Introduction

Abstract

Rather disingenuously, Alex Callinicos once remarked that his only excuse for producing another work on postmodernism was a sense of personal satisfaction gained from alleviating, however temporally, the irritation he felt when confronted by the hubris and obsfucation of certain postmodern texts. More earnestly, but along the same lines, Christopher Norris introduced The Truth about Postmodernism, noting that large sections of the erstwhile left or left-liberal intelligentsia had been won over to consensus-based doctrines of meaning and truth that left them unable to articulate any kind of reasoned or principled opposition. Although the melancholic period of Thatcherism, the context for the above works, has since been superseded by Tony Blair’s new times, and Anthony Giddens’ third way, their language of change and modernisation might be considered to be a sanitised version of the familiar obfuscating pragmatism. As a prolegomena towards a critique of the discourse of globalisation, social exclusion and identity politics, this present work is a commentary on such obfuscation, the process of concealment common both to ‘modernisers’ and postmodernists. It is in effect a commentary on ideology.