From the Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey
Modernism on the left, postmodernism on the right.
romanticism/Symbolism: paraphysics/Dadaism
form (conjunctive, closed): antiform (disjunctive, open)
purpose: play
design: chance
hierarchy: anarchy
mastery/logos: exhaustion/silence
art object/finished work: process/performance/happening
distance: participation
creation/totalisation/synthesis: decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
presence: absence
centring: dispersal
genre/boundary: text/intertext
semantics: rhetoric
paradigm: syntagm
hypotaxis: parataxis
metaphor: metonymy
selection: combination
root/depth: rhizome/surface
interpretation/reading: against interpretation/isreading
signified: signifier
lisible (readerly): scriptible (writerly)
narrative/grande histoire: anti-narrative/petite histoire
master code: idiolect
symptom: desire
type: mutant
genital/phallic: polymorphous/androgynous
paranoia: schizophrenia
origin/cause: difference-difference/trace
God the Father: the Holy Ghost
metaphysics: irony
determinacy: indeterminacy
transcendence: immanence
We tried so hard to be post-modern in the 80s, avoiding list A and embracing list B. But it is quite difficult to pursue an activity while carefully avoiding anything like an end-point. I found myself collaborating with people who had apparently never worked on a project that produced anything. It was exhausting.
Column A doesn't just represent "modernism", it represents the Establishment and right-wing politics. And isn't it defining what appears in Column B? So that post-modernism couldn't exist without modernism?
Read about the middle classes in the 80s here.
More about the 80s here, and links to the rest.
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