognizing that narrative mastery comes not from "meta" form, but from

social situation. And if we wish to salvage "master narrative" as a

phrase, we should return to the pragmatic description in Lyotard's

Instructions paiennes: Master narratives are simply those that hold

positions of dominance. The distinctions between local and metanarratives

are contingent rather than axiomatic. Some groups have been more effective

at institutionalizing their tales and imposing them on others. The

imposition can be crude or subtle, openly contested, as in the Mashpee

trial, or implicitly negotiated, as with ethnographic field work. But

there is no literary legerdemain behind the event, no hidden circuitry of

masterful cognitive power to be unmasked and deactivated. We will not find

a logical or aesthetic essence common to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago,

the courtroom testimony of accused prostitutes, or the creation tales of

the Pueblo. If these are local narratives, it is by virtue of positions

that are always changing and historically specific. No special way of

telling can guarantee that today's local narrative will not become

tomorrow's narrative master. Virtually overnight, the chanting of

subaltern protest may modulate into the crack of the historical whip.



While "meta" or "master narrative" may help to remind us that narratives

can be powerful determinants of experience, in a post-Foucauldian academy,

we should be leery of the simple dualistic vision of power that the phrase

implies. Many of us writing on decolonization and history wish to identify

with the suffering and the oppressed, but we should not succumb to the

temptation to dichotomize narrative forms into "bad" master texts and

"good" local texts, and then try to ground that distinction in an

ahistorical narrative logic. For the Igbo man standing in schizophrenic

isolation on the cover of The Predicament of Culture, capitalism's tale of

the march of science may well be an oppressive force to be resisted,

altered, or transformed. For his spouse or lover, Igbo narrative might be

a harsh and sometimes unhappy master. And the picture itself serves a

warning, for without contextual or intertextual points of reference, the

image is either hopelessly plastic or impossibly opaque. Lacking a more

detailed description of its situation, could we possibly know that the

masker is a "Native" and not a state-certified anthropologist

participating (in time-honored scholarly fashion) in local life? In some

situations, mastery is comparatively easy to define and denounce. In

others, it is not. Unfortunately, no narrative gospel, no analytic

algorithm, nor even the Kantian sublime can cast an eternal light upon our

path.



So what is to be done? Do we toss our hands in the air and declare

"History" evil and despair of rendering postcolonial frontiers without

engaging in intellectual terrorism? Such fatalism seems pointless as well

as needless. We are living a golden age of global narratives in which

universal history is not simply possible, but unavoidable. Instead of

imagining historicity as something that Europe invented and then imposed

upon, or bequeathed to, the benighted "others" of the earth, we might

imagine European historicities as some among many, historicities in both

conversation and conflict with a profusion of narrative traditions. Rather

than elaborating ever more intricate principles for differentiating

historical and non-historical cultures and texts, we need to consider what

happens to historicity when we imagine all peoples, regardless of race,

religion, or literacy, as historical, and think of their narratives as

different varieties of historical discourse rather than romantic

alternatives to it. So long as we are willing to refigure history, that

sort of inclusiveness need not efface local experiences and stories.

Indeed, it may be the only way of taking seriously the voices, memories,

and histories of others. It is one way of hearing the words of Native

American poet Joy Harjo, when she tells us, "I know there is something

larger than the memory of a dispossessed people."(37)



University of California Los Angeles



2. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century

Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 15, 17. See

also Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James

Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley, 1986).



3. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, transl. John and Doreen

Weightman (New York, 1977), esp. 27, 28, 33, 34, 39, 49. Among other

critical readings, see Clifford, Predicament of Culture, esp. 236-246;

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 345-359;

Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Eng., 1977),

esp. 4-8, 147-149; and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis

Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, 1988), 28-43.



4. Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 52, 285, 286.



5. Ibid., 120, 275, 331, 333, 334, 336, 337, 338.



6. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), esp. 1-34,

217-269. The citation is from 257; Levi-Strauss, Totemism, transl. Rodney

Needham (Boston, 1963); Jean-Francois Lyotard, Instructions paiennes

(Paris, 1977), 39.



7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Le 23 mars" (1971), reprinted in Derive a

partir de Marx et Freud (Paris, 1973), 305-316. See Geoff Bennington,

Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester, Eng., 1988), for an introductory

overview. Significantly, neither Hayden White nor Paul Ricoeur, two of the

best known theorists of narrative and history, speak of master or

metanarrative.



8. Instructions paiennes, 23, 25, 31, 34, 35. As an instance of

pragmatics, Lyotard says that one finds the will to power in the

"pragmatique" of official narratives. "Pragmatique," he explained, C'est

un mot pour designer l'ensemble des rapports, tres compliques, qu'il y a

entre celui qui raconte et ce dont il parle, celui qui raconte et celui

qui l'ecoute, et ce dernier et l'histoire dont parle le premier" (16).



9. Ibid., 18, 42, 45. See also his "De la force des faibles." in l'Arc 64

(1976), 4-12.



10. Instructions paiennes, 53, 56, 79, 86, 87. See the reading in Betty R.

McGraw, "Jean-Francois Lyotard's Postmodernism: Feminism, History, and the

Question of Justice," Women's Studies 20 (March 1992), 259-273.



11. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur savoir

(Paris, 1979); Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

transl. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984). The

citation is from xxiii, xxiv.



12. Ibid., 37, 41. See also David Carroll, "Narrative, Heterogeneity, and

the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard," in The Aims of

Representation, ed. Murray Krieger New York, (1987), 69-106; J. M.

Bernstein, "Grand Narratives," in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and

Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London, 1991), 102-123; and Timothy H.

Engstrom, "The Postmodern Sublime? Philosophical Rehabilitations and

Pragmatic Evasions." boundary 2 20 (Summer 1993), 190-204.



13. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 20, 21.



14. Ibid., 19-23, 60; Lyotard, Le Differend (Paris, 1983); Lyotard, The

Differend: Phrases in Dispute, transl. George Van Den Abeele (Minneapolis,

1988), 151-181. The citation is from 155.



15. Lyotard, The Differend, esp., 32-50, 151-155. Compare his account with

that in Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass., 1980). I mean

to leave aside the validity of Kripke's argument. Instead, we might ask,

is a Kripkean account of naming coherent with Lyotard's earlier definition

of narrative forms, and will it do the work Lyotard wishes it to do? I

believe the answer to both questions is "no."



16. Leslie Silko, "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian

Perspective," in English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, ed. Leslie A.

Fiedler and Houston A. Baker (Baltimore, 1979), 54.



17. To begin with, it is not clear that Kripke would endorse Lyotard's

extension of "rigid designators" to collective singulars like "the

Cashinahua" or "the Jews." Kripke's examples are of human individuals,

Richard Nixon or Moses. Lyotard ignores this difficulty entirely. Some

readers might object that I am overlooking his description of the way the

Cashinahua frame their stories, with each narrator naming himself.

Unfortunately for Lyotard's argument, this is an example of the danger of

drawing a universal moral from an anecdote, for this is not a paradigmatic

narrative practice of tribal communities or oral texts. While many oral

communities use ritualized frames for narrating sacred tales, the

performance of "naming" here is hardly universal. Ironically, if erasure

is being done, then Lyotard is doing it to the Cashinahua, reducing their

specific discursive practice to an instance of a universe of "local" (read

Levi-Straussian "savage") narratives. The pragmatics of narrative in oral

discourse is vastly complicated. For a sampling of different approaches,

see Kerwin L. Klein, "Frontier Tales: The Narrative Construction of

Cultural Borders in Twentieth-Century California," Comparative Studies in

Society and History 34 (July 1992), 464-490; Keith H. Basso, Western

Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic Anthropology (Tucson,

1990); Micheal Harkin, "History, Narrative, and Temporality: Examples from

the Northwest Coast," Ethnohistory 35 (Spring 1988), 99-130; and Ronald

Scollon and Suzanne Scollon, Narrative, Literacy, and Face in Interethnic

Communication (Norwood, N. J., 1981).



18. Lyotard. "Histoire universelle et differences culturelles." Critique

41 (May 1985), 559-568; Richard Rorty, "Cosmopolitanism without

Emancipation: A Response to Jean-Francois Lyotard" (1985), in Objectivity,

Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 (Cambridge, Eng.,

1991), 211-222; Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity" (1984), in

Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge,

Eng., 1991), 164-175. See their brief exchange in "Discussion entre

Jean-Francois Lyotard et Richard Rorty," Critique 41 (May 1985), 581-584,

and the useful overview by Vincent Descombes, "Les mots de la tribu," in

ibid., 418-444. Lyotard's subsequent reflections can be found in an

interview, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Gilbert Larochelle, "That Which

Resists, After All," Philosophy Today 36 (Winter 1992), 402-427, esp.

405-406.



19. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton,

1979), esp. 78-79, 257-311, and Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism

(Minneapolis, 1982), esp. xiii-xlvii, 110-138, and 211-232.



20. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially

Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981); Jameson, "Foreword," in Postmodern

Condition, vii-xxi; Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics of Culture"

(1986), reprinted in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

(New York, 1990), 151. Greenblatt mentions, without citation, Wolfgang

Iser as another source of the trope of "oscillating discourses." We should

read this essay against two more recent works in the same volume,

"introduction," 1-15, and "Resonance and Wonder," 161-183.



21. Clifford, Predicament of Culture. For the "monotonous alternation" of

the bad infinity, see George W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, transl. A. V.

Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 1989), 137-143, 150-154.



22. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore,

1976), 24-27, 131; Derrida, "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to

Hegel's Semiology" (1968) in Margins of Philosophy, transl. Alan Bass

(Chicago, 1982), 69-108. Derrida's counterintuitive comment brings out the

ambiguities in Levi-Strauss. Though the anthropologist associates history

with enslavement, Derrida's suggestion that this calls forth the

possibility of history as liberation resonates with Levi-Strauss's hope

that research might recover a "historical dimension" for pre-Columbian

America.



23. There is irony aplenty in Predicament of Culture, but the

denunciations (or celebrations) of it as a study in skepticism strike me

as overwrought. For different readings, see Frances E. Mascia-Lees and

Patricia Sharpe, "Culture, Power, and Text: Anthropology and Literature

Confront Each 'Other,'" American Literary History 4 (Winter 1992),

678-696; P. Steven Sangren, "Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography:

'Postmodernism' and the Social Reproduction of Texts," Current

Anthropology 29 (June 1988), 405-424; Paul Rabinow, "Representations Are

Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology." in Writing

Culture, 234-260; and Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History,

Literature (Berkeley, 1992), 101-126.



24. Clifford, "Identity in Mashpee," in Predicament of Culture, 277, 289.

See the different accounts of the case in Paul Brodeur, Restitution: The

Land Claims of the Mashpee, Pasamaquoddy, and Penobscot Indians of New

England (Boston, 1985); Francis 0. Hutchins, Mashpee: The Story of Cope

Cod's Indian Town (West Franklin, N. J., 1979); and Jack Campisi, The

Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, 1991).



25. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 289.



26. Ibid., 302, 317.



27. Ibid., 329.



28. Ibid., 14, 333. See also Campisi, The Mashpee Indians, esp. l4-i5,

43-45, and Brodeur's account, in Restitution, 59, 60, of the coverage by

the Wall Street Journal.



29. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 342.



30. Despite my criticisms of Clifford's narrative coding, I do not agree

with Walter Benn Michaels that "culture" in general, and Predicament of

Culture in particular, reify essentialist (and racialist) notions of

subjectivity. See Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of

Cultural Identity." Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992), 655-865, and the

ensuing debate: Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation

and the Ground of Jewish Identity," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993),

693-725; Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, "White Philosophy."

Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994), 737-757; and Walter Benn Michaels, "The

No-Drop Rule." Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994), 758-769.



31. Jacques Derrida, "Differance" (1968), in Margins of Philosophy,

transl. Bass, 11; Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of

the Human Sciences" (1966), in Writing and Difference, transl. Alan Bass

(Chicago, 1978), 293. See also Paul de Man's critique of Derrida in "The

Rhetoric of Blindness," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric

of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, 1983), esp. 120-122.



32. For a sense of recent directions, compare History and Theory, Theme

Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics, ed. Philip Pomper, et al.

(1995); After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial

Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, 1995); and Conceptualizing

Global History, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, 1993).



33. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York,

1992). See also his earlier article, "The End of History?" National

Interest 18 (Summer 1989), 3-18. Of the many commentaries on Fukuyama,

perhaps the best is Perry Anderson, "The Ends of History," in A Zone of

Engagement (London, 1992), 279-375.



34. Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point

of View," in On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1963), 11-26;

Kant, "An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly

Progressing?," in ibid., 137-154; Lyotard, The Differend, 154-181. We

cannot do justice to Lyotard's reading of Kant, but we should mention

three points. First, the sign of history becomes the occasion for reading

the Third Critique and the sublime into Kant's (and Lyotard's) reading of

world politics. Second, Lyotard emphasizes the resonance of "event"

(Begebenheit), and, in one of Kant's drafts, finds him using "Ereignis," a

usage which allows Lyotard to situate his reading against Heidegger.

Finally, the suggestion that the metanarratives of modernity have been

effectively falsified (strange affinities here with logical positivism)

has some resonance with his statement, in "Apostil au narratives" (1986),

that metanarratives differ from myths in locating their resolution in some

imagined future. See his Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants (Paris,

1986), 38



35. Kant, "Idea for a Universal History," 31; Fukuyama, End of History,

130; Rorty, "Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation," 219. See also Rorty,

"The End of Leninism and History as Comic Frame," in History and the Idea

of Progress, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, et al. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995) 211-226.



36. Rorty, "Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation"; Fukuyama, End of

History, 215, 234, 244.



37. Joy Harjo, "Grace," in In Mad Love and War (Middletown, Conn., 1993),

1.

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