ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1980s, and in fields as diverse as architectural theory, literary criticism, philosophy, and social theory, the term "postmodernism" was used to mark a diffuse sense of time-consciousness. This consciousness was defined by the widespread sentiment of the exhaustion of the project of modernity, of being at the end of certain cultural, theoretical, and social-political paradigms. As is often the case with terms attempting to capture the Zeitgeist, the very definition of these terms themselves become aspects of the Zeitgeist. It is often difficult to distinguish between the signifier and the signified; the former becomes implicated in the identity of the latter. So it was and continues to be with the term "postmodernism."
