Even after the “end of history,”there has seemed to persist some historical curiosity of a generally systemic―rather than a merely anecdotal―kind: not merely to know what will happen next, but as a more general anxiety about the larger fate or destiny of our system or mode of production without coming up with plausible scenarios as to its disintegration or replacement. ・・・Any attempt to say what postmodernism is can scarcely be separated from the even more problematic attempt to say where it is going―in short, to disengage its contradictions, to imagine its consequences (and the consequences of those consequences), and to conjecture the shape of its agents and institutions in some more fully developed maturity of what can now at best only be trends and currents. All postmodernism theory is thus a telling of the future, with an imperfect deck. ・・・This book attempts a diagnosis of the cultural present with a view toward opening a perspective onto a future they are clearly incapable of forecasting in any prophetic sense.