This chapter is dedicated to the memory of
Bill Readings

These rules, the sign language and the grammar of the Game, constitute a
kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and
arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and
capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the
content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines.The Glass Bead
Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our
culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter
might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble
thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative
eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to
concepts and converted into intellectual property -- on all this immense
body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like an
organist on an organ.

-- Hermann Hesse¹

What is at stake between the defenders of the "project of modernity"
and those who claim postmodernity as a new and distinctive aesthetic,
ethos or attitude, if not the dream of a universal language? With the
"linguistic turn" in twentieth-century culture, philosophy reasserted
itself as the master discipline, the metalanguage, into which all claims
and counterclaims could be translated. Philosophy assumed the status
of a master language, both innocent and universal, which allegedly
could provide the means by which disagreements might be rationally
discussed and resolved. An innocent master language is one that is, in
today's cybernetic terms, noiseless or fully transparent: it conforms to
Jürgen Habermas' ( 1984, 1987b) ideal of a fully rational, dialogical

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