From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 7 Modernist Deconstructions: Fragmented Orders of Possibility

Where Romanticism celebrated symbolic plurality as an opening of possibility, Modernism sharpened that plurality into fracture, ambiguity, and dissonance. The early twentieth century witnessed a radical critique of totalising symbolic systems—whether theological, philosophical, or aesthetic. In their place arose fragmented symbolic orders, where construal became perspectival, provisional, and destabilised. Possibility was no longer guaranteed by cosmic harmony or rational law but had to be continually renegotiated in fields of ambiguity.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism provides a key philosophical backdrop. Rejecting absolute truths and transcendent orders, Nietzsche construes possibility as conditioned by perspective: every construal is a stance, every symbolic order a creation of life and power. The “death of God” signals not the end of possibility but its dispersion into competing horizons, where truth itself is perspectival. In this move, Nietzsche anticipates the symbolic deconstructions that would characterise modernist art and literature.

James Joyce’s Ulysses exemplifies this fragmentation in narrative form. Through shifting styles, voices, and interior monologues, Joyce constructs a symbolic cosmos where possibility is plural, layered, and often incoherent. No single narrative order encompasses the whole; instead, possibility is disclosed through the juxtaposition of perspectives, each partial, each provisional.

Similarly, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time deconstructs linear temporality, revealing possibility as contingent on memory, sensation, and subjective experience. Time itself becomes a symbolic field, fractured and reconstituted through affective construal. In this vision, possibility is not objective but continually remade in the interplay of perception and recollection.

Modernist deconstruction thus entails a decoupling of possibility from fixed narrative or hierarchy. Where myth and theology structured potential through symbolic authority, and Enlightenment systems codified it through rational law, Modernism refuses closure. Possibility is not what is ordained, calculated, or harmonised, but what emerges in the gaps, fractures, and multiplicities of symbolic life.

This shift reveals construal as an inherently unstable practice: to construe is also to fragment, to multiply, to unsettle. Modernism’s symbolic orders are not totalities but fields of ambiguity, where potential remains open precisely because it is not unified.

In this way, Modernist deconstructions mark a profound transformation in the genealogy of symbolic orders: possibility becomes irredeemably perspectival, located not in a single system but in the interplay of fractured and competing construals.