Is the problem technocracy not postmodernism?

The idea of a university as a circle of professorial peers, each with apprentices and each practicing a craft, tends to be replaced by the idea of a university as a set of research bureaucracies, each containing an elaborate division of labor, and hence of intellectual technicians. For the efficient use of these technicians, if for no other reason, the need increases to codify procedures in order that they may be readily learned.

I was struck by this observation - from C. Wright Mills, "The Sociological Imagination". It feels an essential truth, a description of the university's journey from a collegiate environment where knowledge is explored to a complex bureaucracy dedicated to the production of research. There are a lot of people culpable in this journey - Mills points to what others called the 'military-industrial complex' (with a side swipe at research-driven advertising agencies) and to 'human engineers' in bureaucracy:

To say that ‘the real and final aim of human engineering’ or of ‘social science’ is ‘to predict’ is to substitute a technocratic slogan for what ought to be a reasoned moral choice. That too is to assume the bureaucratic perspective within which—once it is fully adopted—there is much less moral choice available.

We hear from Jordan Peterson and others that the problem is postmodernism and relativism. I've a little inkling that empiricism, an obsession with uncontextualised data, is perhaps more of a problem. Technocracy is far more the core ideology of the 'liberal elite' than is postmodernism - it is the idea that bureaucracy can discover a solution through the collection and analysis of data without reference to any moral foundation that sits at the heart of our disconnection with government.

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Post-digimodernism and the Art of Blogging

There are moments of epiphany or are they lightning strikes on the road to Damascus – my grasp of religious metaphor’s a tad limited. But there are moments when you encounter the incomprehensible and wonder why it’s there:

Well, what about digimodernism, one might ask? This is akin to some of the pairings in Ihab Hassan's famous list of binaries where the qualities of modernism were placed over against the characteristics of postmodernism. If within a thematic there are logically only two possibilities, and modernism is clearly over, and postmodernism clearly followed it, does this mean that the more recent moment will be with us forever, there being no other options?

I would reply that digimodernism does not choose to focus on either time or space in this manner, but that it combines and enmeshes two relatively new definitions of both. "Real time" and "cyberspace" are the twin axes of digimodernism. The digimodern appears at the intersection of the two. It's not so much a matter of choosing one term or the other, but first redefining then superimposing them.

One might ask, might one? About digimodernism? Somehow I think this unlikely but let’s explore a little further clutching our trusty Concise Oxford for the trickier words:

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship.

So it seems that this ‘digimodernism’ is something to do with the textual analysis of all the crap that we write on the web – a sort of Jacques Derrida meets the blog. That plus the bizarreness of reality TV, mockumentary and the ubiquity of computer gaming. In essence our ‘digimodernist’ already exists except he, she or it remains blissfully unaware that such an exalted status has been thrust upon them!

I wrote a few crown-sourced (well twitter-sourced really) blog posts – the best of which is:

Beards, cats and clever octopusses - thoughts on the World Cup Finals 

This post wasn’t a conscious digimodernist experiment – more of a giggle really. But it approaches this idea of:

In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.

While part of me loves this stuff – especially the arrogance of saying you wish to appeal to the ‘general reader’ and then exclaiming:

These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality.

The rest of me just want to take the piss – but no-one did that better than Paul Jennings!

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