ABSTRACT

We live in interesting, if rather confusing times. The combination of a sense of new times coupled with an experience of familiar troubles has been described as a typically 'postmodern' phenomenon (Eco 1987). In the postmodern world it seems as though 'past, present, and future coexist in all discourse' (Tyler 1986: 139), a view which receives endorsement in Eco's comments on the continual return of modem ages to the Middle Ages, and to our age as 'neomedieval'. The thawing of the Cold War, the political and economic transformations underway in the societies of formerly existing socialism, the economic and social crises facing the United States of America, the proliferation of ethnic, regional, and infranational struggles threatening (promising) to undermine existing forms of the nation-state, that geopolitical icon of modernity, increasing signs of ecological damage and an associated inability to organise a response at the appropriate global level, the accelerating anti-sociality of cities disintegrating under the impact of excesses of population, communication and transportation, and the various corollaries, for example growing levels of risk, stress, anxiety, uncertainty, terrorism and crime, suggest that we may indeed be living through the transformation

of a particularly complex socioeconomic, political and military configuration. Certainly the complacent equation of our age, and Western culture and civilisation and its destiny with an endless modernity has been challenged, if not irrevocably overturned by growing doubts about the feasibility and desirability of the 'project of modernity', and a parallel realisation that accounts with the past, with tradition, have not been settled.