Pre-Class Post 9/18

In Charles Jencks "The Emergent Rules," one idea he explores is the concept of pluralism and the creation of variety, differences, and "otherness" within postmodernism that took place during the 1970's. He mentions that two unrelated movements really helped develop these ideas and make them more widely accepted: feminist art and advocacy planning. Pluralism became more prevalent both culturally and politically. Pluralism denotes a diversity of views and stands rather than a single approach or method of interpretation and can be used to describe a certain type of architecture as well as art. However in architecture this concept of pluralism is called something different; radical eclecticism: " the mixing of different languages to engage different taste cultures and define different functions according to their appropriate mood" (283). Two connections can be made with Jencks idea of pluralism - one to the beliefs of feminist postmodernists and one to concepts discussed in the reading by Macherey. Feminists during the postmodern era rejected having a perspective that was actually true, they believed everything was partial. They wanted to determine the meaning of things by deconstructing signs/decoding that were hidden among the text, they wanted to find the variety and differences between the lines of the text they were reading - they wanted to highlight the idea of "otherness." That is why Jencks mentions that this movements unintentionally helped spread the idea of pluralism. Going off of what the feminists believed during this time, it also reinforces Macherey's idea of looking at gaps to understand meaning and breaking down language not for what it actually means but for what is not there, which tends to be the most important part. When I was reading Jencks, I thought it was interesting that I could relate it to what I'm learning in my Feminist Methodology class about postmodern feminists and their ideologies as well as Monday's reading by Macherey; neat how they all could be tied together.