(ii)  The Postmodern Subject. 

This analysis is guilty of constructing a “Grand Narrative,” a form of heresy among those intellectual circles that fail to distinguish between metanarrative, grand narrative, and totalizing theory, thereby bulking their analytical values under a single, derided modernist umbrella (Smart 1999:46).  This being the case, it should be stated that the position taken here is one in concurrence with many critiques of chic “New York Times Postmodernism” (that is, postmodernism solely referent to a culture industry and its celebration):  that the argument for the “end of modernist metanaratives of mastery” as Angela McRobbie (1994) alliteratively advocates, is itself ideological, indeed, masterful (Agger 1992:73, 277).  An interest in cultural history is a retrospective interest in the narratives which have come to encapsulate its passing through retrospect. 

Our personal, internal histories and attitudes, when told vicariously through a purely technocratic discourse, “constrain our ability to give expression to meaningful differences and to articulate a story that would allow us to see our lives as a whole as meaningful”  (Simpson 1995:164).   The immediate industrial past is then given centre-stage in a persistent story of a sudden, quantum leap in innovation-often sociobiologically coloured in terms of punctuated equilibrium. 

As a resistance to this clichéd story of the shared American past, the story given here has aimed to speak of technologies and their impacts on perception and our sense of spacetime (which is not to speak through those technologies as if they are synonymous with personal thought processes). There are immanent internal histories with resolve to maintain individuation within the ‘pure duration’ of spacetime (elaborated in the fifth section of this paper) and there are quantifiable external histories, giving emphasis to representative moments or symbols of achievement (Simpson 1995:50-51).  Further to this, as Wayne Gabardi (2001) explains,  “Changes in social reproduction result in changes in cultural representation of time and space relations, which in turn reorder our everyday lives” (Gabardi 2001:25).   The complex of cultural meaning and social interaction is temporally and spatially bounded. Hence it is the case  that if our recently passed 20th century story is to be told, it must “constitute its objects… in spatial terms” (James 1992:97-99).  To deny narrative, as many schools of postmodernism have attempted, is an exercise in futility. As a speaker, one "establishes a place and commands a relation to time and space" (Conley 1993:88).