ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is at once thrillingly bold and disturbingly vague. It is bold in that the prefix ‘post’ evokes the idea of a decisive break with the past and the arrival of a new age. This notion is both appealing and interesting, not least because announcements of postmodernity accord with the views of others who argue we are entering a novel Information Society. However, the subject is also disconcertingly woolly, postmodernity being hard to define with precision. The term can appear to be a series of impressionistic suggestions (with repeated pronouncements on ‘difference’, ‘discourses’, ‘irony’ and the like) and gnomic reflections of the zeitgeist. Furthermore, postmodernity seems at once to be everywhere (in architecture, in academic disciplines, in attitudes to the self) and, because the words are so imprecisely used, impossible to pin down.
