Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

Without things like grand narratives or reliable social foundations, we can no longer securely inhabit a primary identity based on those ideas. We can't be serf, or lord or king, but are now more multiply constructed—academic, leftist, capitalist, upper-middle-class, retro-hippie, conservative, father, husband, teacher. Our identities are constructed in context, dynamically, with other identities spilling in and changing. (French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, for good reasons, associate contemporary capitalism with schizophrenia.)