Varieties of Abstraction

Modernism/Platonism/Gnosis: Joyce's "signatures of all things"; Pynchon's "preterition." The finding of order, emergent or otherwise, in chaos: "systems thinking."

Postmodernism: In which the attempt to exceed language leads, wouldn't you know, to more language.

Sokal'd Postmodernism: The theory of theory as the articulation of a deconstruction of meaning; or, language gaming in the casino of knowledge.