ABSTRACT
Nowadays, attempts to take stock of the state of various regions of contemporary culture often employ the distinction between "modernity" and "postmodernity." While this is nothing if not a contestable contrast, those who use it often seem to mean something along the following lines: modern cultures, practices, and ways of thought are exemplified by the Enlightenment's confidence in reason and human perfectibility. The world is-more or less-there for us to understand, and we are doing an increasingly good job of understanding it. Ethical and political reflection is perhaps more difficult but can also come to reveal both just what it means to better the human lot, and how to go about doing so. Postmodern takes on these matters are less triumphalist. Human beings tell lots of stories about themselves and the world they inhabit, but there isn't much sense in thinking that either who we "really" are or what the world "really" is can be pried apart from those stories, or in thinking that the stories can be woven seamlessly together into one grand story, or even that all of the stories will make sense in their own terms or, indeed, in any other. The tropes of modernism, its theories and practices, are suspect; the confidence in Reason, Truth, and Goodness basically comes down to some people trying to impose what strikes them as reasonable, plausible, or valuable on other people who may not see it the same way. There is a recurrent tendency to be interested in the local, rather than the universal, to applaud particular forms of resistance to dominant, unified understandings, rather than to replace them with accounts different in content but similar in scope.
