Transitional Figures: J. L. Austin, Jay Forrester, Donna Haraway

Taking the so-called language turn in the 1970s, writers in literature and the arts indiscriminately deployed the adjectives “postmodern” and “postmodernist” to describe what comes next. Linking cognition and rule demands a turn specifically to speech and its function in making social experience intelligible. Speaking is doing; speakers seek to affect listeners, who respond by doing something themselves. Systematizing this simple claim of Austin’s offers a table of speech acts, rules, and rule—a classical response to modernist thinking, and not a transition. Instead the explosion of machine-processed information seems to have changed everything in daily life, perhaps to the extent that modernity that has entered “the information age,” in which a virtuous spiral of technological development will save capitalism. Yet Forrester’s systems dynamics points to technology out of control and growth beyond sustainable limits, while Haraway’s fantasy of cyborgs in control take the virtuous spiral for granted.