ABSTRACT
Our world, for good or ill, has begun to operate on principles different from those that have dominated much of the [20th] century and we tend to see ourselves as part of a culture that we may not altogether understand but which we recognize as being ‘after’ what we have known. (Stevick 1985: 135)
Determination is dead, indeterminism reigns. (Baudrillard 1988: 127)
Times are tough when things have got no meaning. (Oasis, Stand by Me, 1997)
Introduction Few would dispute the fact that over the last three decades huge cultural, aesthetic, economic, social and technological changes have taken place. The question that has preoccupied academics in seemingly endless exchanges has been how best to characterise these various transformations and fluctuations. For sociologists especially, the issue has been one of epochs and eras. On one side is the view that this round of change is evidence of the demise of the modernist project (variously defined) and society’s ultimate transition into conditions of ‘postmodernity’ (eg, Baudrillard 1981; Huyssen 1990; Jameson 1984, 1991; Lyotard 1984).1 The opposing perspective, generally associated with theorists such as Giddens (1984, 1990), Beck (1992) and Berman (1982), is more circumspect, suggesting instead that the changing nature of society does not involve anything as significant as a paradigm shift and thus that current social and economic transformations should be situated in the realm of ‘late modernity’ or ‘late capitalism’. The debate can be conceptualised around the knotty question of whether the ‘postmodern’ represents a qualitative break with or merely a quantitative intensification of what has gone before. Are we experiencing the inauguration of a new historical era/epoch, or simply an extension – perhaps more accurately an augmentation (maturation?) – of existing tendencies? Complexity is added to the picture by the realisation that ‘modernity’ has all along been considerably more heterogeneous than its selfdescriptions (Frisby 1985, 2001), a situation that casts considerable doubt on these established, yet rather schematic, and ultimately ‘binary’ distinctions.
