Beyond reason and hysteria: Towards a postmodern model of communication and control in science

Abstract

This article takes the controversy over ‘Mad Cow Disease’ ('BSE') in Britain as the starting point to reflect on postmodern contexts for the production, circulation and control of scientific discourse. It looks at two competing models of scientific rationality, modernist and postmodernist, as they function in contexts we call ‘postmodern’. With BSE? the Government began with the modernist project of combating hysteria with calm reasonableness, thereby helping to produce the hysteria they feared. But science, far from being entirely rational or unitary, is a set of relatively independent discourses? including ‘entropie’ discourse: discursive black holes which are strictly policed but never fully contained—the unconscious of science? where scientific creativity and popular paranoia meet. Where modernist science defends against the crisis of unreason to prevent it from happening, postmodern science (chaos theory, fuzzy logic) accepts the normality of crisis? chaos and unpredictability, which are not coincidentally coming to characterise the postmodern world. The problems of modernist science are not purely epistemological. The postmodern alliance of modernist science and global agribusiness has meant unprecedented assaults on nature, producing a ‘return of the (biotic) repressed’ that, in turn, becomes the content of the discursive repressed of science itself. To contend with these processes, we need postmodern theories of science—including the anomalous? the improbable in the analysis—as was not done with BSE until too late? because current science refused to accept the possible existence of a phenomenon that was empirically unproven and did not fit in. Of equal importance is to include popular discourses among the full set of available sources of scientific ‘truth’. Films like Outbreak and popular science like The Hot Zone express a popular paranoia that discourses of science urgently need to attend to. The study of popular culture should become an integral part in a new postmodern sociology of science.