Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
The complex mix of the Postmodern theory
Postmodernism’s Origins
The Postmodern started while the Modern was yet to make its own statement about the Modern accomplishments. Postmodern started during the Second World War which ended the idea of total declared war by ratcheting up the consequences: a totally declared war would inevitably produce a weapon that would destroy the entirety of what was worth having in the world itself, even though there might be some semblance of life left afterward. The primary reason for inventing was of course to solve problems in the way that Modernism worked. As a result, it started out as a collection of ideas rather than a Cultural System. Many of the ideas were already in some stage of development, such as the submarine and the tank. But be key problem was to build at scale many of the ideas that were already workable. This means that lifting arrangements for hundreds of thousands of people to be trained, to take care of wounds after having served on the battlefront, machines that could fire thousands of rounds being made smaller and more easily transported were the basis of the living arrangements for men who came military conscripts. Essentially Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the Empire Japan, nationalist China, and eventually the United States needed to take whatever men were available and transform them into soldiers with specific functions so that the ensemble could be made to win battles and kill as many of the other sides men as was possible. But also logistics was important: they needed to build tanks in large quantities, fighters, and bombers, trucks for shipping equipment, and they needed to do this more quickly than was possible.
In this, the Modern was similar to the Neoclassical: a war to take territory ended up destroying the value of the territory. In the Neoclassical, the demand was for a short war in the concept of the states’ conditions, but the Neoclassical had developed means to build more weapons and war control which negated the demand; it also gave war power to the monarch then it truly had power to give. Modern merely upped the ante: instead of a short war to decapitate the principal powers of another state, the idea was to populate the new territory with people who were already engaged in the program of world domination. Nazi Party was founded on this principle with its partially Modernized Wehrmacht;i as much as the Kaiser of Germany was founded on the principle that no cost is too much to bear in the Neoclassical; or the Confederate States of America was predicated on the inferiority of some people by others, that ended the Romantic in America. This can be a principle: when a state or other instrument of power builds into itself a premise that violates the logical system, the system in that area is tottering and probably destroyed. If there are readers, then this long formation will be compressed to a short formation. It will be shown that the Postmodern made the same stake with the globalization of the planet ending the cozy normality of the “one world” that the Postmodern could get behind. This is not to say that the globalization of the world is impossible, but there are intricacies to how it must be done: if a supply chain can move parts through the system, then it can move disease through the system as well. The Postmodern decided that this was too much effort, and the resources could be spent better on giving more money to the already rich. This is why President Trump decided not to close down the globalization system: it was too much money to leave on the table when the few were getting away. But the Slavoj Zizek comment:
When we read an abstract ideological proclamation, we are well aware that this is not how actual people experience it: in order to pass from abstract propositions to people’s “real lives,” one has to add to the abstract propositions the unfathomable density of a life world context – and ideology are not the abstract propositions in themselves, ideology is this very life world density which “schematizes” them in Kant’s sense, renders them “livable,” part of our daily experience.ii
It is the unstated principles that need to be violated in order to have the promised land.
This meant that the Postmodern emerged from ideas that had a basis in the Modern. Just before and during the Second World War, the idea that a large number of people could be set to doing basically the same thing at scale was a problem that occupied a large number of people creating a large number of ideas. This means that the population pyramid that started the baby boom was actually started during the Second World War, among the people who made munitions and other objects.
But as with other first movers, there were certain aspects of their personality that were different from those that came after them. First was obvious: the first generation of children born to adults was not understood as a baby boom, they were simply byproducts of production. Much as scrap was a byproduct: one put people to make tanks and one of the side effects was children. The second aspect which was different was that the children were not looked after in the same way that their later siblings would be. After all, since they weren’t yet “Baby Boom” there was no reason to look after them when there was a war. Things such as meat, whole milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables were sent to the men fighting in the war not to the children. Things such as schools were also not built because there were other objects that needed attention first. This meant that the first generation of what would be called the baby boomers had to make the transition from scarcity to abundance in a way that later children would never have to experience. But they had the advantage of being first when the nature of the baby boom became apparent.
But when the war was over, a whole generation came home and formed with the Information which was won at hard cost either in war or in the reduction for it. This led to innovations such as the jet aircraft, the car, and the highway, and innovations such as appliances for doing the dishes, clothes, and vacuuming. To take one example consider the entity known as “suburbia.” Before the war there was little that resembled the cookie-cutter layout of vast swathes until a builder Abraham Levit conceived of building for civilian use what he had built in the military.
Meeting the challenge would require innovation: the building industry was wallowing in traditional methods of constructing houses at a time when mass production had brought consumer goods such as cars and refrigerators into the lives of middle- and working-class.iii
In other words, prior to the Second World War builders competed for the high-end business because those were the people who had the money. After the Second World War, there was pent-up demand on the bottom of the building market, if one could build as cheaply as possible. Abraham Levitt conceived of manufacturing homes on the scale of a military base, with each section being done by a small number of people who then would move on to the next house. Thus in 1952, Levittown was opened.
The result was a proliferation of the same style of house over tracts of land which were then sold for much less than even apartments could be manufactured. It was described by critics of the time as:
Contemporary critics noted the parallel: Eric Larrabee, for example, described the typical Levitt house as the “Model-T equivalent of the rose-covered cottage”; Time described William Levitt as the “Henry Ford of Housing”; and a writer in Fortune marveled at the efficient, factory-like precision of the production process.iv
Thus, even at the time the benefit of cost-cutting was supreme in mass production. It should be noted that while Levitt was progressive in his housing production he was conservative in that he did not allow African-Americans to buy houses. This is interesting because Levitt was Jewish, and therefore had only recently decided to be “white.” This means that the Cultural System only allowed such freedoms as were required by its problems not by their iniquity.
The key concepts of the Military such as the aircraft carrier group, which made stability in a region dependent on an aircraft carrier group and its supporting naval vessels led to a naval view of power that would stand in good stead for the Postmodern world. But even more important was the atomic and later nuclear warhead with the means to deliver it. Thus, on 16 July 1945 in New Mexico, an implosion plutonium “gadget” was detonated at 05:29 Mountain Standard Time initiating the atomic age in the world. One can ask whether the Trinity device was part of the Postmodern and the answer is that global thermonuclear war was the threat that everything occurred beneath, and the Modern could not solve the problem of annihilation of the human race but the Postmodern could: the trick was to have “Mutually Assured Destruction.” Thus when either side of a nuclear exchange wanted to use the most powerful device, the threat would be that before they could decimate their opponent, their opponent would launch missiles and destroy their attacker as well. This is what game theory indicated each side would have to do. This means that the Modern could develop the atomic weapon but could not understand the final consequences. But the Postmodern could: build enough weapons so that if there was a launch a counter-launch would still annihilate the other side. This meant that wars now needed to be fought with only one side on the offensive whereas the other side would employ proxies in the conflict, such as the Vietnam War. So instead of a Modern “hot war” the new situation was for a long “cold war” where each side tried to defeat the other through unconventional means that would destroy the internal economy rather than a frontal assault.
This means that there was a conundrum: people wanted to be happy but underneath a cruel cold war that subordinated all actions. It also meant that the means of production had to be opened up so that more people could enjoy them. Unfortunately, this meant that the oil that provided the grease for an economy ran out in the US and the Middle East wanted to have more of the profits. This meant that a group of countries formed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1960 and accumulated several other countries as well: the original group was the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. They were later joined by Qatar (1961), Indonesia (1962), Libya (1962), the United Arab Emirates (1967), Algeria (1969), Nigeria (1971), Ecuador (1973), Gabon (1975), Angola (2007), Equatorial Guinea (2017) and Congo (2018) and supported by Russia. Only two countries have left OPEC: Qatar and Angola and each of those left in the 21st century.
This is where Game Theory comes in. In von Neumann’s original paper and be full book, every game has at least two players. If they do not talk to each other and have perfect rationality, a number of games, up where the optimal solution is to have players defect even though both cooperating yields a higher payout. This is because, from the point of view of a rational player, they are always better if they defect than when they cooperate. The simplest variation was proposed by Merrill Flood (1908-1991) and Milton Drechsler(1911-1992) in 1950 and is one of the most studied in the world: the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
And it turns out this is precisely the variation in which two nuclear powers find themselves in: not knowing whether the other nuclear power will do, the most logical stance is to always defect and develop more nuclear weapons. The solution is that at some point will have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other one many times over and will realize this. This came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) where even before the power commits to defect previous rounds of the game already meant that there was MAD built into the game. And so, the Postmodern world lived in a condition where the two sides already knew that there was no way to win a nuclear war because there were already enough nuclear weapons to annihilate both sides. Be difference between the postmodern world and the modern world is that the Postmodern could live with such an option whereas the Modern world could not. Essentially, the players in the postmodern had to understand how the Prisoner’s Dilemma, if played rationally, ends with everyone losing. And this means that both players will have to make modifications to the Prisoner’s Dilemma so that they can both cooperate. The cost of playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma is too expensive.
But there was a third power involved in this negotiation: OPEC could destroy the economic engine of the United States and its allies. This meant that there were subsidiary players to the prisoner’s dilemma, that is players who do not have the ability to instantly play the game but have a long-term option where they can destroy the economic fabric which means they have a long-term option. This meant that there were three parties in negotiations: the two superpowers and OPEC, and the tensions between the United States and OPEC caused friction but while it came close to a general war did not do so. This balance between military dominance and economic dominance was the fulcrum of Postmodern economics.
The Design of the Economy
The design of the large manufacturing firms was similar to Levittown: build in quantity and establish each individual niche with certain features which were cheaper to add than the teacher could be sold for. GM made several models each of which was slightly improved from the model below it. This meant that the customer would tell the dealer which category he, and as the 1950s progressed, she, would fit into.
But this meant that designers for each product from the smallest fork to the largest building needed to be trained. This meant that colleges needed to design majors for every niche on the totem pole, and that included engineers, chemists, physicists, but also English and history majors because one had to get inspiration from someplace and once the necessities of life were taken care of then the luxuries beckoned.
And this meant that the power of text became important as the collegiate lifestyle became apparent: people wanted to get better jobs and therefore went to college to obtain them. But many college students heard the beckoning of the humanities. They wanted to know why other people did as they did.
This means that the postmodern world needed engineers and other people trained to do mathematics whether accountants or actuaries, but several of the students became enamored with the idea of questioning why people did what they did in the world of humanities. This meant that a large fraction of the incoming student population ended up studying English, History, Political Science, and Psychology. When studying these humanities programs it was a tax on the real reason for universities to function: training students to do equations studying things like friction, heat, and other problems that came with building machines and buildings or at least the functioning of adults in terms of insurance because the running of life with insurance and other accouterments yields counterintuitive plans for saving money.
This also meant that the people who ran the universities could up the tuition because the amount of money from having a bachelor’s degree was more than not having a bachelor’s degree. This runs afoul of the idea that universities are for the students and instead become for the professionals who run them. This means that university professors start to become a cost that should be reduced so that there will be more money for the professionals who run the universities.
But this means that the universities have a conundrum: if run as profit-making enterprises one should do the least for one’s students. And if run as profit-making enterprises, the tuition and fees should rise to the profit-making level of any business. But the reason for the university’s existence is to gain a head start by having a more educated working class and thus they should want to do as much for the students and charge as little to gain admission. One needs to have enough so that the students understand that if they do not perform there will be a cost, but beyond that, the university’s mission is to educate the incoming population to the best of its ability at the lowest possible cost. In other words, universities as profit-making institutions are directly opposed to universities as a mission. This means that the tuition should go up by more than the cost of inflation, and a university that has a good reputation should charge for that even if it does not attract the best students but the ones with the most ability to pay.
This means that over time the postmodern educational system at the university level is opposed to the reason for the university's mission to society. Since society is ultimately the profit-making enterprise, that is the total of the consumption product of society is ultimately where everything is paid for. This means that the University as a profit-making enterprise, which is normal for the postmodern means of charging for a good or service, is damaged or curly as opposed to the University as an education. That is, society wants universities to educate incoming students to as great a degree as possible because that is the way that society moves up on the chain of development.
But one can see that the cost has reached a limit, and that limit signals that the postmodern way of charging for education has reached a limit. This is one aspect of a Cultural System: the very assumptions of a Cultural System become under threat because the linearly optimal move is no longer possible. That is to say, the University as a profit-making enterprise is coming under threat.
But it is not just college tuition that is changing in its basis: because the postmodern world has been conservative in its governmental system, for the last 50 years the way to increase profits is to charge labor and reduce taxation on capital gains taxes. This was in opposition to the modern system of the world which was to tax capital gains more and labor less. That means that even in 2024 stocks make gains, while labor is held at the lowest point in 50 years. This means that the winners win big and the losers lose big.
Power and “The Text”
Once the text had meaning, the next step was to study the text and find out what the meaning is. After a decade of forming a theory of life, there became a need to study that theory. Thus, at the end of the 1950s, there was a need to study what was being communicated by the text. Sends each discipline was contained in a few axioms which were then expanded out to the discipline itself, one could understand how the extraction worked in the generic sense. As Sterling P. Newberry once noted, at any session of a sub-science most of the contributions were from the founder, the immediate descendents of the founder, or from students of the founder’s greatest students. And then a new discipline needed to be invented to capture details that were hidden.
Postmodernism, the word, encompasses many flavors in architecture, discourse, and philosophy. But it is with Continental philosophy that it started to the used with the greatest reliability. While many names are associated with it two of the earliest are Derrida and Foucault. What did these philosophers point out in their works which was important note so that even the detractors had to explain why they should be dismissed? When this happens, there is a truth that cannot be explained away. This does not mean that you must agree with the philosophical truth, but it does mean that it needs to be incorporated into the canon the arguments for and against it must be explained concisely so that later generations will preamble to understand why the movement gathered force. This is true of Aquinas, Kant, and Heidegger. The reason that the truth exists is because there are certain logical features that the movement cites and explains, and those features need a full explanation. Even their enemies take on a certain nuance and flavor from their works. Fox News is soaked in the power of its text and the intersubjectivity of its power to move an audience irregardless of whether or not what they say is true. This is the power that Postmodernism claims for the author: even if an individual objects to the premise still must grapple with the logic and exposition.
One of the first to make a mark is the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) who created the idea and practice of “deconstructionism” and explained its meaning. In 1967 he had his “annus mirabilis” publishing three works: Writing and Difference, Voice and Phenomenon, and Of Grammatology. Explaining, in fragments, what is idea means and how it is to be applied. But in 1972 he gathered together a fuller explanation as to what was going on with the idea and centered his argument in the most basic philosophical texts: Plato.
The idea of deconstructionism is that the revealed text is uncertain and any attempt to draw meaning from yet can be challenged by looking at the words that yet is composed of. Because the author usually has more material to make is point and the reader is swamped by the detail. The reader must either gear way to the author or reject based on a deep true form of reality. In order to reject Christianity, one must believe in atheism as a synthetic a priori, that is without discussion; the same me be said in reverse: to deny atheism one must believe in a Deist point of view without question.
In Dissemination the reaches for Plato and talks about the “logos” and the “pharmakos” as being like the soul and the body almost in the Iliad sense that the body has to form one as living and the other one as death. One must understand that “logos” is a medicine technical word in ancient Greek, it has many meanings and many aspects to its use, almost the way “fuck” is used in Postmodern English. A meta-syntactical word can be used for an unspoken reality that nevertheless is clear to the listeners by context. In English:
The reader will have caused to reflect that the relation ( the analogy) between the logos/soul relation and the pharmakos/body relation is the same as that of one of its terms. The pharmakos is comprehended in the structure of logos. This comprehension is an act of both domination and a decision.
This tells us that the author has built a connection between the argument and its conclusions. Derrida argues that the only way to break this connection is to sever the pharmakos from the logos. This is the same way that Homer describes a dead body as soma. The way to do this according to Derrida is to look at the very words and decipher what they could mean other than what the author implies. This is similar to taking one verse of the Bible without the entire context and using its argument for another purpose which is the way that evangelical Christians use the Bible.
Because this very deeply on to any author who has a logos which animates a pharmakos, it becomes an irritant for exposing the duplicity which the author needs to have: if one believes the argument, says the author, then one must see the specific nature as being one of its aspects. Because Derrida gives the power back to the reader in exchange of reading a particular text, he has made an enemy of virtually every author, even ones who might agree with him on some particular point.
This then leads to the idea of deconstruction, because any text may be deconstructed by looking at the particular words that it uses to carry its effect. The fact that there is religious deconstruction almost makes the point: believers in the absolute word of the Bible can deconstruct its previous meaning and institute a new reading that accords more closely with how they feel, in a religious sense, with the meaning when in the present.
This means that like any good paradigm, even be people who reject the author except the meaning of the text because it is ingrained.
But before Derrida, a more important figure is the historian Paul-Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984). Before Derrida explained the mechanisms of deconstruction, Foucault enacted this in his writings such as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization), Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard medical (The Birth of the Clinic), and Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (The Order of Things) and went on to create perhaps his masterpiece afterwords: L'Histoire de la sexualité (The History Of Sexuality). Each of these works lays forth the conclusion that in different eras there were different explanations and a different way of treating people, whether pursuing science, sex, or madness. That from this conclusion he states that there is a hidden assumption that is not contained in the text itself. For example:
One last precaution must be taken to disconnect the question continuities by which we organize, the discourses that we are to analyze: we must renounce two link, but opposite themes. The first involves a wish that it should never be possible to assign, in the order of discourse, the irruption of a real event; that beyond any apparent beginning, there is always a secret origin - so secret and so fundamental that it can never be quite grasped in itself… to this theme is connected another according to which all manifest discourse is secretly based on an ‘ already- said’; and that this ‘ already- said’ is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text, that has already been written, but a ‘ never- said’, and incorporeal discourse…v
In other words, the detailed and the broad are both conditioned by the already implied meaning.
Is important to realize that Foucault, the man, was a homosexual with distinct tastes in his sexual life, and that, in turn, moved his philosophical and historical writing to look at how other movements were reflected in the dominant style of discussion. This is not unusual: often times the most disadvantaged are the promoters of a new idea in which they can be themselves without preconditions. But the idea must speak for itself and get other disadvantaged individuals to see themselves in the work. That is to say, the disadvantaged can promote their ideas, but the ideas must find a larger following. And this is what happened when feminists, Marxists, literary theory, communication studies, and anthropology saw their own position as being similar to what they saw in Foucault’s works. Even if the scholarship was haphazard in various places the quotes that they used were specific in nature. Placed his reader in a world that had different logical systems that they were used to, for example, in Madness and Civilization plunging the reader into the Crusades and showing the wealth and the leprosy that came back with the Crusaders.vi
There were many others who were caught up with the idea that the writer has a distinct advantage in knowledge and therefore in power with their text. It should be remembered that the Postmodernist view was analog and centralized, for example in libraries and lecture halls. But almost as soon as it was being written a new form of information was beginning to come to fruition: that is the digital era.
This brings us to a point that needs to be made here: Within a logical system there must be wide room for disagreement. After all, you’re talking about a logical system and therefore there are things that are known, that is things that almost everyone agrees on, but there are things which are unknown and that the logical system seeks answers for. Many times these are sold in a logical system and the logical system goes on. However, there are a few examples of which, either cannot be resolved or, for the visionary moments in the next logical system, ideas that will up and out. This means that when Foucault and Chomsky held a debate, they did not even know what they said had meaning to the other. Chomsky realized that he was on the other side of a divide. Both were Postmodern thinkers, both contributed a great deal to be Postmodernist view of things. Both were brilliant thinkers. They also profoundly agreed and disagreed with each other, for example, Foucault opened his discussion with the idea that in the 1600s the idea of life as an epistemological category was not truly well established.vii
At the time of this book’s writing, many people will read books and articles on a digital screen made out of pixels, and the idea that information is anything but digital is foreign or at least outmoded. But this was not the case when Foucault, Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), Richard Rorty (1931-2007), Fredric Jameson (1934-), and others were thinking about and writing down what became known as Postmodernism. Thus, even if there is a road down that power was inherently adhered in the author of a particular text, the rules which they assumed were already evaporating into a grue from Zork.viii
Cue von Neumann, Nash, Turing, and Shannon dancing stage left, swinging all the way. This is because the logic systems of computers created a language that suited exactly the postmodern view that a language was defined by its core principles even if those core principles were not engaged in any other discipline. this was true in the Neoclassical range of German academia and became a general principle. but this means that many people both accept the deconstruction and reject the deconstructionist because there are intricacies that lead back to the notion that all text is only proven by its instance.
i The gag is that Wehrmacht is a “defensive force.”
ii Žiźek, Slavoj. 2024. “Background Noise in Ideology”. https://substack.com/home/post/p-142486841. Note that ideology is one product of a logical system, but with key pieces thrown out because of its taste in final results.
iii Schuyler, David. 2003. “Reflections On Levittown At Fifty.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 70, no. 1: 101–9. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531 called Schuyler. 102.
iv Schuyler, 103.
v Foucault, Michel, 1972. Histoire De La Folie à l'Âge Classique. Suivi De Mon Corps, Ce Papier, Ce Feu Et La Folie, l'Absence d'Œuvre. [Paris] : Gallimard. Called Folie. 25.
vi Folie, 13.
vii In Foucault opening: Chomsky, Noam. Michel Foucault. 1971. Debate Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault - On human nature
viii Which has its own epistemology and line of descent. Going backward it was referenced in first Adventure and then in Zork by Dave Lebling (1949-) based on a novel series called The Dying Earth, which was a medieval setting set in the far future by Jack Vance (1916-2013). This footnote will be important when we come to TTRPG.