The above text came from the postmodernism generator, an internet site that automatically creates a "post-modern" essay. The authors themselves describe it as "completely meaningless." The generator is a parody on the use of bad science and made by two computer scientists from Australia goofing off on something they do not seem to care about much. More seriously but similarly is the "Bad Writing Contest" by the journal of Philosophy and Literature which has been handing out prizes the past years to authors perceived as promoting linguistic barriers instead of public interpretations. What is going on here?

In "Attacks on Scholars Include a Barbed Context With Prizes," Dinitia Smith of the New York Times points out that ridiculing academic writing is becoming commonplace these days. In her article the argument over bad writing becomes the heart of the continuing "culture wars" between the frivolous humanities and the rigid sciences. But Smith seems to argue that making fun of academic writing is part of a long tradition. Quoting Ralph Hexter, dean of humanities at Berkeley, she writes that "even Aristophanes mocks Socrates for his technical language". Is the postmodernist generator an old idea in a new jacket?

The argument I want to make in this paper is that language is of central importance to what we conceive as truth, and that this truth is much more vulnerable to historical change as normally perceived. Indeed, a dissertation would not be enough to address this issue to the fullest, but a little walk around the bush might suffice.

Anthropologists see language as a repository of cultural meaning (Ingold, 1994). Because of this, it has long been a basic axiom in the anthropological method that in order to gain access to people's cultural understanding of the world it is important to be proficient in their language. As a result of this cross-linguistic understanding, Anthropologists often function as translators between different language systems that represent distinct cultural conceptions. Today anthropologists have turned away from the "exotic" to their backyard, and many of them have become interested in the effect that scientific and other languages have on the production of knowledge.

The continuity between the idea that language shapes the knowledge of the native and that of the scientists has increasingly been reinforced by philosophers and sociologists of science. One such critic is the anthropologist Bruno Latour, who has made fame by critically following the networks of human interactions that allow a certain finding to be moved out of the controlled world of the laboratorium into the real world as "truth" (Latour, 1984, 1988). From this perspective, the language of the western world continues to be one that sees nature as removed from culture, object removed from subject, and science removed from politics, even though in scientific and political reality these division constantly merge and interact. Latour thus suggest that we live in a world of hybrids--combinations of science and politics, of natures and cultures, of subjects and objects--and that the perceived divisions are cultural constructions that make us think we are modern, even though we never quite succeeded (Latour, 1991).

To the anthropologist, we are as much the creators of an imaginary world--an anthropological subject--as the natives were in the earlier days of colonial conquest. From this perspective, science can not be separated from ethnographic knowledge. Interestingly, in physics, the mother of all sciences, Einstein's quantum mechanics has not disputed the line of thought that the subject--the scientific culture--is fundamentally connected to its object of observation--nature. On the contrary: the usual distinction between the observed and the observant has come to crash against fundamental theoretical walls (such as the Heissenberg principle). Furthermore, because Newtonian science did not arrive at this problem, while Einstein's science did, we could conclude that we are dealing with different repositories of cultural meaning--or languages--that shape the cultural reality we humans perceive around us.

The power of language--used in the above broad sense of the word--in shaping human cultural constructions has been addressed by Michel Foucault (1972), perhaps one of the most innovative social thinkers of our time. According to him, since the sixties intellectuals have witnessed an increasing sense of vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices and languages. Described as the "insurrection of subjugated knowledges"--one of these words that would do well in the Postmodernist Generator--Foucault suggests that certain languages--discourses--have been dominant over others, and that the systematicity of this power process has become increasingly visible. Such subjugated, or repressed, knowledges have been left out of historical analysis or disqualified as "popular knowledge" or "folk theories." They are 'naïve' knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity" (Foucault, 1967, p.82).

According to Foucault, these types of knowledges are not commonsense knowledges, they are not general knowledges such as those claimed by science, but on the contrary, they are particular, local, and regional forms of knowledge. Thus, they are forms of decentralized knowledges. Foucault suggests that these disqualified, decentralized knowledges are concerned with the effects of centralizing powers which are linked to the institutions and functioning of an organized scientific language (p. 84). Scientific Journals and publications are institutionalized means of reproducing and disseminating such knowledges. Thus, the question arises to what extent Academic Journals are part of this process of centralization, or to what extent they are selective in what they publish and what not. Is Foucault correct that certain discourses are systematically filtered out in these Journals?

Walker (1998) suggest that until the 1960's, commercial publishers were generally not attracted to scientific publications because there was little potential for profit. He makes the observation that from the 1960's on the number of U.S. science and engineering Ph.D.'s tripled each years while support for research became more and more generous. As a result, the submission to Academic Journals--then still in the hands of purely academic societies--surged, resulting in the governmental approval of "page-charges" (fees for publication) by federal agencies and from federal grants to nonprofit publishers. This new source of revenue lead to a publication of longer and more Journals, and eventually in the commercialization of publications. Furthermore, Walker suggest that these commercial publishers "identified new or newly popular research areas (Microbial Ecology, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Insect Biochemistry) and establish journals in those specialties." Scientists were chosen to be on the board of these journals. The end result of this proliferation of Journals seems to be a decentralization of knowledges. Knowledges formerly perceived as popular by the established lines of thought were pushed forward based on commercial interests, resulting in a closing of the gap between science and popular sciences.

But lead by the commercial sector and mass media, this "closing" was also one that promoted sensationism. Because of the stubborn separation of science and politics, the power of the media in the construction and further centralization of dominant scientific languages unfortunately remains much undertheorized. Angell & Kassirer (1994) point out that the increasingly health obsessed American public finds themselves beset by contradictionary medical advise from the scientific community due to the marketing of knowledges. Not only did the amount of publications rise, also the speed with which the publications were fed to the public increased. The unfortunate result, according to Angell and Kassirer, was the public desillusion with the scientific process: "No wonder health-conscious Americans often feel they just can't win. Why can't researchers get it straight the first time?" Although this demise of scientific respect appears to indeed have led to a decentralization of expertise, it perhaps became channeled instead through the centralizing forces of commercialization. The real result was not a redefinition of science, but instead the increasing costs of public libraries to keep track of all the knowledges produced. Today, fewer books are purchased by libraries due to the fact that books and journals have risen in price faster than library income has (Friend, 2000). A proliferation running out of hand?

It appear to me that what really happened was the increasing hybridization of science with commercialism, which could be redefined as the increasing mixing up of science with politics, since no politics exists without commercial implications. Thus, science itself has become redefined because the medium of its translation, the Academic Journal, has been proliferating new and formerly marginal languages, such as that of Behavioral Ecology. It is unclear to me if this development of the past decades has promoted the resurrection of subjugated knowledges. Although it has further spurred development of Foucauldian (or post-structuralist) thought, the commercial alliance of science and technology has made powerful steps to align the new reality into the lines of the conservative power structures that be. As such, the technological marvels of the time continue to dazzle the masses, enslaving further those already packaged in neatly into the marketing world of consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, the imaginary split between science and politics remains alive.

Many think that the road of language transformation has only just begun. The electronic developments will provide yet again and probably put to test much more strongly the solidity of the marriage between science and technology. Some see this revolution as already deeply immersing the academic community, suggesting that users and struggles over information are becoming the principal drivers of change (Friend, 2000). A new generation of library users is expected to use the internet (sometimes notably written with a capital "I") for all information needs and predictions are that use will continue to escalate. While there are still many people in the developed as well as the developing world who do not have access to the Internet, already there are many more people using the networks to obtain information than would ever have entered a library to look at a book.

The implications of this new revolution are staggering. It seems therefore pertinent for the academic community to come to terms not only with the technical aspects of this revolution, but also, and possibly more importantly, with the societal and human behavioral effect of the new knowledge productions of the internet era. Anthropologists interested in the relationship between science and technology can contribute much to the translation of this transformation as they always have in times of cultural change. I do not think the answer to the new challenge is one that should stress the relativity of scientific knowledge, as Angell and Karrirer propose (1994). The apparent contradictions between scientific knowledges will not survive the test of public scrutiny anyway, nor will they resist the further commercialization of its product. Rather, I believe it would be more fruitful for the Academic community to find means of adapting to a new world where place and time cease to exist. A world which is the product of its own inventions.

This, I believe would mean the acceptance of different types of knowledges, an activity ancient to the anthropological endeavor itself. The democratiziation of science is to recognize the anthropological nature of cultural constructions, of languages that present localized knowledges. This "post-normal" science is one that must be concerned with the management of uncertainty for improved quality of information and the incorporation of a plurality of acknowledged interests in assessing that quality (Funtowitcz and Ravetz, 1994). When the Kuhnian ideology of one changing dominant language of science becomes replaced by a multitude of local languages, the academic community is forced to move beyond "simple" multidisciplinary science. From this, it seems however that a promising mixing and blending of skills might eventually become more commonplace, without having to result to the denial of special competence or expertise. All those engaged in an issue can enrich the comprehension of the whole, and although the distinction will remain, the sharp line between expert and lay person will be reduced, since each expert will belay with respect to at least some of the others. The underlying guiding principle of an electronically driven academic community might become quality rather than truth.

The issue of language in science is one that I believe is central to its changing nature. Past developments and anticipated revolutions will force the academic community to reassess fundamental principles if it wants to remain ethically involved in informing and guiding the quality of life. The prize paid will be that of truth, and perhaps this is only a minor one considering the increasing amount of criticisms coming from the reinsurgence of repressed knowledges in the new information world. In the end, this adaptation and transformation of scientific production will hopefully be one that leads to a further democratization of expertise, instead of taking the path of a totalitarian, commercial centralization of power as many have witnessed in the centralizing struggle of the corporate financial world.

Angell & Kassirer (1994) Clinical Research: What should the public believe? The New England Journal of Medicine. 331:189-190.

Foucault, M. (1967) Two Lectures.

Foucault, M. (1972) The archaeology of knowledge. New York, Pantheon Books

Friend, F.K. (2000) Keeping Your Head in a Revolution. The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Michigan University Press.

Funtowicz, S.O. & Ravetz, J.R. (1994). The worth of a songbird: ecological economics as a post-normal science. Ecological economics 10 (1994) 197-207.

Ingold, T. (1994) Introduction to Culture. In: Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, humanity, culture, and social life. Routledge

Latour, b. (1988) Science in Action: scientists and engineers in society. Ooievaar Pockethouse.

Latour, B. (1984) The pasteurization of France. Harvard University Press

Latour, B. (1993) We have never been modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Smith, D. (1999) Atacks on Scholars Include a Barbed Contest With Prizes. New York Times, Feb 27.

Walker, T.J. (1998) Free internet access to traditional journals. American Scientist, 86:463-471. Sept-Oct.