Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Postmodernism (Literature) Deconstruction“

Abstract Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is one of the earliest and most influential novels in the history of Western literature. John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, published almost three centuries later, can be considered as one of the most seminal postmodern novels ever written in the English language. The goal of this paper is to examine Cervantes’s influence on John Barth in particular and in American postmodernism from a more general point of view. For the Spanish genius’ footsteps on American postmodernism, a deconstructive reading will be employed. Consequently, concepts such as deconstruction of binary opposites, the role of the subaltern or how the distinction between history and story are paramount to both Cervantes and Barth will be used.

Purpose: This article examines some works of musical composition which are dissected by the aesthetic approach of postmodernism. Research methods: The method used is a qualitative method by collecting data through observation, literature review, and document review (discography). Data analysis uses tri angulation of data from raw data collection (scripts), selection, processing, to drawing conclusions. Results and discussion: The idioms along with the aesthetic characteristics of postmodernism are applied to uncover the phenomenon of postmodernity in musical compositions with diverse ideas and perspectives. Even now, there have been a variety of new terms such as new music for new gamelan which are conceptually not familiar to the public and need to be discussed further.Implication: Various musical phenomena as well as aesthetic concepts have moved towards musical progression which not only breaks down shapes and structures but also musical understanding that has undergone a paradigm referring to the 'deconstruction' concepts of the search for identity in the era of local-global aesthetic struggles.

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

<p><em>In addition to the well-known classification of long-term and short-term memory, we are also interested in distinguishing episodic, semantic and procedural memory in the areas of linguistic narrative and multimedial semantic deconstruction in postmodernism. We compare the liveliness of memorization in literary tradition and literature art with postmodernist divisions and reverberations of traditional memorizations through human multitasking and performative multimedia art, as well as formulate the existence of creative, intuitive and superhuman paradigms.</em></p><em>Since the memory can be physical, psychological or spiritual, according to neurobiologist Dr. J. Bauer (Das Gedächtnis des Körpers, 2004), the greatest importance for memorizing has the social role of collaboration, and consequently the personal transformation and remodelling of genomic architecture, yet the media theorist Mark Hansen thinks technology brings different solutions of framing function (Hansen, 2000). We believe that postmodern deconstruction does not necessarily damage memory, especially in the field of human multitasking that utilizes multimedia performative art by means of anthropologization of technology, thereby enhancing artistic and affective pre&amp;post-linguistic experience while unifying technology and humans through intuitive empathy in society.</em>

Valerie Hegarty, who is an American artist, scrutinizes the fundamental notions of history and the heritage of American art. She aims to reverse the relationships among the sign, signifier and signified in the space arrangements that she deals with the politics of America, revisionism, nationalism and regional deformation. With deconstruction that is the critical discourse of postmodernism, Hegarty both questions the colonialism that is the development policy of American legend and she improves reading alternatives against the suppression of cultural memory. Her exhibitions entitled as "Alternative Histories" and "American Berserk" was evaluated by literature review using qualitative research method. These exhibitions present a new perspective to audience by focussing on U.S.A. and internal dynamics of the current political climate with an icon breaking approach. In this article, within the scope of Hegarty’s installations it is dealt with the devaluation of cultural memory signs, and relationship between “visible” and “reality”.

This study aims to find out how literature moves from the postmodern thought, flourished until the 1990s, to the post-postmodern phenomenon. The study traces the evolution of this new phase as depicted in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010). It proposes these two works as examples of how over the past two decades, literature shifted from postmodernist fiction’s irony and skepticism that presents novels as “literature of emergency” to ethical objectivism and neo-realism (Franzen, 2002, p. 258). The purpose of the study is twofold. Firstly, it examines Franzen’s deployment of elements such as the subjective perception of truth, self-restraint, control, and knowledge, which he utilizes to understand reality. Secondly, it explores his employment of narrative tools (e.g., omniscient narrator, metafiction, intertextual dialogue) against postmodern fragmentation and deconstruction. By doing so, Franzen, this study demonstrates, reflects post-postmodernism’s core realist ideas that stress pragmatic interactions with the characters and readers’ cognizance of reality and encourage engagement with the narrative’s language to rework the novel’s social and cultural authority. These post-postmodern narratives reference fictional texts, real-life people, and authentic historical events that exemplify various models, simulations, and patterns of reality within and beyond the text, creating a mediated experience that enables communication with and understanding reality.

The author summarizes Blake studies of the 21st century. The beginning of the modern era of Blake studies can be considered with the paradigm of deconstruction. At the end of the 20th century, synthetic analysis took a special place in Blake studies, when Blake’s illuminated books were studied as an inseparable unity of verbal and visual. Blake’s legacy has undergone a significant evolution related to deconstruction and postmodern approaches, and linguistic research. The development of traditional areas of research, such as psychoanalysis, textual criticism of manuscripts, religious and mystical allusions, and comparative studies is also traced. Postmodernism, which owes much to the Romanticism (i.e. the concept of irony, fragmentation, the category of the exalted, the original lonely hero), brought new features to Blake studies and greatly contributed to its approval among canonical authors of the Romanticism. In modern Blake studies, such areas as gender studies, postcolonial studies, studies in digital reality environments are most actively developing. Starting from the 2000s, the main direction in Blake studies has become reception, that is, the cultural influence of Blake’s writings on later culture, including the culture of other countries: poetry, literature, music and cinema. Each new era reveals fundamentally similar features and adds meanings to Blake: this process is going from symbolism and psychoanalysis to the present day.

The author summarizes Blake studies of the 21st century. The beginning of the modern era of Blake studies can be considered with the paradigm of deconstruction. At the end of the 20th century, synthetic analysis took a special place in Blake studies, when Blake’s illuminated books were studied as an inseparable unity of verbal and visual. Blake’s legacy has undergone a significant evolution related to deconstruction and postmodern approaches, and linguistic research. The development of traditional areas of research, such as psychoanalysis, textual criticism of manuscripts, religious and mystical allusions, and comparative studies is also traced. Postmodernism, which owes much to the Romanticism (i.e. the concept of irony, fragmentation, the category of the exalted, the original lonely hero), brought new features to Blake studies and greatly contributed to its approval among canonical authors of the Romanticism. In modern Blake studies, such areas as gender studies, postcolonial studies, studies in digital reality environments are most actively developing. Starting from the 2000s, the main direction in Blake studies has become reception, that is, the cultural influence of Blake’s writings on later culture, including the culture of other countries: poetry, literature, music and cinema. Each new era reveals fundamentally similar features and adds meanings to Blake: this process is going from symbolism and psychoanalysis to the present day.

This paper endeavors to analyze Zulfikar Ghose&rsquo;s selected poems All in a Lifetime and Silent Birds in light of Jean Francois Lyotard&rsquo;s theory of Postmodernism that was proposed in 1979. Ghose is a globally recognized Pakistani English poet and his poetry is enriched with pathos, sorrows and resistance against destruction caused due to the domination of modern metanarratives, such as progress, nationalism or political objectives. The current study also applies Foucault&rsquo;s theoretical concept of bio power through discourse who coined this term in his The Will to Knowledge in 1988. This study highlights the chaos, fear and anxiety of the current age that is manifested in the poems, moreover, it shows the uncertainty caused by modern scientific warfare it is no more certain when and where one is going to die. The selected poems expose the relation between discourse and power, authority, domination and hegemony. The present study also demonstrates the significant role of Pakistani literature in general that attempts to resist the violence regardless of any differences. The research ends with recommendations and suggestions for further study.

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ (hereafter shortened to “Tristram Shandy”) is a unique novel written by British author Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century. While Sterne’s contemporary readers may have conflicting viewpoints about the artistic value of “Tristram Shandy” because of its surface artlessness and chaos, readers today in the contexts of such twentieth-century critical theories as postmodernism, existentialism, and deconstruction, find it congenial and more intriguing. I argue that despite the apparent chaos of this novel, the author-narrator Tristram is a central consciousness that holds the whole work together. And I believe Sterne narrates his story in such a peculiar way in conformity to his own perception of the outside world. Specifically, this paper aims to explore the inventive narrative strategies employed in Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” in the three aspects of narrative structure, time-shifting technique and self-conscious narrator. Amazingly, “Tristram Shandy” presents a wholly new notion of creative writing, one that goes beyond its time, and has unbreakable connection with twentieth-century literature.

In this article I endeavour to connect two major achievements of postmodernism which, at first glance, may appear incompatible: deconstruction in literature and literary criticism on the one hand and constructivism in educational theory and practice on the other. Subverting traditional literary values such as authorial integrity and power, linearity and logic of plot, consistency of character, the distance between the reader and printed text as well as, above all, the death of the author, poststructuralism has long been recognized as a rather embattled concept. This is due to its evasiveness and hence relative inapplicability to literary criticism and pedagogy. Venturing to overcome this dilemma, the article will investigate the implications of educational constructivism. The chief aim is to link some of its concepts with postmodern literature in such a way as to facilitate didactic methodology in the field of poststructuralist literature. Literary hypertext- the so-called incarnation of postmodern literary theory - will be used as a stereotypical example of poststructuralist evasiveness. The article proposes that literary hypertext has considerable educational potential. Not only does the genre invite subjectcentred pedagogy, which allows students to learn according to their own interests and prior knowledge, but, paradoxically, it also defies the unviability of poststructuralist literature by resurrecting the dead author in collectiveness. The proposal will be illustrated by a case study report, describing the implementation of literary hypertext in an undergraduate German creative writing classroom.

This article examines the modern Indonesian women&rsquo;s prose and its interaction with the elements of postmodernist paradigm. The object of this research is the novelistic writing of the prominent Indonesian author Dewi Lestari on the example of the novel "&ldquo;Supernova: The Knight, The Princess, and The Falling Star&rdquo; (Supernova: Ksatria, Puteri, dan Bintang Jatuh, 2001), which is part of the series &ldquo;Supernova&rdquo; (2001-2016). Fiction, as the &ldquo;median&rdquo; field in literature, embraces various codes of language art. Relying on the tested patterns of popular literature, it can also appeal to postmodernism. In the latter case, the works are characterized by the presence of deconstructive and game (including simulation) principles. The example of application of the codes of fiction and postmodernism is the novel of under review. An important role in the research is played by the literary-theoretical, typological, and descriptive methods. The work of Dewi Lestari has not yet been considered from the perspective of postmodernist game technique and involvement of the concept of simulacrum. An attempt to do this on the example of her most famous works defines the novelty of this research, as well as the noticeable place of postmodernism in Eastern literatures makes relevant it analysis based on the original Indonesian literature. Reference to the poetics of postmodernism through borrowing the simulation game technique allowed Lestari to create a commercially successful product. The perception of the text by each reader in accordance with their worldview, and engagement in the game proposed by Lestari, correspond to the ideas of the postmodernist interpretation of the literary text, as well as to the laws of the market. This is why modern Indonesian writers refer to the postmodernist paradigm.

The contemporary Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch claims Gertrude Stein as an important influence on his work. On the surface, there are indeed many similarities between the poetics of Kroetsch and that of Stein. Separated by one generation and one epoch of literary history – from Stein’s Modernism to Kroetsch’s avowed Postmodernism – they are nevertheless both avant-garde poets, with an interest in the relationship of signifier to signified and in the problems and joys of representation. However, the poetry of these two writers diverges radically in meaning-making practices and, finally, philosophical foundations. Although Stein and Kroetsch share a fascination with the unstable relationship between signifier and signified, Stein’s approach seems to suggest that the instability was a problem and source of anxiety in her quest to represent reality, even inasmuch as ‘representation’ became ‘creation’, while Kroetsch’s poetry and critical writings express a joy and sense of play produced by his awareness of the gap between signified and signifier. I have reconstructed the metalinguistics of these two avant-garde writers by comparing poems by Kroetsch and Stein at the level of syntax, lexical collocation and coherence, and conception. Their poems share many themes and preoccupations, including conceptions of ‘naming’, the deconstruction of the signifier, and the status of the text. However, differences in technique are the direct reflection of philosophical differences in art movements at opposite ends of the 20th century.

Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi’s book offers a fresh contribution not only tostudies in Arabic literature but also to postcolonial critique, cultural criticism,comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies. Its interest lies inthe fact that it introduces a relatively less explored territory in postcolonialthought and cultural criticism: namely, Arabic literature. Theattention of many western and non-western scholars in the field has long been directed toward Anglophone literature from South Asia, Japan,Africa, and Canada, and then to Francophone literature from North Africaand the Antilles.In the context of the Arab world, the author also situates the importanceof his study in how The Thousand and One Nights, a work whosefate and reception he sees as emblematic of the fate of fiction writing inthe Arab world, was received. Just like the novel genre in general, thiswork only received scholarly interest rather recently, after centuries ofneglect and disdain by conservatist Arab scholars and elite culture.Central to postcolonial critique, whose sources and precedents can betraced to the practices and discourses of those writers associated with variousintellectual traditions (e.g., poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,feminism, cultural studies) and which has affinities with the literary movementknown as postmodernism, is the experience of colonization as amoment of cultural self-consciousness and self-dividedness. This momentgenerates contradictory and ambivalent identity patterns and subject positionsresulting from the encounter with the Other (culture), and emphasizesthe constructedness of identity. Al-Musawi transposes these key postcolonialmotifs and insights to the realm of Arabic literature in order to revealimportant dimensions of the contemporary Arabic novel.Scholarly research on Arabic literature (both within and outside theArab world) often privileged poetry as an object of study, given its historicallyprominent place in elite culture and the Arab world’s literary canon.The subject choice of the book is of particular interest, because it targetsthe Arabic novel as an emerging literary genre, and, by the same token,because of its use of postcolonial analytical concepts to account for thisrelatively new literary genre’s place in contemporary Arab culture andsociety ...

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.

Abstract David Foster Wallace’s fiction is often considered to be an expression of the new American fiction emerging in the late 1980s, the authors of which expressed a certain distance from the dehumanised and linguistically constructed subject of postmodern fiction, and which depicted individuals influenced by mass media, pop culture and technology in technologically advanced American society. David Foster Wallace’s short story Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko (1999), however, was also included in the Avant-Pop Anthology (Larry McCaffery, L., eds. After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology. London, New York: Penguin, 1995). Some other critics (Adam Kelly, for example) consider him to be an author who expresses New Sincerity in his depiction of reality, which is a tendency in fiction trying to depict human experience and emotions through the use of language and which does not emphasise the human subject and experience to be a product of the interplay of signifiers as understood by Deconstruction criticism and many postmodern authors. This paper will analyse David Foster Wallace’s use of narrative strategies that are connected with postmodern narrative techniques and, at the same time, the way they express a distance from them through a depiction of human experience as interactive communication between human subjects. In addition, the paper will analyse the poetics of the new sincerity as part of contemporary postpostmodern sensibility. That is why I use the term sensicerity to express a combination of the new sensibility and sincerity.

This study is based on Post-cyberpunk in order to highlight the prominence of Postcyberpunk as an emerging representative genre of Postmodern Literature. Technological progress has altered the ontology of being a human in an era of information technology, thus this study aims to critically discuss the issues of id entity and representation. Although ample critical work has been done on genre Postcyberpunk yet this study is unique in a way that it is a collection of different discursive practices related to identity crises presented in selected Post-cyberpunk narratives. It targets to critically analyze the alternations and transformations in representation of identity in the backdrop of Postmodernist Deconstruction of Metanarratives by Lyotard (1984). Apart from the deconstruction of metanarratives this study signifies the relevance of Post-cyberpunk as Postmodernist Literature that represents society through multidimensional discursivity such as capitalism, hypercasaulization, imperialism, religion, economy and technology. This study aims to deconstruct the metanarratives of identity that were considered to be permanent and claimed to be power narratives. It equally represents the deconstruction of center/margin dichotomy by bringing mininarratives into the center. The method adopted for research is SocioCognitve Approach by van Dijk (2008) from Critical Discourse Analysis.

Through an international case study, this paper illustrates how a conversation method was used effectively to address a cross-cultural ethics problem. The method included as moments in one continuous process three different dimensions of postmodernism—Gadamer reconstruction, Derrida deconstruction, and Rorty neopragmatism. In addition to including different dimensions of postmodernism, the method combines effective mutual learning and effective action. Strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed. The article demonstrates how it can be beneficial to build bridges between and within the postmodernism and organization ethics literatures. Also, the article demonstrates how postmodernism can be positively ethical and not necessarily aethical or nihilistic.

AbstractA criticism of all totalizing knowledge, deconstruction rejects all appeals to ontological, epistemological or ethical absolutes as a metaphysics of presence. Like all postmodernist philosophies, it presents serious difficulties for traditional monotheistic theologies and their basic affirmations about the human subject. Some are apprehensive of the atheistic tendencies of deconstruction, but others have enthusiastically argued for the possibility of a theistic appropriation of postmodern themes and their hermeneutics of suspicion and finitude. This article provides an outline of the ethico-theroretical basis of deconstruction, and examines its ethical claims. Derrida's views on Islam as reflected in his discourse on hospitality are examined, and a critical evaluation of the ethical propositions of deconstruction from an Islamic perspective is presented.

The article discusses the legacy of the literary critic M. Girshman, in particular, his book A Work of Literature. The Theory of Artistic Wholeness [Literaturnoe proizvedenie. Teoriya khudozhestvennoy tselostnosti] (2007), which argues the priority of the holistic and value-based approach to literary criticism over Postmodernist deconstruction practices. According to Girshman, the language of a literary work is an embodied and materialized aspect of aesthetic reality and beauty, incorporating the Truth and the Good. The scholar sees it as the ‘existential-semantic assumption’ of literary criticism. O. Minnullin defends Girshman’s method and challenges the ‘instrumental’ approach of ‘deconstructionist’ philologists, which he believes reduces the aesthetic space: significance in place of meaning; the discourse in place of the world; actions or simulation in place of existence; the scribe in place of the author; a construction or deconstruction in place of wholeness, etc. The article is written in response to the polemic reaction of ‘deconstructionists’ to V. Tyupa’s ‘Literary Theory Two’ As a Threat to Humanities, published in Voprosy Literatury in 2019.

Objective - The aim of the research is to identify the feminist strains in the postmodern Indian Fiction The God of Small Things (TGST). The researcher has planned to investigate the text systematically for seeking feministic values. Methodology/Technique - The study reviews previous literature. Findings - Gender bias and feminism are relevant themes explored by postmodernists. Arundhati Roy portrays the predicament of women through her female characters belonging to three generations in this novel. In the novel, a sense of antagonism and division also infuse the difference senses of identity among the different generation of women. It also generates a line of the clash between the older and the younger generation. Family and political customs play a key role in disadvantaging women. Social constrains are so built up as to sanctify the persecution of women. This is because, in most of the civilizations, social structures are basically patriarchal. Arundhati's novel challenges this position, though her avowed feminist stance. Novelty - Women across the globe worldwide, nationwide, regionally and may be capable of holding the influential note of feminism and being capable of deconstructing a constructive implication of their own femaleness and womanhood after reading this paper. Type of Paper: Review Keywords: Feminism; Gender Bias; Patriarchal; Postmodernism; Downtrodden. JEL Classification: B54, H83.

The issue of identity and its representation is a constant phenomenon since the advent of humanity. Progressive waves of technological advancement in information technology have made the contemporary culture bombastic and dynamic, due to which identity and its representation have become complex. Identity and representation are no more inert; rather, they have become fluid and arbitrary phenomenon. Postmodernist literature does not only represent life and its related issue but also simultaneously deconstructs them to the core; hence there remain no center/margin dichotomies. This study is an analysis of different themes under the theoretical framework of Deconstruction of Metanarratives (1984) and Cybernetics (1948). The method of analysis is Deconstruction by Derrida (1967), from which the tool of intertextuality has helped the researchers to answer the research questions. Analysis of various themes such as Artificial Intelligence, Techno/Globalization, Cyborg, and Posthuman conclude that transition of identity is a repetitive facet of todays individual. Hence, there are no grand narratives of representations. Different identities such as race, gender, religion, human/machine, natural/artificial, physical/nonphysical, real/virtual, life/death have become contestable. This research proves that the deconstruction of metanarratives has given vent to the mini narratives.

In the double poetic of W. B. Yeats, a certain relation between poems is initiated; and this relation is not only interpreted by means of various approaches to the theories of intertextuality but rather the theory of deconstruction as well. Yeats makes it so his poems lean on one another, creating in his poetic practice a self-referentiality, owing to the fact that he uses his own poetry as a basis for further verse-creation. Reality is, in fact, art, which is why in the space between poems a narrative pointed toward diverse themes is formed. One of these themes is art and the poet’s experience of creating a work of art which the poet showcases in his own writings through indications such as repeated verses or themes that guide the reader into a multifaceted nexus of meaning and space between poems in which they create and write a new work of art in the form of an interpretation. Writing about their own experience of the poem, the poet writes about the poem itself, making the experience of writing and the poem the themes of the poem. However, by writing about their own experience of how they write, the poet achieves a complex modernist meta-quality. They do not directly talk about the poem and the laws it rests upon nor do they critique previous rules and derive ideologies behind them nor do they personally set foot in the work of art as is in postmodernism, but rather they do so by means of complex poetic images. These images enable the intricate meta-quality that refers us to the space between poems and makes another important characteristic through which Yeats gets close to modernist poetic possible – communication. The poems communicate with one another and in that exchange the question and theme of communication, which is of great importance to modernist poetic both in poetry and narrative, is raised. If it could be said that money is the main topic of realism, then time would be the main topic of the stream-of-consciousness novel, as well as, in a sense, the modernist novel in general. What distinguishes modernist poetic, besides the theme of communication as a form of discourse – a transfer of knowledge – is the creation of both the identity of the work of art itself and the very social function of the poet – a topos theme of world literature – made possible through the self-same communication. Moreover, communication does not only involve the exchange between two or more poems, in which by way of repetition is the différance of the same, in the space between two or more poems shown, but also the change and transposition of meaning from one place to another. In this way, modernist poets directly deal with the issues of the creation of art itself and the fundamental, often indistinguishable question of what artistic is and when the border between the artistic and inartistic is crossed in a work of art. Through the use of paratextual material – the title, subtitle and the comments – the reader is included in the creation of the work of art as an important link. They as the semiotic reader, in Eco’s terms, through their own literary knowledge create a work of art in which they communicate with the author, while simultaneously correcting that selfsame communication by means of their inner semantic reader whom they never forget, since the writer beguiles their readers through intertextual irony and, especially, meta-quality. The doubleness of reading marks the duality of the creation of a work that has double relations: to itself and to the reality that it – through other works – either expresses or denies but always regards again and again with its writing and its relation to it.

Juffrou Sophia searching for a new perspectiveBy publishing her fascinating novel Juffrou Sophia vlug vorentoe (1993) Berta Smit, modernist Christian novelist of the sixties, has not only terminated a silence of 21 years, but also demonstrates that some text strategies of Deconstruction can be implemented in the representation of a Christian worldview. Breaking down barriers between personal life and newly created text, between master and servant of different races and different walks of life, implementing the technique of erasure and other contributing strategies, Smit creates a fascinating new world of paradox. In her search for a new perspective, the author not only applies new strategies, but also creates a solution typical to both the postmodernist novel and to the Christian faith.

The creative work of modern Taiwanese writer Ho Dinsheng is considered for the first time in the Ukrainian literary studies. The analysis is focused on the peculiarities of the intertextual semantics of transculturation in the essay collection "The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture". The transcultural perspective is embodied as the project, akin to the tendencies of "culture criticism". The accusatory tone, the lashing portrayal of iconic stamps, resulted from simplifying projection of traditional culture into mass discourse, is combined with multiple allusion, reminiscence and quotation techniques, thus the complicated experiment of rereading and deconstructing artistic and philosophical tradition of China in the global perspective is carried out. Within broad context of global literature, the experiment features the reassessment of genre peculiarities of philosophical essay, lecture essay, explicit cultural pragmatism, emotional positivism akin to late Romanticism and modern projects, mildly developing the poetics of postmodernism.

The article attempts to highlight the main romantic motifs that the modern German writer Patrick Süskind used in his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Symbolic for the contemporary cultural context figurative semantic constants (genius, loneliness, rejection, godlessness, etc.) are assigned to such motifs. The ways and means of rethinking romantic motifs in a modern novel are determined, the specifics of their transformation in a postmodern text is analyzed. The similarities between the work of Süskind and popular upbringing novels in the Enlightenment are noted: the main character of the modern German writer goes through the thorny path of formation, he improves his gift, thanks to which he hopes to change the world, subjugate other people to himself. The parody evangelical allusions that contribute to the deconstruction of the romantic figure of an unrecognized genius are analyzed. The postmodernist writer debunks and ridicules the hero, turning the imaginary king into a jester. Unlike the romantic hero, whose main function was to broadcast the divine will, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille refutes the truth of the Absolute by his existence and the ingenious gift inherent in him by nature. The article concludes that Süskind refers to a stable romantic model, implemented many times in literature and art, setting his own accents in his own way, bringing the romantic structure to its limit. This model goes through the second stage in its development, according to the Hegel’s triad, namely, the negation of negation, when any phenomenon turns into its opposite. Refuting the well-known Pushkin’s claim that “genius and villainy are two incompatible things”, the writer at the same time comes to the conclusion that evil, even without meeting a worthy opponent, is destructive to himself. We see further research prospects in the study of the novel in the context of the work of Süskind and modern German-language literature from the point of view of transforming the romantic tradition in the post-modern text.

AbstractAfter the end of apartheid in 1990 and the new constitution of 1994, the genre of the contemporary South African novel is experiencing a heyday. One reason for this is that, with the end of censorship, the authors can go about unrestraint to take a critical look at the traumatized country and the state of a nation that shows a great need to come to terms with its past. In this context, trauma and narration prove to be a fertile combination, an observation that stands in marked contrast to the deconstructionist view of trauma as ‘unclaimed’ experience and the inability to speak about it. Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008) are prime examples of the contemporary South African trauma novel. As crime fiction, Lost Ground not only tells a thrilling story but is also deeply involved in South African politics. The novelist Heyns plays with postmodernist structures, but the real strength of the novel lies in its realistic milieu description and the analysis of the protagonist’s traumatic ‘entanglements’. The Way of the Women is mainly a farm novel but also shows elements of the historical novel and the marriage novel. It continues the process of the deconstruction of the farm as a former symbol of the Afrikaner’s pride and glory. Both novels’ meta-fictional self-reflections betray the self-consciousness of their authors who are aware of the symbolization compulsions in a traumatized country. They use narrative as a means of ‘working through’, coming to terms with trauma, and achieving reconciliation. Both novels’ complex narrative structures may be read as symbolic expressions of traumatic ‘entanglements’ that lie at the heart of the South African dilemma.

The paper’s aim is to follow the metamorphosis of Romanian myths, mainly the myth of Mioritza, in the novels of Dumitru Tsepeneag, a Romanian writer exiled in France after WW II. It is important to see to which extent the source culture is reflected in his writings as an expression of cultural identity through myths in their quality as transmitters of cultural significance, talking about the Romanian soul, about a simple, pastoral lifestyle. From the Romanian folklore underlining the old myths to classical literature, the pastoral myth suffered modifications, mainly in the works of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Dumitru Tsepeneag is one of them. A nonconformist writer, theorist of aesthetic oneirism in Romanian literature, this author has given proof of a permanent desire of literary renewal even under a totalitarian regime which undermined all literary experience surpassing the official canon, the one of socialist realism, which Tsepeneag tried to avoid. Being a precursor of postmodernism in Romania in the 1970s, through his textualist literary texts illustrating aesthetic oneirism, Tsepeneag’s creation is an expression of the nostalgia of origins – through the deconstruction of the Mioritza myth in a postmodernist manner, as a parody, constantly superposed on other myths, on differences, diversity, alterity, all discovered in exile.

Teesid: 1960. aastate lõpus toimusid eesti teatris suured muutused. Ilmus nähtus, mida hakati nimetama nooreks režissuuriks. Eeskätt on see seotud Evald Hermaküla, Jaan Toominga, Kalju Komissarovi, Kaarin Raidi jt nimedega. Noor režissuur tõstis mässu ahtaks muutunud realismi raamide vastu, mis ei vastanud noore põlvkonna teatriootustele. Olles mõjutatud ideeliselt radikaalsest eksperimentaalteatrist USAs, aga ka Jerzy Grotowski katsetustest ning teistest avangardsetest liikumistest, muutis see füüsilist teatrikeelt. Tõusis improvisatsiooni osakaal. Teater lakkas olemast dramaturgiliste tekstide esituskoht, vaid hakkas otsima etendustes vahetut kohalolu. Tajuprotsessi hakkas juhtima mängu põhimõte. Suured müüdid dekonstrueeriti, autoritaarsusele vastanduti. Seksuaalsus ilmutas end uuel jõul, toetatud alateadvuse impulssidest. Uue laine radikaalsus kestis 1970. aastate lõpuni, mil see sulandus peavoolu. Murrang teatriesteetikas mõjutas kogu järgnenud teatriperioodi, seda on kutsutud ka eesti teatri kuldajaks.SU M M A R YYoung directors emerged in Estonian theatre at the end of the 1960s. More specifically, during the years 1969–1974 many new directors’ names appeared on theatre posters, and the fundamental changes in the language and content of the theatre at the end of the 1960s and the 1970s began to be associated with these names. Most important among these are Evald Hermaküla, Jaan Tooming, Kalju Komissarov, and Karin Raid. Within a short time these young directors changed prevailing assumptions about the purpose, means, and content of the theatre in Estonia. This phenomenon came to be referred to as the breakthrough, or the new wave; later on, in sum, as the renewal of theatre.A generational change was taking place in the theatre, and in this framework a different language of theatre emerged, which began carrying innovative emotional and aesthetic paradigms. As in the Anglo-American cultural space, this new theatre was not referred to by a single name: in the USA, it was referred to as experimental, neo-avant-garde, off-off-Broadway, also as alternative. In England, experimental andfringe were among the concepts used. The designation of theatre renewal of the 1960s and 1970s as „postmodern“ could only was a retrospective manoeuvre by American and English theorists.The young directors began to use deconstruction to overturn the grand narratives; binaries and myths were shattered; power and its structures are examined closely; sexuality was used in a shocking manner; the principle of play became foregrounded. All of these directions and intentions connect the new wave with postmodernism.This article uses the above principles to examine some of the most important works of young directors from the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s: a program of the poetry of Gustav Suits, This one song I want to sing (1969); Cinderella-game (1969); Letting Their Hand Be Kissed (1969); Epp Pillapart’s Punjaba Pot Factory (1974); Oliver and Jennifer (1972).Changes in social and aesthetic consciousness also had an effect, as they had in other artistic media. „This was a generation that was not bothered by stalinist norms,“ said Karin Kask. Without a doubt, the emergence of this phenomenon were also affected by moods of renewal in Czechoslovakia and Poland, as well as by the invasion of Czechoslovakia.The period was characterized by the „virus of protest and freedom“ as well as „euphoria on the eve of suppression“. While trying to reform theatre, new concepts emerged, such as imagistic system, impulse, non-conceptual base, complete freedom in the choice of means, a new style, irrationality at the base of humanity, the psychophysical dramatic equivalent, etc. The stage is set free from the circumstantial conjuncture, turning instead toward an existential black-box; alternatively, standard images are tentatively represented on a meta-level. The activities on stage were also transferred to the audience. All of these tendencies indicate a new approach to the theatre.Overthrowing, deconstruction, and the Zeitgeist of rebellion, a new spirit of play, homo ludens are reflected in many writings from the end of the 1960s. When describing the atmosphere of that time, Mati Unt uses Derrida’s term onto-theo-teleo-phallo-phonocentrism. This period is also characterized by the phrase „rebellion against old stereotypes“, with the goal of deconstructing them.According to the theory of Brian McHale, the most important marker of postmodernism is the ontological dominant. And yet such designations as placing objectivity totally in suspension, metatheatrical devices, resistance, physicality, rejection, class and power as mystifications, confessionality – these key words also provide a multi-layered characterization of the postmodernist theatre of the 1960s–1970s both in the USA and Estonia.So far Estonian researchers of postmodernism have not produced a unified account of postmodernism in culture and literature. As the playwright Robert Patrick observes in retrospect, postmodernism set itself in opposition to the schemata of modernism, viewing them as irrelevant: „there was no manifesto, credo, or criteria. It just happened“. It was a rebellion against society as a structure.The abovementioned criteria correspond to a great extent with the traits postmodernism listed by Ihab Hassan: antiauthoritarianism, distantiation from myths, Ego, the disintegration of the I, new sexuality, counterculture, improvisational and aleatory structures, the mixture of forms, play, parody, apocalyptic expectations, elements of communal life and the hippie movement, in addition to frequent attraction toZen, Buddhism, and the occult; applications of intermediality.It is this anti-authoritarianism that is one of the main themes in the Suits poetry evening, the performance Letting their hand be kissed, You, who get your ears boxed, as well as the performance, Good bye, baby!; the different levels of breaking down myth in Cinderella-game, Letting their hand be kissed, Midsummer 1941, as well as The Trial. The performance Letting their hand be kissed destroys illusory stereotypes of ethnic oppression. Most of these leading performances apply the principles of play, along with irony and self-irony: the circumstantial chains of events are cracked open and twisted, amplified by physical movement through which body language becomes tremendously more important than the verbal text. The use of the empty stage in scenography is not so much an aesthetic device as it is a fundamental attitude toward society. „We tried to clear the playing field!“ as Hermaküla expressed it. The effort was made to eliminate the noise and circumstantiality from the signified which had lost its meaning, striving to be authentically present.In print, empty space as a playing field became a manifesto through Peter Brook’s Empty Space (published in Estonian in 1972); Brook’s quest was linked to postmodernism. Certainly some of the choices made were influenced by Jerzy Grotowski’s apologia for a „poor theatre“, which at the time was also linked to postmodernism. Antonin Artaud’s theories, such as the „theatre of cruelty“, were also applied.The new wave’s link with philosophical deconstruction is accompanied by a fundamental anti-authoritarian stance, which in the Soviet Union of the 1970s could not be expressed verbally: in the theatre, it was transformed into systems of images.The rebellion against traditional theatre and a frozen society is naturally connected with theatre through the principle of play. The discovery and expression of authenticity and truth is only possible through play. In a theatre founded on the principle of play, there was a quantum leap in the relative importance of improvisational devices in methods of staging. With the breakthrough of representations of the unconscious, influenced in part by the rebellious youth movement, protests, and sexual revolution in the West in the 1960s, the new wave of the Estonian theatre also saw a clear change via views on human sexuality. In many of the top performances, verbal logic is replaced by associative one and the force of the unconscious. The examination of the new wave of directing in the Estonian theatre by considering postmodernist connections allows its contextualization among theatrical trends throughout the world.

This article explores the deconstructive function of grotesque elements in contemporary Spanish and Ibero-American Literature. Starting with Tirano Banderas. Novela de Tierra Caliente (1926), a highlight in Valle-Inclan’s esperpento aesthetics, mocking what authors as Bakhtin or Foucault pointed out as “official truths”, both collective and individual. It is argued that grotesque representation establishes a subversive relation when confronted with epic or tragic modes, as established by aristotelic-horatian and dogmatic poetics. This may shed some light on the relation between grotesque structure and critical deconstruction, from the so-called Baroque era up until modernist and postmodernist essay, such as it is the case of one of the most thoroughly sophisticated contemporary writers in Brasil, Silviano Santiago, whose collection of essays O Cosmopolitismo do Pobre (2004) is the third pillar of our analysis.

Numerous Serbian novels of the 1980s and 1990s turned to the treatment of an older, allegedly forgotten history which encompasses the premodern period from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. It seems that this shift was accompanied by a political idealism and national-emancipatory zeal after the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia and its cultural politics. This paper will critically examine three extremely successful examples of historical postmodernism in contemporary Serbian literature: Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Radoslav Petković’s Destiny, Annotated (1993) and Goran Petrović’s Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa (The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation, 1997). This “historical turn” of historical postmodernism could be interpreted both as a deceptive attempt to return to the roots and as distinct archaeology with which writing seeks to examine the contemporary unsafe ground of the political, cultural and economic transition from the socialist system to democracy and capitalism. Actually, it seems that this kind of “reconstructive” novelistic approach, which can be seen as a deliberate postmodern double-coding, could be understood as a search for Serbian cultural capital that can be easily—perhaps too easily—found in the distant past. On the other side, the paper analyses “deconstructive” novels, like David Albahari’s Bait (1996), Vladimir Tasić’s Kiša i hartija (Rain and Paper, 2004) and Slobodan Tišma’s Bernardijeva soba (Bernardi’s Room, 2011). The novels from this camp demonstrate that the complexity connected with the demise of meta-narratives is not easy to represent in a work of literature. Through the figure of a weak subject, the “deconstructive” novel is able to imprint itself into the unknown, to disrupt codes, to cross the border and the wall of the symbolic order of capitalism and socialism and their production of desire. At the end of the paper, the paradoxes inherent in both these types of writing are presented.

Introducción El asunto de esta tesis es el estudio de los cambios estructurales y morfológicos a los que es sometido el indumento en la actualidad desde el uso de la moldería experimental como técnica para la construcción de las prendas de vestir. Estos cambios están relacionados con postulados de la filosofía deconstructivista a través de las similitudes técnicas y prácticas que existen entre el diseño de indumentaria y la arquitectura deconstructivista. Si bien, el vestido constantemente ha sido objeto de cambios y mutaciones, desde sus características funcionales y morfológicas, como parte de su evolución y la manera en la que se ha relacionado históricamente con el ser humano, lo que interesa a esta investigación son los cambios morfológicos, estéticos y tipológicos del vestido a través de la experimentación en las formas que se dan a partir de la relación entre el cuerpo y el textil, mediante el uso de la moldería. La motivación personal de la autora para el desarrollo de esta investigación, se encuentra en la fascinación, desde el inicio de sus estudios como diseñadora de indumentaria, por la moldería y los temas relacionados a la construcción de las prendas de vestir. En este recorrido académico y profesional se encontró diferentes diseñadores mundialmente reconocidos, en su mayoría japoneses, que a partir del trabajo relacionado con las modificaciones de las formas, los conceptos y la disposición heterogénea de los elementos constituyentes del vestido, estaban logrando innovar las estructuras y a partir de esto lograron cambios en la estética y la percepción de la moda. A partir de esto se observa que este tipo de diseño innovador, que ha crecido con mayor fuerza en los últimos años y se le ha dado el nombre de moldería experimental, se enseña en talleres y pequeños cursos dictados por profesionales que a través de la experimentación logran establecer y desarrollar una técnica. Sin embargo estas prácticas no han sido suficientemente investigadas ni tienen un sustento teórico y bibliográfico acorde. Esto se convierte en motivaciones para el estudio, ya que a partir de esta ausencia teórica se establecen interrogantes como: ¿en qué se diferencian los cambios evolutivos del vestido, con los cambios que se llaman innovadores, producto del desarrollo de la mordería experimental? ¿Existen diferencias entre la moldería tradicional y esta nueva moldería? ¿Cuál es el origen de la moldería experimental? De acuerdo a estos cuestionamientos se organizó una búsqueda que atravesó el análisis de las similitudes entre la arquitectura y el diseño de indumentaria desde la función de protección al cuerpo y los elementos técnicos que la componen. Puntualmente se inició con la investigación en la arquitectura deconstructivista como movimiento en el que resultaban formas innovadoras a partir de las dislocaciones, rupturas y experimentaciones en las estructuras de los edificios. Como producto de este reconocimiento se encontró que el movimiento arquitectónico tenía enlaces conceptuales e históricos con el movimiento filosófico deconstructivista y que sus formas estaban influenciadas por el constructivismo ruso. Si bien, hay una relación entre la filosofía y la arquitectura bajo este nombre, esta última se destaca por el establecimiento de una teoría independiente de movimientos literarios y filosóficos, por el intento de separar la arquitectura de la idea de “la forma sigue a la función” y finalmente por la generación de nuevas formas y conceptos en esta disciplina. Es bastante interesante encontrarse con la afinidad establecida entre la filosofía deconstructiva y el diseño arquitectónico, que se hace mucho más fuerte desde el encuentro entre sus dos iniciadores que son Jaques Derrida y Peter Eisenman respectivamente. Este encuentro se realiza en el proyecto del parque de La Villette en Francia para el que son llamados a trabajar juntos y diseñar el proyecto desde unas bases teóricas y por supuesto con una aplicación práctica. La filosofía deconstructivista se inicia sobre el final del estructuralismo y pretende ahondar en las estructuras de la metafísica, queriendo buscar dentro de ellas las fisuras e inconsistencias del sentido (Cragnolini, 2007, p. 21), luego se transforma en más que una corriente filosófica en un pensamiento crítico que abarca toda la sociedad y la cultura occidental, yendo a favor de las diferencias y la idea de periferia de esta manera desestructura lo que esta en el centro, esta crítica llega a influenciar diferentes áreas de la creación humana. Finalmente este primer sondeo, arroja como resultado la existencia de un movimiento deconstructivista en la moda, que no sólo se ha visto influenciado por la arquitectura y las formas cambiantes, si no también a través de mediaciones del pensamiento deconstructivista. Esta síntesis acerca de la influencia del deconstructivismo en disciplinas de la creación humana como son la arquitectura y el diseño de indumentaria fue posible en la consecución y búsqueda exhaustiva de literatura, textos, y fuentes bibliográficas que pudieran fundamentar la investigación, acerca de la influencia deconstructivista. En primer lugar se tuvo en cuenta la amplia bibliografía escrita por el padre del deconstructivismo, el filósofo argelino Jacques Derrida, ya que a partir de su teoría se desarrolla la investigación. Para este estudio se tuvieron en cuenta sus libros, entrevistas y ensayos tanto desde la filosofía a través de la crítica y finalmente en la arquitectura. Las fuentes más relevantes escritas por Derrida son: La deconstrucción en las fronteras de la filosofía: la retirada de la metáfora (1989), La metáfora arquitectónica (1986), El filósofo y los arquitectos (1988), Una filosofía deconstructiva (2006), De la gramatología (1971), Margenes de la filosofía (2006). También acerca de la deconstrucción se tuvo en cuenta puntualmente: Derrida, un pensador del resto (2007), escrito por Mónica Cragnolini, en el que la autora a través de la relación entre Derrida y Nietzsche, entre la deconstrucción y la filosofía a martillazos, logra de alguna manera resumir el pensamiento deconstructivista, haciendo más accesible su comprensión. Teniendo en cuenta que el inicio del deconstructivismo discute el estructuralismo, se toma el libro de Concha Fernández Martorell: Estructuralismo. Lenguaje, discurso, escritura (1994) con la idea de comprender el estructuralismo, el pensamiento de Heidegger y las relaciones e inconsistencias que existen entre estas dos corrientes filosóficas. Esta bibliografía central se completa con una cantidad significativa de fuentes e información acerca del pensamiento filosófico. Una fuente muy importante en la investigación ya que hace evidente el entrelazamiento del movimiento deconstructivista entre la arquitectura y la filosofía, dando cuenta de la relación de sus dos iniciadores es Re: working Eisenman (1993) donde se encuentran dos de las cartas que se enviaban Eisenman y Derrida durante el periodo de desarrollo del proyecto de La Villette. Con respecto a la arquitectura deconstructivista, es pertinente citar la tesis de Vicente Esteban Medina, Forma y composición en la arquitectura deconstructivista (2003), en la que éste analiza la influencia del pensamiento filosófico y del constructivismo ruso en la arquitectura deconstructiva, haciendo un análisis a la exposición del MoMA en Nueva York en 1988. Omar Bernardele en su libro Del posmodernismo a la deconstrucción (1994) logra en primer lugar una descripción acerca de la arquitectura deconstructiva y también explica la relación con el constructivismo ruso. Por último se encuentra el libro Arquitectura y crítica (1999) del escritor Josep María Montaner en el que se afronta arquitectura deconstructiva desde la teoría teniendo muy en cuenta las teorías construidas por Eisenman. Cambiando de perspectiva y analizando ahora desde el diseño de indumentaria se reconoce el trabajo hecho por la arquitecta Andrea Saltzman (2004) en su libro El cuerpo diseñado considerado como una primera aproximación teórica a un nuevo tipo de moldería y dise- ño experimental, además del acercamiento a la relación entre la arquitectura y el diseño de indumentaria. De esta manera se plantea una nueva perspectiva de la vestimenta tanto de parte del diseñador como del usuario, comprendiéndola como una especie de hábitat personal que envuelve no sólo el cuerpo sino una gran variedad de sensaciones, sentimientos, movimientos y además sitúa a quien la porta dentro de un sistema social. Por lo que en este libro se puede encontrar analizada la fisiología, ergonomía y movimientos del cuerpo como estructura morfológica fundamental que permite dar vida al vestido, además de conocer histórica y culturalmente los usos del textil teniendo en cuenta su sensación táctil, rigidez y color para ser aceptada por el usuario como una suerte de segunda piel. De acuerdo a las transformaciones culturales y sociales del vestido, las funcionalidades y los parámetros estéticos observados desde el diseño de indumentaria se tienen en cuenta los libros Victimas de la moda: cómo se crea, por qué la seguimos (2005) y Sociología de la moda (2012) de Guillaume Erner y La muerte de la moda, el día después (2010) de la soció- loga argentina Susana Saulquin. Por último, asumiendo la morfología, forma y estructura como fundamentos del diseño que son transformados a partir de la influencia deconstructivista se tendrán en cuenta las teorías de Bruno Munari (1987) y Wucius Wong (2001) con la idea de hacer un análisis más técnico. Los antecedentes encontrados en cuanto a la deconstrucción como movimiento en la moda son: • Fashion and Philosophical Deconstruction: a Fashion In-Deconstruction (2010). Escrito por Flavia Loscialpo, este se trata de un ensayo en el que la autora analiza la relación entre el deconstructivismo y la moda, teniendo en cuenta que este movimiento influenció varias áreas de la creación humana. Hace una descripción del inicio de la moda deconstructiva, nombrando los diseñadores que la representan y explicando de que manera hacen uso de ella. • Sartorial Deconstruction: The Nature of Conceptualism in Postmodernist Japanese Fashion Design (2011) escrito por Boney English, es un ensayo que habla sobre la conceptualización moderna de los diseñadores japoneses, y expone a Kawakubo y Yamamoto como diseñadores deconstructivistas, analizando su trabajo a partir de este movimiento. Finalmente acerca de la moldería experimental como técnica innovadora para la construcción y diseño del vestido se encontraron dos tesis: • El proyecto de grado de Florencia Madeo (2008) en el cual se propone un sistema experimental de trazado de moldería, concebido a partir de la aplicación de un sistema matemático de proporcionalidad denominado “Sección áurea”. • El proyecto de grado de Belén Amigo (2008) el cual tiene como objetivo el estudio de la construcción innovadora de las prendas de vestir a partir de la relación entre la lámina textil y el cuerpo y su anatomía. A partir de todas las ideas expuestas anteriormente y teniendo en cuenta las fuentes bibliográficas consultadas, se establecen unas preguntas para el desarrollo de la investigación, que son contestadas a lo largo del trabajo, además de facilitar la estructuración de la hipótesis y los objetivos. • ¿Cuál es la relación entre la deconstrucción y el diseño de indumentaria? • ¿Cuáles son las instancias mediante las cuales la deconstrucción entra en el diseño de indumentaria? ¿se establece desde la arquitectura o desde el pensamiento crítico? • ¿Cómo se relacionan la arquitectura y el diseño de indumentaria deconstructivistas? • ¿A qué cambios morfológicos y estructurales se ha visto sometido el vestido a partir de la influencia de la deconstrucción? • ¿Qué cánones pertenecientes a la cultura de la moda se están descomponiendo a través de la influencia que ejerce el deconstructivismo en el diseño de indumentaria? • ¿Los diseñadores que hacen uso de la moldería experimental como parte de su desarrollo creativo, tienen conocimientos acerca de la influencia deconstructivista en el diseño de indumentaria? • ¿Por qué la mayoría de los diseñadores que hacen uso de la moldería experimental en el desarrollo de sus colecciones o en el ámbito académico, son de origen japonés? La reunión de todo el material bibliográfico además de estos interrogantes proyecta la hipótesis que se quiere comprobar en la investigación: La moldería experimental es el resultado de la influencia ejercida por el deconstructivismo como pensamiento crítico en el diseño de indumentaria mediado por la deconstrucción en la arquitectura. Esta influencia opera mayormente sobre la estructura y la morfología del vestido, renovándola a través de la experimentación, teniendo como resultado el replanteamiento de las funciones, tipologías y estereotipos culturales de la vestimenta. Finalmente con la idea de comprobar la hipótesis y responder a las preguntas anteriormente planteadas, se plantean los siguientes objetivos de investigación: Objetivo general Analizar la influencia ejercida por el deconstructivismo en el diseño de indumentaria, a través de la arquitectura, reconociendo los cambios estructurales, morfológicos y estéticos que se han generado en la vestimenta actualmente. Objetivos específicos • Reconocer la influencia que ejerce el deconstructivismo en el diseño de indumentaria, innovando la producción y las tendencias de la moda. • Identificar y analizar las técnicas y los diseñadores de indumentaria más reconocidos en la innovación de la vestimenta a través de la deconstrucción. • Establecer la relación existente entre la arquitectura y el diseño de indumentaria. • Estudiar la relación entre la cultura japonesa como periferia respecto de los epicentros tradicionales de la moda y la deconstrucción como pensamiento descentralizado. Para el desarrollo de esta tesis se propone una investigación cualitativa logrando la recopilación y construcción teórica entorno a la deconstrucción que va a desencadenar finalmente en la moldería experimental. La investigación es de tipo exploratoria, ya que ésta permite estudiar un tema o problema que ha sido poco o nada estudiado, por lo que permite al investigador familiarizarse con los conceptos, teorías, elementos y diseñadores que hacen parte o determinan la información acerca del deconstructivismo y la moldería experimental. Esta información puede ser encontrada y estudiada a través de guías, documentos no académicos, e incluso, en la práctica y experimentación de la técnica. La metodología fue abordada en primer lugar desde la recopilación y análisis teórico. En segundo lugar se realizaron entrevistas a diseñadores y profesores que hacen parte de las diferentes áreas en las que influye la deconstrucción. Con todo el material que se obtuvo de estas dos herramientas se realizó un entrecruzamiento de información con la idea de relacionar las fuentes de segunda mano, los libros, con el trabajo de campo realizado a través de la técnica metodológica. El resultado de la revisión teórica y de las opiniones de los entrevistados tuvo como resultado el desarrollo del capítulo I en el que se encuentra una breve introducción y reconocimiento de la deconstrucción desde su inicio en la filosofía y en la lingüística, hasta su paso por la crítica a la sociedad occidental. En el capítulo II se delimitan las características que componen y definen la arquitectura deconstructiva logrando finalmente reconocer la relación existente entre filosofía y arquitectura en el deconstructivismo. También fue posible con estos datos desarrollar el tercer capítulo que se despliega desde el área del diseño y la moda. En este capítulo se realiza una descripción de la moldería y de las diferencias que existen en ella. Además se hizo una breve descripción de lo que se puede pensar como funcionalidad del vestido y los parámetros estéticos que lo componen. En el cuarto capítulo se describe la influencia o la relación que existe entre deconstrucción y diseño de indumentaria y en su segunda parte se avanza en las explicaciones sobre la relación existente entre los diseñadores provenientes de Japón y el desarrollo del deconstructivismo en la moda. Por último en los capítulos V y VI si bien se tuvo en cuenta la revisión bibliográfica se hizo uso de las herramientas metodológicas para su adecuado desarrollo, para lo que se realizaron entrevistas en las que se tuvieron en cuenta profesores que se encuentran en el área de la historia, la filosofía y la arquitectura, obviamente teniendo en cuenta que su área de especialidad sea la deconstrucción. También se entrevistaron profesoras y diseñadoras que actualmente imparten cursos de moldería experimental y hacen uso de las transformaciones de las prendas a través de la forma tridimensional. Esta herramienta permitió principalmente definir la moldería experimental y observar su relación con la arquitectura desde la manipulación del textil sobre el cuerpo. En el quinto capítulo se realizo una descripción de la manera en la que es abordada la moldería experimental. Para su adecuado entendimiento y desarrollo se levanto un registro fotográfico de esta técnica, de todo el proceso creativo a través de la moldería y por su puesto del resultado final. Ya para terminar se hizo uso del análisis de imágenes como método de observación con la idea de demostrar en ellas la relación existente entre la deconstrucción y la moda. Este análisis abarca todo el quinto capítulo, en el que se separaron las imágenes de acuerdo a tres características. La influencia de la crítica deconstructivista en los ideales sociales y culturales de las sociedades occidentales, la influencia de esta misma crítica en los prototipos culturales y estéticos del vestido y del cuerpo portante, la deconstrucción y reconstrucción de las prendas de vestir como una crítica a la industria de la moda y finalmente las imá- genes relacionadas a la moldería experimental, desde la modificación de las estructuras, formas y tipologías encontrándole relación con la arquitectura deconstructivista. En relación a todo lo anterior, la intención de esta investigación es reconocer la influencia ejercida por la deconstrucción en el campo del diseño constituyendo un método innovador para la producción de las prendas de vestir en el diseño de indumentaria actualmente, denominado moldería experimental, partiendo del análisis de las variables con la idea de lograr un aporte teórico desde la investigación de esta técnica, determinando con precisión cuál es su uso, los elementos que la influencian y como llega a establecerse casi como una tendencia en el ámbito académico y en la industria de la moda.

I wake up early, questions buzzing through my mind. While I sip my morning cup of tea and read The Guardian online, the writer, restless because I’m ignoring her, walks around firing questions.“Expecting the patriarchy to want to share its enormous wealth and power with women is extremely naïve.”I nod. Outside the window pieces of sky are framed by trees, fluffy white clouds alternate with bright patches of blue. The sweet, heady first wafts of lavender and citrus drift in through the open window. Spring has come to Hvar. Time to get to work.The more I understand about narcissism, the more I understand the world. I didn’t understand before. In the 1990s.“No—you knew, but you didn’t know at the same time.”I kept telling everybody The River Ophelia wasn’t about sex, (or the sex wasn’t about sex), it was about power. Not many people listened or heard, though. Only some readers.I’ve come here to get away. To disappear. To write.I can’t find the essay I want for my article about the 1990s. I consider the novel I’m reading, I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and wonder whether I should write about it instead? It’s just been reprinted, twenty years after its initial release. The back cover boasts, “widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades.” It was first published in the 1990s. So far it’s about a woman named Chris who’s addictively obsessed with an unavailable man, though I’m yet to unravel Kraus’s particular brand of feminism—abjection? Maybe, maybe … while I think, I click through my storage folder. Half way through, I find a piece I wrote about Kathy Acker in 1997, a tribute of sorts that was never published. The last I’d heard from Kathy before this had been that she was heading down to Mexico to try shark cartilage for her breast cancer. That was just before she died.When I was first introduced to the work of Foucault and Deleuze, it was very political; it was about what was happening to the economy and about changing the political system. By the time it was taken up by the American academy, the politics had gone to hell. (Acker qtd. in Friedman 20)Looking back, I’d have to say my friendship with Kathy Acker was intense and short-lived.In the original I’d written “was a little off and on.” But I prefer the new version. I first met Kathy in person in Sydney, in 1995. We were at a World Art launch at Ariel bookshop and I remember feeling distinctly nervous. As it turned out, I needn’t have been. Nervous, that is.Reading this now brings it all back: how Kathy and I lost touch in the intervening two years and the sudden fact of her death. I turn to the end and read, “She died tragically, not only because she was much too young, but because American literature seems rather frumpy without her, of cancer on the 30th November 1997, aged 53.”The same age as I am now. (While some believe Kathy was 50 when she died, Kathy told me she lied about her age even to the point of changing her passport. Women who lie about their age tend to want to be younger than they are, so I’m sticking with 53.) This coincidence spooks me a little.I make a cup of tea and eat some chocolate.“This could work …” the writer says. My reasons for feeling nervous were historical. I’d spoken to Kathy once previously (before the publication of The River Ophelia on the phone from Seattle to San Francisco in 1993) and the conversation had ended abruptly. I’d wanted to interview Kathy for my PhD on American fiction but Kathy wouldn’t commit. Now I was meeting her face to face and trying to push the past to the back of my mind.The evening turned out to be a memorable one. A whole bunch of us—a mixture of writers, publishers, academics and literati—went out to dinner and then carried on drinking well into the night. I made plans to see Kathy again. She struck me as a warm, generous, sincere and intensely engaging person. It seemed we might become friends. I hesitated: should I include the rest? Or was that too much?The first thing Kathy had said when we were introduced was, “I loved your book, The River Ophelia. I found it as soon as I arrived. I bought it from the bookshop at the airport. I saw your amazing cover and then I read on the back that it was influenced by the work of Kathy Acker. I was like, wow, no one in America has ever put that on the back cover of a novel. So I read it immediately and I couldn’t put it down. I love the way you’ve deconstructed the canon but still managed to put a compelling narrative to it. I never did that.”Why didn’t I include that? It had given me more satisfaction than anything anyone else had said.I remember how quickly I abandoned my bestselling life in Sydney, sexual harassment had all but ruined my career, and exchanged it for an uncertain future in London. My notoriety as an author was damaging my books and my relationship with my publisher had become toxic. The first thing I did in London was hire a lawyer, break my contract with Picador and take both novels out of print.Reality intrudes in the form of a phone call from my mother. Terminally ill with cancer, she informs me that she’s off her food. For a retired chef, the loss of appetite is not inconsiderable. Her dying is a dull ache, a constant tiredness and sadness in me. She’s just arrived in London. I will go there next week to meet her.(1)I first came across Kathy’s work in 1991. I’d just finished my MA thesis on postmodernism and parody and was rewarding myself with some real reading (i.e. not related to my thesis) when I came across the novel Don Quixote. This novel had a tremendous impact on me. Those familiar with DQ may recall that it begins with an abortion that transforms its female narrator into a knight.When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love. How can a woman love? By loving someone other than herself. (Acker Quixote 9)Kathy’s opening sentences produced a powerful emotional response in me and her bold confronting account of an abortion both put me in touch with feelings I was trying to avoid and connected these disturbing feelings with a broader political context. Kathy’s technique of linking the personal and emotional with the political changed the way I worked as a writer.I’d submitted the piece as an obituary for publication to an Australian journal; the editor had written suggestions in the margin in red. All about making the piece a more conventional academic essay. I hadn’t been sure that was what I wanted to do. Ambitious, creative, I was trying to put poststructuralist theory into practice, to write theoretical fiction. It’s true, I hadn’t been to the Sorbonne, but so what? What was the point of studying theory if one didn’t put it into practice? I was trying to write like French theorists, not to write about them. The editor’s remarks would have made a better academic essay, it’s just I’m not sure that’s where I wanted to go. I never rewrote it and it was never published.I first encountered I Love Dick (2017) during a film course at the AFTVRS when the lecturer presented a short clip of the adaptation for the class to analyse. When I later saw the novel in a bookshop I bought a copy. Given my discovery of the unpublished obituary it is also a bit spooky that I’m reading this book as both Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker had relationships with academic and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. Chris as his wife, Kathy as his lover. Kraus wrote a biography of Acker called After Kathy Acker: A Biography, which seems fairly unsympathetic according to the review I read in The Guardian. (Cooke 2017) Intrigued, I add Kraus’s biography to my growing pile of Acker related reading, the Acker/Wark letters I’m Very Into You and Olivia Laing’s novel, Crudo. While I’ve not read the letters yet, Crudo’s breathless yet rhythmic layering of images and it’s fragmented reflections upon war, women and politics reminded me less of Acker and more of Woolf; Mrs Dalloway, in fact.(2)What most inspired me, and what makes Kathy such a great writer, is her manner of writing politically. For the purposes of this piece, when I say Kathy writes politically, I’m referring to what happens when you read her books. That is, your mind—fuelled by powerful feelings—makes creative leaps that link everyday things and ideas with political discourses and debates (for Kathy, these were usually critiques of bourgeois society, of oedipal culture and of the patriarchy).In the first pages of Don Quixote, for example, an abortion becomes synonymous with the process of becoming a knight. The links Kathy makes between these two seemingly unrelated events yields a political message for the creative reader. There is more at stake than just gender-bending or metamorphoses here: a reversal of power seems to have taken place. A relatively powerless woman (a female victim except for the fact that in having an abortion she’s exerting some measure of control over her life), far from being destroyed by the experience of aborting her foetus, actually gains power—power to become a knight and go about the world fulfilling a quest. In writing about an abortion in this way, Kathy challenges our assumptions about this controversial topic: beyond the moral debate, there are other issues at stake, like identity and power. An abortion becomes a birth, rather than a banal tragedy.When I think about the 1990s, I automatically think of shoulder pads, cocktails and expense accounts (the consumption of the former, in my case, dependent on the latter). But on reflection, I think about the corporatisation of the publishing industry, the Backlash and films like Thelma and Louise, (1991) Basic Instinct (1992) and Single White Female (1992). It occurs to me that the Hollywood movie star glamorous #MeToo has its origin in the turbulent 1990s Backlash. When I first saw each of these films I thought they were exciting, controversial. I loved the provocative stance they took about women. But looking back I can’t help wondering: whose stories were they really, why were we hearing them and what was the political point?It was a confusing time in terms of debates about gender equality.Excluding the premise for Thelma and Louise, all three films present as narrative truth scenarios that ran in stark contrast to reality. When it came to violence and women, most domestic homicide and violence was perpetrated by men. And violence towards women, in the 1990s, was statistically on the rise and there’s little improvement in these statistics today.Utter chaos, having a British passport never feels quite so wonderful as it does in the arrivals hall at Heathrow.“Perhaps these films allow women to fantasise about killing the men who are violent towards them?”Nyah, BI is chick killing chick … and think about the moral to the story. Fantasy OK, concrete action painful, even deadly.“Different story today …”How so?“Violent female protagonists are all the rage and definitely profitable. Killing Eve (2018) and A Simple Favour (2018).”I don’t have an immediate answer here. Killing Eve is a TV series, I think aloud, A Simple Favour structurally similar to Single White Female … “Why don’t you try self-publishing? It’ll be 20 years since you took The River Ophelia out of print, bit of an anniversary, maybe it’s time?”Not a bad idea. I’m now on the tube to meet mum at her bed and breakfast but the writer is impatient to get back to work. Maybe I should just write the screenplay instead?“Try both. If you don’t believe in your writing, who else will?”She has a point. I’m not getting anywhere with my new novel.A message pips through on Facebook. Want to catch up?What? Talk about out of the blue. I haven’t heard from Sade in twenty years … and how on earth did he get through my privacy settings?After meeting mum, the next thing I do is go to the doctor. My old doctor from West Kensington, she asks me how I’m going and I say I’m fine except that mum’s dying and this awful narcissistic ex-partner of mine has contacted me on Facebook. She recommends I read the following article, “The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist” (Psychology Today).“Sometimes being a kind caring person makes you vulnerable to abusers.”After the appointment I can’t get her words out of my head.I dash into a Starbucks, I’m in Notting Hill just near the tube station, and read the article on my laptop on wifi. I highlight various sections. Narcissists “have a complete lack of empathy for others including their own family and friends, so that they will take advantage of people to get their own needs and desires met, even if it hurts someone.” That sounds about right, Sade could always find some way of masking his real motives in charm, or twisting reality around to make it look like things weren’t his fault, they were mine. How cleverly he’d lied! Narcissists, I read, are attracted to kind, compassionate people who they then use and lie to without remorse.But the bit that really makes me sit up is towards the end of the article. “For someone on the outside looking at a relationship between a highly sensitive person and a narcissist, it’s all too easy to blame the HSP. How and why would anyone want to stay in such a relationship?” Narcissists are incredibly good at making you doubt yourself, especially the part of you that says: this has happened before, it’ll happen again. You need to leave.The opening paragraph of the psychology textbook I read next uses Donald Trump as an example. Trump is also Patrick Bateman’s hero, the misogynistic serial killer protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious American Psycho. Despite an earlier version that broadly focused on New York fiction of the 1990s, Ellis’s novel and the feminist outcry it provoked became the central topic of my PhD.“Are you alright mum?”I’ve just picked Mum up and I’m driving her to Paris for a night and then on to Switzerland where she’s going to have voluntary euthanasia. Despite the London drizzle and the horrific traffic the whole thing has a Thelma and Louise feel about it. I tell mum and she laughs.“We should watch it again. Have you seen it since it first came out?”“Sounds like a good idea.”Mum, tiny, pointy-kneed and wearing an out-of-character fluoro green beanie given to her at the oncology clinic in Sydney, is being very stoic but I can tell from the way she constantly wrings her hands that she’s actually quite terrified.“OK Louise,” she says as I unfold her Zimmer frame later that evening.“OK Thelma,” I reply as she walks off towards the hotel.Paris is a treat. My brother is waiting inside and we’re hoping to enjoy one last meal together.Mum didn’t want to continue with chemo at 83, but she’s frightened of dying a horrific death. As we approach hotel reception Mum can’t help taking a detour to inspect the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant.“Oysters naturel. That sounds nice.”I smile, wait, and take her by the elbow.I’ve completely forgotten. The interview/review I wrote of Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, in 1995 for Rolling Stone. Where is it? I open my laptop and quickly click through the endless publicity and reviews of The River Ophelia, the interview/review came out around the same time the novel was published, but I can’t find it. I know I had it out just a few months ago, when I was chasing up some freelance book reviews.I make a fresh pot of tea from the mini bar, green, and return to my Acker tribute. Should I try to get it published? Here, or back in Australia? Ever the émigré’s dilemma. I decide I like the Parisian sense of style in this room, especially the cotton-linen sheets.Finally, I find it, it’s in the wrong folder. Printing it out, I remember how Kathy had called her agent and publisher in New York, and her disbelief when I’d told her the book hadn’t been picked up overseas. Kathy’s call resulted in my first New York agent. I scrutinise its pages.Kathy smiles benign childlike creativity in the larger photo, and gestures in passionate exasperation in the smaller group, her baby face framed by countless metal ear piercings. The interview takes place—at Kathy’s insistence—on her futon in her hotel room. My memories clarify. It wasn’t that we drifted apart, or rather we did, but only after men had come between us first. Neither of us had much luck in that department.(4)Kathy’s writing is also political because her characters don’t act or speak the way you’d expect them to. They don’t seem to follow the rules or behave in the way your average fictional character tends to do. From sentence to sentence, Kathy’s characters either change into different people, or live revolutionary lives, or even more radical still, live impossible lives.When the narrator of DQ transforms herself into a knight (and lives an impossible life); she turns a situation in which she is passive and relatively powerless—she is about to be operated on and drugged—into an empowering experience (and lives a creative revolutionary life). Ironically, getting power means she turns herself into a male knight. But Kathy gets around the problem that power is male by not letting things rest there. The female, aborting Kathy isn’t actually replaced by a male knight, bits of him are just grafted onto her. Sure, she sets out on a quest, but the other aspects of her empowerment are pretty superficial: she does adopt a new name (which is more like a disguise), and identity (appearance); and picks up a bad habit or two—a tendency to talk in the language used by knights.“But who’s the father?” the writer wants to know. “I mean isn’t that the real question here?”No, that is exactly not the real question here and not the point. It is not about who the father is—it’s about what happens to a woman who has an unwanted unplanned pregnancy.The phone rings. It’s my brother. Mum’s waiting for me downstairs and the oysters are beckoning.(5)The idea that writing could be political was very appealing. The transformation between my first novel, Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure and my second, The River Ophelia (Picador insisted on publishing them in reverse chronology) was partly a result of my discovery of Kathy’s work and the ideas it set off in me. Kathy wasn’t the first novelist to write politically, but she was the first female novelist to do so in a way that had an immediate impact on me at an emotional level. And it was this powerful emotional response that inspired me as a writer—I wanted to affect my readers in a similar way (because reading Kathy’s work, I felt less alone and that my darkest experiences, so long silenced by shame and skirted around in the interests of maintaining appearances, could be given a voice).We’re driving through Switzerland and I’m thinking about narcissism and the way the narcissists in my personal and professional life overshadowed everything else. But now it’s time to give the rest of the world some attention. It’s also one way of pulling back the power from the psychopaths who rule the world.As we approach Zurich, my mother asks to pull over so she can use the ladies. When she comes out I can see she’s been crying. Inside the car, she reaches for my hand and clasps it. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to say goodbye.”“It’s alright Mum,” I say and hold her while we both cry.A police car drives by and my mother’s eyes snag. Harassed by the police in Australia and unable to obtain Nembutal in the UK, Mum has run out of options.To be a woman in this society is to find oneself living outside the law. Maybe this is what Acker meant when she wrote about becoming a pirate, or a knight?Textual deconstruction can be a risky business and writers like Acker walk a fine line when it comes to the law. Empire of the Senseless ran into a plagiarism suit in the UK and her publishers forced Acker to sign an apology to Harold Robbins (Acker Hannibal Lecter 13). My third novel Dependency similarly fell foul of the law when I discovered that in deconstructing gossip and myths about celebrities, drawing on their lives and then making stuff up, the result proved prophetic. When my publisher, Harper Collins, refused to indemnify me against potential unintended defamation I pulled the book from its contract on the advice of a lawyer. I was worth seven million pounds on paper at that point, the internet travel site my then husband and I had founded with Bob Geldof had taken off, and the novel was a radical hybrid text comprised of Rupert Murdoch’s biography, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hello Magazine and I was worried that Murdoch might come after me personally. I’d fictionalised him as a King Lear type, writing his Cordelia out of his will and leaving everything to his Goneril and Reagan.Recent theoretical studies argue that Acker’s appropriation and deconstruction constitute a feminist politics as “fragmentation” (June 2) and as “agency” (Pitchford 22). As Acker puts it. “And then it’s like a kid: suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture.” (Acker Hannibal Lecter 11).We don’t easily fit in a system that wasn’t ever designed to meet our needs.(6)By writing about the most private parts of women’s lives, I’ve tried to show how far there is to go before women and men are equal on a personal level. The River Ophelia is about a young woman whose public life might seem a success from the outside (she is a student doing an honours year at university in receipt of a scholarship), but whose private life is insufferable (she knows nothing about dealing with misogyny on an intimate level and she has no real relationship-survival skills, partly as a result of her family history, partly because the only survival skills she has have been inscribed by patriarchy and leave her vulnerable to more abuse). When Justine-the-character learns how to get around sexism of the personal variety (by re-inventing her life through parodies of classic texts about oedipal society) she not only changes her life, but she passes on her new-found survival skills to the reader.A disturbing tale about a young university student who loses herself in a destructive relationship, The River Ophelia is a postmodern novel about domestic violence and sexual harassment in the academy, contrary to its marketing campaign at the time. It’s protagonist, Justine, loves Sade but Sade is only interested in sex; indeed, he’s a brutish sex addict. Despite this, Justine can’t seem to leave: for all her education, she’s looking for love and commitment in all the wrong places. While the feminist lore of previous generations seems to work well in theory, Justine can’t seem to make it work in practise. Owning her power and experimenting with her own sexuality only leaves her feeling more despairing than before. Unconventional, compelling and controversial, The River Ophelia became an instant best-seller and is credited with beginning the Australian literary movement known as grunge/dirty realism.But there is always the possibility, given the rich intertextuality and self referentiality, that The River Ophelia is Justine’s honours thesis in creative writing. In this case, Sade, Juliette, Ophelia, Hamlet, Bataille, Simone, Marcelle and Leopold become hybrids made up from appropriated canonical characters, fragments of Justine’s turbulent student’s world and invented sections. But The River Ophelia is also a feminist novel that partly began as a dialogue with Ellis whose scandalous American Psycho it parodies even as it reinvents. This creative activity, which also involves the reader by inviting her to participate in the textual play, eventually empowers Justine over the canon and over her perpetrator, Sade.Another hotel room. This one, just out of Zürich, is tiny. I place my suitcase on the rack beneath the window overlooking the narrow street and start to unpack.“Hasn’t this all been said before, about The River Ophelia?” The writer says, trying out the bed. I’m in the middle of an email about self-publishing a new edition of TRO.Some of it. While the grunge label has been refuted, Acker’s influence has been underplayed.Acker often named her protagonists after herself, so losing the Acker part of my textual filiation plays into the whole grunge/dirty realism marketing campaign. I’ve talked about how I always name protagonists after famous women but not linked this to Acker. Bohemia Beach has a protagonist named after Cathy as in Wuthering Heights. Justine of The River Ophelia was doubly an Acker trait: firstly, she was named Justine after De Sade’s character and is a deconstruction of that character, and secondly she was named Justine self-reflexively after me, as a tribute to Kathy as in Kathy Goes to Haiti.The other context for The River Ophelia that has been lost is to do with the early work of Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier. The narcissists were so destructive and so powerful they left no time for the relatively more subtle Gaitskill or Texier. Prototypes for Sex in the City, the 1990s was also a time when Downtown New York women writers explored the idea that gender equality meant women could do anything men did sexually, that they deserved the full gamut of libertine sexual freedoms. Twenty years on it should also be said that women who push the envelope by writing women protagonists who are every bit as sexually transgressive as men, every bit as addictively self-destructive as male protagonists deserve not to be shamed for that experimentation. They deserve to be celebrated and read.AfterwordI’d like to remember Kathy as I knew her briefly in Sydney. A bottle-blonde with a number two haircut, a leopard-skin bikini and a totally tattooed body, she swam a surprisingly genteel breast-stroke in the next lane in one of the world’s most macho lap-swimming pools.ReferencesA Simple Favour. Dir. Paul Feig. Lionsgate, 2018.Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. London: Collins, 1986.———. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.———. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.———. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly, 1994.——— and McKenzie Wark. I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996. New York: Semiotext(e), 2015.Basic Instinct. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. TriStar Pictures, 1992.Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Norton and Co, 2003.Bushnell, Candace. Sex in the City. United States: Grand Central Publishing, 1996.Cooke, Rachel. “Review of After Kathy Acker: A Biography by Chris Kraus—Baffling Life Study.” The Guardian 4 Sep. 2017. 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/04/after-kathy-acker-a-biography-chris-kraus-review>.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991.Ettler, Justine. Bohemia Beach. Melbourne: Transit Lounge. 2018.———. “Kathy Acker: King of the Pussies.” Review of Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Kathy Acker. Rolling Stone. Nov. 1995: 60-61.———. Marilyn’s Almost Terminal New York Adventure. Sydney: Picador, 1996.———. “La Trobe University Essay: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, and Catherine Texier’s Break Up.” Australian Book Review, 1995.———. The Best Ellis for Business: A Re-Examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of “American Psycho.” PhD. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2013.———. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991.Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (Fall 1989): 20-21.Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behaviour. New York: Random House, 1988.I Love Dick. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Video, 2017.June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern Feminist and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Therese Huk, Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.Killing Eve. Dir. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. BBC America, 2018.Kraus, Chris. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Penguin, 2017.———. I Love Dick. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016.Laing, Olivia. Crudo. London: Picador, 2018.Lee, Bandy. The Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. New York: St Martin’s Press. 2017.Lombard, Nancy, and Lesley McMillan. “Introduction.” Violence against Women. Eds. Nancy Lombard and Lesley McMillan. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013.Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. London: Associated Uni Press, 2002.Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso, 2000.Shakespeare, William. King Lear. London: Penguin Classics, 2015.Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. United States: John Hopkins Press, 1989.Single White Female. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. Columbia Pictures, 1992.Texier, Catherine. Panic Blood. London: Collins, 1991.Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Ward, Deborah. “Sense and Sensitivity: The Highly Sensitive Person and the Narcissist.” Psychology Today (16 Jan. 2012). 4 Dec. 2018 <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-and-sensitivity/201201/the-highly-sensitive-person-and-the-narcissist>.

‘Complex(ity)’ is currently fashionable in the humanities. Fashions come and go, but in this article I argue that the interest in complexity connects with something deeper, an intellectual revolution that began before complexity became trendy, and will continue after the spotlight passes on. Yet to make this case, and understand and advance this revolution, we need a better take on ‘complexity’. ‘Complex’ is of course complex. In common use it refers to something ‘composed of many interrelated parts’, or problems ‘so complicated or intricate as to be hard to deal with’. I will call this popular meaning, with its positive and negative values, complexity-1. In science it has a more negative sense, complexity-2, referring to the presenting complexity of problems, which science will strip down to underlying simplicity. But recently it has developed positive meanings in both science and humanities. Complexity-3 marks a revolutionarily more positive attitude to complexity in science that does seek to be reductive. Humanities-style complexity-4, which acknowledges and celebrates the inherent complexity of texts and meanings, is basic in contemporary Media and Cultural studies (MaC for short). The underlying root of complex is plico bend or fold, plus con- together, via complector grasp (something), encompass an idea, or person. The double of ‘complex’ is ‘simple’, from Latin simplex, which less obviously also comes from plico, plus semel once, at the same time. ‘Simple’ and ‘complex’ are closer than people think: only a fold or two apart. A key idea is that these elements are interdependent, parts of a single underlying form. ‘Simple(x)’ is another modality of ‘complex’, dialectically related, different in degree not kind, not absolutely opposite. The idea of ‘holding together’ is stronger in Latin complex, the idea of difficulty more prominent in modern usage, yet the term still includes both. The concept ‘complex’ is untenable apart from ‘simple’. This figure maps the basic structures in ‘complexity’. This complexity contains both positive and negative values, science and non-science, academic and popular meanings, with folds/differences and relationships so dynamically related that no aspect is totally independent. This complex field is the minimum context in which to explore claims about a ‘complexity revolution’. Complexity in Science and Humanities In spite of the apparent similarities between Complexity-3 (sciences) and 4 (humanities), in practice a gulf separates them, policed from both sides. If these sides do not talk to each other, as they often do not, the result is not a complex meaning for ‘complex’, but a semantic war-zone. These two forms of complexity connect and collide because they reach into a new space where discourses of science and non-science are interacting more than they have for many years. For many, in both academic communities, a strong, taken-for-granted mindset declares the difference between them is absolute. They assume that if ‘complexity’ exists in science, it must mean something completely different from what it means in humanities or everyday discourse, so different as to be incomprehensible or unusable by humanists. This terrified defence of the traditional gulf between sciences and humanities is not the clinching argument these critics think. On the contrary, it symptomises what needs to be challenged, via the concept complex. One influential critic of this split was Lord Snow, who talked of ‘two cultures’. Writing in class-conscious post-war Britain he regretted the ignorance of humanities-trained ruling elites about basic science, and scientists’ ignorance of humanities. No-one then or now doubts there is a problem. Most MaC students have a science-light education, and feel vulnerable to critiques which say they do not need to know any science or maths, including complexity science, and could not understand it anyway. To understand how this has happened I go back to the 17th century rise of ‘modern science’. The Royal Society then included the poet Dryden as well as the scientist Newton, but already the fissure between science and humanities was emerging in the elite, re-enforcing existing gaps between both these and technology. The three forms of knowledge and their communities continued to develop over the next 400 years, producing the education system which formed most of us, the structure of academic knowledges in which culture, technology and science form distinct fields. Complexity has been implicated in this three-way split. Influenced by Newton’s wonderful achievement, explaining so much (movements of earthly and heavenly bodies) with so little (three elegant laws of motion, one brief formula), science defined itself as a reductive practice, in which complexity was a challenge. Simplicity was the sign of a successful solution, altering the older reciprocity between simplicity and complexity. The paradox was ignored that proof involved highly complex mathematics, as anyone who reads Newton knows. What science held onto was the outcome, a simplicity then retrospectively attributed to the universe itself, as its true nature. Simplicity became a core quality in the ontology of science, with complexity-2 the imperfection which challenged and provoked science to eliminate it. Humanities remained a refuge for a complexity ontology, in which both problems and solutions were irreducibly complex. Because of the dominance of science as a form of knowing, the social sciences developed a reductivist approach opposing traditional humanities. They also waged bitter struggles against anti-reductionists who emerged in what was called ‘social theory’. Complexity-4 in humanities is often associated with ‘post-structuralism’, as in Derrida, who emphasises the irreducible complexity of every text and process of meaning, or ‘postmodernism’, as in Lyotard’s controversial, influential polemic. Lyotard attempted to take the pulse of contemporary Western thought. Among trends he noted were new forms of science, new relationships between science and humanities, and a new kind of logic pervading all branches of knowledge. Not all Lyotard’s claims have worn well, but his claim that something really important is happening in the relationship between kinds and institutions of knowledge, especially between sciences and humanities, is worth serious attention. Even classic sociologists like Durkheim recognised that the modern world is highly complex. Contemporary sociologists agree that ‘globalisation’ introduces new levels of complexity in its root sense, interconnections on a scale never seen before. Urry argues that the hyper-complexity of the global world requires a complexity approach, combining complexity-3 and 4. Lyotard’s ‘postmodernism’ has too much baggage, including dogmatic hostility to science. Humanities complexity-4 has lost touch with the sceptical side of popular complexity-1, and lacks a dialectic relationship with simplicity. ‘Complexity’, incorporating Complexity-1 and 3, popular and scientific, made more complex by incorporating humanities complexity-4, may prove a better concept for thinking creatively and productively about these momentous changes. Only complex complexity in the approach, flexible and interdisciplinary, can comprehend these highly complex new objects of knowledge. Complexity and the New Condition of Science Some important changes in the way science is done are driven not from above, by new theories or discoveries, but by new developments in social contexts. Gibbons and Nowottny identify new forms of knowledge and practice, which they call ‘mode-2 knowledge’, emerging alongside older forms. Mode-1 is traditional academic knowledge, based in universities, organised in disciplines, relating to real-life problems at one remove, as experts to clients or consultants to employers. Mode-2 is orientated to real life problems, interdisciplinary and collaborative, producing provisional, emergent knowledge. Gibbons and Nowottny do not reference postmodernism but are looking at Lyotard’s trends as they were emerging in practice 10 years later. They do not emphasise complexity, but the new objects of knowledge they address are fluid, dynamic and highly complex. They emphasise a new scale of interdisciplinarity, in collaborations between academics across all disciplines, in science, technology, social sciences and humanities, though they do not see a strong role for humanities. This approach confronts and welcomes irreducible complexity in object and methods. It takes for granted that real-life problems will always be too complex (with too many factors, interrelated in too many ways) to be reduced to the sort of problem that isolated disciplines could handle. The complexity of objects requires equivalent complexity in responses; teamwork, using networks, drawing on relevant knowledge wherever it is to be found. Lyotard famously and foolishly predicted the death of the ‘grand narrative’ of science, but Gibbons and Nowottny offer a more complex picture in which modes-1 and 2 will continue alongside each other in productive dialectic. The linear form of science Lyotard attacked is stronger than ever in some ways, as ‘Big Science’, which delivers wealth and prestige to disciplinary scientists, accessing huge funds to solve highly complex problems with a reductionist mindset. But governments also like the idea of mode-2 knowledge, under whatever name, and try to fund it despite resistance from powerful mode-1 academics. Moreover, non-reductionist science in practice has always been more common than the dominant ideology allowed, whether or not its exponents, some of them eminent scientists, chose to call it ‘complexity’ science. Quantum physics, called ‘the new physics’, consciously departed from the linear, reductionist assumptions of Newtonian physics to project an irreducibly complex picture of the quantum world. Different movements, labelled ‘catastrophe theory’, ‘chaos theory’ and ‘complexity science’, emerged, not a single coherent movement replacing the older reductionist model, but loosely linked by new attitudes to complexity. Instead of seeing chaos and complexity as problems to be removed by analysis, chaos and complexity play a more ambiguous role, as ontologically primary. Disorder and complexity are not later regrettable lapses from underlying essential simplicity and order, but potentially creative resources, to be understood and harnessed, not feared, controlled, eliminated. As a taste of exciting ideas on complexity, barred from humanities MaC students by the general prohibition on ‘consorting with the enemy’ (science), I will outline three ideas, originally developed in complexity-3, which can be described in ways requiring no specialist knowledge or vocabulary, beyond a Mode-2 openness to dynamic, interdisciplinary engagement. Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, are so popular as striking shapes produced by computer-graphics, circulated on T-shirts, that they may seem superficial, unscientific, trendy. They exist at an intersection between science, media and culture, and their complexity includes transactions across that folded space. The name comes from Latin fractus, broken: irregular shapes like broken shards, which however have their own pattern. Mandelbrot claims that in nature, many such patterns partly repeat on different scales. When this happens, he says, objects on any one scale will have equivalent complexity. Part of this idea is contained in Blake’s famous line: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. The importance of the principle is that it fundamentally challenges reductiveness. Nor is it as unscientific as it may sound. Geologists indeed see grains of sand under a microscope as highly complex. In sociology, instead of individuals (literal meaning ‘cannot be divided’) being the minimally simple unit of analysis, individuals can be understood to be as complex (e.g. with multiple identities, linked with many other social beings) as groups, classes or nations. There is no level where complexity disappears. A second concept is ‘fuzzy logic’, invented by an engineer, Zadeh. The basic idea is not unlike the literary critic Empson’s ‘ambiguity’, the sometimes inexhaustible complexity of meanings in great literature. Zadeh’s contribution was to praise the inherent ambiguity and ambiguity of natural languages as a resource for scientists and engineers, making them better, not worse, for programming control systems. Across this apparently simple bridge have flowed many fuzzy machines, more effective than their over-precise brothers. Zadeh crystallised this wisdom in his ‘Principle of incompatibility’: As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behaviour decreases until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics (28) Something along these lines is common wisdom in complexity-1. For instance, under the headline “Law is too complex for juries to understand, says judge” (Dick 4), the Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, noted a paradox of complexity, that attempts to improve a system by increasing its complexity make it worse (meaningless or irrelevant, as Zadeh said). The system loses its complexity in another sense, that it no longer holds together. My third concept is the ‘Butterfly Effect’, a name coined by Lorenz. The butterfly was this scientist’s poetic fantasy, an imagined butterfly that flaps its wings somewhere on the Andes, and introduces a small change in the weather system that triggers a hurricane in Montana, or Beijing. This idea is another riff on the idea that complex situations are not reducible to component elements. Every cause is so complex that we can never know in advance just what factor will operate in a given situation, or what its effects might be across a highly complex system. Travels in Complexity I will now explore these issues with reference to a single example, or rather, a nested set of examples, each (as in fractal theory) equivalently complex, yet none identical at any scale. I was travelling in a train from Penrith to Sydney in New South Wales in early 2006 when I read a publicity text from NSW State Rail which asked me: ‘Did you know that delays at Sydenham affect trains to Parramatta? Or that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?’ No, I did not know that. As a typical commuter I was impressed, and even more so as an untypical commuter who knows about complexity science. Without ostentatious reference to sources in popular science, NSW Rail was illustrating Lorenz’s ‘butterfly effect’. A sick passenger is prosaic, a realistic illustration of the basic point, that in a highly complex system, a small change in one part, so small that no-one could predict it would matter, can produce a massive, apparently unrelated change in another part. This text was part of a publicity campaign with a scientific complexity-3 subtext, which ran in a variety of forms, in their website, in notices in carriages, on the back of tickets. I will use a complexity framework to suggest different kinds of analysis and project which might interest MaC students, applicable to objects that may not refer to be complexity-3. The text does two distinct things. It describes a planning process, and is part of a publicity program. The first, simplifying movement of Mode-1 analysis would see this difference as projecting two separate objects for two different specialists: a transport expert for the planning, a MaC analyst for the publicity, including the image. Unfortunately, as Zadeh warned, in complex conditions simplification carries an explanatory cost, producing descriptions that are meaningless or irrelevant, even though common sense (complexity-1) says otherwise. What do MaC specialists know about rail systems? What do engineers know about publicity? But collaboration in a mode-2 framework does not need extensive specialist knowledge, only enough to communicate with others. MaC specialists have a fuzzy knowledge of their own and other areas of knowledge, attuned by Humanities complexity-4 to tolerate uncertainty. According to the butterfly principle it would be foolish to wish our University education had equipped us with the necessary other knowledges. We could never predict what precise items of knowledge would be handy from our formal and informal education. The complexity of most mode-2 problems is so great that we cannot predict in advance what we will need to know. MaC is already a complex field, in which ‘Media’ and ‘Culture’ are fuzzy terms which interact in different ways. Media and other organisations we might work with are often imbued with linear forms of thought (complexity-2), and want simple answers to simple questions about complex systems. For instance, MaC researchers might be asked as consultants to determine the effect of this message on typical commuters. That form of analysis is no longer respectable in complexity-4 MaC studies. Old-style (complexity-2) effects-research modelled Senders, Messages and Receivers to measure effects. Standard research methods of complexity-2 social sciences might test effects of the message by a survey instrument, with a large sample to allow statistically significant results. Using this, researchers could claim to know whether the publicity campaign had its desired effect on its targeted demographic: presumably inspiring confidence in NSW Rail. However, each of these elements is complex, and interactions between them, and others that don’t enter into the analysis, create further levels of complexity. To manage this complexity, MaC analysts often draw on Foucault’s authority to use ‘discourse’ to simplify analysis. This does not betray the principle of complexity. Complexity-4 needs a simplicity-complexity dialectic. In this case I propose a ‘complexity discourse’ to encapsulate the complex relations between Senders, Receivers and Messages into a single word, which can then be related to other such elements (e.g. ‘publicity discourse’). In this case complexity-3 can also be produced by attending to details of elements in the S-M-R chain, combining Derridean ‘deconstruction’ with expert knowledge of the situation. This Sender may be some combination of engineers and planners, managers who commissioned the advertisement, media professionals who carried it out. The message likewise loses its unity as its different parts decompose into separate messages, leaving the transaction a fraught, unpredictable encounter between multiple messages and many kinds of reader and sender. Alongside its celebration of complexity-3, this short text runs another message: ‘untangling our complex rail network’. This is complexity-2 from science and engineering, where complexity is only a problem to be removed. A fuller text on the web-site expands this second strand, using bullet points and other signals of a linear approach. In this text, there are 5 uses of ‘reliable’, 6 uses of words for problems of complexity (‘bottlenecks’, ‘delays’, ‘congestion’), and 6 uses of words for the new system (‘simpler’, ‘independent’). ‘Complex’ is used twice, both times negatively. In spite of the impression given by references to complexity-3, this text mostly has a reductionist attitude to complexity. Complexity is the enemy. Then there is the image. Each line is a different colour, and they loop in an attractive way, seeming to celebrate graceful complexity-2. Yet this part of the image is what is going to be eliminated by the new program’s complexity-2. The interesting complexity of the upper part of the image is what the text declares is the problem. What are commuters meant to think? And Railcorp? This media analysis identifies a fissure in the message, which reflects a fissure in the Sender-complex. It also throws up a problem in the culture that produced such interesting allusions to complexity science, but has linear, reductionist attitudes to complexity in its practice. We can ask: where does this cultural problem go, in the organisation, in the interconnected system and bureaucracy it manages? Is this culture implicated in the problems the program is meant to address? These questions are more productive if asked in a collaborative mode-2 framework, with an organisation open to such questions, with complex researchers able to move between different identities, as media analyst, cultural analyst, and commuter, interested in issues of organisation and logistics, engaged with complexity in all senses. I will continue my imaginary mode-2 collaboration with Railcorp by offering them another example of fractal analysis, looking at another instant, captured in a brief media text. On Wednesday 14 March, 2007, two weeks before a State government election, a very small cause triggered a systems failure in the Sydney network. A small carbon strip worth $44 which was not properly attached properly threw Sydney’s transport network into chaos on Wednesday night, causing thousands of commuters to be trapped in trains for hours. (Baker and Davies 7) This is an excellent example of a butterfly effect, but it is not labelled as such, nor regarded positively in this complexity-1 framework. ‘Chaos’ signifies something no-one wants in a transport system. This is popular not scientific reductionism. The article goes on to tell the story of one passenger, Mark MacCauley, a quadriplegic left without power or electricity in a train because the lift was not working. He rang City Rail, and was told that “someone would be in touch in 3 to 5 days” (Baker and Davies 7). He then rang emergency OOO, and was finally rescued by contractors “who happened to be installing a lift at North Sydney” (Baker and Davies 7). My new friends at NSW Rail would be very unhappy with this story. It would not help much to tell them that this is a standard ‘human interest’ article, nor that it is more complex than it looks. For instance, MacCauley is not typical of standard passengers who usually concern complexity-2 planners of rail networks. He is another butterfly, whose specific needs would be hard to predict or cater for. His rescue is similarly unpredictable. Who would have predicted that these contractors, with their specialist equipment, would be in the right place at the right time to rescue him? Complexity provided both problem and solution. The media’s double attitude to complexity, positive and negative, complexity-1 with a touch of complexity-3, is a resource which NSW Rail might learn to use, even though it is presented with such hostility here. One lesson of the complexity is that a tight, linear framing of systems and problems creates or exacerbates problems, and closes off possible solutions. In the problem, different systems didn’t connect: social and material systems, road and rail, which are all ‘media’ in McLuhan’s highly fuzzy sense. NSW Rail communication systems were cumbrously linear, slow (3 to 5 days) and narrow. In the solution, communication cut across institutional divisions, mediated by responsive, fuzzy complex humans. If the problem came from a highly complex system, the solution is a complex response on many fronts: planning, engineering, social and communication systems open to unpredictable input from other surrounding systems. As NSW Rail would have been well aware, the story responded to another context. The page was headed ‘Battle for NSW’, referring to an election in 2 weeks, in which this newspaper editorialised that the incumbent government should be thrown out. This political context is clearly part of the complexity of the newspaper message, which tries to link not just the carbon strip and ‘chaos’, but science and politics, this strip and the government’s credibility. Yet the government was returned with a substantial though reduced majority, not the swingeing defeat that might have been predicted by linear logic (rail chaos = electoral defeat) or by some interpretations of the butterfly effect. But complexity-3 does not say that every small cause produces catastrophic effects. On the contrary, it says that causal situations can be so complex that we can never be entirely sure what effects will follow from any given case. The political situation in all its complexity is an inseparable part of the minimal complex situation which NSW Rail must take into account as it considers how to reform its operations. It must make complexity in all its senses a friend and ally, not just a source of nasty surprises. My relationship with NSW Rail at the moment is purely imaginary, but illustrates positive and negative aspects of complexity as an organising principle for MaC researchers today. The unlimited complexity of Humanities’ complexity-4, Derridean and Foucauldian, can be liberating alongside the sometimes excessive scepticism of Complexity-2, but needs to keep in touch with the ambivalence of popular complexity-1. Complexity-3 connects with complexity-2 and 4 to hold the bundle together, in a more complex, cohesive, yet still unstable dynamic structure. It is this total sprawling, inchoate, contradictory (‘complex’) brand of complexity that I believe will play a key role in the up-coming intellectual revolution. But only time will tell. References Baker, Jordan, and Anne Davies. “Carbon Strip Caused Train Chaos.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Mar. 2007: 7. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976. Dick, Tim. “Law Is Now Too Complex for Juries to Understand, Says Judge.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 Mar. 2007: 4. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930. Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” In Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Gibbons, Michael. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage, 1994. Lorenz, Edward. The Essence of Chaos. London: University College, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Routledge, 1964. Mandelbrot, Benoit. “The Fractal Geometry of Nature.” In Nina Hall, ed. The New Scientist Guide to Chaos. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Nowottny, Henry. Rethinking Science. London: Polity, 2001. Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. London: Faber 1959. Urry, John. Global Complexity. London: Sage, 2003. Zadeh, Lotfi Asker. “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes.” ILEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 3.1 (1973): 28-44. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hodge, Bob. "The Complexity Revolution." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>. APA Style Hodge, B. (Jun. 2007) "The Complexity Revolution," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/01-hodge.php>.

“The intellect must not only desire surreptitious delights; it must become completely free and celebrate Saturnalia.” (Nietzsche 6) Theory-jamming suggests an array of eclectic methods, deployed in response to emerging conditions, using traditional patterns to generate innovative moves, seeking harmony and syncopation, transparent about purpose and power, aiming for demonstrable certainties while aware of their own provisional fragility. In this paper, theory-jamming is suggested as an antidote for the confusion and disarray that typifies communication theory. Communication theory as the means to conceptualise the transmission of information and the negotiation of meaning has never been a stable entity. Entrenched divisions between ‘administrative’ and ‘critical’ tendencies are played out within schools and emerging disciplines and across a range of scientific/humanist, quantitative/qualitative and political/cultural paradigms. “Of course, this is only the beginning of the mischief for there are many other polarities at play and a host of variations within polar contrasts” (Dervin, Shields and Song). This paper argues that the play of contending schools with little purchase on each other, or anything much, has turned meta-discourse about communication into an ontological spiral. Perhaps the only way to ride out this storm is to look towards communication practices that confront these issues and appreciate their theoretical underpinnings. From its roots in jazz and blues to its contemporary manifestations in rap and hip-hop and throughout the communication industries, the jam (or improvised reorganisation of traditional themes into new and striking patterns) confronts the ontological spiral in music, and life, by taking the flotsam flung out of the spiral to piece together the means to transcend the downward pull into the abyss. Many pretenders have a theory. Theory abounds: language theory, number theory, game theory, quantum theory, string theory, chaos theory, cyber-theory, queer theory, even conspiracy theory and, most poignantly, the putative theory of everything. But since Bertrand Russell’s unsustainable class of all classes, Gödel’s systemically unprovable propositions and Heisenberger’s uncertainty principle, the propensity for theories to fall into holes in themselves has been apparent. Nowhere is this more obvious than in communication theory where many schools contend without actually connecting to each other. From the 1930s, as the mass media formed, there have been administrative and critical tendencies at war in the communication arena. Some point to the origins of the split in the Institute of Social Research’s Radio Project where pragmatic sociologist, Paul Lazarsfeld broke with Frankfurt School critical theorist, Theodor Adorno over the quality of data. Lazarsfeld was keen to produce results while Adorno complained the data over-simplified the relationship between mass media and audiences (Rogers). From this split grew the twin disciplines of mass communication (quantitative, liberal, commercial and lost in its obsession with the measurement of minor media effects) and cultural/media studies (qualitative, post-Marxist, radical and lost in simulacra of their own devising). The complexity of interactions between these two disciplines, with the same subject matter but very different ways of thinking about it, is the foundation of the ontological black hole in communication theory. As the disciplines have spread out across universities, professional organizations and publishers, they have been used and abused for ideological, institutional and personal purposes. By the summer of 1983, the split was documented in a special issue of the Journal of Communication titled “Ferment in the Field”. Further, professional courses in journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising and media production have complex relations with both theoretical wings, which need the student numbers and are adept at constructing and defending new boundaries. The 90s saw any number ‘wars’: Journalism vs Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies vs Cultural Policy Studies, Cultural Studies vs Public Relations, Public Relations vs Journalism. More recently, the study of new communication technologies has led to a profusion of nascent, neo-disciplines shadowing, mimicking and reacting with old communication studies: “Internet studies; New media studies; Digital media studies; Digital arts and culture studies; Cyberculture studies; Critical cyberculture studies; Networked culture studies; Informatics; Information science; Information society studies; Contemporary media studies” (Silver & Massanari 1). As this shower of cyberstudies spirals by, it is further warped by the split between the hard science of communication infrastructure in engineering and information technology and what the liberal arts have to offer. The early, heroic attempt to bridge this gap by Claude Shannon and, particularly, Warren Weaver was met with disdain by both sides. Weaver’s philosophical interpretation of Shannon’s mathematics, accommodating the interests of technology and of human communication together, is a useful example of how disparate ideas can connect productively. But how does a communications scholar find such connections? How can we find purchase amongst this avalanche of ideas and agendas? Where can we get the traction to move beyond twentieth century Balkanisation of communications theory to embrace the whole? An answer came to me while watching the Discovery Channel. A documentary on apes showed them leaping from branch to branch, settling on a swaying platform of leaves, eating and preening, then leaping into the void until they make another landing, settling again… until the next leap. They are looking for what is viable and never come to ground. Why are we concerned to ground theory which can only prove its own impossibility while disregarding the certainty of what is viable for now? I carried this uneasy insight for almost five years, until I read Nietzsche on the methods of the pre-Platonic philosophers: “Two wanderers stand in a wild forest brook flowing over rocks; the one leaps across using the stones of the brook, moving to and fro ever further… The other stands there helplessly at each moment. At first he must construct the footing that can support his heavy steps; when this does not work, no god helps him across the brook. Is it only boundless rash flight across great spaces? Is it only greater acceleration? No, it is with flights of fantasy, in continuous leaps from possibility to possibility taken as certainties; an ingenious notion shows them to him, and he conjectures that there are formally demonstrable certainties” (Nietzsche 26). Nietzsche’s advice to take the leap is salutary but theory must be more than jumping from one good idea to the next. What guidance do the practices of communication offer? Considering new forms that have developed since the 1930s, as communication theory went into meltdown, the significance of the jam is unavoidable. While the jam session began as improvised jazz and blues music for practice, fellowship and fun, it quickly became the forum for exploring new kinds of music arising from the deconstruction of the old and experimentation with technical, and ontological, possibilities. The jam arose as a spin-off of the dance music circuit in the 1930s. After the main, professional show was over, small groups would gather together in all-night dives for informal, spontaneous sessions of unrehearsed improvisation, playing for their own pleasure, “in accordance with their own esthetic [sic] standards” (Cameron 177). But the jam is much more than having a go. The improvisation occurs on standard melodies: “Theoretically …certain introductions, cadenzas, clichés and ensemble obbligati assume traditional associations (as) ‘folkways’… that are rarely written down but rather learned from hearing (“head jobs”)” (Cameron 178-9). From this platform of tradition, the artist must “imagine in advance the pattern which unfolds… select a part in the pattern appropriate to the occasion, instrument and personal abilities (then) produce startlingly distinctive sound patterns (that) rationalise the impossible.” The jam is founded on its very impossibility: “the jazz aesthetic is basically a paradox… traditionalism and the radical originality are irreconcilable” (Cameron 181). So how do we escape from this paradox, the same paradox that catches all communication theorists between the demands of the past and the impossibility of the future? “Experimentation is mandatory and formal rules become suspect because they too quickly stereotype and ossify” (Cameron 181). The jam seems to work because it offers the possibility of the impossible made real by the act of communication. This play between the possible and the impossible, the rumbling engine of narrative, is the dynamo of the jam. Theory-jamming seeks to activate just such a dynamo. Rather than having a group of players on their instruments, the communication theorist has access a range of theoretical riffs and moves that can be orchestrated to respond to the question in focus, to latest developments, to contradictions or blank spaces within theoretical terrains. The theory-jammer works to their own standards, turning ideas learned from others (‘head jobs’) into their own distinctive patterns, still reliant on traditional melody, harmony and syncopation but now bent, twisted and reorganised into an entirely new story. The practice of following old pathways to new destinations has a long tradition in the West as eclecticism, a Graeco-Roman, particularly Alexandrian, philosophical tradition from the first century BC to the end of the classical period. Typified by Potamo who “encouraged his pupils instead to learn from a variety of masters”, eclecticism sought the best from each school, “all that teaches righteousness combined, the complete eclectic unity” (Kelley 578). By selecting the best, most reasonable, most useful elements from existing philosophical beliefs, polymaths such as Cicero sought the harmonious solution of particular problems. We see something similar to eclecticism in the East in the practices of ‘wild fox zen’ which teaches liberation from conceptual fixation (Heine). The 20th century’s most interesting eclectic was probably Walter Benjamin whose method owes something to both scientific Marxism and the Jewish Kabbalah. His hero was the rag-picker who had the cunning to create life from refuse and detritus. Benjamin’s greatest work, the unfinished Arcades Project, sought to create history from the same. It is a collection of photos, ephemera and transcriptions from books and newspapers (Benjamin). The particularity of eclecticism may be contrasted with the claim to universality of syncretism, the reconciliation of disparate or opposing beliefs by melding together various schools of thought into a new orthodoxy. Theory-jammers are not looking for a final solution but rather they seek what will work on this problem now, to come to a provisional solution, always aware that other, better, further solutions may be ahead. Elements of the jam are apparent in other contemporary forms of communication. For example bricolage, the practice from art, culture and information systems, involves tinkering elements together by trial and error, in ways not originally planned. Pastiche, from literature to the movies, mimics style while creating a new message. In theatre and TV comedy, improvisation has become a style in itself. Theory-jamming has direct connections with brainstorming, the practice that originated in the advertising industry to generate new ideas and solutions by kicking around possibilities. Against the hyper-administration of modern life, as the disintegration of grand theory immobilises thinkers, theory-jamming provides the means to think new thoughts. As a political activist and communications practitioner in Australia over the last thirty years, I have always been bemused by the human propensity to factionalise. Rather than getting bogged down by positions, I have sought to use administrative structures to explore critical ideas, to marshal critical approaches into administrative apparatus, to weld together critical and administrative formations in ways useful to both sides, bust most importantly, in ways useful to human society and a healthy environment. I've been accused of selling-out by the critical camp and of being unrealistic by the administrative side. My response is that we have much more to learn by listening and adapting than we do by self-satisfied stasis. Five Theses on Theory-Jamming Eclecticism requires Ethnography: the eclectic is the ethnographer loose in their own mind. “The free spirit surveys things, and now for the first time mundane existence appears to it worthy of contemplation…” (Nietzsche 6). Enculturation and Enumeration need each other: qualitative and quantitative research work best when they work off each other. “Beginners learned how to establish parallels, by means of the Game’s symbols, between a piece of classical music and the formula for some law of nature. Experts and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited combinations.” (Hesse) Ephemera and Esoterica tell us the most: the back-story is the real story as we stumble on the greatest truths as if by accident. “…the mind’s deeper currents often need to be surprised by indirection, sometimes, indeed, by treachery and ruse, as when you steer away from a goal in order to reach it more directly…” (Jameson 71). Experimentation beyond Empiricism: more than testing our sense of our sense data of the world. Communication theory extends from infra-red to ultraviolet, from silent to ultrasonic, from absolute zero to complete heat, from the sub-atomic to the inter-galactic. “That is the true characteristic of the philosophical drive: wonderment at that which lies before everyone.” (Nietzsche 6). Extravagance and Exuberance: don’t stop until you’ve got enough. Theory-jamming opens the possibility for a unified theory of communication that starts, not with a false narrative certainty, but with the gaps in communication: the distance between what we know and what we say, between what we say and what we write, between what we write and what others read back, between what others say and what we hear. References Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2002. Cameron, W. B. “Sociological Notes on the Jam Session.” Social Forces 33 (Dec. 1954): 177–82. Dervin, B., P. Shields and M. 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M. “The Empirical and the Critical Schools of Communication Research.” Communication Yearbook 5 (1982): 125-144. Shannon, C.E., and W. Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Silver, David, Adrienne Massanari. Critical Cyberculture Studies. New York: NYU P, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen. "Theory-Jamming: Uses of Eclectic Method in an Ontological Spiral." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/09-stockwell.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. (Dec. 2006) "Theory-Jamming: Uses of Eclectic Method in an Ontological Spiral," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/09-stockwell.php>.