Brooke Bumgarner, Jencks

After reading Charles Jencks position on “Postmodern Poetics and the New Rules”, I was actually very intrigued. While some of what he proposes does still confuse me, many of his points made a lot of sense to me or at least sparked some desire to explore my initial thoughts and understanding. The first passage drew me in when he wrote, “Often in history there is a combination of continuity and change which looks perplexing because our view of both the old and the new is altered” (Jencks 1987, 281). I started thinking about how relevant this statement is, not only in the context of architecture and art, but really, in every aspect of life. Further as he elaborated about postmodern classicism, explaining, “the meanings, values and forms of modernism and classicism are simultaneously transformed into a hybrid combination” (Jencks 1987, 281) my understanding was tested.

In the past, the theories of modernism and postmodernism have perplexed me greatly. For me, the society I was living in was ‘modern’ never ‘postmodern’ because for me, I didn't understand how something could be 'postmodern' when we are living in a modern society. Yet, when I think about it now, I feel as if we can be living in a world that encompasses both. The theory of ‘postmodern classicism’, to me, are the ideas and ever changing fresh, ‘new’, and ‘modern’ approaches, paired with the styles and principles of ancient Greece and Rome, which is exactly as he states in the quote above, converging into a mixture.

Jencks proposes eleven significant rules or canons that accompany the theory of postmodernism, directly emphasized in architecture and art. These many rules seek to explain the mixture of ideas in an ever-changing world.

As I assess and consider the rules and sources of postmodernism, I try to put them into relatively simple terms to aid in my understanding; I would define or explain them as follows.

1. Beauty in ‘disharmonious harmony’. Put simply, beauty in complexity, even in what would originally seem contradictory or paradoxical.
2. The significance of cultural and political pluralism, or the theory that there are many principles to postmodernism. Thus, enhancing the ideas of eclecticism, in which countless historical styles are paired with equally modern styles and elements in essence to produce a mixing pot of elements.
3. ‘Urbane urbanism’ which can be understood as the sophistication and explicitness of all the different, yet specific parts of a city, which to some lends to creative cleanness and perhaps powerful nostalgia, for it is not as indefinite or ambiguous.
4. The prevalence and reliance on the verifiability of human form or anthropomorphism “as a valid departure point” (Jencks 1987, 286).
5. Concepts of nostalgia and amnesia, through the “historical continuum and the relation between the past and the present” (Jencks 1987, 286) which enhance recollection by anamnesis.
6. Again the ideas of pluralism, yet the reliance on previous content. However, such content continues to be understood as diverse and various, thus creating intertextuality and ‘divergent signification’ which allows for multiple understandings and significations.
7. The extension of “’double-coding’ use of irony, ambiguity and contradiction” (Jencks 1987, 288) from modern literature to art and architecture. The use of double meaning through the usage of ‘both’ and ‘and’, versus decisions reliant on ‘either’ or ‘or’ (Jencks 1987, 288) to enable the “validity or opposite approaches and different tastes” (Jencks 1987, 289).
8. The significance of ‘multivalence’ or the linking of three or more qualities. Specifically in art and architecture through “forms, colours and themes” (Jencks 1987, 289). Therefore, utilization of collaboration is possible.
9. The consideration of ‘tradition reinterpretation’ through utilization and emphasis on the past and the memories, anamnesis and continuance that it evokes. Through the idea of ‘tradition reinterpretation’ “old forms are given new meanings to justify their existence” (Jencks 1987, 291).
10. The invention of new (and in some cases improved) artistic forms, inventions and ‘new rhetorical figures’. 
11. “This return to the absent centre” (Jencks 1987, 292) is the idea that after all the modifications and adaptions of the previous rules and ideas, there is not one form significant enough and completely encompassing to stand for the center, middle or perhaps “heart” of postmodernism.

The theory of postmodernism is extremely interesting to me, not only in architecture and art, but also, in everyday society. If, as Jencks explains in his closing argument 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” (Jencks 1987, 293), postmodernism is indeed abstract and inclusive of many ideas though based off of a set of specifics that has the ability to be ever changing. This would make sense that postmodernism has a strong sense of where to begin, but as ideals and values develop, the destination becomes unclear and undetermined. With the idea that postmodernism architecture and art is indeed a “hybrid of dissonant beauty, or disharmonious harmony” (Jencks 1987, 282), it is acceptable that there is no clear destination, perhaps, because such disharmonious harmony seems to be ever changing because of the variability and differences it encourages.