The End of History?

For Gianni Vattimo “modernity ends its existence when -for multiple reasons- the possibility of speaking about history as a unitary entity disappears” (Translation is mine; Vattimo, p. 10). For him the principal reason for this is “the irruption of the society of communication.” “These mediums -press, radio, television, in general everything that in Italian is called “telemática”- have been the determinant cause of the dissolution of the central points of view that the French philosopher, Jean-Françoise Lyotard, call grand narratives” (Translation is mine; Vattimo, p. 13). The postmodern condition means for him the advent of a “transparent society” characterized by an explosion and multiplication of world views which no longer make possible conceiving a history articulated from a central and unique point of view.

The critique of history also means a critique of teleology and progress. From a postmodern perspective the ideal of history in modernity is seen as teleological. That teleology -in which history is a gradual movement towards emancipation- leads the erasure of contingencies by canceling the possibility of the incalculable and the unexpected. All events are perceived as belonging to a general matrix of progress. That is why the valorization of events is done in terms of how that event fits the framework of progress. The “good” event is a “step forward” in that ideal of history. The end of history is, therefore, the end of a singular, linear and progressive history which inevitably will lead to human emancipation.

The current work of Elizabeth Grosz overlaps with some of the arguments about history expressed before. In “Thinking the New, Of Futures Yet Unthought”, she contended about new conceptions of temporality open to the idea of the new. Indirectly, her argument have some implications to the question of history by addressing the issue of change. She wants to get away from conceptions of predictable, measured, and regulated change, which are characteristic of modernity. We should remember that modernity is concerned with novelty, but novelty has become subjected to calculation and prediction, a paradoxical operation because cancels the possibility of novelty itself. Thus, the grand narrative of history, by sticking to already defined lineal and teleologic frameworks eliminates the possibility of the chaotic, the contingent, or of the new. By the same token, her argument have the implication of calling forth a new conception of history open to the unpredicted, the incalculable, the chaotic, the new. “Which mean that change should be thought in terms other than the calculative initiation of a new causal chain” (Cheah 1996, “Mattering”).