A Pragmatic Postmodern Approach to Communication Part I

    If one rejects the Grand Narrative of Western Civilization, one is belaboring the obvious. The Grand Narrative and in a large sense, the values of Western Civilization are in significant abeyance. However, if one therefore reduces history to a picaresque chronology holding no meaning, one is not a postmodernist but definitively a nihilist. They are profoundly not the same thing.
   As I examine the last century I see the Grand Narrative being replaced by a Grand Design created by the Invisible Hand of the market deploying technology developed by the petite narrative of science. This process is totally pragmatic and operationally amoral. The Grand Design is not in its essence Western Civilization even though Western Civilization developed the disciplines, with help from other civilizations, that produced it. It is a spectacularly different animal that we traditionally  label the Industrial Revolution and casually reference, in an intellectually nonstandard usage, as Modernism.
    To be a postmodernist one must recognize the lessons of both the petite narrative of science and the logic of technological development. To do so is to recognize that postmodernism is 'after' modernism in the sense that it means one is ahead of the curve of the petite narrative and the technological logic, not behind them. The 'beyond' of postmodernism lies in the sense that one is grasping a wholly new phenomenon describing a universe as different from the 18th century as the 13th was from the 10th. It is, as Thomas S. Kuhn described, a paradigm shift, a different world, and if one knows Kuhn's work, one is acutely aware that one does not author a paradigm shift, one authors a superior model that causes a paradigm shift.
    We are in possession of enough new theory and enough new technology to destroy the Grand Narrative, but then we had those in the 1920's. What we haven't demonstrated is enough of both to create a new world of narrative and values sufficient to allow empowerment and quality of life across a broad spectrum of society. We still operate economically as too zero sum, too La Belle Epoque, to establish a sustainable basis for legitimate social existence. We are, to the point, too nihilist.
    The object of this particular exercise is to reference significant intellectual developments created by the clash of the Grand Narrative and the Grand Design over the last two centuries and to establish the basis of a model of communication. It would not be too far off the mark to say that social existence is communication. If we are to create a new model to supersede the Grand Design which, by the way, has been estimated by everyone from Schumpeter to Von Neumann to have a logical terminus, we should, I believe, begin with communication and so I have made this attempt to be described in Part II.

House Wins!

    The theoretical structure of zero-sum two person games ignores a basic fact that anyone who has visited a casino will tell you. Everytime a game is played, the house, the socioeconomic context of that game, wins. Poker is thought of as a zero-sum game but the house always gets its cut.
    If I buy a computer from you, it is a guessing game and a negotiation as to what the value of the computer really is since at any given moment in the economic picture there is a cost/benefit value to that computer in terms of what I will do with it and this value can theoretically be computed ex post facto. That is the nature of market transactions. I cannot know the value of the computer and neither can you so we reference similar transactions, a game in itself, and make our best guess.
    When the sale is complete, taxes are paid, paychecks are honored, corporate bonds paid, and profits, point of sale and up the line, are generated. The house wins. Zero-sum two person games are amenable to mathematical modeling. The question is, are they amenable to reality. Can we extrapolate the behavior and the model to actual market activity?  A few months ago I proposed a simple systems theory model that would context the transaction game. Add in a cut for the house, the political economy, and that model would fly as a replicated building block of an actual economy. With a scaled out computer doing parallel processing, the computation is doable.
    Are the mathematics of a transaction game with a cut for the house doable? I don't know. I'm not John Von Neumann. I am just suggesting a possible systems model that is easily in reach of reality.
    Do well and be well!