Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
Modern Era as a Cultural System
Differences Between Neoclassical and Modern
While the meetings after the first battle of the Marne on the German side were the triggering point, almost immediately there afterward all of the major powers decided on a long war to obtain those things which could not be done under the old system. This means, without intending to, they had moved from a neoclassical order of diplomacy to a modern order where warfare was unrestricted. What they did not realize is that they, the leaders, were also of the neoclassical order, and in fact their time had come. The era of absolute monarchy the things that needed to go. This is because the modern state needed to prioritize the resources for making machines and other things without any other restrictions. However, the absolute monarchy wanted to control where the resources were to go to obtain a unified and stable order of people who were not selected by merit but by birth. The modern wanted the ability to assign things by their necessity rather than by who would ask for them.
What were the differences between this new system and the old? The first imagining is that there is a search for symbolic truth as opposed to image or reality. When the Impressionists looked for “light” in all of its forms they codified the idea that the perception of existence is itself a reality. A reality that cannot be denied because they have gone out into “en plein air.” What this meant that other painters could go out into other places, and that meant that others could go half a world away such as Gaugin who went ultimately to Tahiti where the painted D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? (Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?) At this point, this is not a movement, but it shows the outline of what could be a movement if it gets the push from enough people.
And I would suggest that in painting the push was not from Gauguin, the key was extremely reported in the development, but from Paul Cézanne (1848-1906). In this I am hardly the first or the most detailed in my arguments. But why Cézanne? In his lifetime it seemed as if the critical works condemned his rejection of all of Naturalism and Impressionism, however, he was the object of adoration by van Gogh and a few other people who saw in his work something different.i It made people want to paint differently and capture the planes of color. But Gaugin, Cézanne, van Gogh, and Munch were not part of a movement but individuals searching for a new way of doing things in a culture that was set up along different lines. If they are Modernists, then they were without context from the rest of the world as to what Modernism is. A better word is that they were visionaries who called to those who saw a different world. There were many such, but some correctly saw that there were tremors that included breaking down beauty into the sharpest forms, rejection of complete naturalism, primitivism, and a welter of color beyond what was seen.
This effect is beyond art, warfare, and politics to every corner of human endeavor. But to explain why we must first contrast the Neoclassical movement with the Modern movement and see how the Modernist movement had been in a visionary mode where the dominant idea was still Neoclassical but then became revolutionary when the paradigm could control all of the aspects of a system.
Let us take the Neoclassical: it was formed with Euclidean geometry, with a vector called “time” which progressed the same for all actors in every space, and was governed by a clock, keys, as in musical keys, and colors that were defined by the object. In other words, each person could experience the definitive “real” time whether in music, literature, physics, chemistry, oratory, industry, or any other field. The Neoclassical felt that it was getting close to a universal state that could be measured in any way that the human being wanted to.
However, there were riffs that began to appear in every field. In literature the idea that there was a form that undergirded the sonnet, the play, or the novel was broken when James Joyce published Ulysses, Proust had the first section of his magnum opus À la recherche du temps perdu called Du côté de chez Swann, Picasso shifted direction and painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon while Braque painted Le Viaduc de l'Estaque, T.S. Eliot published "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Scriabin played his late Piano Sonatas, Schoenberg composed Pierrot Lunaire and wrote Harmonielehre - which was the Modern way of doing harmony in music, Ralph Vaughan Williams composed A London Symphony, and this was only in art and only a selection. However, there also was a simplistic Modernism which exploded after the war with Hemingway and others as well as more Modernistic expression from the composers such as But at the same time revolutions were occurring both in science and sport which changed the nature of competition.
This explosion before the war in the creative arts was paralleled by a revolution in physics and in the same territory as creative expression. Before the universe was Euclidean geometry with time has the universal clock. But beginning with Plank’s need to solve what was termed “The Ultra-Violet Catastrophe” by inserting a constant and then figuring back to what that constant mathematically and physically meant two waves of physics were undermining the entire paradigm: specific and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.
The main realization of Modern physics was that time was not the same for everyone, the grid did not exist but was limited the value of the Plank Constant, was limited by an uncertainty principle which may it impossible to determine both the momentum and position of a particle, the wave function used for calculating light needed to have an imaginary component, and that light did not according to a Euclidean grid but was part of spacetime which had measurable consequences. As the words, just as art found that the constants could not just be skirted to question tonality but could be dismantled entirely, science was coming to grips with the equally unsettling understanding that there was a new grid and no time on which everyone could agree on.
But it is with industry that these pieces came together in terms of warfare: instead of having a craftsman build an entire piece, one had individual people do one thing over and over again. This could be measured by Time Study Analysis. The idea of building an automobile out of individually built parts that had separately defined components machined to exact tolerances was vital for the weapons of war. However, this was the key to why a Neoclassical government thought that it could ignore the short war because they now had an almost unlimited supply of munitions and almost limited control over their subjects, so “battles” were converted to “fronts” and conflict was spread out over the last areas. What did not occur to the leaders, of any variety, was that they too had to be adapted to the new reality. That is the monarch and the Prime Minister needed to be adapted the same way that the novel, the painting, and the automobile had been adapted. But, and this is crucial, one cannot see that you yourself need to be adapted only that other things could be adapted to your use. The Kaiser ordered the great war to continue because he still had plenty of shells left.
However, it must be realized that a significant majority of the people were against the Modernist movement in its most rarefied forms but things like silent movies and recorded discs that showcased country music and urban sensibility were also part of the Modernist movement and people liked those aspects which they could understand. However, the makers of silent films were interested in the Modernist movement for its own sake and for the power of visualization that it contained. This meant that the “high” form of Modernism had a foothold in the “low” in both the technical aspects and the visualization aspects. This became more pronounced after the Great War was over and new leaders, such as Virginia Woolf, F Scott Fitzgerald, and the missing link: the sports figures that changed the rules of the game was particularly Babe Ruth who transformed the hitting game into a home run game in a stroke in the 1920s.
This is because the terms “high” and “low” were still signified as the Neoclassical thought of them and did not reconfigure until there was a new baseline for the Modern era. This is true constantly where new art needs to find a place in the ferment:
Certainly, Eliot knew how to create a memorable image. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the first of his poems to garner widespread attention, does so from the get-go with the shocking conceit of its opening lines: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table. . . . ” In “Tradition,” his image of the poet is equally outré: “I . . . invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and Sulphur dioxide.”ii
It is easy after 100 years to recognize “high” art, but it is far more difficult at the time of publication. T.S. Eliot created a stir by quoting Dante and others but doing so in a way devoid of meter let alone in a regularized form. But the change happened rapidly because a new generation of readers was searching for the expression of a new age where the influenza epidemic of 1919 and the Great War left many of them in “shell shock” because no event had ruptured any generation as deeply. The cries for the return of Alsace–Lorraine before the war seemed trivial at its conclusion.
But it was in 1938 that Adorno published a sound attack, by saying that in discourse there is a tendency to degrade music criticism when it is the critic, not the composer who is out of step.iii This change happened after the explosion of the Great War.
We will start with physics because it is with the hardest of sciences that the boisterous brouhaha was out of place in more normal times.
30 Years That Rocked Physics
The two branches of physics were affected by two ideas. The first one was special and general relativity which undermined the Newtonian framework for gravity and kinematics of moving objects. The second one was the quantization of particles which became known as quantum mechanics. The two points that must be stressed are that one, at the time of this writing we are still in the grips of these two ideas and that, though they are both enormously successful, they are incommensurable with each other. This means that the “theory of everything” required that at least one and perhaps both needed to be modified so that the two halves would fit together. We will talk about string theory in the Postmodern period as the first approach to join the two by pure mathematics, but the initial revolution was instigated by the fact that there were incommensurable problems and the solution was to recenter the mathematics on different terms: the calculus needed to have imaginary numbers, statistical units, and a space-time which was one rather than separate pieces.
In the waning years of the 1800s, one of the best physicists announced the discovery that upset almost a century of the belief that the atom was the smallest divisible unit of matter.iv The concept that the pattern was “indivisible” was in the name tom- was Greek for cut, as a tome was an instrument for cutting, and a- simply meant not. But Thompson showed that there was at least one article that had a negative charge which he could show why using anode and cathode devices. Eventually, this device would be the basis for the Cathode Ray Tube and was used in the 20th century as television and monitors on computers.
It must be understood that “classical” physics was only established a few years ago because it was felt that physics was close to a “theory of everything” with the finding of the discoveries, particularly in the atom. Until that point the atom had been described by John Dalton (1766-1844) but whose origin was incomplete because Dalton, himself, as principal secretary of the documents regularly revised them to keep them in line with his final thoughts and whose explanation has at least three separate versions which all have differences.v It took a great deal of effort to unravel the origins going through the work of Leonard K. Nash, who realized that even the notes from the experimental side of Dalton’s work were incomplete. This means that the view of the comes from work done in 1803 featuring work with nitric oxide with oxygen as the test case for what Dalton called the “law of multiple proportions” passing from a specific case to the more general case in support of his atomic theory. It was this that Nash determined was incomplete in his research.vi The reason for researching the basis for an obsolete model of the atom is that it was important to Thompson because it could not allow for charges to be at the centerpiece of a “not cutable” version of the atom.
Though there were different interpretations by the late years of the 19th century, the central idea of the atom as modeled by Dalton was as follows: Dalton described atoms as being like billiard balls in structure. We should note that this concept is still taught as a stepping stone to a more complete version of the atoms’ structure, showing how even the obsolete ideas are still kept for pedagogical reasons.vii This meant that in the Dalton atom impacts were at the surface and the density was uniform for the atom and round. This was exactly what Thompson’s work contradicted: the cathode Ray excitations meant that there was a deeper structure to the atom than Dalton’s work showed.
Again, this meant that the world of classical physics was in itself a new construct which the quantum world was challenging. This meant that the ideas were of relatively similar ages and there must be a deeper logic which meant that one was “old” or “classical” and the other was “new” and based on different mathematics. One can see what the difference was: the classical version was based on Newton, it hypothesized that the atom was the same as the solar system, that it moved in the same mathematical language, and had units that could be analogized to the atoms and the solar system. Whereas the news said that the atom was not the same as the solar system, one could not stare up at the night sky and down to the atom, and that there were not individual bits constituting the electron, the neutron, and the proton but that it was a different world. The ideas were similar in age, but they were completely different in their logical system: the old could be recognized as the calculus and the second derivative for the force, whether gravity or electromagnetism, while the new required different approaches and different variables because it was statistical. It is the interpretation of what is being written not the age of the idea.
What this means is that people who were attracted to the calculus, the derivative of the square, and seeing cells in the middle between the large and the small as represented by Newton and Maxwell, were attracted to “classical” while those who felt the randomness beneath them and the symmetry about them were attracted to the “new physics.” The ironic points were thick to the ground in that Einstein ended up being attracted to the classical model of the new physics and was given a Nobel Prize not for his general relativity but for the photoelectric effect, which was more controversial in that it set up the quantum view of the universe. This means that mathematicians such as Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) who published a paper in the year of his death supporting the new physics and showing that the quantum nature was necessary.viii This is why it is a logical system and therefore a paradigm rather than simply an old versus new: it is within the brain not the calendar.
The beginning of the revolution didn’t seem like a revolution at all it began very much in the same time frame as the discovery of X-rays with the idea that there was a limit to how small a fragment of energy could be speculated by Max Planck (1858-1947). Planck had been admitted to the ranks of the “Habilitation” which is a doctorate in which he defended his dissertation on Gleichgewichtszustände isotroper Körper in verschiedenen Temperaturen (Equilibrium states of isotropic bodies at different temperatures) which formulates the necessary and sufficient conditions for thermodynamic equilibrium. But in the latter years of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, he went from being an unpaid professor to one of the key pieces to pandering the quatumization of the extremely small.
In 1900 he formulated what is now called “Planck’s Law” which was about a special type of electromagnetic radiation formed by a “black box.” All bodies emit spontaneously electromagnetic radiation and on the 14th of December, 1900 to the German Physical Society produced the claim that energy comes in quantum not continuous states.ix It was not an instantaneous hit with the physicists.x The opinion of Klein is that while the pieces of a crisis were known, based on Rayleigh’s working out of the black box radiation and Planck's idea to use quantization of the parts, it was not clear that classical physics was in crisis. Planck outlined in 1897-9 his program of radiation, importantly that the radiation was irreversible: a dipole, which is an electrostatic charge, produces a spherical wave of radiation, but not the reverse a spherical wave does not produce a dipole. The primary focus is why the process goes only in one direction.xi We can see from Planck's notes that there was debate from Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906) and from a student of Planck’s Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953) which only slowly made its way into Planck’s working hypothesis - in that Boltzmann had refuted Zermelo’s points.xii The key matter was that there was nothing in the laws of electromagnetism which prevented going from a sphere to a dipole just as there was nothing in the laws of kinematics to prevent a gas from converging on a point.xiii Essentially, Boltzmann was in that Planck had not formed a cohesive theory as to why the irreversible nature was happening. But once this criticism of Planck Equations had been swallowed a new idea started to take form, and Planck went from being a critic of Boltzmann’s methods to showing how the methods could be squared with the irreversibility, so long as one quantized the individual unit. However, the root to that realization took a long road, because while there was an easy way to show the result by statistical mechanics, instead Planck used a thermodynamic approach which was more difficult.xiv This is rather common: the easy way is unknown to the discoverer and instead, be route taken is more ornate and complex because the discoverer knows it. What he chose is that statistical mechanics was not in Planck’s mind even though it would be essential to quantum physics as it would develop. This means in Planck's case that a definition would have to be supplied even though the motivation for the definition is not formulated at the time but must have been necessary.xv
This moment is one where a logical system is being born out of the need to create a paradigm for solving a specific problem, in this case, Planck’s purpose, almost obsession really, with finding the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy must increase in the entire universe. The fact that some processes were irreversible by experiment but not, in theory, made it possible for the law to be incomplete or missing a subtle point. What Planck did not know at the time was that quantization would be the gateway to a new form of mechanics. This book will argue that this was one of the principles by which the Modern would supplant the Neoclassical in that the curve of the universe, in whatever field humanity pursues it, has a limit and that limit causes certain other things to happen as it approaches.
That means that while Planck's presentation was not considered important, as the pieces were gathered up it was realized that there was a crisis, that crisis came from small pieces that added up together to make Classical physics unable to explain certain realities but that Modern physics could.
This was shown by an obscure Swiss patent clerk who published several articles in the year 1905. Of course, it was the obscure Swiss patent clerk was Einstein, and in the paper on the photoelectric effect, he cited Planck. And preceded to charge ahead to a new idea for how photons were emitted. In the first section of the paper, he notes that there is a theoretical prediction based on what is now called “classical physics.”xvi The law predicts a different result from the experiment.xvii
In his 1905 paper "Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt" (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light") which marks Einstein's annus mirabilis or Wunderjahr took Planck’s idea and ran with it by asserting that instead of light being absorbed in a steady state unit was instead he needed and received in discrete and finite amounts whether in the photoelectric effect or the black body. This was antithetical to Maxwell’s equations and continued the notion that there was a finite limit to the amount of light. What was funny was that this was considered less controversial than Einstein’s work in Relativity.
But Einstein was not done even with his Wunderjahr, because in the same year the formulated it. His most famous equation: E = mc2.
The change from Neoclassical to Modern in the world of physics was the change from continuous to discrete and all that that entailed, which was tremendous and ushered in quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Fin de Siecle and the Modern Revolt
At the same time that there was a cross-cutting and between the classical and Modern view of physics there was a revolt in favor of a new kind of synthesis in the arts. but, this is always going on because new painting methods are constantly being tried. However, as has been pointed out improvements in industry for example the tube of paint are not part of the artists’ control but under the control of capital and the imagination that capital can employ. To take an example of the difference, compare Renoir’s painting of porcelain ceramics to what the did on the canvas. One is obscure; the other one is world-famous. There is a reason the first type of imagination is the capital harnessed imagination for decoration of someone else whereas the second kind of imagination is for the artist and those who knowingly choose that imagination. One is subservient to the accouterments that the customer plans the other one is to show that the customer knows that there is a genius beyond the customer’s reach. So what was it in the 1900s and 1910s that was new to the discussion?
We have already touched on Cubism in the hands of Picasso and Braque, but was this the only revolution or was there a field of revolutions that happened?
The above is from Vasily Kandinsky(1866-1944) in the year 1909, and we can see the revolution against the realistic mode in this too. The years 1900 through 1910 with such paintings even though they had been there since at least Munch’s Der Schrei der Natur. But the latter is a personal vision whereas the former is recognition of the external world living in a particular direction: nature is no longer the only source of the landscape, human beings with their rows of lights and cleaning steel trains have come into the picture.at the same time the visionary leaders of the late 19th century with another other direction: they sculpted their canvas on the outside world. This led to Monet’s swirling colors of light, which he held on to the scraps of realism that Impressionism demanded. Then this was the difference: people after a certain point were willing to expend even denounce the realism and the symbolism that ended at the real, whereas the younger painters did not. Eventually, Kandinsky went completely to abstraction but in a different mode than Picasso.
Once the floodgates were opened different movements tried to expand the visualization even if they worked realistic or symbolically realistic because they discarded the idea that paint could be in the real. One signature example is Fauvism which only lasted from 1905 to 1910 and was championed by André Derain and Henri Matisse. Another one was Expressionism which heightened and distorted the human features and was championed by Egon Schiele. One haste to wonder if the Egon of Ghostbusters was in part named for the painter of Tod und die Jungfrau (Death and the Maiden.)xviii
The early works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg were rather conventional in their scope: consider Stravinsky’s Symphony in E-flat, which was labeled Opus 1, indicating that this work was his first “mature” opus however, he moved rapidly into the Modern with Petrushka, The Firebird, Le Sacre du Printemps. But he joined the revolt in what some critics called the “hyper-modern.”
We can see that before the Modern became the default standard, it had a long trial, especially in the arts and physics. It had promulgated different ideas and had shown that at least some of them were “true” in different ways. For example,
Only in the roundabout way whose beginning we have sketched did it gradually become clear that what general relativity resolved was, first of all, a clash between two equally universal structures of space-time, manifested in the borderline problem of free fall as described by the equivalence principle. As John Stachel has pointed out, the awkwardness of this pathway was mainly due to the lack of appropriate mathematical tools to capture one of these structures: the understanding of gravitation and inertia in terms of an affine structure. xix
The work of Tullio Levi-Civita, Hermann Weyl, Emile Noether, and Elie Cartan was instrumental to the redefining of gravitation and conserved structure.
Modern Dying
When an era is being born it has paradoxes from the age before and it solves them by introducing new concepts. Thus, when the modern era was being born the idea that space was limited, that musically different forms could be used rather than the diatonic, and in literature, a welter of new ideas could be expressed were all being explored. At the end of the modern new forms of reaching an audience were accepted such as cinema, and there were changes made to law, locomotion, and other activities which were founded on the early principles. But as the modern age came to its end some of its principles were found to have consequential changes.
One of these was game theory, because just as with mathematics of the infinite game theory suggested that there was a difference between small interactions and large interactions. And this was made clear during the Cuban missile crisis. It may not be clear why game theory was important so let us detail the Cuban missile crisis from the point of view of game theory. The modern had been premised on the idea that a total war was not possible because of the expense of fighting one. Therefore, conflicts between nations had to be broken down into small exchanges.
But the global thermonuclear war does not have a smaller exchange. Therefore, the conundrum was that if one was a superpower, part of the basis of that was to have enough nuclear-armed firepower to obliterate any nation in the world. There were two superpowers at that time: the United States and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Either of these two powers was capable of committing a large launch event that would effectively end the other.
The Cuban missile crisis made it possible for satellite countries to have the first strike on the other’s capital. Suddenly it was no longer half an hour but six minutes. The change was dramatic in that half an hour is just barely enough time to make a decision. But eight minutes was not. When the Soviet Union decided to respond to Jupiter II missiles in Turkey with equivalent missiles in Cuba, a desperate attempt to negotiate a new settlement was engaged. While the events of the Cuban missile crisis were played out the end result was that if the USSR did not deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba, then the United States would dismantle the Jupiter II missiles in Turkey. The dismantling of Jupiter II missiles was to be held back and the dismantling of missiles in Cuba was to be portrayed as a “victory” for the United States because the USSR did not have to worry about public opinion in the same way that the United States did.
This was a postmodern way of dealing with the missile crisis rather than a modern way: enough time had to be given to the two main superpowers. This would be a step in game theory which did not have an equivalent in the modern era. In other words, while many of the postmodern developments and the theory of postmodernity were still quite new, the practical consequence was that a postmodern theory was to be triumphant over modern theories: game theory and the postmodern view of what the text was, in this case, the text was the theory of warfare. Foucault and Derrida were not mentioned but their theory that a substratum of assumptions would guide the interpretation was paramount to explaining why they are was a difference between 15 minutes and 6.
Over the course of the 1960s other developments would occur that would shift the dominant ideology from modernism to postmodernism. This would have consequences for the modern liberal hegemony that guided the United States and the modern Politburo that guided the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What would take its place was a postmodern view of how executive power was used and the rise of powers which were not European in their nature, such as OPEC. What this meant was that the industrialized economy of the United States rested on other powers being cooperative. That meant that these other powers had to be given a voice in the way affairs were run.
Game Theory says that the game must be equal: the Soviets wanted the same advantage that NATO had. When they got this deal they toke it. So:
In other words, both have to agree because each one has the ability to reject. While the theory of games was introduced in the modern, its application to a real-world, life-or-death situation was a postmodern era because game theory had emerged as a critical way of thinking about strategies. Compare this to the total war situation where a party could engage in deception to get the outcome that they wanted. This is the difference between postmodern and modern: it is a matter of information which is what this example Cultural System is focused on: when the matter of information is made equal how do people respond?
Over the course of the 1960s, various other developments would change from modern to postmodern. In each case, individuals would prefer the postmodern alternative even if the modern was more recognizable. But the postmodern era beckoned, and it brought with it theory, in terms of Foucault and von Neumann, and engineering such as color televisions and jet aircraft. But with each new innovation, certain aspects of the postmodern had to be accepted. For example, if you want jet travel you must accept a greater increase of fossil fuels because that is the cost of jet travel. If the powers accepted this, then they must give more power to the local entities that control countries that produce oil. It is no longer possible to control all of the world from a European, or rather European plus others who have developed the same apparatus for making control a centralized affair. This means that in the post-World War II model superpowers could control the levers of power almost without limit. But as the postmodern involved this is no longer possible and can be seen in the French defeat in Indochina, the British-French defeats in North Africa, and the new parity among the Communist powers between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.
This means that the equilibrium of power must rest in a game theory praxis rather than a centered outward modern paradigm. This meant that the global parameters in both trade, people, and services, as well as the structure of the way that countries could be organized by a theory of games where individual countries had more power than before. The individual countries could not get everything that they wanted but at the same time, there were levers that they could pull on occasion which meant they could get from the superpowers and their close allies gains. A simple example is that Algeria at the close of the Second World War was a province of France, but this collapsed in 10 years because the Arabs were no longer individualized servants of the French but an organized system where enough members were willing to die to become autonomous. This does not mean that the newly autonomous countries were “better” but they were under local control even if it was a dictatorial local control because before it was dictatorial and foreign-controlled.
The problem was that the central countries were no longer willing to place enough manpower to control their provinces. This was often the case when individual actors adopted communist party or Marxist ideologies. These ideologies made it clear that one of the most important things was that the local proletariat had to control the local government. And this was most clearly seen in Indochina and especially in the place of Vietnam.
In the Modern view, Vietnam was simply Korea updated to the 1960s. in the 1950s South Korea’s power structure was closed and in the 1960s the same was true of Vietnam. The president and his, let’s not mince words, cronies did not have to listen to the public as was shown by the coup against South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm. on November 2, 1963 he was arrested and executed in a CIA-backed coup. The president thought that he would be freed being allowed to leave South Vietnam on a U.S.-supplied aircraft, and instead was assassinated by AVRN officers in the back of an armored car. Afterward, there was in effect a military junta with leaders changing from month to month.
In a modern-era view, the required response from the US was to escalate, but this did not capture the facts on the ground. This is because instead of a totalitarian regime in the north, there was a complex situation where Hồ Chí Minh was the leader but not always in control of the country. He stepped down in 1965 leading to the decision among North Vietnamese leaders to gamble on a “Tet Offensive” starting on 30th January 1968. While the military aspects of the Tet Offensive were a defeat for the North Vietnamese, in that they were expecting an armed revolt by the people of the South against their government, the problem was that the US wanted an end to hostilities and the fact that an offensive was still possible and the fact that more US troops would have to be drafted to quiesce the situation in Vietnam meant that the US objective was not met even though the South maintained control over the territory.
Looking at this from the Modern/Postmodern lens, the Tet Offensive showed the American public that a protracted level of engagement was going to be required to keep South Vietnam as part of its anti-Communist alliance. The new administration tried two withdraw US troops and support the South Vietnamese government with air power especially over the North and in Cambodia and Laos. As this did not work, even with surprises such as the bombing of Hanoi, the then capital of North Vietnam, Nixon sued for peace, and the South was defeated very shortly there afterwards.
Why is this a marker for the collapse of a modern era?
Look at this in two ways: as a game theory and as a postmodernist construction of the text.
In a Game Theory way, the problem was that the US wanted a complete victory whereas the Communist forces needed only to continue the conflict until the US was willing to not commit the number of troops to the conflict. Thus the game is that each side plays a number of troops. If the number of troops is large then the US wins, and if the number of troops is large enough then the Communists launch a revolt. This means that the US is total victory cannot happen if the North can inspire a revolt. If there is not a resolution then the play happens again making it a repeated game.
Thus, though the Tet Offensive was a military failure it was a success in that the US needed a total victory which was not going to happen because eventually, another Tet would happen. That is, what was missing was what kind of result the US forces wanted from the Tet Offensive: it had to be a complete victory or the US withdrawals. Even though the North did not win the Tet Offensive, that it was a repeated game meant that the Communists only needed the game to be repeated whereas the US needed for it to be a single encounter. Thus, the only victory is for there to be a US total victory otherwise the North wins eventually.
In a postmodern game theory result, the US needed a total victory and no further games to the played, whereas the Communists needed only to avoid this result. The problem was that the United States was thinking in a modern-era victory term, where the underlying threat was from a single player who had to be defeated. However, in a postmodern era, the Cold War is the model of all confrontations, where the Cold War does not end but is a repeated game. Thus the Korean War did not end with a surrender document but merely with an armistice. Only when one side decides to surrender in that piece of the world where there is conflict will conflict finally end. But this also means that while losing the hot war may be an option, winning the peace may still happen. Consider that the Vietnamese Republic is now free from both the two powers and is free to make its own decisions. One could argue that the United States has one more from the peace, including the overthrow of Kampuchea and returning it to a more normal regime. This means that the modern view and be postmodern view are different in the way they construct negotiations. In the modern view, Vietnam is a war, whereas in the postmodern view, it is a country with negotiations as to its status.
Now let us take a look at the postmodern theory. This then developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
i A good example of how Cézanne was influential in Cubism is Donnell-Kotrozo, Carol. 1979. “Cézanne, Cubism, and the Destination Theory of Style.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 13, no. 4: 93–108. https://doi.org/10.2307/3331753.
ii Dettmer, Kevin. 2019. A Hundred Years of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. The New Yorker. October 27.
iii Adorno, T. W. 1991. On the Fetish Characters in Music and the Regression of Listening. In J. M. Bernstin (Ed.)
iv J. J. Thomson. 1897. 'Cathode rays' (Friday evening meeting of the Royal Institution, 30 April 1897), The Electrician 39. 104.
v Nash, Leonard K. “The Origin of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory.” Isis 47, no. 2 (1956): 101–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/227334. Called Leonard Nash. 101.
vi Leonard Nash, 105-106.
vii Note that the “models” of the atoms are also in modeling atomic structure in the case of DNA. Watson, J. D. 1968. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Atheneum. Cover.
viii Hudson, Robert G. 1997. “Classical Physics and Early Quantum Theory: A Legitimate Case of Theoretical Underdetermination.” Synthese 110, no. 2: 217–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20117595. 217.
ix Klein, Martin J. 1962 .“Max Planck and the Beginnings of the Quantum Theory.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 1, no. 5: 459–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41133222. Called Klein. 459.
x Klein, 459.
xi Klein, 461.
xii Klein, 462
xiii Klein, 462.
xiv Klein, 462.
xv Klein, 463. Klein notes that it is probable that Planck was thinking of Wein’s Distribution Law formulated in 1896, though it is often called Wein’s approximation. Remember that Wein’s motivation was to answer the question of why the Maxwell-Boltzmann energy distribution was not measurable experimentally. The Wein’s equation is which is far harder than taking ) and solving for .
xvi Singh, Virendra. “Einstein and the Quantum.” 2005. Current Science 89, no. 12: 2101–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24111072. Called Singh. 2104.
xvii Singh 2104. Singh also notes that Einstein obtained the result even though it is now called “Rayleigh-Jeans Law.” However, since the prediction is wrong are unsigned may be said to have missed out on the error.
xviii The painting this course named for Schubbert and later is applied to a play, a film, and other artifacts.
xix Blum, Alexander, Roberto Lalli, and Jürgen Renn. “The Reinvention of General Relativity: A Historiographical Framework for Assessing One Hundred Years of Curved Space-Time.” Isis 106, no. 3 (2015): 598–620. https://doi.org/10.1086/683425. 603.