Introduction Postmodernity and Beyond

Abstract

Postmodernism has of late come in for increasing criticism, often of a highly charged sort. A kind of modernist counter-attack against postmodernism’s critique of modernity is now clearly, and unabashedly, in evidence on the culture scene. Postmodernism, we are warned by these counter-critics, is dangerously nihilistic; by undermining (“deconstructing”) the notion of “objective” knowledge- indeed, the very idea of “reality”-postmodernism leads directly to the demise of all truth and value, and thus to a debilitating cognitive and moral vacuum. This line of attack is perhaps most in evidence in the assault launched by scientific “realists” against that postmodern school of thought which maintains that what science calls “reality” is nothing more than a social construct (“the social construction of reality”).¹ It must be admitted that the “realists” have every reason to be concerned.