The I Ching’s fluidity-changes cosmology prefigured the postmodern worldview.

Evidence

Wilhelm, seemingly unaware that his own work is based on this massive founding modern dualism, repudiates dualism (or valorizes the I Ching’s move beyond dualism) because dualism is far too simple a model of the complexity of the universe. At the heart of this Chinese representational system’s adequacy to the complexity of the universe is its privileging of transition, fluidity, change (”The Book of Changes”)— ”movements in change,” ”tendencies in movement”—over the ”Occidental” privileging of ”things in their state of being,” ”things as such” (one of the most frequently used countercultural slang phrases in the sixties was ”going through changes,” to indicate a fruitful, convention-renouncing turbulence in one’s life). This view of a universe of fluidity and continual change rather than static states of being has become a central, defining concept of postmodernity. This concept has made impossible the notions of ”Occident” and ”Orient”—two massively static states of being and things as such—that underlies Wilhelm’s conceptualization, characteristic of the sixties, of the significance of the I Ching. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 722

Categorization

• XREF: The postmodern valorization of flux over static being echoes the earlier claims that sixties utopian attacks discarded static states in favor of process and change. — connects to: FitzGerald constructed Vietnamese culture as postmodern in her very mode of describing it — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 747; The Living Theatre staged I Ching-based chance theater in Village coffeehouses — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 267
• QUESTION: Interesting that an ancient Chinese text’s representational logic maps so cleanly onto a late-20th-century Western paradigm — worth checking whether this is a genuine lineage or retrospective projection.
• SEED: Could be an essay angle: ‘going through changes’ as the linguistic hinge where counterculture slang met an ancient cosmology and both fed postmodern theory.

Broader Connections

• The Living Theatre staged I Ching-based chance theater in Village coffeehouses #exemplifies (0.75) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 267