Kuloco, Jencks

“Rules, however, do not necessarily a masterpiece make, and tend to generate new sets of dead-ends, imbalances and urban problems. Hence the ambivalence of our age to orthodoxy and the romantic impulse to challenge all canons of art and architecture while, at the same time, retaining them as a necessary precondition for creation: simultaneously promoting rules and breaking them” (294).

I think it is interesting how Jencks points out the relationships between Classical styles and Postmodern ideas. One would usually believe that they are completely separate entities, forming a sort of past and present and influencing the future. However, each of the eleven canons that Jencks mentions contains a movement away from Classic forms and show how Postmodernist ideas interpret the ones that have come before them.
I also found it interesting how Jencks describes “Postmodernism” and any other term with the prefix “post.” He says that they are “culture[s] that has a strong sense of its departure point, but no clear sense of destination” (293). This relates to a lot of things that we have studied in CMC and give a definition of events that have happened in history. Some of these anti-hegemonic thoughts resulted in the Revolutionary War, the Collapse of the Berlin Wall, and even with art during the various Renaissances. The most recent example could be the past United States Presidential election of Barack Obama. His platform of “change” obviously shows the departure point—the movement of Republican to Democrat leadership, hopefully a positive change in the economy, a way out of War, and many more. However, even though we voted for “change,” as a country, we are still unsure of what the future will hold for us.
The thing I found most interesting in the article is in the end of my starting quote—“simultaneously promoting rules and breaking them.” I feel that this is how we all function and it is easily related to other texts and historical events. This supports his claim that the eleven canons are “understood as relative, rather than absolute” (281). Our ideas are ever-changing and the addition of new “rules” create new eras, like in Jencks’ case of architecture and art, and are also always open to interpretation and change. This change results from, as Macherey previously noted, the critical analysis of past texts and how we, as readers, associate and fill-in the silences with our own ideas.