Introduction

The characteristics of postmodernist thought are the subject of intense debate, and therefore the thinkers who have generated it do not lend themselves to concise categorization. Postmodernism describes more than architectural innovation. The new architectural “style” is a metaphor for a new condition; in the late twentieth century, social scientists and artists alike have found themselves alienated from what they view as the “empty” promises of modernity. The most famous, and perhaps infamous, postmodernist thinkers are French, yet postmodernism is a cultural and intellectual phenomenon whose influence has been most pervasive in the United States. Postmodernists object that the moderns have conceptualized time and space as fixed, linear, and measurable. Postmodernists have identified three Enlightenment metanarratives as targets: namely the subject or rational human agent, the notion of secular salvation or progress, and science in its broadest sense, including an entire constellation of philosophical and metaphysical foundations.