Mamta Kalia

power and desire. There was a general
drift from linguistic position to power
and desire position but Lyotard
reoriented from the latter to the former,
celebrating desire even in its negative
manifestations. Deleuge and Guattari
perceive desire as a positive force but
it could be appropriated for negative
ends. Lyotard says in no uncertain terms
that subject, representation, meaning,
sign and truth are links in a chain that
must be broken as a whole for political
emancipation. Further, Lyotard rejects
the binary opposition between science
and narrative as science is also a kind
of meta narrative. Three meta narratives
legitimize science:
a) creation of wealth- science is
considered legitimate because it
leads to progress and is essentially
a drive for industrial- commercial
growth.
b) Working subject- science is
considered to serve for the
liberation of humanity from
exploitation, drudgery etc.
c) dialectics of spirit- science is
considered legitimate because it
leads to the emancipation of ideas.
But these three meta narratives are
falsified in real life situation as science
has also given birth to the arms race,
nuclear bomb, and attack on less powerful
countries by super powers like US and
USSR (now only one super power, US).
The very claim of science for objectivity
and value- neutrality is suspected and,
therefore, Lyotard argues to ‘ abandon
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meta narratives and embrace the postmodern
condition of uncertainty and
relativity’.
In his book ‘Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture’ (1966),
Robert Venturi preferred for the ‘difficult
unity of inclusion’ to modernism’s ‘easy
unity of exclusion’. He also preferred
elements like ‘hybrid’, to ‘pure’,
‘ambiguous’ to ‘articulated’,
conventional’ to ‘designed’,
‘accommodating’ to ‘excluding’,
‘redundant’ to ‘simple’, ‘inconsistent’ and
‘equivocal’ to ‘direct and clear’, ‘perverse
and impersonal’, ‘boring and interesting’
and ‘vestigial and innovating’. Thus he
stands for the ‘messy vitality over obvious
unity’. Thus preferring ‘both-and’ to
‘either-or’ categorisation, his architecture
evokes many levels of meanings and
combinations of focus, as various levels
of meanings come in pairs and a new
meaning is superimposed upon or merges
with, an older meaning. To achieve double
meaning, one needs to use conventions
or ‘vestigial’ elements in new ways.
Thus Venturi does not break completely
with the immediate past, unlike some
post-modernists, who focus only on the
present. In the context of Hindi literature
one may say that. Nirala and Muktibodh
are as much significant as Dharmvir
Bharati and Agyeya, representing
different shades of Indian social reality
in Hindi poetry.
Later Charles Jenks developed a
concept of ‘double-coded postmodernism’
(‘The Language of Post-