Towards a postmodern science of language

This article outlines the terms and rationale for a ‘postmodern’ science of language, and illustrates it with reference to a single text: President George Bush's speech to Congress in the wake of September 11. It first addresses the issue of whether and how students of language can or should draw on scientific concepts and theories, and where the acute anxieties on this topic come from. It then proposes that a new stage in science needs to be recognised that changes the terms of the relations between science and the humanities. ‘Postmodern’ forms of science accept and work with the uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity and contradiction that characterise the phenomena of language and society in every era, and is especially marked in the present ‘postmodern condition’. The article then briefly explains key concepts from this body of scientific work: Poincare´'s Three Body Analysis, Prigogine's far-from-equilibrium analysis, Zadeh's fuzzy logic, Mandelbrot's fractals, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Lorenz's Butterfly Effect.     

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

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.     

Burma's intelligence apparatus

Since it regained its independence in 1948, Burma has developed a complex structure of intelligence and specialized security agencies. After General Ne Win's coup d'etat in 1962, and led by the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), this apparatus was completely dominated by the armed forces, which used it not only to gather combat‐related intelligence but also to stamp out any challenges to continuing military rule. So powerful did the MIS become that, at times, it was seen as a threat to the Ne Win regime, and purged of key personnel. After the creation of the State Law and Order Restoration Council in 1988, the resources devoted to Burma's intelligence agencies greatly increased. Under the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence, more attention was given to purely military intelligence, but there was also closer surveillance of both the armed forces and the civilian population. Since late 1997, this policy has continued under the State Peace and Development Council. Several intelligence failures in recent years, however, have raised serious questions about the ability of even this expanded apparatus to meet all the demands being placed upon it.     

Challenges of strategic intelligence

Bruce D. Beikowitz and Allan E. Goodman, Strategic Intelligence for American National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Pp. xiii + 232. $19.95.

Rhodri Jeffreys‐Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1989). Pp. x + 338. $30.00.

Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Pp. xv + 266. $19.95.     

The springtime of French intelligence

Dominique Prieur (avec Jean‐Marie Pontaut), Agent secrète (Paris: Fayard 1995). Pp.248. Ff110. ISBN 2–213–59277–2.

Paul Paillote (entretiens avec Alain‐Gilles Minella), L'homme des services secrets (Paris: Julliard 1995). Pp.323. Ff129. ISBN 2–260–01341–4.

Claude Silberzahn (avec Jean Guisnel), Au coeur du secret, 1.500 jours aux commandes de la DGSE. 1989–1993 (Paris: Fayard 1995). Pp.330. Ff120. ISBN 22–13–59311–6.