This was an interesting week of confluences. On the one hand this was the week in which I finally decided to come up to speed on my understanding of postmodernist thinking. At the same time Confused of Calcutta decided to launch an interesting discussion on the future of markets and intellectual property rights. I decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to try to exercise what I had been learning about postmodernism, and I shall now try to distill what emerged and demonstrate that postmodern thinking may be as relevant to our understanding of markets and intellectual property as it has been to philosophy and literary theory.My bottom line is that postmodernism has emerged as a result of a general need to cope with uncertainty. (Think about it: what better sources of uncertainty can we find in today's business world than marketing and intellectual property?). I would argue that we cannot talk about uncertainty without recognizing that there are actually two independent concepts, both of which are instances of uncertainty:
I like to characterize the first with my favorite Henry Miller quote: Uncertainty is the “order which is not understood.” We deal with it through what I would call provisional understanding. We do this by constructing models (usually probabilistic) based on empirical data (which, hopefully, we collect through sound and disciplined techniques).
The second concept, however, is the order that cannot be understood. The best example comes from Heisenberg’s Principle about the uncertainty of measurement. This has the status of a physical law. However, I would also argue that there are social laws about uncertainty that cannot be understood, my favorite example coming from Isaiah Berlin: conflicts of value are inevitable and irresolvable because they are part of “human nature.”
Now, when we are dealing with the first concept, we can strive to reduce uncertainty through formal techniques applied to building and refining models; and, when we do this, we live by putting the theories of modernism into practice.
When confronted with the second concept, we have no such luck; and postmodernism emerged as a school of thought to comfort us in our helplessness. It all goes back to Nietzsche’s commitment to “dissolving the presumption that there can be objective knowledge” (as Simon Blackburn put it in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Nietzsche then set the stage for Isaiah Berlin being able to argue that Enlightenment thinking was as much grounded in dogma as was Catholicism, and Enlightenment dogma committed us to the belief that every uncertainty was an instance of the first concept. Once Heisenberg blew that dogma out of the water, we had to develop strategies for living with the realty of the second concept; and this is the mission of postmodernism.
Whatever may have come from twentieth-century postmodernism, my personal feeling is that the best strategy can still be traced back to Nietzsche and his conviction that fictions are indispensable for life and the actions we take in the course of our lives. So, in his meticulous and rational analysis of markets, Peter Drucker could never explain why suppliers would hang their strategies on a fiction, no matter how good he was at expounding on fundamental hard-core facts of marketing. Sometimes logic just does not cut the mustard. Perhaps, at the end of the day, marketing is one of those uncertainties that really cannot be understood; and the strategies that so aggravated Drucker just emerged as a strategy for coping with such a “second-concept” uncertainty.
Similarly, the value of a patent may also be a “second-concept” uncertainty. Here, however, I would like to propose a postmodernist take on Wittgenstein’s language games. We are all familiar with playing games in which we “make moves” as a means of “buying information.” (I guess both poker and bridge are the classic examples.) I would argue that we can do the same thing with our language games; and, in some settings, that may be the only strategy we have for dealing with “second-concept” uncertainties like the value of a patent. That is why the typology of patents now includes language that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago: offensive patents, defensive patents, frivolous patents, spam patents, and shyster patents. These are nothing more than “language game moves” for dealing with “second-concept value uncertainty!”
This takes me to my favorite topic (not to mention my advocacy of blogging): the virtues of conversation. However, if conversations are to be effective, we have to confront a fundamental question: How do we ground the concepts behind the terminology that grounds our conversations? (Habermas never got beyond postulating that conversations must be grounded on a shared terminology, but I would argue that this is only half of the problem.) Confused of Calcutta, for example, likes to have conversations about concepts like “freedom,” “the market,” and “risk;” but the answer to the question should generalize to just about any other concept, be it “love,” “art,” “community,” or what have you.
I would argue that the postmodernist answer to this question involves a synthesis of the above contributions of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. From Wittgenstein we get the thesis that, at the end of the day, concepts are never “grounded.” They assume their semantic interpretations on the basis of the moves we make in the language games of our conversations; and, as I tried to indicate with the example of intellectual property, we actually do a lot of things with those language games. As a matter of fact, to borrow a page from Anthony Giddens, I would say that we use those games (at least) to signify, to dominate, and to legitimate. This takes us over to the Nietzsche contribution to the formula, which involves the necessity for fiction. If our conversations are motivated by our observations and our experiences, they are not limited to rendering those observations and experiences through language; they also involve fabrications, because those are “language game moves,” too.
I suppose I first started going down this path when I first encountered John Kenneth Galbraith’s treatise on money (long before I ever encountered names like Derrida and Foucault). My take-away from that treatise was that money is what it is as a product of the conversations we have over it and the exchanges resulting from those conversations. (Galbraith did not put it that way, but I do not think I have violated the basic thrust of his reasoning. Instead, I have resorted to a fabrication of my own to illustrate how that reasoning relates to the points of the previous paragraph. See how the game works?) Of course what Galbraith said about money can also be said about the underlying concept of “value” (not to mention concepts of “market” and “risk”).
Given the current state of the world these days, I think it is particularly important to explore the concept of "freedom" though such a postmodern lens. In that respect let me be bold enough to posit that Rousseau was invoking fictions in his language games about freedom long before it made sense to have a conversation about “the postmodern condition!” Thus, it is not that “second-concept” uncertainties challenge the existence of freedom in our environment but that, within that environment, both our freedoms and our chains are emergent properties of the moves we make in our language games (as they have always been?). More importantly, those language games are the primary (only?) instrument we have that can check threats to rationality, such as groupthink (and its “cousins,” such as fundamentalism).
I used to work for a company that, for a while, had adopted the slogan: Keep the conversation going! I subsequently found this slogan (in the same wording) in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For all the virtues of rationality, we have to face up to the ways in which postmodern thinking are now confronting us. Keeping the conversation going may be the only way in which we can rise to such confrontation.
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