ABSTRACT
The post-modern world is a world dominated by pastiche, best defined as parody without humour or, as Frederic Jameson puts it, 'an imitation which mocks the original'. Nancy Frazer and Linda Nicholson discuss 'Feminism and Postmodernism', and seem keen to adopt some kind of 'post-modern' strategy where they argue for the combination of post-modernism's criticisms of functionalism and essentialism with feminism's conception of social criticism. Post-structuralism, with its regime of floating signifiers, promotes a depthless synchronic history, partly as a consequence of its destruction of the historical metanarrative. Today everything moves with the market, from the price of plutonium to the value put on the past and on archaeology. Robert Hewison has recently illustrated quite vividly some of the problems extant in the heritage industry. The public's ability to differentiate between truth and falsity, or even economic truth, must be questioned as the role of the 'expert' or intellectual is marginalised under neo-conservative regimes.
