drstevebest.org > Books > The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium
By Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
Introduction: Between the Modern and the Postmodern
Modes of Adventure
The Politics of Mapping
Crises of Mapping and Dialectics of the Present
Transdisciplinary and Multiperspectivist Vision
Chapter 1: Thomas Pynchon and the Advent of Postmodernity
Literary Modernism/Postmodernism
Gravity's Rainbow: Mapping History
The Rocket State: Technocapitalism, Patriarchy, and Imperialism
Bureaucracy, Determinism, and Domination
In the Zone
Changing the System?
Chapter 2: Modern/Postmodern Wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Beyond
Cultural Studies, History, and Representations of War
Dispatches as Reconstructive Modernism
Vietnam as Modern War
Mapping Strategies: Narrative, Collage, and Theory
Cyberwar and Media Spectacle in the War Against Iraq
Simulation, Hyperreality, and Infowar
The Cyborg Soldier
From the Gulf to the Balkans
On the Road to Postmodern War
Chapter 3: Postmodern Turns in Science: Towards a Reconstruction
Physics: The "End of Science" or Postmodern Paradigm Shifts?
Modern and Postmodern Mappings: Science as Contested Terrain
The Coevolution of Science, Technology, and Capital
Biology and the New Search for Order
Coopting the New Sciences: Kevin Kelly and Co.
High Noon at Jurassic Park: Technofantasies Confront
Complexity
Living in the Multiverse: Postmodern Turns in Cosmology
Chapter 4: Technological Revolutions and Human Evolution
Debates over New Technologies
The Frankenstein Syndrome
Posthumanism and the Fifth Discontinuity
H.G. Wells' Science-Fiction Breakthrough
Haraway's Cyborgs and Rucker's Riotous Robots
The Imploding World of David Cronenberg
Mutations of Technology in the Postmodern
Chapter 5: The Restructuring of Capital
Technocapitalism, Globalization, and the Infotainment Society
Technoculture, Technobodies, and Cyberidentities
The Interactive Spectacle and Cybersituations
Technopolitics, New Technologies, and the New Public Spheres
Epilogue: Challenges for the Third Millennium
Making Contact: Carl Sagan and the Postmodern Voyage
The Apocalyptic Vision of Philip K. Dick
Human Identity Politics: Homo Indeterminus
Reconstructing Theory and Politics
Introduction: Between the Modern and the Postmodern
"May you live in interesting times." Ancient Chinese curse.
"The road is always better than the inn." Cervantes
"Seek, Seeker. The future is made of seeking." Ortega Y Gasset
"The best is yet to come!" Bill Gates
"The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge. Bill Joy
The past several decades have exhibited vertiginous change, turmoil, and upheaval. Dramatic metamorphosis and surprising novelties are characteristic features of the present age. This "great transformation," comparable in scope to the shifts produced by the industrial revolution, is moving toward a postindustrial, infotainment, and biotech mode of global capitalism, organized around new information, communications, and genetic technologies. As we enter the Third Millennium, scientific and technological revolution are key elements of the global restructuring of capitalism which includes: the growth of far-reaching transnational corporations; intensified competition on a planetary scale; the moving of industry and manufacturing to the developing world, while investment flows into the overdeveloped world; trade laws which protect transnational corporations at the expense of human life, biodiversity, and the environment; computerization of all facets of production and expanding automation; heightened exploitation of labor; corporate downsizing; greater levels of unemployment, inequality, and insecurity; and the advent of a digitized and networked economy and society. The scientific-technological-economic revolutions of the era provide new financial opportunities, openings for political amelioration, and a wealth of ingenious products and technologies which might improve the human condition -- or, they may lead to explosive conflict, crisis, and catastrophe. Hence, the turbulent transmutations of the current condition are highly contradictory and ambiguous, with both promising and threatening features.
This novel situation and its myriad mutations are often subsumed under the label of the "postmodern," although few discussions link the condition to both wide-ranging scientific and technological revolutions and the global restructuring of capitalism. For us, the concept of the "postmodern" serves as a marker to highlight the new, to call attention to discontinuities and ruptures, and to signal that an extensive range of novelties are appearing which require fresh analyses, theories, and practices. But for the postmodern to have theoretical and political weight, it must be articulated with the profound alterations of the day and given concrete substance and force. We will accordingly attempt to show that the transition to a postmodern society and culture is bound up with fundamental changes that are transforming pivotal phenomena from war to education to politics, while creating new forms of work, communications, entertainment, everyday life, social relations, identities, and even life forms.
Within politics today, one observes a broad expanse of phenomena, many novel, ranging from local struggles over power and identity to new types of global conflicts and movements. The latter respond to powerful sociopolitical forces such as transnational corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and formations like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Alliance. The global economy and polity thus display new structures and alliances which in many cases surpass the power of the nation-state that became a key institution of the modern political order -- although the state continues to be a stronger governmental force than some theories of globalization indicate (see Chapter 5). Moreover, violence and political fragmentation in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Asia, Africa, and numerous other regions have created a new world disorder based on intense ethnic and territorial rivalries.
In the United States, the "New Deal" of the 1930s and the "Great Society" of the 1960s have devolved into a dysfunctional welfare state, which in the 1990s degenerated further into a disciplinary workfare camp and industrial-prison complex, as millions continue to fall through tears in the "social safety net." Throughout the globe, neo-liberalism has replaced Social Democracy and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a predatory global capitalism and its hypercommodified McCulture are now hegemonic, confronted with no alternative historical bloc. Yet novel kinds of spectacle and technopolitics and new multimedia are creating nascent oppositional public spheres and altering the locus and networks of communication and contestation. For decades, politics has been played out significantly in broadcast media, and now with the Internet, cyberculture, and digital technologies, new public spheres and domains of political information, debate, and struggle are arising (see Chapter 5).
On the level of society and everyday life, individuals are bombarded by a proliferation of technologies which are reconstructing every aspect of experience. The entertainment and information industries have created novel realms of interaction, where TV zappers surf proliferating numbers of cable channels and computer users cruise an ever-burgeoning Internet. Within cyberspace, everything from UFO cults and video voyeurism of live sex and child pornography to myriad modes of politics, alternative forms of art, and interactive information networks are on display. These emergent cultural technologies, and a rapidly materializing virtual reality, are producing radically new domains that alter existing notions of space, time, reality, and identity. VR technologies can simulate any world or experience through sound, advanced graphics, and intensely immersive and interactive environments, and are being used to transform architecture, medicine, art, entertainment, and even the activity of war (see Chapters 2-5 below).
Societal evolution is especially striking within the United States, the epicenter of global capital within which we ourselves live and write. In addition to a burst of new technologies and an erratic economy, with accelerated periods of boom and bust displaying ever-mutating cast of winners and losers, recent years have exhibited escalating urban violence, a wave of teen murders, proliferation of guns, intensifying hate crimes, a high-level of drug and alcohol addiction, steadily-increasing divorce rates, declining wages for many, unprecedented levels of consumer debt, and growing divisions between the haves and have nots. In this grave new high-tech world, existence is becoming stranger and increasingly dangerous. The specter of apocalyptic war is returning as more states gain nuclear weapons and threaten to use them, and as rogue terrorist groups buy weapons of mass destruction on the international market like kids in a candy store. In the global Western imaginary, Saddam Hussein and other thugs experiment with biowarfare, and Osama bin Laden declares a Jihad on U.S. citizens. In response, the U.S. government launches ineffectual, illegal, and immoral bombing excursions on these demonized "foreign others," and conspires with NATO to undertake a full-scale airwar against Serbia, while trying to resurrect a star wars missile defense system. Cyberterrorism threatens the global economy and the Y2K problem pointed to the potential collapse of every major social system, although so far the network society has avoided major disasters.
Moreover, overdevelopment, overpopulation, rampant consumerism, ozone thinning, global warming, and rainforest destruction forecast a holocaust of species extinction and multiple ecological crises. The nascent "Biotech Century" is already undertaking "the most radical experiment humankind has ever carried out on the natural world" (Rifkin 1998: x). Novel types of medicine and biotechnology promise to cure numerous inherited diseases, but also presage immense dangers that pertain to corporate monopoly of the gene pool of plants, animals, and human beings; the genetic engineering of the food supply; and the creation of transgenic species, along with genetic pollution, eugenics, and genetic discrimination. As bioengineering technologies redesign life, the idea of "species" as something unique and inviolable becomes obsolete and the notion of a "natural world" is ever more problematic. Human identity itself is put in question with advances in cloning and the implosion of biology and technology (see Chapters 3-4, and Epilogue).
During the same period as dramatic socioeconomic, scientific, and technological developments occurred, a paradigm shift has been underway in the realms of theory, the arts, science, and culture at large (see Best and Kellner 1997). By the 1980s, there were intense polemics over the importance of the postmodern turn, with some celebrating postmodern discourse and culture as an advance over moribund modern forms, while others attacked postmodern theory and artifacts as irrationalist and regressive (Best and Kellner 1991). Many, especially the older generation, went on with business as usual, ignoring the massive alterations taking place and the controversies over their significance.
The postmodern turn thus arose in part as an attempt to describe the intense shifts and crises in every realm of life, a process that is proliferating a bewildering variety of contending theories. Responding to this situation, our studies explore what kinds of theory and culture can best explain the striking changes and impassioned conflicts of the current era, and what modes of politics are needed to realize contemporary potentialities for justice, peace, self-fulfillment, solidarity, and an ecological, sustainable society. Throughout, we raise the question of which theoretical and political perspectives can guide us into a better future and which are dead ends. Where are we going and what, if any, are our choices? Which turns lead to a viable and better future, and which paths lead to disaster and regression? And who are "we" and what are we becoming?
There are many conflicting answers to these questions which have generated controversies among advocates of modern and postmodern discourses. The polemics have circulated from academic and avant garde cultural circles to media culture and everyday life, becoming a defining, albeit highly disputed, arena of the contemporary era. Theory today, like culture and politics, is a contested terrain with contrasting modern and postmodern theories claiming that they provide the most reliable account of the intricacies of the present. Leaving behind familiar guideposts and conventional wisdom thrusts us into a novel and uncharted territory. Consequently, the raging debates, controversy, and passions of the day have led many theorists and individuals, including ourselves, to interrogate the contemporary moment in order to produce fresh theoretical and political insight, to promote a superior grasp of the prevailing situation, and to facilitate progressive social transformation.
Our previous two books documented the origin and proliferation of postmodern shifts from the 1960s into the 1990s and the rise of new postmodern paradigms in a wide range of fields. Postmodern Theory (1991) analyzed the genesis and trajectory of the discourse of the postmodern in philosophy and social theory and called for a multiperspectival approach that employed the best elements of modern and postmodern positions and politics. The Postmodern Turn (1997) analyzed mutations from the modern to the postmodern in society, culture, the arts, science, and politics, showing key commonalities across these areas. We attempted to demonstrate that the postmodern turn, far from being a fad or momentary fashion, is becoming deeper and wider in its range of influence. Aware of the extravagant and problematic positions taken by many advocates of the postmodern, we have always distanced ourselves from extreme versions of postmodern theory that postulate a complete break with modernity and a rupture between the modern and the postmodern. Accordingly, we will argue in this book for a reconstruction of theory and politics that combines the best of modern and postmodern perspectives.
In the realm of theory, the postmodern turn consists of a movement away from the mechanistic and positivistic conception of modern science, along with a repudiation of Enlightenment optimism, faith in reason, and emphasis on transcultural values and human nature. Postmodernists typically reject foundationalism and transcendental subjectivities within theory, the modernist emphases on innovation and originality in art, and a universal, rights-based, alliance-forming modern politics. With the belief that modern theories and politics have become reductive, illusory, and arrogant, diverse postmodern theorists, artists, and activists emphasize counter-values of multiplicity and difference, anti-realism, aesthetic irony and appropriation, ecological perspectives, and a proliferation of competing forms of struggle.
We share many of these positions, but advocate the advancement and reconstruction of the best elements of modern theory, culture, society, and politics, rather than their negation, as in some extreme versions of postmodern theory. At the same time, we reject both completely affirmative or negative stances toward assorted postmodern theories and attempt to extract and develop what we consider to be valuable postmodern positions, while criticizing problematic ones. Rather than pursuing the modern logic of the either/or (e.g. either the modern or the postmodern), throughout our studies we pursue a postmodern logic of both/and, drawing on both traditions and situating the present era between the modern and the postmodern (see below).
We also use the notion of the Third Millennium to help dramatize novelties, challenges, and possibilities of the contemporary situation. The discourse of the New Millennium signals changing times, a new age, and is thus parallel to the postmodern which signifies breaks and ruptures in history and movement into a new constellation. Both discourses reveal a penchant for periodization in the contemporary epoch, for reflecting on breaks with the past and novelties of the present, and for consideration of what is coming in the rapidly approaching future. Of course, millennial discourse is based on a premodern Christian dating system and eschatology, while the postmodern is a construct of recent philosophy, social, and cultural theory. Nonetheless, we find the concept of the Third Millennium useful as a marker which forces us to confront what is new and different in our present situation.
We will attempt to show that as we enter into the Third Millennium we are in the midst of a tempestuous period of transition from the modern to the postmodern, propelled principally by transmutations in science, technology, and capitalism. Our project is to combine critical social theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies in a multiperspectival and transdisciplinary framework that theorizes the dynamics of the current moment. We seek to grasp the continuities and discontinuities with the modern era, while mapping the changes, threats, and promises now before us. Confronting the turbulence, excitement, and unpredictability of the day immerses us in what we are calling "the postmodern adventure."
Modes of Adventure
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous ... the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." A.N. Whitehead
We use the postmodern adventure to describe engagement with the striking metamorphoses and the contentious controversies over how to characterize the vicissitudes of the present era. Whereas Alfred North Whitehead (1967) charts the trajectories of Western culture through various "adventures of ideas," we argue that fundamental changes stem first and foremost from material transformations in the domains of science, technology, and economics. Hence, we theorize conceptual shifts in philosophy, culture, identity, and so on as tremors felt from more primary groundswells.
The postmodern adventure consists in leaving behind the assumptions and procedures of modern theory for a dynamic and ongoing encounter with new theories, sciences, technologies, cultural forms, communications media, experiences, politics, and identities. It involves the traversal and exploration of emerging social and cultural spaces, with fresh possibilities for thought, action, and personal and social change. The adventure contests accepted types of thought and behavior, and alters definitions of natural, social, and human reality. It requires novel modes of representation, mapping, and practice.
The conceptions of the postmodern adventure and the Third Millennium are thus linked for us. In our interpretive construct, the postmodern adventure is coming to fruition in the Third Millennium and hurtling us into an unknown future. Yet, as our studies will show, the postmodern adventure has roots in the past and continuities with modernity. As we argue, the postmodern adventure took off during World War Two with the creation of novel forms of science and technology which created the nuclear bomb and apocalyptic weapons, as well as revolutionary computer and information systems, powerful cybernetic control networks and new forms of society and culture (Chapter 1). The postmodern adventure is only fully becoming apparent, however, in our story, during the commencement of the Third Millennium, an era rife with claims of a new postmodernity, economy, and culture -- declarations that we will historicize and interrogate, as we criticize the hype and ideologies that exaggerate and celebrate the transformations that we engage.
The notion of adventure has a long and complex history. It served as a key ideological concept for colonialism and modernity, legitimating the destruction of the old world and creation of the new, and remains central for the present epoch which like its predecessor is premised on endless innovation and rapid evolution. An adventure involves leaving behind the safe and secure moorings of the habitual and established, and voyaging into unfamiliar realms and experiences. Whether they constitute geographical travels, social experiments, or philosophical journeys, adventures embrace hazards, uncertainty, and movement toward the uncharted and unknown. Adventures demand risk and the courage to question received orthodoxies and positions, while trying alternative perspectives and ideas, or, literally, setting out for new lands and spaces. Such enterprises may be undertaken as conscious choices, but the full range of their effects can never be planned, predicted, or foreseen.
Adventures thus include a certain amount of tension and anxiety, but also excitement and challenge. Adventures often entail struggle and conflict; as singular processes embodying drama and the extraordinary, they can be represented as stories or narratives. The exploits of Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Marco Polo, the Vikings, Columbus, and others are fascinating epic tales, depicting premodern and early modern adventures, presaging things to come, mapping the parameters of new realms of thought and experience, and the tumultuous movement of cultures. Adventures are journeys taken not only by bold individuals but also by groups and societies in general. While it is often a few pioneers who undertake inventive courses that uproot traditions shared by all, as was the case in modern economic, scientific, and technological revolutions, transformative practices are often engaged by entire groups and can alter societies in far-reaching ways.
According to the narratives of classical social theory, stability and tradition, not change and adventure, were the desiderata of most premodern societies. As surveyed by Michael Nerlich's magisterial Ideology of Adventure (1987), the modern idea of adventure appeared toward the end of the twelfth century, with the self-glorification of the knightly class in French romance novels. The premodern ventures of Odysseus, Hercules, and Jason and Argonauts were coded as the will of the gods that great men had to endure. By contrast, the proto-modern notion of adventure advanced in medieval France consisted of events and perils that knights actively pursued, as a means of distinguishing themselves from the placid and languid men of the nobility, the villains, and of the towns, the bourgeois. Within this decisive mutation, "aventure" still carries the connotations of risk and danger, but it now becomes an experiment that one consciously plans and seeks, no longer involving the machinations of fate one hopefully transcends. Because adventures carry hazards and unpredictability, the adventurer becomes a hero, a courageous soul, the most noble and developed type of human being, in effect, a Nietzschean Ubermensch "living dangerously."
In a kind of "transvaluation of values," continuing the Nietzsche reference, the rising bourgeoisie appropriates the idea of adventure as their own, stigmatizes the knights and all other classes, and upholds themselves as the most progressive and creative forces of history. The old chivalric worldview gives way to the new bourgeois ideology which recodes adventure as the daring feats of a new figure in history, homo economicus. The bourgeoisie, indeed, embarked on the greatest adventure yet known to human history -- the dismantling of the entire premodern past; the destruction of all traditional values; the uprooting of social norms and ethical restraints in favor of an aggressive, unmitigated, and untrammeled pursuit of trade and profit; the unleashing of individuality; and the creation of a modern world.
During this "great transformation" (Polyani), the bourgeoisie gained control over economic markets. They fought and won revolutions and colonized non-European lands and cultures in paroxysms of savagery. Redrawing the maps of nations, the construction of modern societies transplanted millions of people from the countryside to the cities and created vast new industries, sciences, systems of communication and transportation, vibrant forms of art and culture, and fabulous wealth and new products. Stripping life of any sanctity, the bourgeoisie reduced all things to a cash value, while commodifying time itself. The nascent capitalist class unleashed a process of incessant growth that made perpetual innovation and crisis the banal facts of everyday life and the fuel and substance of modernity. This juggernaut of "progress" also produced destruction of traditional ways of life, colonial conquests, slave trade, the oppression of workers, imperialist wars, and untold amounts of human suffering.
The modern adventure is thus directly related to exploration and the modern epoch has been referred to as "the age of discovery" (Boorstin 1983). Beginning in 1492, the adventures that Europeans such as Columbus embarked on, however, were premised on pillaging, rape, slavery, and genocide, as the they ran roughshod over scores of diverse cultures in colonized lands. From the Caribbean and Mexico to Africa and North America, colonizers were driven by a lust for gold and other commodities, as they rode into new lands carrying the flags of Progress, Manifest Destiny, and Christianity that for them justified the genocide of "godless savages" and "barbarians." The Age of Discovery, as many argued, was really an Age of Conquest (Sale 1990).
Furthermore, the seafaring journeys of fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe by no means were the first time the peoples of the earth undertook long or dangerous adventures. Numerous other cultures from China, Japan, Siberia, Ireland, and Afro-Phoenicia had taken to the seas centuries before, with voyagers from diverse continents and islands having made it to the Americas, but not many history books. It is a crucial urge of the Eurocentric mindset to perpetuate the myth that Columbus and other modern figures alone had the courage and intelligence for such bold adventures. Indeed, the "New World" Columbus "discovered" on the other side of the Atlantic had long been inhabited by twenty million people, the original "settlers," who themselves often travelled from foreign continents and lands, their adventures veiled in the mists of prehistory.
The concept of adventure was central to the ideology of capitalism. By the 18th century, it legitimated the rising social class as the torchbearers of development and advancement, and the representatives of rights, democracy, and freedom, authenticating the bourgeoisie as bold visionaries lighting the path to utopia. The emerging ruling class willingly leapt into the unknown, risking not only money and fortunes in unstable markets (although economic protectionism has a long history), but also, at least for the early merchant capitalists, putting at risk life and limb, braving the dangers of foreign lands and the high seas, with bandits, pirates, and "savages" lurking everywhere.
Hence, in Nerlich's interpretation, modernity began in the early Middle Ages with the ideology of adventure, as knights, princes, voyagers, and businessmen sought novel worlds, experiences, and goods. Adventure then becomes central to modern discourse as it justifies the destruction of the old and the quest for the new, producing an always expanding field of alteration and novelty. As Marshall Berman argued (1982), it is the very essence of modernity to leave behind the familiar and stable, while generating fresh visions, experiences, and practices in a process of "creative destruction." Modernity cannot have a stable justifying ground of tradition as it is constantly mutating and negating previous forms. Yet this process of development itself, inscribed in a narrative of progress, has frequently served as the legitimating ideology of modernity, as an ever-advancing spiral toward "higher" and "better" levels of social development, toward the best of all possible worlds -- or at least a better one.
The postmodern adventure, from this perspective, is congruent with modernity in the sense that it too is driven by capitalism, science, and technology, which interact and coevolve in complex ways. Both modes of adventure consist of ceaseless and rapid change for its own sake, or rather for the sake of capital, as economic growth continues to advance apart from any substantive guiding by ethical norms or ecological concerns. Both adventures construct incipient realms of experience and produce novel modes of society, culture, identity, and politics. Both cultivate alternative visions, perspectives, discourses, and theories. Yet while it is continuous in various ways with modernity, and an extension of it, the postmodern adventure involves fundamental discontinuities and novelties that legitimate use of the "post." The concept thus highlights a markedly distinct situation that is qualitatively different from the modern and which requires fresh types of mapping and representation -- as we attempt to demonstrate in this book.
The Politics of Mapping
"An aesthetic of cognitive mapping -- a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system -- will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice... The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale." Fredric Jameson
To some extent, while modernity and the ideology of adventure are primarily Western discourses, they had analogues and anticipations throughout the world. And while there is a shadow side to modernity, hidden by its legitimating ideologies, there is also a heroic aspect, as modern explorers roamed the unknown world in search of fame and fortune. Voyagers needed reliable maps of the heavens, seas, and land, and themselves sketched the parameters of the unmapped worlds they sought and surveyed. A world market was appearing with the dawn of modernity, cities were proliferating which required mappings and orientation, and desacrilized modes of science were investigating nature and the cosmos. Once fully developed by the eighteenth century, modern discourse sought to eradicate premodern religious ideologies and to replace mystical qualitative modes of thought with alternative quantitative scientific models that emphasized mathematics and the experimental method. Modern science gravitated toward a mechanistic outlook that eradicated all traces of life and purpose from the universe, seeing nature as mere matter in motion and resources for human colonization. The modern scientific method was ruthlessly deterministic and reductionistic, describing a simple and static world of regularities, constants, and fixed laws of nature.
Thus, the bourgeoisie were not the only adventurers of the modern world, for the other principal pioneers were the discoverers who charted the heavens, the seas, the land, and the hidden laws of nature. From Copernicus to Newton, from Columbus to Magellan, and from Mason and Dixon to Lewis and Clark, the architects of the modern world uncovered and mapped previously unknown spaces, and made it possible to circulate the modern adventure, for others to follow in their footsteps, and for new worlds and experiences to be constantly opened, investigated, and sketched.
The quantitative mania of modern science quickly spilled over into the nascent "social sciences" as, by the 18th century, there were attempts to construct a "social physics" or "social mathematics," to locate the "laws" of human behavior so that culture could have the same order and regularity as nature. As Foucault (1979 and 1980) revealed in his genealogies of modern types of power in the form of discipline and normalization of subjects' bodies and minds, mapping is a capturing and mastering of the recalcitrant and unpredictable, an attempt to impose constructed order on heterogeneous phenomena, reducing multiplicity to identity, and otherness to unity.
Modern mapping was not neutral or innocent by any means; rather, the cartographical projects of modernity were attempts to gain domination over nature and society and were intimately implicated with the "primitive accumulation of capital" (Marx). Science was driven not only by a "desire for truth," but also by the pragmatics of the political and economic objectives of colonialism. Foucault's (1977) emphasis on the dialectic of power/knowledge is remarkably evident during the early colonial period of modernity. Numerous kinds of scientific and technological knowledge -- relating to navigation, astronomy, agriculture, and so on -- were necessary for the colonial "adventures" to be possible in the first place. They were stimulated by the need, for example, to improve the ability to travel by land and sea, to mine minerals, and to identify useful plants. Conversely, imperialist conquests provided a laboratory for the fledgling efforts of modern science and vast amounts of wealth and resources for the accumulation of knowledge. Many of the gains of modern science and technology were acquired from the various cultures colonialists conquered.
But Europeans are not known for their honesty and generosity. In the case of modern science, once conquerors like the Spaniards plundered the knowledge of the "old world" cultures, they slaughtered or enslaved their people and stigmatized them as backwards and inferior. Today, many cultural theorists and activists are calling for a "multicultural science" (see Chapter 3), yet the irony, as Sandra Harding (1999) observes, is that modern "European" science has been multicultural since its inception, and, however "original" Western culture may be, the distinction between western/nonwestern is now highly contested and a key part of the culture wars (see Bernal 1989; James 1992; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996; and Lefkowitz 1997). The alleged universality of European culture is in fact a disguised locality, the product of distinct ideologies and institutions belonging to modern European nations. For the sake of accuracy, it might be preferable to say that "Western science" is a bricolage of stolen knowledges, from Egypt to Islam to China, along with its own local contributions and its mechanistic and quantitative mappings.
Maps are often seen as translucent windows to the world, but this realist conception misses the limited perspective of every such "window" and the interests of the architect who designs it. As Denis Wood writes, "`Mirror,' `window,' `objective,' `accurate,' `transparent,' `neutral': all conspire to disguise the map as a ... reproduction ... of the world, disabling us from recognizing it for a social construction" (1992: 22). But perhaps a window is not an inappropriate metaphor since, while the glass may not be translucent, windows are, after all, small and selective openings to the world. By opening one portal, maps close all others; even a massive world map attains its impressive scope only by obscuring regional details. The central irony of cartography is that for a map to be accurate and useful, it inevitably misleads. As Mark Monmonier states, "Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it's essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality" (cited in Wood 1992: 76).
Indeed, a map is made to scale, and thus is a simulation of the territory it visualizes. The paradigm shift in cartography today involves a move from seeing maps as objective representations of the world to understanding them as rhetorical and political devices, portraying not only physical relationships, but also social relationships. That maps are made from an interested standpoint, that they are political, is clear if one considers the construction of modern nation-states that arbitrarily drew borderlines through contested terrains, often driving off original inhabitants who were forced to emigrate because of their ethnicities or religions. A more local U.S. example would be the demarcation of geographical boundaries through gerrymandering, whereby politicians outline their districts in a way that determines who votes and which votes count, altering social space to match selective criteria of class, race, or ideology. Certainly one of the most blatant instances of the politicization of maps involved those of seventeenth century North America, as drawn up by Spanish, French, and English colonialists, who somehow forgot to designate the territory as already belonging to a myriad of Native American Indian cultures.
In general, maps have both cognitive and political functions. To draw a map is to make sense of the world, to enable individuals to visualize and control their environment. But it also establishes relations of power, delimiting territoriality and constructing artificial boundaries, instructing people where they are safe and at home and where it may be risky and forbidden to dwell. Maps comprise attempts by observers to discern the contours and nature of the world in relation to the individual and specific social groups. They are optics and ways of seeing that enable people to perceive their world from a perspective useful to the viewer, but they are often constructed by ruling social and political forces. All maps, therefore, have both objective and subjective dimensions. To avoid an overly literal notion of mapping as mere picture making, it is crucial to emphasize that mapping is essentially a cognitive and political process and that there are numerous modes of mapping, not only geographical and scientific, quantitative and qualitative, but also religious, philosophical, literary, and political forms. Each mapping constitutes a distinctive attempt through which individuals and groups try to situate themselves within society and nature, or even the cosmos at large.
Quantitative maps are produced by scientists, geographers, archaeologists, and explorers, relying on mathematical methods and technologies such as the compass, telescope, and computer. Scientific maps include astronomical maps of the heavens, navigational maps of the oceans and seas, geographical maps of the land, neurological maps of the brain, medical maps of the body, genetic maps of chromosomes, such as have been assembled by the Human Genome Project and Celera corporation, and even representations of the prodigious World Wide Web by cybergeographers in search of more efficient ways to transmit information. The "end of science" debate in effect is an argument over whether or not the modern mapping adventure basically has drawn to a close, and whether there is agreement over which are the best and most reliable forms of mapping (see Chapter 3).
Qualitative maps range from religion and philosophy, to normative social and political theory, to fiction and other types of aesthetic mapping. Religion, for example, is a cosmological mapping that seeks to locate the ontological and spiritual place of the subject in the world, rather than its spatial location, and it requires wonder rather than mathematics or technologies, faith rather than proof and evidence. Religion asks: "What is this world in which I live? Who created it and for what reason? What purpose, if any, do I have here?" Of course, spatial coordinates can figure importantly in religious mappings. Christian maps -- constructed by Ptolemy, Dante, and others -- were geocentric charts that ensconced human beings at an illusory center of the cosmos, and thereby provided existential comfort for those who adhered to them. Modern scientific mappings sought to demolish biblically-based geocentric maps in favor of new cosmic creation stories like the Big Bang. A cosmology need not be religious, of course, but it does entail situating human beings within the universe as a whole, as do new postmodern scientific cosmologies which typically combine science and narrative, description and interpretation (see Chapter 3).
Theories too are a form of mapping, a way of enabling individuals to see and navigate the world. The Greek word theoria derives from vision, and theories help one see what exists in the natural and social worlds, they grasp the fundamental aspects of experience, the underlying connections and relations, and the vast structures and processes that constitute shared sociohistorical reality. Modern philosophy and social theory arose with modernity, mapping the novelties of modern society, conceptualizing its basic ideas, ways of seeing, methods of investigating reality, and discourses of truth and objectivity. Theories are optics or perspectives on the world that illuminate phenomena and features on which they focus intently, though each has its blindspots, thereby requiring multiperspectivist vision for an adequate grasp of the world. Competing philosophies, social theories, and other analytical discourses thus offer distinct ways of mapping, ordering, analyzing, and in some cases criticizing and reconstructing the world.
Utopian maps depart from the distinction between what is and what can be, between actuality and potentiality, as they envision the realization of possibilities for human freedom, charting the "not-yet." As Ernst Bloch (1986) noted, there are utopian longings in all the great philosophical, religious, and aesthetic mappings, desires that yearn for a better world and sketch visions of a good life. Judaic conceptions of law and justice, Christian notions of community and redemption, Enlightenment visions of equality, freedom, and democracy, and Marxian conceptions of communism, all project images of a superior world and yearnings for increased freedom, happiness, and community. Likewise, Bloch suggests that popular culture too contains its utopian strivings, as, for example, advertising both evinces and conditions desires for existential reformation. Indeed, following Bloch, Jameson (1979) argues that all media culture must present some utopian content, some fantasies of a preferable life, to attract mass audiences.
Modern literature and art constitute another key mode of qualitative mapping. Artists, whether consciously or not, often offer vivid portrayals of the social relations and ideologies of their time, as well as concrete descriptions of everyday life and human experience. For many, aesthetic maps are as valuable as scientific or sociological maps, because they render social processes and experiences in artistic form, concretely illuminating the subjective structures of experience. The novel, for instance, attempted to chart the escapades of the newly liberated modern individual seeking adventure and fortune in the exciting world of modernity, adapting to fresh experiences and fashioning a distinctive self. In the era of modernist aesthetic experimentation, starting with Baudelaire and the avant-gardes of the 19th century, constructing original styles of art and making one's own life a work of art provoked aesthetic adventures that constantly sought the new, the innovative, the modern, the monumental, and the revolutionary.
The result was an explosion of modernist art forms that uncovered singular universes and dimensions of experience, from the spontaneous unconscious to the carefully constructed, from the realist to the abstract, from the typical to the bizarre and extreme, often contesting traditional representational means of mapping reality. Modern art crossed previous frontiers of form and subject matter, concocting ever new figures, styles, and engagements with the full range of contemporary experience. Moreover, aesthetic maps not only concretize and dramatize the experiences of everyday life in a way that theoretical maps cannot, they also are often sources of utopian longing and normative critique. Some outstanding examples of critical aesthetic maps would be George Grosz's scathing satires of bourgeois life; John Heartfield's photomontages attacking capitalism and Nazism; and Bertolt Brecht's plays which relied on a theatrical technique -- the "alienation effect" -- that sought to engage critical reflection in the audience.
Thus, we understand mapping in a broad, multidimensional sense that includes various quantitative and qualitative representations, and which charts not only geographical, navigational, and astronomical spaces, but also human experience of space, time, everyday life, and social restructuring. Maps are spatial, temporal, and experiential; they portray existing configurations and transmutations, while tracing evolving processes in nature, society, and history. Modes of representation are therefore transitory and need to change as the conditions they seek to depict themselves unfold. Consequently, we should continually update our theoretical and practical perspectives, and if mutations are significant enough it is necessary to invent markedly new modes of representation. Indeed, we are arguing that the tumultuous transformations of the contemporary moment themselves require fresh postmodern visions, theories, and politics.
Crises of Mapping and the Dialectics of the Present
"Investigations of various topics and levels of abstraction that are collected here are united in the intention of developing a theory of the present society." Max Horkheimer
"What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living?" Michel Foucault
The postmodern adventure thus seeks new mappings to represent emergent social conditions, economic shifts, sciences, technologies, experiences, and identities as we enter the Third Millennium. In his classic essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism" (1984, revised 1991), Fredric Jameson vividly describes the disorientation of contemporary life, which includes the loss of social spatial coordinates, the confusing "hyperspace" of postmodern architecture and culture, the decline of historical consciousness, the waning of affect leading to emotional numbness and detachment, and the cooptation of resistance and abolition of critical distance. The thrust of this original historical situation entails a crisis in mapping, involving both the obsolescence of the guides to the modern epoch and the inability of subjects to maneuver their way through space and time in traversing the buildings, cities, cultural spaces, and transnational global environment which envelops them. The postmodern adventure for Jameson also involves a proliferation of forms of simulation and hyperreality in a situation stranded between a buried historical past and an unimaginably different future. Realizing that diverse types of spatial, temporal, and existential vision are crucial for individuals to regain critical awareness and sociopolitical agency, Jameson concludes his essay with a call for new modes of "cognitive mapping." These cartographies for Jameson, as for us, comprise both theory and fresh creations of pedagogical art: "The political form of postmodernism, if there is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale" (1991: 54).
During the postmodern adventure, the boundaries of the modern world are breaking down and we need to provide theoretical and practical guides that will help us understand and navigate the tempests and turmoil of the day. Accordingly, we will be engaged in a form of metacartography, reflecting on the various processes of mapping and the contributions and limitations of the classical theories of modernity and the fledgling charting of the postmodern. We will interrogate the blindness and insights, limitations and visions, of opposing modern and postmodern modes of representation as we try to make sense of the epochal change drawing the entire world into its maelstrom. We reflect on diverse types of representations, including theory and science, art and media culture, quantitative and qualitative, descriptive and normative, ethical and political, and utopian and dystopian modes. We argue that multiple chartings are relevant and necessary for distinct levels of social reality and specific social situations and projects, and that it is thus a pragmatic question concerning which cognitive forms should be used in specific contexts.
Different people use distinctive maps to make sense of the world, deploying divergent ideas, models, and theories to organize their experience, to orient themselves in their environment, and to reduce multiplicity and disorder to structure and order. Mappings also help construct personal identities, pointing to ways of being in the world, existential options, and sense-making activities, as when social groups emulate "heroes of production" or "heroes of consumption" (Lowenthal 1961), or individuals follow the fashions and style of celebrities. Indeed, the postmodern adventure involves the dissolution of older traditional and modern identities and the construction of new ones. Whereas traditional identity maintained stable roles and social functions, modernity problematized social identity, providing new possibilities to construct varied and richer subjectivities. The ability to switch identities intensified problems of alienation and authenticity, as individuals felt that they were being severed from their true selves while passionately seeking their genuine or higher nature. The postmodernization of identity in turn has engendered disparate searches for the authentic and real, as ersatz identities proliferate, resulting in the growth of oppositional identity subcultures and politics. An always proliferating image and media culture, supplemented by the psychological games of the Internet where one can experiment with self-construction in ludic performative modes, generates a further expansion of identity (see Turkle 1996 and Chapter 4).
Indeed, the question of identity has been connected with the problematics of the self from the beginning. The philosophical dialectic of identity and difference in the modern era attempted to theorize the specificity of an object, and in the case of the self, what constituted a unique individual. After the deconstruction of the rational self by Hume, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, the existentialist notion of the constructed self, of self-constituted identity, became widespread. Yet in the late 1960s, French theorists like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and others associated with poststructuralism aggressively attacked all concepts of subjectivity, reducing selfhood, agency, and consciousness to mere effects of language and desire. In the most extreme versions of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, reason and enlightenment norms also collapse, all the distinctions and differentiations of modern thought and society implode. Rupture, fragmentation, local micronarratives and discourses, and textual play and irony are celebrated and affirmed over modern Enlightenment discourses, practices, and representations.
An affirmative and constructive version of the postmodern turn takes the best features from modern theory, recognizes the challenge and cogency of much postmodern critique, and undertakes new reconstructive projects (see Best and Kellner 1997). From our perspective, the postmodern adventure is a navigation through the turmoil and complexity of the present, a search for order in the seeming disorder, as it maps both the disorganization of the previous forms of culture and society and its reorganization into new modes and structures. This aspect of the postmodern adventure pertains to discovery and exploration of powerful technological realms such as those of genetic engineering, cloning, new multimedia, cyberspace, virtual reality, and technopolitics. These developments demand analysis of the ways that new technologies pose grave dangers and/or can be used to remake society, culture, and human beings in progressive forms. The postmodern adventure also comprises interrogating the discourses of emergent theories and sciences, engaging novel modes of culture and society, and constructing disparate identities, politics, and theories. There are, of course, hazards and dangers in this project, as there were in the modern adventure, and there no doubt will be successes and failures, triumphs and disasters, important new discoveries and misadventures as well.
While there are clearly important continuities with the modern era (Robins and Webster 1999), the changes wrought by scientific-technological revolution and the proliferation of a new global economy effect every aspect of politics, culture, and everyday life. In this conjuncture, one encounters startling metamorphoses that some are theorizing as the advent of a new postmodernity, qualitatively distinct from the modern era. These developments are highly ambiguous. On the positive side, there are exciting possibilities for new experiences in constellations like cyberspace, unparalleled potential for medical advances, and increased opportunities for labor and leisure. One also finds exciting political openings and movements such as the protests against the Seattle WTO meetings in December 1999 and anti-IMF and World Bank demonstrations in Washington in April 2000, which signal new coalitions and activism against capitalist globalization.
But there are worrisome dangers that plague the scientific, technological, economic, and other shifts and mutations of our time. In some ways, the postmodern adventure may confront us with the dystopias haunting the modern mind, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with genetic engineering and marketable body parts current realities, to the futuristic visions of H.G. Wells whose The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Food of the Gods appears prescient as biological mutations and technologically created species are now engendered with unforeseen consequences. Orwell's 1984 anticipates the panoptic society of the present, with surveillance techniques becoming ever more sophisticated and privacy increasingly diminished. Similarly, Huxley's Brave New World prefigures the prevailing situation, as eugenics looms on the horizon, cloning has arrived, and sundry brands of soma (e.g., Prozac, Ecstacy, and Methamphetamine) and pleasure machines and multisensory spectacles are readily available in a high-tech, consumerist, pharmacopian society of the spectacle (see Chapters 3-5).
The "dialectics of the present" thus involves living through a highly chaotic and conflictual situation. Resisting both attempts to deny any fundamental ruptures or novelties of the existing sociohistorical situation, as well as hyperbolic claims for a postmodern rupture, we suggest that it is best to envisage the prevailing condition in a zone between the modern and the postmodern. Here one finds continuities and discontinuities with the past, striking changes and enduring structures, peppered with perpetual conflicts between the old and the new. Our studies imply that the contemporary moment is a contradictory amalgam of progressive and regressive, positive and negative, and thus highly ambivalent phenomena, all difficult to chart and evaluate.
The postmodern adventure has already produced unprecedented phenomena, some benign and fascinating, others frightening and deadly, as new forms of postmodern war (Chapter 2), science, (Chapter 3), technology (Chapter 4), and society, culture, and politics spring forth (Chapter 5). Collectively, these emerging possibilities and dangers constitute a new world that requires different social, philosophical, ethical, and legal conceptions. The rigid boundaries constructed by modernity are beginning to unravel like a DNA double helix, borders that once were thought impermeable and impassable, as solid as "matter" itself (which at a quantum level is a vast emptiness) and whose solidity is now melting as did the premodern world in the Marxian vision. Seen as contingent, arbitrary, and repressive, the old perimeters are in the process of being deconstructed and reconstructed, many as obsolete as Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall. The conceptual divisions under contestation include those between humans and animals; society and nature; biology and technology; nation states; and diverse racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities in an era of radical hybridization. Even the distinctions between life and nonlife, the living and the made, are being contested and rethought by the findings of evolutionary biology, cosmology, and computer simulation technologies (Chapter 3).
As we show throughout our studies, society, culture and identity are all undergoing a tremendous rethinking and currently are in a state of crisis and confusion, largely through the impact of new communication and genetic technologies and scientific theories and cosmologies. We are in a condition somewhat analogous to the remapping of the cosmos in the era of Copernicus, Brache, Kepler, and Galileo. Because of intense social and technological developments not only are numerous human beings reshaping their ethnic, gender, and political identities, but humanity as a species is starting seriously to rethink its status in response to ecology and environmental ethics, evolutionary theory, and "smart machines." With supercomputers like IBM's Deep Blue outwitting chess masters, and genetic engineering and cloning technologies transcending species boundaries and portending the fabrication of individuals in a new age of designer bodies and babies, the very fate and future of the human being itself is at stake (Chapter 4).
The postmodern adventure, if nothing else, is indeed risky and we do not just mean for a few entrepreneurs or finance capitalists; rather, the future of humanity and other complex life forms is being mortgaged to a rampaging capitalism and profit-driven science and technological development. Nuclear waste and weapons proliferation, biowarfare, the growth of the global arms market, terrorism, DNA splicing, xenotransplantation (inserting animal blood and organs into humans), loss of cultural and biodiversity, the greenhouse effect, and global capitalist reorganization, to name just a few things, are leading the human race into dangerous ground and a possible endgame of social and ecological devolution. The postmodern voyage beyond the observable into the very stuff of life, past the limits of the human into new implosions of humans and technology, provides new powers and capacities for the human species. Not only does technoscience enable humans to better manipulate the natural world, but also to produce new natures and beings with highly volatile results.
As the modern adventure continues to transgress ethical and ecological limits, begetting new problems and crises, there is growing recognition of the need to impose limits on the excesses of capitalist modernity and its sciences and technologies, while constructing more humane and ecological values, institutions, and practices to sustain life on earth. Without this latter aspect of the postmodern adventure, the mutating dynamics of capitalist overdevelopment might bring the adventure of evolution to a tragic close, at least here on this planet. Although not intended or planned by a knowing agent, the evolution of the universe itself is the greatest adventure and story of all, a 12-15 billion year odyssey, involving the maturation of organic matter from inorganic matter, life from nonlife, and its subsequent earthly unfolding over 4.6 billion years, advancing from carbon and hydrogen atoms to DNA and the first proteins, to plants, animals, and human beings. Evolution has generated boundless diversity and ever new and more complex forms of life.
Hence, critical reflection on the pathologies and illusions of the modern adventure and their continuation in the present is an important part of the postmodern adventure. A shift in mindset consequently should be informed by an enhanced awareness of limits, contingency, and unpredictability, along with nonhierarchical thinking. This new gestalt also requires repudiation of the modern will to power over society and nature, revulsion toward arrogant Westerncentric humanism, disenchantment with a solely disenchanting worldview, and renunciation of the fantasy of control and the belief in the technofix for critical social and ecological problems. Where the modern adventure was predicated on the values of control, endless growth, mastery of nature, and a cornucopian world of limitless resources, a key aspect of the postmodern adventure is the systematic dismantling of this discourse and the reconstruction of the best aspects of modernity -- humanism, individuality, enlightened reason, democracy, rights, and solidarities, to be tempered by reverence for nature, respect for all life, sustainability, and ecological balance.
Transdisciplinary and Multiperspectivist Mapping
"There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Dialectical thought has meant the most advanced state of knowledge, and it is only from this, in the last analysis, that decisive action can come." Max Horkheimer
Modernity is thus an era of remarkable societal expansion of social complexity and differentiation, which requires ever new concepts and representations to capture the changes within a constantly evolving society and culture. As complexity grows apace in the transition from the modern to the postmodern, mapping continues to be a central concern because social reality has become so fragmented, perplexing, and indeterminate. Relativism is rampant, traditional social and moral moorings are wobbly, and experience is increasingly media-ted by a plethora of images, channels, virtual domains, and networks. Science, technology, and media and computer culture are propelling us into new dimensions of experience that call into question traditional notions of reality, so that everything is up for grabs, including the "real," the "natural," and "the human."
It is our view that we are now between the modern and the postmodern, in an interim period between epochs, undergoing spectacular changes in all realms of life. Just as the Renaissance was a long period between the premodern and the modern without easily datable beginnings and endings, so too is humanity entering a period of protracted transformation between the modern era and a new era for which the term "postmodern" serves as a marker to call attention to novelties and discontinuities. The postmodern adventure in the Third Millennium both undermines and advances the millennial thinking rooted in Christianity and continued in the Enlightenment, Marxism, and other utopian and millenarian movements. From the dawn of Christianity through Enlightenment projects of social construction to the scientific and technological revolutions of the day, Western culture has constructed a story of the gradual movement of humanity toward a state of perfection (see Becker 1964; Rifkin 1998; and Noble 1998).
Many continue this salvationist and linear historical narrative, believing that science, technology, and capitalism will solve all human problems and create a new world of wealth, democracy, and well-being (see critical discussions of this discourse in Chapters 4 and 5). While the postmodern assault against grand historical narratives can be used to undercut this metanarrative of historical progress, there are also postmodern claims that we are at the end of history in a perfected state of capitalism and democracy (Fukuyama 1994). Many argue that globalization will create a world of affluence and justice (Friedman 1999), that new technologies and cyberculture create utopian cultural and social spaces, and that new sciences like biotechnology will do everything from curing our diseases and feeding the world's starving children, to even prolonging of human life and producing a state approaching immortality. In the imagination of many bioengineers, the genetic sciences allow the realization of the vision of Enlightenment visionary Marquis de Condorcet, who proudly proclaimed: "No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human facilities -- the perfectability of man is absolute" (cited in Rifkin 1998: 170).
Thus, far from breaking with religious values and narratives, science and technology in many ways have only deepened them as today it is genetics and eugenics that will perfect us and bring us grace without the need for divine intervention. On the other hand, the juggernaut of capital, technology, and science undercuts religious cosmologies, provides a highly secular and materialist ethos, and focuses people on succeeding and surviving in a rapidly fluxuating present. As we enter the Third Millennium, the postmodern adventure is extremely ambiguous and contradictory. There are trends within the postmodern that return to tradition and there has been an upsurge of religion and millennial thinking. But there are also new forms of postmodern identity politics, possessive individualism, and a willingness to embrace the destruction of the past and tradition for the glories of the present moment (see Best and Kellner 1997).
Contemporary developments exhibit so many twists and turns, and are so highly complex, that they elude simple historical sketches, reductive theoretical explications, and facile generalizations. What is required, we would suggest, is a multiperspectival optic on the trajectory of the postmodern adventure that combines historical narrative and critical social theory. Mapping the contours of the postmodern adventure in the Third Millennium accordingly involves an enterprise that crosses theoretical borders into a new transdisciplinary and multiperspectivist space.
The social maps called classical social theories are to some extent torn, tattered, fragmented, and in many cases outdated and obsolete. Fresh theories need to be constructed constantly, using both the resources of past theories and salient sketches of the contemporary era to make sense of our current historical condition. Maps and theories provide orientation, overviews, contexts, and show how parts relate to each other and to a larger whole. If something new appears on the horizon, a good map will chart and contextualize it, including sketches of future configurations of potential promises and perils. But while numerous older theories and authorities are discredited and decayed, others continue to provide important guideposts for thought and action today.
Given our concerns for mapping, it should be clear that we do not accept self-refuting postmodern attacks on theory that are sometimes advanced by writers like Lyotard, Foucault, and Rorty. Nor do we embrace postmodern rejections of a "hermeneutics of suspicion" that strive to overcome social illusions, mythologies, and fetishized appearances by locating underlying forces and causes of domination and destruction. Without theory, interpretation, and critical charts, we are as lost and hapless as Columbus in his first excursion. Theory and interpretation are necessary to the extent that the world is not completely and immediately transparent to consciousness. Since our social and cultural situation is hard to grasp, especially in a hypercapitalist culture of spectacles, simulacra, and disinformation, we need to comprehend how our lives are being shaped and controlled. Postmodern claims that "theory" necessarily commits the sin of illicitly totalizing irreducibly heterogeneous phenomena are themselves reductive and homogenizing. Ludic postmodern calls for formalistic analysis oriented toward surfaces and aesthetic pleasures of the text disarms a cultural studies and political hermeneutics that reads culture in terms of social and ideological conflicts and contradictions. To refuse interpretative depth is to extend reification to "critique" itself by reducing analysis to description of surface and form detached from radical theory and politics (see Best and Kellner 1987). The postmodern argument for the renunciation of critique and transformative politics thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We believe that theory can provide social maps and inform historical narratives which supply spatial and temporal contextualizations of the present age. These critical theories study society holistically, moving from specific phenomena and modes of human experience into an ever-expanding analysis that may extend from the individual self, to its network of everyday social relations, to its more encompassing regional environment, to its national setting, and finally to the international arena of global capitalism. Within this dialectical framework, social maps shift from one level to another, articulating complex connections between economics, politics, the state, science and technology, media culture, everyday life, and its contending discourses and practices. We still find that the most powerful methodology for social analysis is a historically informed, dialectical method that sees human reality as evolving and conflict-ridden. This outlook grasps societies and history in general as coherent wholes, while analyzing society as a differentiated structure comprised of multiple levels -- economics, politics, science, technology, culture, and so on -- each of which have their own history, autonomy, and conflicts.
In more contemporary language, we shall investigate how key phenomena like science and technology "coevolve" in relation to mutations within the economy, culture, and polity, all of which develop together and mutually shape and co-construct one another (see Chapters 2-5). We advocate a historical approach that theorizes the interaction and coevolutionary development of science, technology, capitalism, society, and human beings as part of reciprocally interacting social processes. Our perspective emphasizes the mutual unfolding of all levels of life, such that nature is integrated into social, technological, and human development. The concept "coevolution" avoids the determinism, reductionism, and monoperspectival outlooks found in many scientific and sociological perspectives. We link coevolution to a critical social theory that avoids conflating separate levels of social development and idealizing society as one only of cooperation and harmony, thereby missing how social relations today are shaped principally by competition, conflict, domination, and struggle.
We also stress the co-construction of humans, society, science, and technology, arguing that while humans create the artifacts of their culture and everyday life, they are in turn shaped by major forces such as capitalism, science, and technology. The concept of co-construction serves to emphasize that science and technology are not neutral, that specific societal interests and biases enter into their production and development. The concept underscores the constructedness of our science, technology, and culture, that they are fabricated in specific ways in particular contexts, and can be reconstructed to meet human needs. These can be redesigned to serve public interests and to promote the creation of a more democratic, just, humane, and ecological world -- freed from the imperatives of the state, the military, and a predatory corporate capitalism.
Thus, we propose dynamic coevolutionary, co-constructivist, and reconstructive perspectives for theorizing the dynamics of the Third Millennium. Operating in the tradition of critical theory, we believe that the role of theory is to provide weapons for social critique and change, to illuminate the sources of human unhappiness, and to contribute to the goals of human emancipation and a democratic, socially just, and ecological society. Critical theory involves the fabrication of concepts to illuminate the present and historical narratives to identify how the constellations of the contemporary have been shaped by the past and are open to alternative futures.
As argued in the historicist tradition that began in the nineteenth century (e.g. the work of Hegel, Marx, Weber, Dilthey, and others), all values, worldviews, traditions, social institutions, and individuals themselves should be understood historically as they evolve through time. In the form of Foucault's genealogies, historical narratives chart the temporal trajectories of significant experiences and events, of political movements, or the forces constituting subjectivities. Against the postmodern tendency to randomize history as a disconnected series of events, we believe historical narratives should grasp both continuities and discontinuities. Such sociohistorical analysis should engage both negative and positive developments, critiquing forms of oppression, domination, and exploitation, while valorizing positive possibilities for moral and technical evolution.
Together, social maps and historical narratives study the points of intersection between individuals and their cultures, between power and knowledge. To the fullest degree possible, they seek to lift the veils of ideology and expose the given as contingent and the present as social constructs, while providing visions of alternative futures. Theories and narratives, then, are meant to overcome quietism and fatalism, to sharpen political vision, and to encourage translation of concepts into practice in order to advance personal freedom, social justice, and ecological preservation and reclamation. Theories and narratives should not be confused with the territories and times they analyze; they are approximations of a densely constituted human world that require theories and imagination to conceive and depict. Nor should social mappings be seen as final or complete, since they must be constantly rethought and revised in light of new information and rapidly changing situations. Mappings and narratives can thus only be provisional, reports from diverse explorations that require further investigation, testing, and revision. Hence, we are offering a mapping, not the mapping, of our contemporary world, one that will require additional revision and updating.
On the whole, border-crossing, a transgressing of boundaries between fields carefully delineated and segregated under the regime of the modern, is a productive aspect of the postmodern turn in both theory and the arts. Theoretical crossings of disciplinary borders which subvert the modern academic division of labor have given rise to a vast array of studies which have provoked new insight and activity. Earlier attempts at both modern and postmodern transdisciplinary work tended to be within the realms of cultural and social theory. Yet we would argue that the revolutions in science and technology require broadening our theoretical perspectives and optics. Previously, calls for transdisciplinary work concerned integration of perspectives and methods of the social and cultural sciences, often without significant components of the natural sciences or new philosophies of science and technology. We affirm, however, inclusion of both the natural and social sciences to overcome the gap between the "two cultures" (C.P. Snow 1964), along with analysis of the impact of technological innovations, in order to provide more integrated and comprehensive frameworks for theory and critique today.
Formerly, major philosophers from Diderot to Dewey and many in the humanities and social sciences stayed in touch with cutting-edge developments in science, looked to scientific method as the source of knowledge, and critically engaged the latest creations of scientific theory. Indeed, the major social theorists of the 18th and 19th centuries saw science and technology as the driving motors of change and progress that would lift humanity from the dungeons of premodernity to become a major civilizing force that would bring a rational society in its wake. Karl Marx championed science and technology as liberating forces and went so far as to equate human emancipation with advancement of the "productive forces" of society. Likewise, John Dewey directly related science and democracy, claiming that the scientific method of experimentation was the best pedagogy for education and the form of a democratic society and culture.
However, with a variety of critiques of modern science developing in the 20th century, ranging from phenomenological and feminist assaults on scientific objectivity to critical theory attacks on positivism, many leading theorists and schools distanced themselves from science, ignored its developments, and did not engage its results. We claim that this is a crucial mistake and argue throughout that science should once again become part of a transdisciplinary optic and returned to its status as a valuable theoretical resource. While we wish to avoid the uncritical modern embrace of science and technology, such as advanced by classical Marxism and pragmatism, we also eschew totalizing critiques tha reduce science and technology to one-dimensional reason and a force of social domination. Like it or not, science and technology have been major constitutent forces of modernity and, similarly, are key catalysts of change for postmodernity. As such, they need to be engaged in light of their momentous importance and carefully theorized so that their positive potentialities can be realized through theoretical critique and political struggle.
We will accordingly develop critical theories of science and technology which appreciate their emancipatory potential, but also critique their limitations, dangers, and possible destructive effects. A critical theory of science and technology strives to overcome one-sided affirmations or rejections, developing dialectical perspectives which distinguish between positive and negative features and consequences, and that grasp contradictions and ambiguities in these highly complex and significant phenomena.
Critical theories of science and technology are also transdisciplinary and historical. Transdisciplinary interpretation is necessary because science and technology have shaped our society and identities to such a profound degree that they are part and parcel of our culture, the stuff of everyday life, and are interfacing with our very bodies and subjectivities in unpredictable ways. A critical theory, for example, that synthesizes philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, but ignores the impact of science and technology on culture clearly is limited in its ability to grasp the fundamental dynamics of the current conjuncture. Thus, a postmodern transdisciplinary theory should include reflections on science, technology, and ecology in a multiperspectivist project that integrates critical social theory, cultural studies, science and technology studies, race theory, postcolonial analysis, feminism, and environmental concerns. Such an enterprise draws on the most useful resources of both modern and postmodern theory, as well as on theoretical and fictional mappings.
Accordingly, our projects of reconstruction incorporate a variety of transdisciplinary enterprises, including cultural studies and the new advances of "science and technology studies" (STS). The latter project is premised on a contextual understanding of scientific theory and procedures, often producing analysis of its prevailing forms and assumptions. Taking its lead from Kuhn's (1970) analysis of paradigm shifts in science, STS have studied the social construction of science, questioned modern philosophy and self-understandings of science, and developed alternative "social epistemologies" of science" (see Haraway 1991 and 1997; Fuller 1991, 1995, and forthcoming; and Harding 1999). In addition, a wide spectrum of related studies are emerging. These range from specific studies of key episodes of modern science and analysis of current scientific research and development, to investigations of alternative forms of scientific activity and knowledge and inquiries into how disparate social groups use science and technology to promote democracy and social justice (see Harding 1999 and Kleinman, forthcoming).
Some versions of STS, however, tend to be scholastic and conservative. They historicize science and technology, but fail to explicitly politicize them in the context of the coevolution of science, technology, capital, the state, and the military, and thus, more generally, within social relations of power and resistance. Moreover, while sociologically-oriented analysts may see science as culture -- as a product of a changing community of scientists, cultural assumptions, and social practices --, not all STS theorists analyze science and technology from the optic of its impact on politics, identities, and everyday life, or engage how media culture represents science and technology.
In the 1980s and 1990s, numerous theorists rooted in cultural studies enlarged their terrain from film, television, and other artifacts to include science and technology within their purview. Whereas these cultural studies theorists could therefore be considered doing STS, the converse is not necessarily true and the past decades has exhibited furious battles over the nature and effects of science and technology. Working from positions which include critical theory, feminism, multiculturalism, radical green theory, and postmodern theory, philosophical and political challenges to regnant modern paradigms led to the eruption of a heated "science wars" between neo-positivists and so-called "social constructionists" (see Ross 1996, Best and Kellner 1997, and Chapter 3 below). Guided by the sound assumption that science and technology are too important to be left to scientists and technocrats themselves, theorists such as Stanley Aronowitz (1988, 1993, 1995), Donna Haraway (1989, 1991, and 1997), Andrew Ross (1991, 1995, 1998), Katherine Hayles (1984, 1990, 1999), and others have undertaken historical, philosophical, cultural, and political approaches to these fields. In case studies and specific readings, cultural studies theorists have analyzed the ideologies and effects of science and technology on the social and natural worlds, and typically call for democratic, ethical, and ecological uses of science and technology (see Taylor et. al., 1997). According to Peter Taylor (1997: 204), the potency of a cultural studies orientation to STS is to historically situate acontextual universal claims to Truth and Progress; to destabilize natural and self-evidence facades; to disrupt alliances of knowledge with power; to advance counterdiscourses rooted in sites including domestic life, schools, workplaces, and popular culture; and to work across disciplinary boundaries.
Like Haraway, Aronowitz, Taylor, and others, we seek to absorb STS into the field of cultural studies traditions, as we also work to overcome limitations of many cultural studies approaches to science and technology themselves. We wish to avoid overly abstract, academic, and pretentious deconstructionist and postmodern jargon, as we engage science and technology from a multidisciplinary perspective enriched by consideration of cultural texts ranging from literature and science fiction to the texts of media culture, and grounded in a critical theory informed by ecological concerns. Moreover, we engage the complex interactions among science, technology, and capital, within the broad context of the global restructuring of capitalism currently in process and its constitutive scientific and technological revolutions.
Further, we attempt to expand the project of cultural studies to take account of such artifacts as modernist and postmodernist literature, war and its representations, technology, science, environmental issues, politics, and critical theory itself. We engage and build on British and North American cultural studies, but believe that this tradition has been vitiated in recent years by a cultural populism that is too uncritical of media and consumer culture. This tradition is excessively dismissive of so-called elitist "high culture," that neglects the complex and important ways in which economics mediate cultural artifacts, and it abandons the perspectives of critical social theory too readily (Kellner 1995a).
Consequently, while it was an important move to intensely focus on media culture, it has been a mistake to turn away from literary texts and so-called high culture for sometimes exclusive focus on the "popular" within contemporary cultural studies. We also believe that both modernist and postmodernist theory have potentially emancipatory effects which have been sacrificed by a postmodern turn in cultural studies that contemptuously swings away from high art and theory which it dismisses as "elite." We engage the politics and effects of a wide range of cultural phenomena and dismiss rigid and usually dubious distinctions between high and low culture, interrogating examples ascribed to both categories. Our notion of a critical cultural studies combines formal analysis of style, texture, and surface with interpretation of content, ideology, and normative values. Our concept of "text" encompasses theory and literature, including the writings of Thomas Pynchon, Michael Herr, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and cyberpunk; popular media like film and television; as well as a global transnational image culture, the Internet, and events like the Gulf war. Our maps deploy the resources of both "theory" and "fiction," since each provides key illuminations of social experience from different vantage points that supplement and complement each other. At stake is developing modes of social theory and cultural criticism adequate to capture salient aspects of our contemporary predicament, connecting these with projects of social transformation.