ABSTRACT
The rise of the term “postmodernity” to considerable currency not only in academic circles but also in the mass media betokens a discursive shift in how we collectively represent, understand, and interpret the world. This shift depended upon a reconfiguration of all manner of conceptual apparatuses in many different spheres. It is doubtful, for example, if postmodernism could have acquired the currency and purchase it undoubtedly has without the rise of concepts to do with chaos, complexity, fractals, and the like within mathematics and the sciences, for no matter how badly misunderstood these ideas might be in the humanities or in the media, they still add their authority to the destabilization of traditional concepts that is such a hallmark of postmodern sensibility.
