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I enjoyed reading Jencks' work, and it helped me to make some more sense of our previous readings. I wanted to discuss numbers 5, 9, and 11 in Jencks' list of the 11 most significant canons of Postmodern Classicism.
I want to start backwards with point 11 because it helped me to fit the puzzle pieces of modernism v.s. postmodernism into place the most out of the canons. Jencks states that, "Postmodern then meant a culture that was post-Western and post-Christian: a culture that had a strong sense of its departure point, but no clear sense of destination" (293). From my understanding, in modernism, there is a destination; there is purpose and a clear motivation to progress from the present towards the future by breaking traditions. In contrast, postmodernism argues that there is no clear future, so we tend to lean on anamnesis, or relying on things from the past, to fabricate our current present. When Jencks uses the wording "departure point" I assume he is talking about society reaching the point in which reinvention is needed, or in other words,"wanting to escape the dead formulae of the past" (293).
This brings me to my next piece of discussion, canon 9. Jencks establishes that, "A precondition for this resonance is a complex relation to the past: without memories and associations a building is diminished in meaning, while if it is purely revivalist, its scope will be equally restricted. Hence the postmodern emphasis on anamnesis, or the historical continuum, and another of its defining rules...tradition reinterpreted" (291). I'm still a little confused as to how "tradition reinterpreted" in postmodernism and the idea of breaking tradition in modernism are different, so I am going to write it out of my head and on to paper. If you are reinterpreting tradition, are you not "breaking" the original flow of what that tradition was intended for? This might seem silly, but I'm going to try to use an example from the musical Fiddler on the Roof to try and explain my confusion. Fiddler on the Roof is all about breaking traditions. One of the characters, Tzitel decides to marry someone out of love as opposed to listening to the matchmaker. Because of this, she breaks tradition, but in the long run, it causes her community to rethink all of their previous traditions related to marriage and how they might be outdated. Since postmodernism relies on modernism, as described by canon 11, maybe tradition reinterpreted relies on breaking tradition first. Once that new precedent is set, when we reach that "departure point" as mentioned in canon 11, society will accept that new precedent and establish it as a part of life. I'm not 100% sure if my conclusion is correct/if I made sense of it correctly, so perhaps we can talk about it in class.
Canon 5 is just fascinating to me. The idea of past and present are very present (pun intended) in Jencks' work, and he suggests that the connection between the two, "...has led to an outbreak of parody, nostalgia and pastiche...but has also resulted in anamnesis, or suggested recollection" (286). It reminded me of our discussion in class about how styles from the 80's and 90's are very "in" right now. Yet, the people who wear these styles the most on social media tend to be those who are a part of Gen-Z. Gen-Z is the cohort after 1996, so most of them would not even remember these styles being popular. It is really interesting how we (and by we, I mean as a society) also tend to idolize past decades and try to find the good in them without having actually experienced them. Honestly, now that I think about it, every generation has done this at one point or another. When Dr. Cummings showed the Happy Days poster in class last week, it reminded me of my dad. He is the biggest fan of the show and the character Fonzie, yet he was born in the 70s, not the 50s. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say "I was born in the wrong decade," I'd have a lot of nickels. But why do we as a society do this? In terms of postmodernism, maybe anamnesis used to find comfort from the fact that we don't know where the future is going. It could also be to try and make sense if the current present. Or, it could also be a combination of these things. I'm just writing out ideas and trying to make more sense of Jencks!
Citation:
Docherty, Thomas, and Charles Jencks. “The Emergent Rules.” Postmodernism: A Reader, Routledge, London, 1993.
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