Introduction: The Context and Language of Postmodernism

Abstract

In any collection of essays on the topic of postmodernism, it is tempting to dispense with an editorial introduction and not only because it is a difficult topic to introduce. The collection in this volume is based on a conference held at the University of St Andrews in August 1989. The aim of that meeting was to bring together social scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds to explore the common ‘problem’ of postmodernism. What does it mean? What are the individual social sciences making of it? Can they talk to each other about it? The results were both interesting and exhilarating with many voices saying different things and probably generating more controversy than agreement. What follows is a selection of essays covering all the major social sciences. They display a wide variety of responses to postmodernism. Herein lies the temptation to let the reader loose immediately to experience the variety, the fragmentation, the differences and perhaps the confusions which have become as much features of the literature on postmodernism as they are said to be of postmodernism itself. Such an editorial approach would certainly be in tune with the mood of postmodern writings. Yet we have decided not to take this course for two reasons. First, although the volume is not intended to be a celebration of postmodernism, neither is it intended to be a sustained critique. Its task is rather to contribute to an important debate within the social sciences by examining the impact of postmodernist ideas in their (modernist) academic locales.

No matter how troubling it may be, the landscape of the postmodern surrounds us. It simultaneously delimits and opens our horizons. It’s our problem and our hope.

(Huyssen, 1988: 221)