摘要：Theorists of post-modernism have declared the end of history in the sense that it was understood in the precedingera.i This does not mean, as some have understood it, that we have somehow miraculously removed ourselves fromhistory. Rather our relation to the cultural past has been profoundly changed by technologies of reproduction anddistribution. The cultural past returns to the present not as part of a grand narrative of loss or progress nor asnostalgic synecdoche for an absent whole (the ruin), but in bits and pieces, available simultaneously, taken out ofcontext. If context is sought, it does not come as a whole story but as a narrative fragment in a hyperlink. TheDerridean “archive” is increasingly on-line, and bits of the archive return as signs of rich but blurred significance ina changing fashion system.
