Resomodernity Café v4: The FOCA Axioms and Redefining Modernity
Posted: December 10, 2025 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: culture, philosophy, politics, systems, values Leave a commentSequel to Resomodernity Café v3: The Unresolved Resofesto
With the FOCA Axioms as their Brief, write a dialogue where Émile Durkheim, James Madison, and Donna Haraway engagingly struggle to
ChatGPT Prompt
embody a coherent response.
The FOCA Axioms for Relational Minds
- Generativity depends on our Foundations Of Collective Action
- Coordination is enabled/constrained by our shared design language
- Modernity scaled coordination via impersonal procedures
- Disembodiment is modernity’s failure mode
- Proposed successors repeat the same disembodiment flaw
- The next design language must make embodiment scalable and antifragile
Act I: The Table
DURKHEIM
(leaning over the page)
This diagnosis of social life is written in a mechanical idiom, yet—it has a pulse. The first axiom rings true: human generativity does depend on our ability to act together.
But I see no ritual here, no sacred core.
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life I showed that social cohesion arises from collective effervescence.
Where is the heartbeat that binds the group?
MADISON
(raising an eyebrow)
Your heartbeat is admirable, Monsieur Durkheim, but republics do not rest on pulsations.
Coordination at scale depends on interests harnessed by rules.
Impersonal procedures aren’t failures—they are protections.
The Federalist Papers make this clear.
HARAWAY
(smiling sideways)
And yet here we sit, three bodies, three histories—already entangled.
No procedure summoned us; no ritual ordained us.
We are stitched together by this brief, this table, this moment.
As I argued in A Cyborg Manifesto, generativity is neither sacred nor procedural, but cyborg—a joining of flesh and code.
Act II: The Argument Begins
DURKHEIM
(reading)
“Axiom Three: Modernity scaled coordination via impersonal procedures.”
True. But at the cost of severing society from its embodied root.
Disembodiment is not merely a failure—it is a starvation.
MADISON
Procedures are not disembodiment; they are agreements.
They tame faction. They enable cooperation among strangers.
Without impersonality, the polity collapses into feudal loyalties.
HARAWAY
But impersonality is a myth. Everything is relational—even your procedural systems encode histories of power.
When you hide the body behind a rulebook, the body returns through glitch or revolt.
This is the cyborg condition.
MADISON
Then propose an alternative:
How do you scale embodiment to millions without drifting into tribalism or tyranny?
DURKHEIM
(softly)
Perhaps by restoring a grammar of belonging without reverting to old idols.
HARAWAY
Or acknowledging that embodiment mutates—digital, augmented, interspecies.
Act III: The Crux — Axiom Six
HARAWAY
(reading)
“Axiom Six: The next design language must make embodiment scalable and antifragile.”
I want to believe this.
But embodiment doesn’t scale; it transforms.
When groups grow, bodies dissolve into platforms and networks.
We must design for hybridity, not nostalgia.
MADISON
Antifragility? A republic cannot depend on improvisation.
It requires predictable law.
Embodied life is too volatile.
DURKHEIM
You misunderstand embodiment.
Embodiment is not opposed to scale—
it is opposed to isolation.
Synchronization—ritual, shared labor, danger—creates a super-organic unity.
That is not mysticism; it is sociology.
HARAWAY
But risk and synchrony are unevenly distributed.
Any scalable embodiment must reckon with difference.
MADISON
And with liberty.
Unity must not consume the individual.
DURKHEIM
True.
So we invent new rituals—embodied practices that foster cohesion without demanding uniformity.
HARAWAY
Rituals that include cyborg bodies, algorithmic bodies, porous bodies.
MADISON
Perhaps—if federated and voluntary.
Act IV: The Moment of Friction
DURKHEIM
What does “antifragile embodiment” even mean?
HARAWAY
Bodies that become more relational under stress, not less.
Bodies that metabolize conflict into repair.
MADISON
Bodies alone cannot guarantee justice.
Passions flare; factions rise.
You cannot scale vulnerability.
HARAWAY
You scale repair, not vulnerability.
You scale repair, not vulnerability.
Haraway
DURKHEIM
Ah—embodied repair.
A ritual of realalignment, not domination.
MADISON
But repair must be guided by rules. Fairness is not self-generating.
HARAWAY
And by relational capacity—our ability to realign across difference.
DURKHEIM
And by shared presence, symbolic or literal, that tunes us into a common rhythm.
MADISON
Then the future is a synthesis: presence, procedure, and plurality.
Then the future is a synthesis: presence, procedure, and plurality.
Madison
HARAWAY
(smiling)
A cyborg liturgy of collective action.
Act V: The Struggle for a Coherent Response
DURKHEIM
So is FOCA a ritual? A structure? A networked ecology?
MADISON
Is the next design language embodied?
Federated?
Constitutional?
Algorithmic?
HARAWAY
Is generativity biological?
Social?
Artificial?
All of the above?
DURKHEIM
(tapping the axioms)
We agree only on this: the next coordination grammar must restore the body.
MADISON
But protect scalable fairness.
HARAWAY
And embrace hybrid entanglement.
DURKHEIM
Then we cannot return to premodernity.
MADISON
Nor cling to procedural modernity.
HARAWAY
Nor dissolve into postmodern fragmentation.
(They look at one another: a fragile triangle.)
MADISON
So what do we conclude?
DURKHEIM
(quietly)
We do not have a final answer.
HARAWAY
Perhaps that is the answer.
The next design language is gestating in the struggle itself—
an attempt to weave embodiment, structure, and plurality without erasing any.
MADISON
A federation of differences.
DURKHEIM
A ritual of repair.
HARAWAY
A cyborg commons.
(The axioms lie between them, unchanged but marked with fingerprints—
as if the next design language has already begun to embody itself.)
Appendix: What Exactly Is Modernity an Example Of?
Below is a concise synthesis of the major insights from our discussion.
1. Modernity is a FOCA-solution
Modernity is not a worldview, ideology, or era.
It is a design language built to solve the Foundations of Collective Action (FOCA) at unprecedented scale.
Its generative core:
Modernity = a procedural coordination architecture.
2. Modernity’s JTBD (Job To Be Done)
Modernity was “hired” to solve this specific FOCA-problem:
How to coordinate extremely large, diverse, mobile populations without shared metaphysics, kinship, or embodied community.
This was new in human history.
3. Modernity’s Key Innovation
Pre-modern orders relied on substrates:
- sacred cosmologies
- thick communal identity
- hierarchical roles
- embodied ritual cohesion
Modernity replaces substrates with generators:
- law
- markets
- scientific method
- bureaucracy
- elections
- contracts
Thus:
Old FOCA-solution: shared metaphysics → shared action.
Modern FOCA-solution: shared procedures → shared action.
4. What Modernity Is Not
- It is not simply “the age of reason.”
- It is not identical to liberalism, capitalism, or secularization.
- It is not a metaphysics.
- It is not a moral theory.
It is a scalable coordination design language.
5. Relation to Pre-modernity
Pre-modernity solved FOCA using:
- embodied synchrony
- shared cosmology
- ritual identity
- stable relational webs
These did not scale under pluralism, mobility, or cognitive divergence.
Modernity outcompeted them by offering a substrate-free coordination model.
6. Relation to Post-modernity
Post-modernity reveals modernity’s flaw:
Procedural systems cannot regenerate the meaning, trust, and embodied presence they depend on.
Thus modernity’s scalability becomes its fragility: disembodiment.
Post-modernity diagnoses this failure but cannot repair it.
7. What Comes After Modernity?
Any successor “-ity” must:
- Retain modernity’s scalability
- Resist modernity’s disembodiment
- Rekindle embodied relationality
- Federate small groups into large wholes
- Avoid returning to pre-modern uniformity
Thus:
The next design language must make embodiment scalable and antifragile.
This is the FOCA frontier, and what frameworks like resomodernity are beginning to explore.
Radical Centrism 