ABSTRACT
The aesthetic postmodernism is always intimately imbricate with the issue of a political post modernity is a salient fact. This chapter addresses the issue of the Enlightenment and its legacy. This leads into a necessary reconsideration of the conceptions and constructions of the Immanuel Kantian categories of time and space. A deep formative influence lying behind much of the contemporary debate is the legacy of the Frankfurt School, perhaps most especially the work of Adorno. As a result of this legacy inherited from Frankfurt, the issue of the postmodern is also tangentially, at least an issue of Marxism. A major source for the contemporary debates around the postmodern is to be found in the work of the Frankfurt School, most specifically in the text proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1944, Dialectic of Enlightenment. One twentieth-century legacy of the Enlightenment is the so-called Copernican revolution proposed initially by structuralism and semiotics.
