ABSTRACT
Postmodernism is the most slippery of terms. It encompasses a broad variety of developments, not only in philosophy and social science, but also in architecture, the arts, literature, fashion, and many other spheres of human endeavour. Postmodernism refuses all semblance of the totalising and essentialist orientations of modernist systems of thought. Where modernism purports to base itself on generalised, indubitable truths about the way things really are postmodernism abandons the entire epistemological basis for any such claims to truth. There seems to be no limit to the number of ways in which the relationship between postmodernism and post-structuralism is portrayed in the literature. Post-structuralism retains structuralism’s commitment to de Ferdinand de Saussure’s view that the meaning of words derives from their relationship to one another and not from any postulated relationship to non-linguistic reality. In Freudian theory, condensation and displacement are mechanisms whereby repressed desires can be formulated in ways acceptable to the psychic censor.
