The transmutation of the logos in postmodern society

Stages of the diurnal: from logos to logistics 

Let us trace the fate of the Logos in the Postmodern. It is extremely important to always remember that the Logos is one of the manifestations of the heroic myth, i.e. the product of the diurnal regime (according to J. Durand's classification). Nor is it the only one, nor is it absolute. The Logos includes the antithetical and pleonasmic sides of the heroic myth (heterogeneous homogenisation) and takes them to their ultimate limit, but it also leaves aspects of the Diurnal myth such as the direct and frenzied will to power, passionality and hyperbolisation in the unconscious. Of course, these aspects of the Diurnal - relatives of the Logos - also penetrate the same, but not explicitly, but through the inertia of the choreic attraction of the heroic myths to one another (i.e. not logically).

The emergence of the Logos from the mythos is, as we have seen, the first step that a stable and balanced ethnos takes towards modernity. But not all societies, built around the Logos, achieve Modernity; this, too, must be taken into account.

The next step towards Modernity is the transition from Logos to logic.  At this stage, the Logos, as a crystallised order, moves further away from the general complex of the heroic myth and develops a scheme that describes the fundamental parameters of itself - this is the science of logic and, to a large extent, of mathematics, geometry, etc. Although logic reflects the structure of the logos as accurately as possible, it leaves much behind. In Christianity, therefore, the Logos (Word) is God and God is naturally above logic - in particular the fact of his incarnation, as well as many aspects of Christian teaching based on Christ-logos statements, but also containing logical paradoxes. 

In Aristtle's logic, there is no room for paradoxes. Logic is a property of such a society, which is even closer to Modernity. Christian society is certainly a society of the Logos (or rather, of Christ-Logos). Logic actively penetrated Christianity along with the theological constructions of the Eastern Church Fathers and especially with the flowering of scholastic Aristotelianism, but the definitive transition to a society of logic only occurs when we move away from Christian theism, in the Renaissance and especially in the Enlightenment (as we have shown in previous chapters). Modern society is based on an autonomous and generalised logic, which becomes the main social order - processes, relations, institutions, legal norms, politics, status, economics, etc. - and becomes the main social order. The modern developed becomes increasingly technical and shifts its focus to the economic sphere. The economy becomes the 'destiny' of Western societies. Thus, gradually, as Modernity takes hold, logic is transformed into logistics.

Logistics is a military term for the ordering of food, ammunition, housing, etc. to troops. From the realm of military strategy, it has entered modern management theories, where it now stands for optimisation of production processes, cost reduction, better management of money and information flows, etc. Logic applies to various activities: intellectual, political, scientific, social, etc., logistics is logic applied only to the process of managing material resources for purely pragmatic purposes. Logistics is much more narrow and concrete than Logos.

Economic society - both capitalist and socialist (in theory) - is based on the primacy of logistics, and the dispute between the two political-economic systems in the 20th century revolved around which logistics system was more efficient, operational and competitive. The battle between the two camps was a competition between market-based and plan-based logistics. The end of this rivalry and the victory of market-based logistics coincided with the transition to Postmodernism.

In logistics, the concentration of the subject, which was a characteristic of the day-to-day, is dispersed into a multitude of subjects:,the individual manager, each of whom becomes an autonomous system that carries out its business cycle individually. The manager is the latest edition of the diurnal, a little hero struggling with the chaos of goods, labour, stock exchange quotations, financial documents, reports, taxes, which he has to tidy up in the warehouse, operate as efficiently as possible, distribute to the instances, sort into folders, pass on to other managers for execution. In a logistics company, each person is thought of as a manager, i.e. as an individual bearer of intelligence, reduced to the skills needed to perform logistics operations. Heterogeneous homogenisation - as a basic property of the day-to-day - is here reduced to the competences of logistical adequacy, elevated to the norm. Whoever succeeds is a winner. Those who fail are losers.

From logistician to Logeme

So the Postmodern has arrived in a winner-take-all logistics environment with a normative type of manager. At each stage of the logistic-journalistic line, the heroic myth has lost some aspects, shrinking its mythological potential. Logic is the state in which the infinitesimal remains of the original diurnal are the atom of the diurnal. Postmodernity, however, represents a trend towards an even greater fragmentation of the logical atom. In the previous chapter, we described this phenomenon as the logeme. 

The logeme [Editor's note: obsolete term for the basic association of signified and signifier in the morpheme], in the sociological sense, is the fragmentation of logistical rationality into an even smaller, sub-individual or divisional level. The object of order for the logeme is not the immediate external space - the troops in need of nourishment, the interests and optimisation patterns of a society or the goods scattered in a warehouse - but the body and psyche of the individual and the objects adjacent to them - clothes, food, skin, hair, legs, hands, ears, as well as the smallest emotions, experiences, sensations. Logeme the triumphant ability to cope with oneself - walking upright, bringing a handkerchief to one's nose and a cup to one's lips, tying one's shoelaces, coping with the urge to scratch the spot of a mosquito bite with one's nails, etc. In this, too, there is an echo of the will to power and the desire to create order out of chaos, only on a micro level. It is the same inflexible diurnalism, only reduced to a microscopic scale. But the microscopic of this scale does not (yet) automatically translate into the antiphrasis and euphemism of the nocturnal. On the contrary, microdesires and macrodesires are hyperbolised, titanised, taken to planetary scale. The remedy for seborrhea grows to enormous billboards obscuring the sky - it is the last outburst of heroic paranoia; the microscopic and the insignificant grow to the proportions of the 'far' and the 'great'. 

The phenomenon of glamour fits exactly into this trend. Glamour is the glorification of logeme, the granting of the status of social hegemony and image to comfort, hygiene and micro-desires, the rigid standardisation of the body and its proportions, the totalitarian norm of exemplary appearance elevated to an absolute.

The transition from the logistical society to the logeme society is the most important and fundamental process of the Postmodern.
 

Nothingness and its sociology

One of the specific products of the Logos is nothingness. This logical representation is a development of diurnal dualism. The diurnal is identified with the 'all' and at the opposite extreme - like death - a place is prepared for nothingness. When we move to the level of the Logos, nothingness becomes the most important link in the fundamental is-no binomial, as generalised nothingness. 

In parallel, nothingness is necessarily included in the foundation of monotheistic theologies, where the world is created from nothingness. The Logos, as identical with itself, is everything. That which is not identical to it is nothingness. 

In logic, the is-not binomial becomes the most important operational module because it predetermines the structure of the functioning of rational consciousness. Nothingness acquires a permanent technical character.

In logistics, nothingness acquires the property of routine, i.e. the absence of a good, a shortage, the need to fill a box, an expense (a credit). Nothingness becomes trivial.

However, as the subject bearer of the logos crumbles in the development of the diurnal from God to the manager (the manager), the sphere of nothingness constantly expands, moving from the periphery (from the bottom of creation) to the centre of the social system, until it is trivialised in the financial balance sheet (credit) or in marketing studies ('no product in stock'). The lower the figure of the bearer of the Logos, the wider the zone of nothingness. 

This was first noticed in the philosophy of Nietzsche, who identified nihilism as a fundamental characteristic of modern Western civilisation. Nietzsche said: 'The desert grows. Woe to those who hide a desert within themselves'. The growth of the 'desert' is the growth of a zone of nothingness encompassing the shrinking individual on all sides. Moreover, being homogeneous - as it is devoid of properties - the nothingness extended around one individual merges with the nothingness extended around another individual, increasing the volume of the 'desert'. 

Heidegger followed Nietzsche to develop the theme of nothingness in detail, and Jean-Paul Sartre in turn systematised Heidegger's insights in his great work Being and Nothingness. The increasing focus on nothingness is a direct consequence of the rationality and logicality of Western culture, which increasingly reflects basic sociological tendencies within its inherent dual logic. The Logos becomes more superficial, the nothingness expands. 

In the transition to Postmodernism, when one must move to an even finer level, some philosophers, notably Gilles Deleuze, proclaim that 'the time has come for the transition from the nothingness of the will (the disease of nihilism) to nothingness, from incomplete, painful and passive nihilism to active nihilism'. There is a very subtle point here. One thing is the growth of nothingness (and nihilism) as the bearer of the Logos crumbles, another is the orientation of the Logos towards nothingness, i.e. the active and conscious search for its opposite. This clearly goes beyond diurnalism and entails a regime change in favour of euphemism and, consequently, nocturnalism.

In terms of Logos and even logic and logistics, nothingness is pure nothingness; it is not the conventional designation of the other, but it is not the designation of nothingness. The growth of nothingness therefore takes place in the space of the numerator of the human fraction, where the Logos is located. Nothingness is the product of the Logos. Remaining in the numerator, Western society has as its limit the nothingness with which the bearer of reason is in constant dialogue and interaction; the nothingness grows, the bearer of the Logos diminishes, but in the inertia of sociological history, the nothingness is the last limit of the Logos, beyond which social history cannot continue. Being stalled on nothingness, history ends (Fukuyama wrote about this) and is replaced by the economy (logistics). The manager is an active nihilist, he no longer tries to synthesise social, philosophical or scientific data, to construct a logical order, he is content to construct a logistical order in his environment, not giving a damn about universal social laws and, in so doing, fragments society and optimistically promotes nothingness. Nothing is more nihilistic than economics, management and marketing. The market is the pure element of nihilism, where cycles of crushed economic rationality circulate, and macroeconomics itself in liberal theory is nothing more than the generalisation of atomic microeconomics, which is constitutive in its chaotic yet logistic movement. 

If reason begins to consciously aspire to nothingness, it points to a completely different path than the economist who suggests that, by unconsciously advancing nothingness, it focuses on logistic cycles and successfully manages the 'end of history'.

And here we come to the most important thing: if for the Logos nothingness is nothingness, for the mythos nothingness is not nothingness, it is something, and it is manifold, rich and alive, because the mythos itself, pushed to the denominator, is in the position of nothingness for the Logos. The nothingness of the Logos is the whole mythos, it is the fullness of the unconscious, except for the infinitesimal part of the heroic myth, which has been gradually transformed into the small Logos of the modern, which is completed, and if one imagines that the Logos can, in fact, not only approach nothingness, but also descend into it (as Deleuze himself threw himself out of the window), then it would fall directly into mythos.

In the will to nothingness, then, contrary to the intentions of the postmodern, we can recognise a secret impulse from the unconscious. For reason, madness is the end, whereas for the unconscious, the arrest or rupture of the mind's logical procedures is always a new beginning, a new cycle of individuation, a new explosion of the dynamics of myth.

We will therefore look no further than the representatives of rational philosophy from the sophist Gorgias (483 BC - 380 BC) to Sartre and Deleuze, seeing in it those aspects of myth that are not included in strict rationalisation, not transferred into the Logos. Hence the important conclusion: the nihilism of contemporary Western civilisation, especially in the transition to Postmodernism, can be seen on the other hand as a consolidation of unconscious energies that do not find an outlet in the numerator through legitimate means, and that prepare their return when the 'repressive' structures of the Logos have definitively weakened.

The powers of the Logos

This moment coincides with the transition from logos to logeme, i.e. with the forthcoming splitting of the logos vector and the concentration of attention on the subatomic level. The logeme is a daily life out of context, detached not only from the great social cycles, but even from the primitive and routine operations of the management of economic units. The manager, the bearer of logem, is still accountable to others: competitors, partners, corporations, financial and administrative institutions, tax authorities, employees, sellers and buyers, etc. Logeme comes into play when the objective becomes the ordering of individual impulses and the organisation of the space adjacent to the body - external and internal. It is a concern for comfort, health, satiety, good mood, etc. Logical tasks include 

• shopping
• sight seeing
• epilation
• tattooing
• choosing clothing
• piercing
• drinking refreshment (drinking refreshing drinks, coffee and tea)
• text messaging (sending and receiving text messages - often anonymous or loosely attributed)
• contemplation of TV
• drugs
• dancing
• weekend
• relaxation
• sport
• driving
• smoking
• swimming in the pool
• browsing glossy
• holiday travel
• personal hygiene products
• make-up
• peeling
• nightclubbing (going to the disco)
• licking (wearing headphones with music)
• internautics (clicking your fingers on banners and links on the Internet)
• filling in questionnaires
• answering simple questions correctly and briefly.

The structures with which the logeme operates are so miniaturised that they are at the last level of logic and threaten to slide definitively into nothingness, into the unconscious, into myth, into the nocturnal. At the crossroads between the logical ultra-minimalism, if not pure nihilism, embodied in the logeme, and the mode of the nocturne, which is cautiously emerging from the underground, a sociology of the Postmodern, a systematic analysis of that conglomerate of fading logeme-bearers - reminiscent of the halo of St. Elmo or the fall of meteorites - which replaces the dissolving society of the Modern, may emerge.

The feminological sociology of Alfred Schütz

The forerunner of this sociology of the minimal was the famous Austro-American sociologist Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), who founded the phenomenological direction of sociology. Schütz was a student of the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the creator of phenomenology. The essence of the phenomenological approach is the invitation to abstract from generalist deductive concepts that infer the small from the large, the particular from the general, and to focus on the small, the particular, the empirically present. In particular, Husserl called for starting with concrete thinking as we find it in ordinary people, from the 'world of life' (Lebenswelt), and then proceeding cautiously to generalisations and rationalisations. This phenomenological approach led Martin Heidegger to identify a central philosophical category for his teaching, Dasein, with which he constructed his fundamental ontology. In Schütz's case, phenomenology led to a sociology of everyday life, studying the micro-phenomena of human behaviour in the world around us.

Schütz showed that the behaviour of the everyday person includes a wide range of phenomena that are taken for granted. This class of objects, phenomena and events constitutes a crucial reference point in the structure of everyday life. Schütz calls them 'taken for granted': 'something that is taken for granted'. The world of life consists of these moments. The everyday person is so imbued with the 'taken for granted' that he or she begins to project these 'certainties' onto the world. This is what Schütz calls 'typification', i.e. the process of constantly interpreting the obvious as self-evident. By typifying an unknown passer-by in the street, the inhabitant projects onto him a set of perceptions that was formed before the encounter and without any connection to it. He draws conclusions on the basis of clothing, gait, age and gender and places the stranger in a broad set of 'taken for granted', thus excluding the unknown or broad social and philosophical generalisations. The life world of the average person is a continuous typification: every new event, phenomenon, object or message is interpreted through a chain of things already known, mastered and 'taken for granted'.

Another gradation of the average person's behaviour consists of two types of motivation: 'goal motivation' and 'cause motivation'. Developing Weber's ideas on rational and purposeful activity, Schütz believes that goal motivation focuses the human will to achieve something specific and thus leads to action. Whereas motivation by cause only prepares the ground and increases the likelihood of action, but does not inevitably lead to action. 

Another sociologically operative idea of Schütz is the division of the philistine's sphere of life into four horizons:

• the horizon of predecessors
• the horizon of descendants
• the horizon of spatially close people ('conspatials')
• the horizon of people living at a particular time - at the same time as a particular individual ('contemporaries'). 

Within these horizons, the individual practices two types of relationships: understanding-interpretation and action-influence. Only understanding-interpretation can be applied to predecessors, only action-influence can be applied to descendants, and both types of relationship can be applied to narrow spatial and temporal relationships.

Schütz's sociological formalisation is extremely important because:

• it is constructed from the minimal figure of the philistine, and does not appeal to any sociological system that explains the genesis of the philistine himself, places him in a concrete social context, and consciously interprets what he takes 'for granted' and what he does not, and where this 'granted' comes from;
• what the nodes of typification are in different societies and how this typification operates;
• how goals and causes are structured in a given society and why it is so and not otherwise;
• how the 4 horizons are configured, what is included in them and how patterns of interpretation-understanding and active influence relations unfold.

In a full-fledged society and in classical sociology, especially in structural sociology, Schutz's phenomenology would be empty and meaningless, as it would explain nothing in substance and would merely describe and systematise trivial processes at a primary level, but reveals its most important methodological significance at the moment when society as a phenomenon comes to an end, its structures undergo a dissolution, a dissipation, and are replaced by micro-essences, for which it is of no importance - products of which constructions, social structures and religious-philosophical ensembles are products of dissolution. The manager still had a sociological profile. The logical carrier does not have this profile, and here Schütz's phenomenological approach reveals all its importance and relevance. He describes the philistine, immersed in the structure of the concrete sensual forms of life, as an autonomous figure at the intersection of its basic 'sociological' axes, where the most bizarre and exotic hypotheses can be placed. 

This methodology, which would be inadequate in a society with a preserved sociological foundation - whether in the space of the Modern or the Premodern - reveals its relevance and heuristic potential in the Postmodern, on the contrary. 

The everyday becomes even more everyday

The small phenomenological scale proposed by Schütz is further reduced in the Postmodern. This can be seen, in particular, in the question of the disappearance of horizons. The first two horizons - the relationship with ancestors and descendants - practically disappear, or at least become so secondary that they do not affect the structure of everyday life in any way. Thus, the typical postmodern figure is left with only two horizons: the 'conspatial' and the 'contemporary'. At the same time, the spatial zone transforms in two directions: it shrinks closer to individual corporeity (to the detriment of social institutions, family ties after the attainment of a certain degree of adolescent autonomy, etc.) and the 'contemporary' zone.

The contemporary zone also expands and shrinks. Since the past and the future are no longer the object of attention, certain themes significant to the Postmodern dweller are transferred from the past (the future) to the present, placed holographically. The historical character played by a famous actor is identified with the actor himself, i.e. placed plastically in the contemporary. On the other hand, that which of the present does not directly concern the corporeal singularity is ignored and not included in the zone of attention, i.e. cut off from the present and placed in 'nothingness'.

The structure of 'taken for granted' is also changing, incorporating elements of celebration, gratification, pleasure, in total disconnection from work, effort and personal fulfilment. This is linked to the general trend towards more civil rights and social guarantees. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer requirements for socialisation. To become a productive citizen it is enough to be able to count to two and say 'hello' with an accent. In many European countries this is sufficient to obtain citizenship and social benefits. 

The balance between motivation to the goal and motivation to the cause is also changing. The refinement of the Logos weakens the volitional impulse towards the goal, relativises the goal and thus the action becomes less probable, more virtual. The intention remains at the level of virtual desire and does not reach the level of active realisation. In contrast, the probabilistic 'cause motivation' becomes more meaningful, as the 'why' refers to both action and inaction, and the explanation of why someone did something (and more often why they did not) becomes a soothing method for the increasingly complex and painful feelings the logeme has towards action. Schütz distinguishes between 'action' and 'act', that is, between the process of doing and the act (done). In the postmodern era, the dominant aspect is undoubtedly 'the action', i.e. the doing of something, which can stop at any time without ever completing itself, or move to another state and open up as another doing of which no one (including the doer) was aware at the first stage. Doing is difficult for the logemaker to endure, requires effort and entails irreversibility; doing is more acceptable, but ideally should be done lightly, festively and without an unambiguous end. It can be compared to breaking and tearing. Tearing is an irreversible state (the thread just rips). Tearing is a process of tension in which the thread has been pulled but not yet torn. Tearing is the breaking of a thread: the thread is pulled, but you dare not tear it, you just keep pulling and pulling. 

Michel Maffesoli: conquering the present

Schütz's methodology has been brilliantly applied to the study of (post)modern Western society, which is rapidly moving towards postmodernism, by another sociologist, Michel Maffessoli (b. 1944). A disciple of Gilbert Durand, Maffessoli combines the principles of depth sociology and Schütz's phenomenological approach in his research. 

According to Maffessoli, the postmodern society is characterised by the fatigue of normative patterns located in the past (history) or in the future (utopia).  This is where the 'conquest of the present'(10) begins. The postmodern distrusts scale, neither temporal nor social, and is not interested in what has gone before and what will come after. Postmodernism focuses on the moment, the near and the very near, the now. Thus the topoi of the new sociology emerge: 'micro-event', 'realisation of utopia here and now', 'celebration', 'locality'. The topoi of Everyman place the scenarios of the 'big society' (which can include both archaic tribes and modern technological civilisations) on a micro level, reproducing them on the scale of a room or a computer screen. Everyday life becomes epic, grandiose. The significance of mundane events is hypertrophied and routine becomes a celebration. Rationality becomes increasingly local, managing individual and uncomplicated operations, but refusing to move towards generalisation. What postmoderns take as 'taken for granted' - WiFi networks everywhere, mobile phones, Mac Do's around the corner, etc. - is bizarre and isolated. - is bizarre and isolated, fragmented in nature.

Against the backdrop of this shattering of the Logos into dust, Maffesoli captures the rise of myth and, specifically, the myth of Dionysus. This is an extremely important observation, because it shows that the loss in Postmodernity of the hold of the great Logos and the critical rise of nihilism are compensated for by the rise of the unconscious - and in particular the structures of the nocturnal. 

Maffesoli's sociological schema is as follows: the logocentrism of Modernity (which he ironically refers to as the 'Post-Middle Ages') and the social forms that preceded it has been exhausted, and a new recourse to myth is underway, but this recourse has, and Maffesoli agrees, a pathological character, because it is linked to the complete expulsion of myth from the realm of consciousness that immediately preceded it, which compresses the spring of the denominator to the point of bending it. Maffesoli illustrates this in an interview by pointing to the resurgence of serial murders in the West and, above all, in the United States. He emphasises that serial killers as a social phenomenon flourish in societies where security - and thus the sterilisation of aggression - is elevated to the highest value. Maffesoli cites the example of 'nosocomial' infections, i.e. those infections or, more generally, diseases that a person contracts when he or she is admitted to a clinic for the treatment of quite different illnesses. Modern society, especially American society, seeks total 'asepsis' in the sphere of violence, wants to treat it in all its manifestations. This leads to a compensatory concentration of sporadic violence in certain places, in hypertrophied forms. Contemporary violence is 'nosocomial': it stems from an excessive desire to eradicate it. The very process of cure becomes the source and cause of disease.

Thus, the logeme, as an aspiration to rationalise the smallest aspects of an individual's life, revives the Dionysian outbursts of the nocturnal myth. In the Postmodern, myth can be said to take on a nosocomial character, breaking through logemes that are easier to evade than the more total and vigilant structures of logistics. The myth breaks through when the logeme has equated it with nothingness.

The postmodernism of the youth masses and the Albanian language

Maffesoli believes that contemporary European society exists in two registers. At the level of elites and the intelligentsia, it thinks in terms of modernity and liberal and sometimes social democratic narratives. For the elites, society is still there; they live in the modern, but the masses and especially the masses of young people, who have ceased to understand the 'grand narratives', are happy to immerse themselves in the Dionysian element of decadence and social defragmentation, grouping themselves into small collectives (companies), outside of which the world and society exist in a guessing and probabilistic way. Young people are no longer Modern, they do not understand the discourse. Young people are Postmodern, poised on the ironic game of logemes and born out of unconsciously disparate night images and myths. Hence the youth's desire to distort language, to invent a new argot that intends to destroy grammatical norms. From the point of view of the Logos, these are pure errors, but from the point of view of myth, it is an attempt to recreate rhetoric in its fundamental quality: as the language of parallel logic, the language of myth. 

The Internet and Live Journal provide many examples of this. The 'Albanian language' circulating in Internet Russia, which was extremely popular in Live Journal some time ago, is a prime example. The expressions 'preved', 'krosavcheg', 'afftar zhot', etc. are full of vague but expressive myths, exclamations that are placed between syllables (ordering the surrounding microcosm with such Internet grunts, lifting the mood, ensuring collective membership in the Internet community, etc.), and the 'Albanian' language is a very popular language in the Russian-speaking world. The 'Albanian' language is a spontaneous discovery of the power of katahreza, which is the most important trope of the nocturnal.

Networks and logos

The fixation on places, particularly evident in the youth environment, allows us to understand the structure of the network society, which is a characteristic of Postmodernity.

The network is not centred. It develops simultaneously from different poles, which can appear and disappear, flow from one to another, increase in number or decrease. The significance of the pole of the network - the server - is that it is always local, that is, it is located in a reduced space, proportional to the logeme. The pole is organised around a singular body and the simplest stripe. At the same time, it can form around a single emotion, mood or image. Larger networks develop around a single expression - the 'Albanian' network 'Preved, Medved' or the movement of fake Emo teenage sobs. More complex networks - bikers, break-dancers, skinheads, etc. - are less common. - are less widespread precisely because of the complexity of their network protocols. The closer the protocol is to the logjam, the more the network has a chance to spread. 

When a network pole occurs, an industry begins to develop that exploits this pole. This is how overlapping networks of collateral goods, services, broadcasting, gadget and badge production, markets and distribution centres develop, all the way to the drafting and enactment of government laws. The number of poles is theoretically unlimited, and every logeme - that is, the effort of a disintegrating individual to cope with a depleting world - has the possibility to become such a pole, to deploy a network around itself or to tap into already existing networks. Both of these actions, the emergence of the pole and the connection to existing networks, will in the long run become one: each new user of the network becomes at the same time a new portal, a new 'server'. Not only can he watch the reality show live, but he can show it from his seat in front of his computer, and then all the network users can see him sitting in front of the screen watching someone else sitting in front of the screen watching... And so on for a while. For once you can make a grimace or a giggle and a new (post)minimalist, networked society is born. 

The shadow of Dionysus

Maffesoli's observation about the return of myth through a new youthful idiocy (idiocy, on the Logos side) leads us to an extremely important conclusion about the structure of Postmodernism. On the Logos side, Postmodernism represents the nihilism and critical fragmentation of the bearer of the Logos at the level of the logemi. Yet, it is nothing but the unfolding of the modern programme in its highest phase, and thus the continuation of the work begun by the diurnal myth in archaic times. Most postmodern philosophers did not at all seek a return to myth or a closure of Modernity as a temporary misunderstanding. On the contrary, they wanted to 'illuminate the Enlightenment' (Horkheimer), to complete the mission of Modernity that it had failed to fulfil. Postmodernism does not intend to prepare the return of myth, but to free itself definitively from myth in all its variants, down to those that remain in the Logos, logic and even logistics. Thus, the official programme of Postmodernism is only logos and, in the extreme, nothingness; a logos interacting with nothingness. This logos-nothing dichotomy is the latest edition of the diurnal dualism - the hero staring death in the face (nowadays expressed as 'the young man drinking beer on the underground' or 'the lady in the solarium'). Postmodern man, the post-human, is a micro-rationality surrounded by a sprawling desert. No longer man and death, but a piece of man, a separate organ and the fact of separation from the rest, with the rest perceived not as 'everything', where one can integrate, but as nothing, where one cannot integrate. The fate of the gap in Postmodernism is the tragedy of the prosthesis thrown away; the prosthesis that for a moment received a quantum of consciousness. Salvation lies in drugs, unconventional sex, early HIV infection and the possibility of 'dying young' (e.g. in a car accident). There are no prospects for growth, no future (no future is a punk slogan from the 1980s). Hence a youth anthropology, theoretically extended to all ages, and the refusal to grow up in western society (where we increasingly see grandparents dressing and behaving like teenagers).

This active nihilism is the positive programme of Postmodernism in its logical dimension. Moreover, before this ideal can be realised, it is suggested that effort should be spent fighting the remnants of 'totalitarianism' in Modernity itself that prevent the realisation of this 'ideal'.

If, however, we acknowledge Maffesoli's correctness, we see the full picture from the other side. The weakening of the Logos, its pulverisation, allows the repressed and repressed myths - especially the less visible and more flexible nocturnal myths - to gradually rise from the unconscious and penetrate the numerator under the guise of 'nothingness', on the one hand, and under the guise of a 'very weak' Logos, on the other. The nocturnal myths offer their help to the local division both to order the surrounding chaos and to regulate relations with the nothingness, which can be euphemised. In doing so, the activity of the logeme becomes ecstatic and nothingness becomes sweet. This is the 'shadow of Dionysus' of which Maffesoli speaks. The nocturnal mipheme invisibly penetrates the logeme and transforms it into something else. In this case, Postmodernism becomes a 'return of the myth'. 

But such a perspective, especially given Postmodernism's general negative vigilance towards the diurnal, subject to asepsis, can only lead to the soft dissolution of society into the promiscuous 'realm of mothers' (which Goethe's Faust sought), and thus to the immersion of society into the unconscious, into myth, and into its nocturnal hypostasis. It could therefore be both the end of this diurnal cycle and the prelude to the beginning of the next. - These hypotheses have been taken up by sociologists P. Sorokin, J. Durand, Ch. Lalo, etc., who believe that modern European (and world) society is completing its next phase (sensual, Dionysian, postclassical, etc.) and that through a series of shocks, crises and catastrophes a new humanity, with completely different social attitudes ('the return of the old gods' or a new 'ideational order') will appear in place of the current one.

Postmodernism and archaeo-modernism in globalisation

Another important implication of Maffesoli's analysis of Postmodernism in sociology is the possibility of correlating the principles of Postmodernism proper (strictly speaking, the logos perspective) and archaeo-modernism. In the process of globalisation, as we have shown, globalising Postmodernism overlaps with localising archaeo-modernism. This is an important structural observation because it describes the essence of the network. The network integrates at the level of logemes (Postmodernism) local poles (servers) that have the nature of the archaeo-modern (i.e. consisting of a fuzzy logeme already saturated with nascent nocturnal myths). The global logeme (globalism proper as a project of One World, 'one world' with 'world government', 'world electronic parliament', etc.) integrates an arbitrary number of local semi-logemes at the level of weak links. All are exchanged horizontally and vertically by interlinking, meaningless quanta of information, which create a simulation of action and process, in the absence of any progression or accumulation (the path 'forward' has already been blocked by an enormous nothingness). The archaeo-modernist does not understand the global logeme and is not at all sympathetic to it. It lives in Schütz's minimised 'life-world', within an increasingly virtual 'conspatiality' and bizarre 'contemporaneity'. And it is here that the incensed and relatively free rise of nocturnal myths takes place. The archaeo-modern is the point at which myth creeps into the logos in the structure of network society. 

The network itself is the latest edition of the Logos, but what it integrates are the contradictory and monstrous agglomerations of undigested Modernity, mixed with fragments of myth that have not been removed. Portals - individual networking initiatives as well as entire countries - are almost always archaeo-modern, i.e. half-logos half-myth. The fact that they are willing to integrate themselves into a global network with a common protocol testifies to their submission to the integrating globalist project of Postmodernism (on the side of Logos), but the fact that they do not follow the path of Logos and modernisation, and instead intend to bring all the contradictions and inconsistencies of their unfinished modernisation onto the network, combined with the already deconstructed structure of myth, testifies to the prospect of a growing mass of mythological elements constantly accumulating in the net, and although at first these elements will certainly be grotesque, fragmented and chaotic myths, at some point, according to the chreod principle, they will begin to form more ordered mythological constructions to a certain saturation. Perhaps at some point the nothingness will take on the contours of the 'great mother', the cultic 'baba of gold'...

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Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini