A.O. 9/15/ 16: "Rules do not exist to bind you. They exist so you may know your freedoms."

A line that struck me was the very last lines of the text where Jencks cites a quote by Yeats saying “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, and responds in kind by saying “Things fall together, and there is no centre, but connections”. These lines, once I read them, suddenly made the entire reading make a bit more sense. Post-Modernism argues in favor of the idea that ideas and concepts, agreeable or disharmonious, should be mixed together not because they relate (have a “centre”), but because we are free to do so. It’s like Rule #11: The Absent Centre says in the description of the “post-” prefix, we’ve moved free from past traditions and thought we don’t have a particular destination, we in no way have to abide by any particular set of rules (an arguable centre of society). Thought, we are free to look back on these rules constantly as a sort of motivation as to why we’re able to produce the things we do now.  

The more and more I thought about it, the more and more I realized how this idea of freedom to mix has led to wonderful things in our world. America was made with the ideal of freedom in mind and as such we’ve had multiple cultures come together to share their ideas with us and make amazing things like new fashion, architecture, artistic movements and more (though, we have yet to properly show people appreciation for their cultural presence, but we’re working on it). Even the most basic skill of cooking can fit into this idea that mixing things can not only work, but make something even better than its original components.

Even mixing of the past and present is applicable. Rule #9: Tradition Reinvented has this line: “…old forms are given new meaning to justify their existence”. Even aside from the obvious socio-political implications the line has that really are important to making a more progressive society, it even has a less cynical, more playful connotation when thinking about the feelings of nostalgia. Sometimes is nice to just look back at what used to be, but to somehow bring it into the future to enjoy it once again is even better. For me, video games designed in a more archaic style has a sort of special feel in this age of realism, for other people they can have the same feeling through a drink that haven’t had since childhood, an old toy, a style of music, etc. Granted our modern age marketing has sort of perverted this feeling of nostalgia as a cheap marketing trick, I think that nostalgia does have an inherently pleasant quality to it.  

Post-modernisms celebration of difference, eclecticisms (Rule #2), and encouragement of mixing is just really justified and worthwhile if you think about it.