The postmodernist idea Ross sketches out here is solid [nb: this refers to a comment that Ross made – I’ll put it in the comment section here] – it’s exactly right that there is a complicated version of federalism because of First Nations / Indigenous political concerns. Deleuze’s issues is different from that, though. Both the transcendental idea of nation and the transcendentalist’s version of materialism are both representational. They both work with a model. What if that model isn’t there? The American system is modernist in part because it has a model (the Constitution), and its hermeneutic is one of figuring that model out. One version of Canadian postmodernism is that its model lies in its future, to be earned rather than recovered. But another version is that there is no model at all, that it is more like an ant colony or some other complex system, in which the players behave by some basic rules, but in which the results of their behaviour is autopoietic, that is, it creates order out of chaos in a non-transcendental manner. So, the ant colony doesn’t operate because there is a queen giving orders. There are no orders, there are just simple rules that every ant lives by. And, we get complex and surprising behaviour. Same with starling murmurations, same with weather systems, same with markets, same with consciousness. And, one could argue, same with a nation. We could try and model it, but that’s always playing catch-up. So we might want to say that Canada is postmodern not because its model lies in front of it, but because it’s coming to terms, however dimly, with the idea that it is a complex system that models will never do justice to. The US – not even close to that realization, at a public level.