The Postmodern History Reader. Ed. by Keith Jenkins. To be sure, several of the essays are most interesting. Poster appeals to Michel Foucault's notion of discontinuity and dispersal to show how subjects are differentially constructed over time and space. Although I am fully in agreement with the critique, the hard questions, it seems to me, lie in how we can tell difference and also to what extent one might reify difference.
Poster seeks to imagine a new history more in sync with the postmodern conditions of our time.
These are interesting suggestions, but we do not yet have the new history and Poster does not quite theorize the relations between the new technology and epistemology beyond these remarks, thereby leaving us with a vague impression of technological reductionism. Also, Poster does not always have a sense for the concrete, for the telling example. Whether or not the housewife buys one brand or the other constitutes as much resistance to capitalism as does Clint Eastwood's infamous smirk. Despite my list of criticisms of Poster, I do believe his critiques are perceptive, clear, and justified. The absence of an exciting alternative history appears to be more general.