Postmodernism and Science

The term postmodernism emerged in the late 1970s to capture the changed character of the sciences in the 20th century, which called into question the idea that the organized pursuit of knowledge has a unique and natural course of development that can provide the basis for the general improvement of humanity, typically in the form of rational statecraft. In this respect, post-modernism's recognition of multiple sources of scientific authority has complicated the task of science communication, as it opens the possibility that one might still be proscience yet opposed to the dominant “modernist” narratives advanced in official scientific pronouncements and much popular science writing.

This “modernist” ideal had gone under a variety of names, from “positivism” in philosophical circles to simply “progress” in more popular ones. However, far from denying the fundamental importance of knowledge, postmodernists hold that knowledge is constitutive of social and individual identity. Instead, what they deny is that knowledge functions in some situation-transcendent capacity [Page 592]as a goal or regulative ideal in terms of which progress may be measured. In this respect, postmodernism is a revolt against the use of knowledge as a normative standard for judging other things. Michel Foucault's stress on the embodied and self-disciplining character of knowledge is indicative of this position. Generally speaking, social epistemol-ogy attempts to reconstruct knowledge's norma-tivity, given the features of our epistemic predicament that Jean-Franois Lyotard originally called the “postmodern condition.”

The term Enlightenment is often used for the tendency in the history of Western thought that postmodernism is said to oppose, if not undermine. However, principled opponents of postmodernism such as Jürgen Habermas generally mean by the term something rather different from the movement's 18th-century originators, such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Indeed, in certain important respects, the 18th-century Enlightenment was very much like contemporary postmodernism: (a) Both bemoaned the role of the universities in legitimating the status quo; (b) both broke with scholastic conventions of intellectual expression by turning to irony, satire, shock, and ridicule; (c) both celebrated the plurality of cultures, especially when they provided critical distance from taken-for-granted European customs; and (d) both were resolutely skeptical in demeanor, often confounding any positive foundation for social and intellectual order, as in the case of the signature Enlightenment project, L'Encyclopédie, in which cross-referenced entries often contradicted each other, so as to force readers to make up their own minds.

The temporal ambiguity of postmodernism is reflected in a variety of associated “end” states, all of which include an ironic twist, whereby the future turns back into the past. Daniel Bell, who first popularized the term postmodernism in the 1970s, may be seen as having endorsed all of these “ends”—but minus the ironic twists:

• End of science: As science gets more specialized and technical, it also requires a larger outlay of material and human resources, which then reopens the door to greater public scrutiny and, increasingly, skepticism about the rate of return on investment. Consequently, high-tech science may return—via computer simulation—to the status of an art that aims to model nature, rather than predict and control it. This also opens the door to a revival of the typically low-tech “alternative” sciences promoted by multiculturalism.
• End of economics: As capitalist economies increase productivity so as to eliminate most forms of material scarcity, new scarcities emerge that reflect one's relative deprivation of such immaterial, or status-based, goods as credentials, of which one can never have enough, as long as others are trying to acquire them as well. This is nowadays called the problem of “positional goods.”
• End of politics: As more people acquire the right to vote, the value of voting diminishes—so much so that the interactive character of the public sphere in advanced democracies dissolves into, on the one hand, mass media presentations and, on the other, customized consumption patterns. The Internet symbolizes this apolitical future, though it has been also used for developing post-public “lifestyle politics,” perhaps the most substantial of which are associated with such premodern sources of meaning as religion and the natural environment.
• End of history: If all possible forms of social organization have been tested at some point in human history, and liberal democracy seems to be most robust, what more needs to be done then to ensure that we do not backslide? This was the question that Friedrich Nietzsche originally posed of Georg W. F. Hegel's progressive vision, which seemed to reduce the “last men,” the most advanced in the species, to mere caretakers. In response, Francis Fukuyama's influential 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, offered a syncretistic vision of future that aimed to reintroduce the Athenian craving for honor into capitalism's endless drive toward innovation.

Postmodernism is perhaps most precisely captured as a set of replies to the following question: What happens to the project of the Enlightenment, once you deny the inevitability of its success? Notice that I do not say that the Enlightenment has failed, only that it has met obstacles, which may or may not be surmountable. I have also kept open the question of whether the Enlightenment project [Page 593]has been given a fair run for its money over the last 250 years. Thus, there are four logically possible

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