The desire to focus on the post prevents effective class conciseness – the focus on genealogy only positions history as something that is not linear preferring bourgeois knowledge

The "post" in deconstructive semiotics is itself the subject of ludic textuality and marks an indeterminate non-history that occults the material contradictions of capitalism. Post-ality invokes a playfulness that blurs the lines of the "before" and "after" and thus making "post" a waving-wavering "puncept" of undecidability what Ulmer calls "moira," which is the textual equivalent of the "visual illusion known as the moire effect" ("The Puncept of Grammatology" 179-189)-that obscures its retrograde political valence. This "blurring" is, as I will argue, simply an inaugural move for cutting off-in the pedagogy of "double session"-the relation of the past and present by constructing a history that "has no middle" (Derrida, Dissemination 227). "Post" in post-al theory is not the concept of a decided linear temporality in history but the puncept of a crisis-effect "within" history itself (postality as what Derrida calls "spacing" across the ages). As such, it is both a "before" and an "after," a supratemporality that contains "The Seeds of Time," to use the title of Fredric Jameson's neoconservative book of, what Hal Foster has called, "untimely meditations" on a theory of history. This atemporal "post" is motivated by the movement not of class struggle but of differance, the optics-moire-effect- of the sign. In this reactionary avant-gardism, the waving-wavering effect (moire) gives "post" the "paradoxical ability both to precede and to come after itself" (Elarn 12) and turns "post" into a conceptual slippage, a puncept. The notion of history without a middle now informs both right-wing circles and the postal left, which has fully surrendered to this bourgeois notion of history. As I will argue at the end of this section, left writers such as Fredric Jameson are now in the forefront of a double sessional theory of history. The notion of differance post" as "moire" effect) generates a radical fissure that renders knowledge the source of wealth and consequently posits culture and politics as autonomous from the production practices in advanced industrial societies. This enables bourgeois theory to propose a radical break from a "before" to an "after." In its formal discourses, of course, post-al theory vehemently denounces, as historically naive and epistemologically simplistic, any notion of a linear history that could establish a self-identical "before" and "after." It does not regard the "before" as a place of origin and reads the "after" simply as an "after-effect": a complex rewriting of the "before" (Lyotard, "'Re-writing' Modernism"). This disconnecting of the "before" and "after" is itself part of a larger move to exclude causality from the domain of history and with it "historical necessity." The dismantling of "historical necessity" is the project of a post-al science of historiography specified as "genealogy." in place of "historical necessity" and "causality," post-al genealogy installs the "haphazard" (the "event") which is excessive and not subordinate to any "laws" but acts by the alea-the chance and randomness of desire (Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 154). The need for a "break" (post-alityl is a symptom of a recurrent crisis in the labor practices in capitalism. Bourgeois philosophy "solves" this material crisis in the theoretical imaginary (on the superstructural level) by inventing the "new" (over and over again), that is to say, by producing a post-al state which provides a "beyond" to the crisis-a novel post-al state free from the burden (contradictions) of· the past. The turmoil of the contemporary labor force, for instance, is mystified by the post-al discourses on the outdatedness (the "before") of labor and the radically new knowledge worker who is an "after" without any connection to the before. This paradigm of explanation is highly attractive to post-al knowledge industry because it does not have to "explain" the contradictions that transforms the "before" into an "after." Post-al theory simply starts all over again until what is now the "after" itself becomes untenable owing to the increasing contradictions and at which time the "after" is abandoned in favor of a newer "after." Post-al historiography is, in fact, a series of these accelerated "afters" without "befores": a history which "has no middle" and as such does not have to account for its own historicity (what, as I will discuss later) Leo Strauss calls history without historicity and is now the basis of not only academic historiography but also right-wing conservative theory. In my discussion of the construction of a "post" in post-al theory, I leave aside the writings of such theorists as Foucault and Bell who postulate a "discontinuity" (Archaeology of Knowledge, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) and a "difference" (Bell xiii) between various events and stages of history without at the same time giving up the notion of history as "palimpsests" (Bellxvi)andtdiscourse" (Foucault). I will focus instead on the more complicated fate of the "post" in Lyotard and Derrida who formally denounce the "break" and the "post''-as-break and instead talk of post-ality as immanent to history: as a continuing rewriting, which is another way of saying the "post" is a crisis of representation across the ages----no age is immune to it.