In American cultural politics today there are at least two positions on postmodernism now in place: one aligned with a neoconservative politics, the other derived from poststructuralist theory. "Neoconservative" postmodernism is the more familiar of the two: defined mostly in terms of style, it depends on modernism, which, reduced to its own worst formalist image, is countered with a return to narrative, ornament and the figure. This position is often one of reaction, but in more ways than the stylistic for also proclaimed is the return of history (the humanist tradition) and the return of the subject (the artist/architect as the master auteur). "Poststructuralist" postmodernism, on the other hand, assumes "the death of man" not only as original creator of unique artifacts but also as the centered subject of representation and of history. This postmodernism, opposed to the neoconservative, is profoundly antihumanist: rather than a return to representation, it launches a critique in which representation is shown to be more constitutive of reality than transparent to it (thus the poststructuralist connection). And yet, however opposed in sytle and politics, it is my contention that these two cepts of postmodernism disclose an historical identity.