Forgetting postmodernism? Recuperating a social history of local knowledge

Abstract

After making a substantial impact across the social sciences and humanities for more than a decade, interest in postmodernism is waning, creating an opportunity to reassess this theoretical programme free of the hyperbole that frequently surrounded discussion in the past. In its contextualism and critique of metanarratives, I approach postmodernism as a form of local knowledge, characterized as knowledge inevitably framed through the here of our collective presence and the now of our collective interests. Knowledge in short is group-centred, and chronocentric in its privileging of the current. This argument is extended to the idea and practice of modernism in the built environment, and contrasted with a postmodernism that reflexively works from an epistemology and ontology of the local. I suggest that lessons drawn from a critical postmodernism, emanating from the social movements of the 1965-75 period, have had constructive results in the built environment. As such, the legacy of postmodernism should not be forgotten as its life cycle seemingly draws to a close.