I just think there are a growing number of people who believe that trust is something of value to everybody (not blind trust but educated trust). And behaving in a way that engenders trust is a good plan.

Even the Australian cricket team have pretty much stopped sledging their opponents. They have stopped deriving any value from that tactic because it is ultimately a zero-sum game once everybody knows how to play it. As a cricketer in the 1990s I would never have “walked”, I would wait for the umpire to give his decision. Nowadays I’m not so sure. I hope I would walk when I knew I was out in the hope that the umpire would know my reputation for fairness and not dismiss me when there was reasonable doubt in his mind. If everybody plays this game, everybody wins. If a minority try to exploit it then their reputation ultimately suffers.

This isn’t just altruistic hippydom. I’m talking about the same culture used by poker players in a Wild West saloon. Trust is everything. If you cheat then peer pressure does its talking with a six-shooter.

http://thinkprogress.org/clinton-interview/

Over here I believe that the United States has a history of sustaining itself on “fictions of convenience” that reaches back way before “postmodern” entered our vocabulary. I am not sure I can easily track down its origins; but the first example that had an impact on me was Malcolm Cowley’s description of the primary narrative of William Faulkner’s ABSALOM, ABSALOM! as “a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is … an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.” The operative word there is “legendary,” as in the most memorable line from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (hardly a postmodern classic): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” (J. Hillis Miller actually continued Cowley’s argument by demonstrating the key role of “fictions of convenience” in the SECONDARY narrative 0f ABSALOM, ABSALOM!) So, while playtime may be over in the United Kingdom (which I would be the first to applaud), the games continue over here and the stakes keep getting higher, whether you are talking about policy-making in the public sector or the conduct of business in the private!

It seems to me that today you can represent yourself with humility, sincerity and openness without suffering for it. And indeed that those values are increasingly recognised as the foundation for some kind of success, or at least productivity.

If modernism was the reduction of things to their basic functional elements, and postmodernism the knowing use of those elements in a somewhat arbitrary way, then hopefully post-postmodernism is the recognition that we have had our playtime and it’s time to put the functional elements to the best and simplest use we can.

So let me try to address your question on the basis of my ongoing attempt to analyze the postmodernist position. The general question, as I see it, is: How to we ground the concepts behind the terminology that grounds our conversations? In this forum we happen to be having 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 contributions of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche that I cited above. 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, 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 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” (and, for that matter, the concepts of “market” and “risk” that you posed).

As far as “freedom” is concerned, 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, to build on your own assertion, it is not that “second-concept” uncertainties have created an environment without freedom 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 and rankism).

By the way, it you are interested in a take on all of this from someone who is more of a “card-carrying postmodernist” than I am, I would recommend your taking a look at the book CONFIDENCE GAMES: MONEY AND MARKETS IN A WORLD WITHOUT REDEMPTION by Mark C. Taylor, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004.

Keep the conversation going!

Stephen, I am still mulling over what you said. In your postmodernist worldview, what is freedom? What is the market? And what is risk?

If the uncertainties create an environment without freedom, then we will have rampant rankism and fundamentalism, unchecked and unfettered.

I am not sure we can have freedom without the ability to take risk.

If we are free and we can take risk then we can have markets.

Conversations.

Otherwise it really doesn’t matter. We can spend the rest of our lives in nanny states with political pigs with snouts in troughs and rampant rankism and Big Brother and not care.

Thanks for the workout guys.

I suppose we’re back to http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2/different/ now.