GRGR(30): You will want cause and effect.

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Michel Ryckx wrote:

> Since a few days now the air is filled with very interesting ideas on
> architecture, literature etc.  A word comes popping up all the time: post
> modernism.  I've really read and reread all these posts, but, alas, the longer
> one discusses the object, the vaguer it becomes -to me, at least.  Even those
> who tend to regard it sympathetically do not seem to agree on the meaning of
> it. Is it a kind of philosophy or a category, a genre, a style? In what way is
> ' pomo literature' related to 'pomo architecture' and other pomo's?  Does it
> still exist or is it considered to have been the fashion of certain period?
> Is it (horresco referens) 'transhistorical'?
> 
> The useless (in the sense: it will not affect my daily life) questions tend to
> lead to interesting answers.  But my brain seems to like it.  I look at
> philosophy not as a science, but as an attitude: to be critical and not to
> accept what seems to be.
> 
> I cannot think of an answer to your question, Paul.  But I know GR (and mr.
> Pynchon's other works as well) is a mystery in the most literal sense of the
> word: one can look at it, but one will never be able to grasp it completely.
> 
> As for 'You will want...', I see it as: you, reader, want real stories? Here
> they are.  Then follows a story.
> 
> Nowhere in GR I found an assault on the reader. I just saw myself, a reader
> challenged.


Some very smart people spent a lot of time and printers ink trying to
figure out postmodernism. Not only WHAT it was, but IF it was. Don't
think they every settled it but here's a hint that I hope won't
mislead.  Yes postmodernist architeture is related to
postmodernist literature. One example which can encompass both
architecture and literature is the distinction between INSIDE and
OUTSIDE. Whether these binary opposites are upheld or undermined can be
applied both to mental/historical/social space and to the physical 
space in which we live, work and shop. Whereas in literature the
postmodernist impulse may be to transgress the retrictive boundaries
between self (inside) and other (outside) by whatever strategies can be
devised, in postmodernist architecture there is often an attempt, among
other things, to blur the distinction between what is INSIDE the building
under a roof and what is OUTSIDE under the sun, rain and stars. 

This is only one tiny example but may suggest what postmodernism tends
to be about though it is a also a zillion things more.

			P.