With the resistance to traditional forms of knowledge making (science, religion, language), inquiry, communication, and building meaning take on different forms to the post-structuralist. We can look at this difference as a split between Modernism and Postmodernism. The table below, excerpted from theorist Ihab Hassan's The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1998), offers us a way to make sense of some differences between Modernism, dominated by Enlightenment ideas, and Postmodernism, a space of freeplay and discourse.
Keep in mind that even the author, Hassan, "...is quick to point out how the dichotomies are themselves insecure, equivocal" (Harvey 42). Though post-structuralism is uncomfortable with binaries, Hassan provides us with some interesting contrasts to consider:
| Modernism vs Postmodernism | |
| Modernism | Postmodernism |
| romanticism/symbolism | paraphysics/Dadaism |
| form (conjunctive, closed) | antiform (disjunctive, open) |
| purpose | play |
| design | chance |
| hierarchy | anarchy |
| mastery/logos | exhaustion/silence |
| art object/finished work/logos | process/performance/antithesis |
| centering | absence |
| genre/boundary | text/intertext |
| semantics | rhetoric |
| metaphor | metonymy |
| root/depth | rhizome/surface |
| signified | signifier |
| narrative/grande histoire | anti-narrative/petite histoire |
| genital/phallic | polymorphous/androgynous |
| paranoia | schizophrenia |
| origin/cause | difference-difference/trace |
| God the Father | The Holy Ghost |
| determinacy | interdeterminacy |
| transcendence | immanence |
(from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/08/)
In this lecture on the postmodern psyche, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. and Slavoj Žižek. The notion of the "postmodern" is defined through the use of examples in the visual arts and architecture. Deleuze and Guattari's theory of "rhizomatic" thinking and their intellectual debts are elucidated. Žižek's film criticism, focused on the relation between desire and need, is explored in connection with Lacan.