ABSTRACT
Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose (1984, pages 65 - 66) This essay is an exploration of discontinuities and contingencies. It is an attempt
to place meaning about significant breaks in the evolution of discourse on planning, and about the socia! conditions surrounding such diseourse(1). My purpose is to "unravel an alien system of meaning", that is, to foeus not on the familiar, but to piek at the discourse where it is most opaque (Darnton, 1985, pages 4;- 5). 'Postmodemism' represents one such point of entry. It seems to have generated intense interest in (for example) architecture, yet it has not yet pereolated through to planning. Moreover, its preeise import is exeeedingly vague. As Jeneks (1984, page 5) observes,
"Defining our world today as Post-Modern is rather like defining women as 'non-men'. It doesn't tell us very mueh, either flattering or predictive. All it says is what we have left-the Modern worId, which is paradoxiea!ly doomed, like an obsolete futurist, to extinction."
