NOTES 22/03/2023

Jacques Derrida — Deconstruction.

The main point of Derrida's theory of deconstruction is to show that the meaning of a work is unstable
and could have multiple or alternative meanings, so the meaning could easily be the centre as it could
be marginal.

Development of critique of deconstruction and the major figure of Jacques Derrida. Beyond technical
philosophical discourse. Deconstruction is very complicated, Derrida himself was not very clear.

Deconstruction: all through the history of western philosophy, the way we think is organised by a
structure that has a centre, the thing that anchors everything else.
● Western Philosophy: Western philosophy is characterized by a canonical set of thinkers
including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, etc. It is also characterized by the influence of
monotheistic religions, especially Christianity. Finally, Western philosophy has often reflected
theories that emphasize formalism and universal concepts.

GOD was the centre of everything. All around God. But when we refer to humanism it is where the
man becomes the centre.

What happened there is that we got a very similar structure, but the centre is itself substituted, that is
all just the play of elements. Already become a non-sense, already deconstructive.

Derrida said that there is a moment in all this when people become aware that the centre is not the
centre.

We have a conscious mind and an unconscious man. The important thing is there are two possible
responses to the loss of the centre. Nostalgia and Play.

- Play refers to everything being implied so let’s play, let's enjoy it.

If you believe in God, there are some explanations that you had already. (know myself perfectly)

The business of life is the business of constant encounters with the world.

The idea of deeply nostalgia for the centre and being forced to play.

Karl Marx said all history is the history of class struggle.

Masculinity and femininity would produce by artist defended. Gender is increasing, and more radical
deconstruction of gender. Gender is ideology.
Edward Said. In Orientalism, Edward Said expounds on the notion of "othering." According to Said,
"othering" is the invention of difference (an "Us versus Them") to separate a dominant culture or
group from a supposedly inferior "other." Everyone who is not the man from the west acquires the
identity of “The other”.

Emergent critique of Jameson about the difference between modernism and postmodernism.
Modernism is characterized by paranoia and postmodernism by schizophrenia. Notice of very intense
sensory experience but without coherent meaning in terms of the rest of life. Someone with
schizophrenia has an extraordinarily intense experience. So this is used as a method for postmodern
conditions.

There is I and there is other — the world is completely divided. This is called modern alienation. A
city is a place where is easy to belong it. Urban alienation is a common theme in modern literature.
Paranoia is connected to alienation.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation

Alienation is the estrangement of individuals from work conceptualised by Marx against the backdrop
of capitalism and industrialisation that forced workers into exploitative, routine production jobs.
Modern sociologists recognised alienation as more widespread across jobs with limited worker
autonomy.

Jameson argues that in postmodernism there is no anymore nature, which sounds very weird, no
nature to urban culture. Every element of nature in the art world has been shaped by urban culture. It
is a product of human activity. The overwhelming power of nature.

Nature replaces by a big Other. Traditional sublime scared us. Too big for us to handle it. Inventing
conspiracy theories as a way of reducing the complexity of the system.

The soul (pre-modern) is the eternal, essential, essential truth of human beings. The soul is replaced
by the notion of self (modern). The goal of the self is to maximize human potential and create
something beyond death. Self also unifies your inner truth of you and you have to discover it to get
that (digging), making your potential real, realising your potential, and taking your potential as far as
you can. Postmodernism is the idea of the subject, 2 systems of powers, a performer, and an actor,
and is a linguistic phenomenon. We are not an individual whole truth. A human being is a network, a
point of exchange of information in discords.

Postmodernism of play has basically multiple aspects. It is characterized by things like

experimentation, non-realism, irony, pastiche, and metafiction…

- Lady Gaga is sometimes an example of postmodernism (Born this way)

- Patiche of history (Bridgerton), with a contemporary sensibility.
- The Simpsons
- Stranger Things — nostalgia

Post-modernism writers are coming after the giant impact of modernism such as Virginia Woolf. First
of all, we do pastiche. Get feminist rewriting, and retelling of female tales.
Percival Everett — Erasure (about experimental black writer). He read it and thinks is horror, very
stereotypical. Stop to write about this ancient greek, no one will buy it.

➢ Examples of Postmodernism Play

- Ballon Dog — Jeff Koons
- Michael Graves — Team Disney Building
- Flying Pins (2000) — Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
Notion to make something beautiful and nothing to make something interesting.

Postmodernism of resistance
This is the postmodernism of the post-classical-Marxist progressive Left and social justice
movements. It includes critiques of universalizing humanism, officially received history and the
traditional western canon of “dead white males.” It also includes work influenced by or compatible
with feminism, post-colonialism, critical race studies, ethnic studies, gender and queer theory, and
environmentalism.

➢ Examples of postmodernism of resistance:

- In American writing, it has given us figures as different as Pynchon, Toni Morrison,
Adrienne Rich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tim O’Brien, Tony Kushner (Angels in
America), Suzan-Lori Parks, Sandra Cisneros, and Harryette Mullen.
- In the art world we might think of Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and much of the
performance art movement.

In popular culture, we might think of The Clash, Rage against the Machine, early rap groups such as
Public Enemy and NWA; many of the films of John Sayles or Spike Lee or the documentaries of
Barbara Kopple; or even such Oscar-nominated films as Syriana, The Hours, or Brokeback Mountain.

The Mural — The women’s building

Antipostmodernism from the left vs. Antipostmodernism from teh right.

But there is the anti-postmodernism from the right side, where people do not want a diverse society,
recovery of the history to black people and indigenous people in the American Nation.

The anti-postmodern.This includes a wide range of discourses that favor a return to modernism or to
traditional metanarratives as the proper response to postmodernity. Examples include the
conservative modernism of architecture critic and journal editor Hilton Kramer (represented in the
coursepack; the more progressive modernism of Jürgen Habermas as in “Modernity: An Incomplete
Project”: the Marxist reservations about postmodernism expressed by Terry Eagleton and others; the
literary critique of postmodernity from Philip Roth, Saul bellow, Tom Wolfe, and others; the pop
resistance to postmodernity in films such as Terminator 2, Forrest Gump, and the work of Mel
Gibson; and contemporary Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, which often makes use of
postmodern techniques and performance elements in the service of radically anti-postmodern and
even anti-modern metanarratives.

Both the postmodernism of play and that of resistance tend to share the following elements, in
opposition to the anti-postmodern:

- Both are on the side of the dissolution of master narratives and tend to question and
undermine the oppositions on which these were based—oppositions such as nature-culture,
reality-language, male-female, philosophy-rhetoric, knowledge-power, high art-mass culture.
- In contrast to high modernism and to the movement known as New Criticism that advocated
it, both postmodernisms of play and of resistance work against the notion of high art as
transcendent. Both tend to value the ongoing encounter with the field of experience rather
than the attempt to rise above and organize it. Both of these kinds of postmodernism see art
as a discourse rather than an object, as a process more than a form, as part of an ongoing
conversation rather than as a world apart or a safe haven from the world’s chaos.
- Both seem generally to emphasize and celebrate multiplicity, rather than coherence and unity.

Postmodernism of play and resistance have in common some elements that anti-postmodernism does
not share.

Poetry
- transcendence
- immanence
★ Allen Ginsberg — Howl (final part of the poem)
➢ all about wildness
➢ collapsing the laws
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof
they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O
skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory
forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the
door of my cottage in the Western night