For a number of authors, the term deconstruction has come to signify an ‘interruption’ within the constitutive discourses of contemporary human geography. Specifically, a deconstructive event is said to mark a site where the coherent and legitimate linking of geographical phrases can no longer be maintained. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that the deconstructive event of ‘interruption’ has been drawn upon as a device capable of marking the limit beyond which modern geography cannot go. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely upon the basis of this absolutely unbreachable limit that one can begin to think about a site which is nevertheless beyond it. Postmodernity is the name usually given to this ‘site’ beyond the ‘interruption’ of modernity. Whether or not one is for or against the attempted passage from the horizons of modernity, one will nevertheless have sought to have done with the event of ‘interruption’ itself. At its simplest, deconstruction is the reversible pathway, or pivot, which connects the modern with the postmodern. This, at least, is what the dialecticians have told us. Within this paper, the texts of Derrida and Lyotard will be drawn upon in order to argue that deconstruction and postmodernism have nothing to do with the passage from modernity into postmodernity. Specifically, it will be argued that the dialectical understanding of the term ‘interruption’ betrays a serious imprecision within our understanding of modernity itself. Ultimately, there will have been neither ‘interruption’ nor ‘pivot’ within the course of this paper, only the interminable vacillation of an interruption without interruption.
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