ABSTRACT
When discussing a concept such as ‘modernity’, critical attention necessarily focuses upon the boundary or limit of its applicability. One is thereby forced to confront the threshold of other periodizations. Wellmer has drawn attention to the deeply elusive character of the ‘pre’ and ‘post’ concept-types which are usually employed to negotiate these limits (Wellmer 1985). He claims that they occupy a marginal location which is hostile to definition. Furthermore, any clarificatory process can be rooted only in contemporary forms of understanding. In the particular case of modernism and postmodernism, the interpretive project is itself bounded by a ‘horizon’ (Gadamer 1975) that it is attempting to comprehend. It is not merely that we are ‘too close’ to events to see them as they really are but that there is in principle no privileged standpoint which could give us epistemological security about where we draw the lines that demarcate epochs.
