FIRST PART The Postmodern Condition

An Introduction to Postmodernism

'Postmodern' means different things to different people1, so that it is difficult to define. More than a clear-cut movement of thought, postmodern can be defined as a 'mood', an 'atmosphere', in which different strategies or approaches coexist and overlap2. The postmodern world is composed of a number of self-meaning-generating agencies, without horizontal or vertical order, which do not claim supracommunal authority. Postmodern thought is then irrevocably and irreducibly pluralistic, complex, contradictory and destabilizing. Therefore, the word 'bewilderment' (spaesamento)3 has been used to describe the condition of the postmodern person. 'Fragmentation' is another term often connected with the postmodern condition, and certainly is one of its key characteristics.

The use of the term 'postmodernism' may be traced back to as early as the 1880s, when it was used by the British artist John Watkins Chapman. In 1917 Rudolf Pannwitz again used this term.4 In the 1930s the term was employed to describe the major historical transition already under way and the latest developments in the arts in reaction to modernism. The use of 'posts', as in post-impressionism (1880s) and post-industrial (1914-22), developed steadily in the 1960s, when the 'posts' were multiplied: post-structuralism; post-anthropological, post-metaphysical, post-rationalistic, post-ideologies, post-Marxism, post-Christianity etc... These 'posts' were used to designate the radical changes that were taking place first of all in architecture, and subsequently in the various arts, in literature, social thought, economics, science, philosophy and religion. The concept of postmodernism gained widespread attention as a broader cultural phenomenon in the 1970s.

According to Charles Jencks, the most influential authority on architectural postmodernism, Postmodernism was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.5 The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was more than a landmark of modern architecture, it was a symbol that epitomized "modernity itself in its goal of employing technology to create a utopian society for the benefit of all."6 The government, however, could not prevent the buildings from being vandalized and could not renovate the project, in spite of much effort and the millions of dollars put into the plan. In an era of symbols, the razing of the housing project symbolizes the death of modernism and birth of post-modernism.

In this article I distinguish between postmodernism and postmodernity. The first is the intellectual development that, as the name obviously indicates, goes beyond modernism. Post-modernity indicates the historical phase that succeeds the age universally called 'modernity.' 'Postmodern' is a general term that, in my presentation, comprises both the concept of postmodernism and of postmodernity.

Modern and Postmodern

If postmodern is defined in relation to the modern, we should first define what 'modern' means. But this task would take too much of our time here. While I take the complex notion of modernity as understood, I simply summarize some of its content as follows. 'Modern' means: 1. The absolutization of human reason as the only and supreme subject of knowledge; the modern subject is self-grounded and self-understanding, the principle of totality; 2. The emancipation of the individual from any constraint which limits his/her supreme freedom and dignity, or, in other words, modernity is the process in which the ultimate liberation of the human being unfolds; 3. Opposition to tradition and to the church as the chief enemies of emancipation and freedom; 4. Nationalism and statism as the sovereign regulative principles of human existence and co-existence; 5. Unlimited trust in science, economic and technological expansion, industrialism.

Postmodernism is described not by what it is, but what it is not: it is not modern. What does 'it is not modern' mean? Is the postmodern a result of modernism? Or is it the aftermath of modernism? Or the afterbirth of modernism? Is postmodernism a development of modernism? Or its denial? Or the rejection of modernism, or its surrogate? Is it a form of late-modernism? Is postmodernism all these things together?

Postmodernism may find it uncomfortable to define itself negatively in reference to modernism. If modern (from Latin modo: just now, presently) means what is happening now, then it will be, by definition, modern until the end of history. But modernism, like the Pruitt-Igoe project, is falling apart and unable to meet the challenges of a new epoch. Modernism, addicted to the defensive-conservative illusion that nothing will transcend itself, is finally waning.7 What is waning is the presumption, implied in the very word 'modernism', that modernity is the definitive emancipation of the human condition and an irreversible process. There is no choice, until a more suitable term is found, but to call such a phenomenon post-modernism, since whatever outlasts modernity is, by linguistic definition, postmodern. At the same time postmodernism expresses a cry of protest against the pretence of modernism to be the ultimate category of the human spirit and of history.

The Postmodern Condition

The Postmodern Condition by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard is the title of a short book which appeared in 1979 and which put postmodernism into the arena of philosophical debate.8 Postmodernity is characterized, according to Lyotard, by incredulity toward metanarratives, the grand narratives of history. The 'great stories' of progress were based on the modern postulate that history is moving toward a positive end, as indicated by the emancipation of the various political movements. After Lyotard, others have tried to describe the features of the unfolding of postmodern society and the complexity of the postmodern condition. The contemporary world is still in the turmoil of the transition, unable to propose a new project. From the status quo into which modern history had fallen, the postmodern is still in a fluxus quo, in the process of deconstructing history, its determinateness and finality. The status quo of modernity, imbued with historical determinateness and finality,9 generated the various totalitarian ideologies and political tyrannies.

With the dissolution of history and its linear meaning, we entered into a society saturated with communication, in which the mass media play a decisive role. The uninterrupted flux of information seems to make society more complex, confused, chaotic and oscillating. Society seems now made to the measure of the mass media, history has disappeared: what remains is spectacle. We live in 'hyperreality',10 where everything is in excess of itself, piles of images that represent nothing but themselves, in which reality and truth have become irrelevant. The generalized communication and proliferation of images generates, by means of disorientation,11 a multicultural and pluralist world. An infinite number of other possibilities of existence become part of our daily experience, so that 'otherness' is realized before our own eyes. "To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation."12 According to Gianni Vattimo it is exactly from these characteristics of chaos and oscillation that the hope for a society finally human derives.13

Postmodern Arts

As has been mentioned above, architecture played a pivotal role in the affirmation of the postmodern mentality. The postmodern architects' harsh criticism of modern architecture set an intellectual trend which many exponents of other artistic, cultural and scientific disciplines would soon follow. Postmodern architects advocated not simply a change of direction, but "a refusal, a rapture, a renouncement" of modern architecture, whose "main article was precisely an annihilation of tradition, the obligatory renewal, the theology for the new, (...) the perpetual invention of and search for the new at all costs".14 Postmodern architects denounce the dogmas of functionalism, anti-traditionalism and technologism, which reduce Modern Architecture to being an accomplice of bureaucracy and totalitarianism. Thomas Oden15 has offered an illuminating scheme to summarize the characteristics of the transition from modern to postmodern architecture, as described by postmodern architects, especially Jencks. The scheme is basically applicable to other arts which have made the transition to the postmodern: Music, Painting, Literature, Theater, Photography, Film, Television, Dance, Fashion etc...16The scheme corresponds surprisingly to the transitions being experienced in other fields, including theology.

Postmodern arts, however, do not escape the decadent and nihilistic inclination of postmodernity. On a critical note, Fred Lawrence accuses postmodern artistic trends of having reached the reductio ad absurdum of Romantic expressionism. Postmodern art promotes "promiscuity in styles and codes, mixing parody, pastiche, irony, and playfulness, and insisting on the absence of depth and the paradoxical importance of superficiality."17

Postmodern Science

Even science, whose ultimate power to explain and solve all problems was one of the strongest beliefs and fundamental pillars of modernity, is under severe criticism. People realize that science cannot be the only language to describe reality. Life becomes meaningful and beautiful thanks to values, ideas, hopes and aims that go beyond the achievements of science. Moreover the postmoderns question whether science and technology are, instead of being the solution to every human problem, the principal danger to humanity. Scientific and technological development has been poisonous to humanity, generating a worsening of the quality of life, uncontrolled genetic engineering, weapons of mass destruction, resource imbalances and shortages, environmental damage that has reached the point of no return. A growing number of people and groups call for a return to nature and a rejection of modern science since the very possibility of a future on the planet has been endangered. Ever larger groups of naturalists repudiate the modernist project of employing science as the instrument for making human beings "the masters and possessors of nature" (Descartes). 18They accuse the scientists of practicing terrorism against defenseless nature, the experts and technologists of being the modern inquisitors of the authoritarian rule of science and technology.19 Ecology has become the 'ideology' of many postmoderns, who no longer dream about the future earth, the fruit of the progress, but rather lament the earth of the 'good old days,' when it was still uncontaminated by human manipulation. In the postmodern age, conservation is preferred to change, the green colour of nature is preferred to the red colour of revolution. If people in the sixties believed in a better future (see the New Frontier of Kennedy), people in the nineties believe that, thanks to the impending nuclear and ecological menaces, there might be no future at all. The science that should have liberated humanity created the means to destroy it, and the technology that should have humanized nature, devastated it.

One of the claims of postmodernist scientists is that modern Western scientific knowledge is culturally influenced, that is, it is not purely objective. The entire world picture described by modern physics, such as the view that time is linear or the belief that reality is purely physical, is a culturally specific way of looking at reality.20 Philosophers of science are now claiming that many indigenous knowledge systems, such as those of the Australian Yolngu Aborigines, the Yoruba of Nigeria or the Native American Blackfeet, include a genuine alternative scientific understanding of the world.21 This being the case, "science turns out to be a term as multifaceted and problematic as religion" affirms philosopher of science Margaret Wertheim.22

The quantum theory offers a radical new way of understanding the nature of reality, which according to its supporters, often baffles and bemuses mainstream modern scientists.23 Quantum physics challenges the materialistic vision of the world, formulating the theory that everything we perceive and experience is not pieces of matter but living energy, emitted in nonlinear waves or particles. Einstein called this non-continuous emission of energy packets quanta. According to the scientists who developed this theory, the nature of the quantum (particle-wave) is indeterminate, undefinable, and they postulated the phenomenon of the 'wave packet', wherein the subatomic particles are neither particles nor waves. The wave packet defies precise measurement, so that uncertainty and probability are the qualities of this deeper quantum level. The wave function can simultaneously offer several different possibilities, but when observation has been made, only one of these possibilities materializes. The perception of reality can be described as a set of relationships, so that the observer will always influence the process of observing and the object observed. In quantum theory there is no such thing as objective reality. On the contrary, the observer becomes not only part of the process, but he or she brings about what is being observed. We are in a participatory universe, and, according to some of the advocates of quantum theory (the so-called School of Copenhagen), we create our own reality, we are the masters of creation. Other quantum 'scientists' recently overcame the concept of humans as creators of the universe, which still postulates a dualism between observer and being observed, and expanded 'wholistic consciousness.' Everything is interpreted according to a complex model of giving and receiving, observing and being observed, so that the concept of relationship becomes central in the co-creative process of the universe, in which humans are not masters but participators.24 The modern scientific model of cause and effect and determinism is severely rebuffed by 'postmodern' quantum theory.

The Philosophy of Postmodernism

Some authors, like Hugh J. Silverman, Gregory B. Smith and F. F. Centore, think that postmodernism is not simply the refusal to accept modernist principles and perspectives; it is rather its straightforward extension,25 its extreme result, "the latest and most intense form of modern self-dissatisfaction",26 a distorted form of hyper-modernism.27 Other theoreticians define this time as 'late-modernity', or modernity which has come to reflect on itself.28 Among them Jesus Ballesteros, Robert Spaemann and Alejandro Llano especially distinguish the concepts of postmodernity from late-modernity.29 While the first term indicates a genuine epochal turn, the second refers to the attempt of powerful political and cultural centers to delay the death of the Enlightenment and of the subsequent ideologies. According to them (Ballesteros, Spaemann and Llano), thinkers like Rorty, Derrida, Deluze, Foucault, Vattimo, Borges, Habermas and Apel are not postmodern but rather late-modern. In the same line of thought, Gianfranco Morra notes that both modernity and postmodernity are atheist, and as a consequence he states that postmodernity is not a new era, not after-modernity, but rather modernity of the after, modernity in its dissolving and nihilistic phase.30

If the line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism is not well defined for the theoreticians mentioned above, such a line is much clearer for other authors, like Todd Gitlin, who claims that "postmodernism is more than a buzzword or an esthetic (...). It is a way of seeing, a view of the human spirit and an attitude toward political as well as cultural possibilities."31 Thomas Oden salutes postmodernism as the liberator from oppressive modernism, which is the mother of all modern disasters and sufferings. The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who anticipated the collapse of Marxism when it was still glorified by the mainstream culture, defines modernity as the age of 'catastrophe,' in its literal meaning of 'turning upside down.' The thesis that Del Noce calls the 'heterogenesis of the ends' (eterogenesi dei fini) states that the ends of modernity produced results which were the exact opposite of the original intentions.32 The totalitarian ideologies that aimed to liberate human beings from religions turned themselves into 'secular religions.' The evils and horrors that followed are there for everyone to see.

My assumption in this study is that postmodernism has brought the modernist philosophical hegemony to a close. Postmodernism reveals the outcome of the 'parable' of modernity. The modern emancipated adult reason, which was at once the agent and the aim of modernity, finds itself in a grave crisis.

Where modernism asserts centering, focusing and continuity, postmodernism is fragmented, de-centered, discontinuous, multiple, dispersed, without identity and unity.33 "Contemporary postmodernism is fundamentally a sign of disintegration, of transition, of waning faith in the modern ideas of Reason and Progress,"34 the heritage of the Enlightenment. The modern confidence about the subject's ability to dominate and change the world has vanished, and no other 'strong thoughts' seem to be available. This disintegration characterizes this age with irrationalism, anxiety and lost hope. Such a condition was powerfully anticipated by (pre post-?) modern authors when they described these as times of 'dis-aster' -without guiding stars- (Maurice Blanchot), 'the lands of sunset', from which 'gods have fled' (Martin Heidegger), where 'everything is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance' (Jean-Paul Sartre).35 This nihilistic stance provides an explanation of the attitude of indifference and avoidance. In the age of generalized communication, in the society of the mass media and fiction, the postmoderns live in a world of abstractions, where the concrete world withdraws and triviality reigns. Gianfranco Morra calls it the culture of the 'fourth man.'36 After the man of the Greek culture, the man of Christianity, the man of Modernity, the 'fourth man' is the man of consumerism, of the mass-media, of the esthetic. The fourth man does not reject religion, science and philosophy, but rather considers them linguistic games of knowledge without real consistency. Milan Kundera seems to have captured such a situation with the striking phrase 'the unbearable lightness of being', the title of his successful (postmodern?) novel.37

The postmodern respond to this 'condition' by adopting a defensive posture, an attitude of detachment, a nihilistic stance. The crisis of modern reason shows itself mainly in the shape of a 'collapse of meaning': whereas enlightened reason had clear and obvious solutions worked out within the context of an all-comprehensive and transparent meaning, postmodern thinking rediscovers the dark recalcitrance of life with respect to any ideal clarification. The outcome of modern reason's crisis is a farewell to security, a reinstatement of death, the abandoning of any basis, in order to voyage towards the unknown, towards nothingness, even finally liberation from the lure of a meaning.38

Three principal postmodern philosophers, Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, develop their thought in the footsteps of their modern philosophical mentors: respectively Friedrick Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, whose thought leads directly to contemporary skepticism. Foucault, echoing Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God, declares the 'end of man', which follows the eclipse of man as a ground of thought. Derrida's deconstruction, in opposition to and overcoming structuralism, takes place since differance will never disappear wherever there 'is' something. In such a way the texts are liberated from any ontological foundation, from any concept of embodied meaning derived by western logocentrism. Deconstruction points toward that which philosophy is unable to say. Rorty's neo-pragmatism, elaborated around the concepts of contingency and irony, constitutes a postmodern development of Dewey's thought. 'Ironic' is the person who does not take anything too seriously, not even him/herself, since he or she is too conscious of the linguistic contingency of all affirmations.39

Postmodern thinkers, like their modern precursors, have rejected the modern reigning epistemological principle of the 'correspondence' between language and the world it represents. Consequently postmodern people have given up the search for universal and objective truth. "They are convinced that there is nothing more to find than a host of conflicting interpretations or an infinity of linguistically created worlds."40 The denial of the 'ontological' God as the extreme consequence of the rejection of the 'correspondence theory' was anticipated by Nietzsche: "Alas, I fear we still believe in God because we still believe in grammar."41 The Italian postmodern philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, proposes the adoption of a 'weak thought,' (pensiero debole) against all the unjustified and outdated pretences of the 'strong thoughts.'42 'Weak thought,' which I would call the 'philosophical heart of postmodernism' taking over from the failure of enlightened identity, seems to result in an utter collapse, in a permanent fall into the void. A weak thought can be defined as the position that one holds valid as long as it is useful here and now. Such a position might not be good for another person, it might not be good for tomorrow. The postmodernists deliver no message, bear no truth, bring no revelation, and do not speak for those who remain in silence. While modern ideologies were revolutionary, weak thought represents something that is not worth fighting for, since it is not valid for others, not something that one wants or should impose on others. We have entered into the age of the 'ontology of decline,' as another Italian philosopher, Pier Angelo Rovatti, put it. This decline is best described in the successful 'postmodern' novel of Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose: "the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make the truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for the truth."43 Eco here gives what is possibly the best description of the 'ironic individual' of Richard Rorty.

Postmodernity as the Post-ideological Era

According to Arnold Toynbee, postmodernity is the fourth and last phase of Western history: postmodernity is the name given to the epoch that succeeded modernity. As mentioned above, postmodernity overcomes the status quo into which modernity has fallen: if modernity means what is happening now, then it will be modern until the end of time. Francis Fukuyama reaches the epitome of the thesis that there is nothing beyond modernity with his theory of the 'End of History'.44 With the collapse of Marxist communism, liberal capitalism has achieved a global victory, signaling nothing less than the end of history. But postmodern thinkers refuse to take modernity as the final expression of history, as the ultimate, irreversible, untranscendable stage of historical progress.45 They reject the notion that we have arrived at the inevitable end of history. But they also reject, especially with Lyotard, the 'metanarratives,' the dogma that states that history is linear, unitary and progresses toward its destined end.46

If postmodernism was born in St Louis on July 15th 1972, postmodernity was born 17 years later, in Berlin, on November 9, 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the collapse of the last ideology still dominating Europe. This date signaled the end of the 'short century', which started with the First World War (1914). Postmodernity means very much post-Marxism, as the book of the (post-) Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (1992), is meant to demonstrate. The collapse of communism in 1989 is actually the end of modernity "because what collapsed was the most decisive attempt to make modernity work; and it failed. It failed as blatantly as the attempt was blatant."47 The crisis of ideologies was the inevitable consequence of the crisis of modern reason. The 'short century' witnessed both the triumph and the collapse of the political ideologies, in 1945 the demise of the Right, in 1989 that of the Left.

The post-ideological outcome of postmodernity highlights the rejection of the Hegelian program of totality and the Marxist ideological attempt to reduce reality to Hegelian idealism, suppressing contradictions and difference as the residue of negativiness. The crisis of modern ideologies is rooted exactly in the presumption of the absoluteness of the will to power of the subjects who endowed themselves with the historical mission of synthesizing the ideal and the real: emancipated reason, emancipated ideology, emancipated party and state. The program of forcing the ideal to be real inevitably ended up in the violent totalitarianism of a party which claimed to combine in itself society, the state and knowledge. The ideological pre-comprehension of the real in the name of the programmed ideal produced new totalities, which we have already described above as 'secular religions.' They proved to be extremely costly, in human as well as in social and ecological terms.

1. Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, p. vii.

2. Tosolini, T. (1998) Postmodernity and Mission, offprint of a lecture given by the author in Arriccia (Rome), p. 1.

3. Mucci, G. (1997) Il Postmoderno e la Compagnia della Cultura Cristiana. La Civilta Cattolica II, p. 236.

4. Appignanesi, R. and Garatt, C. (1995) Postmodernism for Beginners. Cambridge: Icon Books, p. 3.

5. Jenks, C. (1984) The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Academy Editions, p. 9.

6. Grenz, S. J. (1996) A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge U. K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, p. 11.

7. Oden, T. C. (1990) Agenda for Theology. After Modernity...What? Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, p. 76.

8. Lyotard, J. F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

9. Tracy, D. (1994) On Naming the Present. God, Hermeneutics and Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 14-15.

10. Baudrillard, J. (1988) Simulacra and Simulation. In M. Poster (ed.), Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 170.

11. Vattimo, G. (1992) The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 8.

12. Ibid., p. 10.

13. Ibid., pp. 4-11.

14. Portoghesi, P. (1982) After Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, p. 7.

15. Oden. Agenda for Theology, p. 73.

16. Silverman, H. J. (1990) Postmodernism - Philosophy and the Arts. New York and London: Routledge.

17. Lawrence, F. (1993) The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other. Theological Studies 54, p. 55.

18. Ibid., pp. 57-58.

19. Messori, V. (1992) Pensare La Storia. Milano: Edizioni Paoline, p. 396. Mucci, G. (1997) L'Assenza di Dio nel Postmoderno. La Civilta Cattolica XI, pp. 544-545.

20. Wertheim, M. (1999) The Odd Couple. The Sciences, March/April, p. 42.

21. Ibid. p. 43.

22. Ibid.

23. 'O Murchu, D. (1998) Qantum Theology. Spiritual Implication of the New Physics. New York: Crossroad, p. 27.

24. For this presentation of quantum theory I referred to ibid., pp. 27-36 and Wentzel Van Huyssteen, J. (1998) Duet or Duel, Theology and Science in a Postmodern World. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinitarian Press International, pp. 58-68.

25. Smith, G. B. (1996) Nietzche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 6.

26. Ibid. p. 8.

27. Centore, F. F. (1991) Being and Becoming, A Critique of Post-Modernism. New York / Westport, Connecticut / London: Greenwood Press, p. xii.

28. Junker-Kenny, M. (1999) Church, Modernity and Postmodernity. Concilium 1, pp. 94-95.

29. Mucci, G. (1997) La Postmodernita Buona. La Civilta Cattolica I, pp. 435-443.

30. Morra, G. (1994) Dio nella Filosofia Post-moderna. Studi Cattolici 38, pp. 620-626.

31. Gitlin, T. (1988) Hip-Deep in Post-modernism (Book Review). New York Times November 6. Quoted by Silverman, H. J. The Philosophy of Postmodernism. In Silverman, Postmodernism - Philosophy and the Arts, p. 8.

32. Del Noce, A. (1978) Il Suicidio della Rivoluzione. Milano: Jaca Book. Quoted by Messori, Pensare La Storia, pp. 661-671.

33. Silverman, The Philosophy of Postmodernism, p. 5.

34. Smith, Nietzche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity, p. 8.

35. See Tosolini, Postmodernity and Mission, p. 19.

36. Morra, G. (1996) Il Quarto Uomo. Postmodernita o Crisi della Modernita? Roma: Armando, pp. 11-23.

37. Ibid. p. 10.

38. Forte, B. (1997) Speaking of God in Post-modern Europe. Religion and Culture 2, pp. 210-211.

39. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

40. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p. 163.

41. Quoted by MacKenna, J. (1997) Derrida, Death, and Forgiveness. First Things 71, p. 34.

42. Vattimo, G. (1983) Il Pensiero Debole. Milano: Feltrinelli.

43. Eco, U. (1984) The Name of the Rose. Trans. W. Weaver. Picador, p. 491.

44. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Basic Books.

45. Oden, Agenda for Theology after Modernity, p. 76.

46. Vattimo, G. (1988) The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. John R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 7-13.

47. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, p. 222. See also Blanquart, P. (1992) 'Post-Marxism and Post-Modernity': What is the Church's Presence? Concilium. 6, pp. 115-123.