I have been doing quite a bit of reading in postmodernist literary theory lately, and find this stuff fascinating if sometimes a bit hard to make sense of. A couple of years ago the university that I am on the faculty of had Duke University professor Fredric Jameson as a visiting professor and that's basically how I got interested in all this.

One of the things that I seem to more or less get about postmodernity is that there is a loss of the referent, or the part of a sign that the signifier or symbol stands for. Or maybe it is that the signifier and referent do not have the stable connection they were once thought to have...or something like that.

I see things now in the world around me that get me thinking in these terms...just a block or so from where I work is a building currently used by the Flint Journal newspaper as part of their operation. I walked past this building many times, aware of the faint outlines/fastener holes at the top facade of the building, where letters once spelled out words. But I could never quite tell what the words were! Then one day I was leafing through some old "Life" magazines we have at the library from 1970 and there it was...an ad for a long defunct (or absorbed by a larger competitor) bank known in 1970 as "Detroit and Northern Savings." There was an address that looked like it might be the aforementioned building and indeed it is. And more recently I noticed ghostly remnants of lettering on the side of the building as well. In this case the referent is the bank itself which no longer exists, although the signifier lingers on in the form of the impressions left on the building from the effaced signature of the long gone bank.

Or consider the "World's Biggest Tire" alongside Highway 94 just outside Detroit. There used to be an actual tire factory (referent) there, now only the 80 foot tire totem (signifier) remains. The name of the company in question (Uniroyal) is also quite typically postmodern, replacing as it did a more modernist name (U.S. Royal) that actually made direct reference to the United States. In a further twist, I believe that the actual Uniroyal company no longer even makes tires, having sold the rights to the Uniroyal brand tires to Michelin. All very consistent with the nature of Late Corporate Capitalism as I understand it.

Unless my understanding is not quite right which is of course entirely possible, especially if it is true that in Postmodernity we no longer have recourse to Master Narratives.