The central place where things are sorted in our society is the Post Office, hence the importance of postal systems in the novel. You can't win. Things are going to get worse before they get better. Who says they're going to get better. Communication theory , which aims to sort the signal from the noise, and thus preserve meaning in the face of too much random information.
Modernism tends to continue the Romantic myth of organicism, and therefore to be hostile to science.
It looks to the past, before society became technologised, when mythic or religious systems of belief dominated. Musil is a scientist, but Young Torless focuses on the limitations of the scientific world-view, and tries to find shelter in humanism. The Victorians imagined that science would gradually create a rational world and drive out old superstitions, especially religion. Instead, both have flourished in our society and become more extreme. A second feature of postmodernism is the mixing of cultural levels.