Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

economy to describe how economic wealth is now mostly dependent on informationalresources and on a countries “knowledge base” 22 .Combined, these various schools agree on a multi-theoretical perspectivism. And thiseclecticism in theoretical approaches and ideas itself constitutes a post-modern sensibility:the notion that things are too complex to be grasped by any one theoretical account. Thepost-modern world is now understood to be composed of interpenetrating and multiplerealities, where complexity in social, economic, and political relationships is furthercompounded by a multitude of electronic images, disparate cultural influences, and changesin the dimensional referents of time and space due to advances in transportations andcommunications. These realities discount the utility of monotheoretical accounts. Instead, itsuggests the need for multiple theoretical analysis that avoid reflection on any one dimensionin favor of a reflexive understanding of relationships between social, political and economicdimensions 23 .An interesting combination: Lyotard and BoydKnowledge production is at the heart of what many consider the core text of postmodernism:Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition, a Report on Knowledge, published inFrench in 1979 and in English in 1984. Lyotard’s aim is to study the conditions of knowledgein developed societies 24 . The term “modern” designates the traditional positivist scientificmodel. Post-modernists say that a changing social world requires an entirely different way ofreflecting on our existence today. They argue, just as social conditions change, so too do theconcepts and categories that we use to make sense of the society, a theme central to Boyd’swork and one that obviously applies to the societal phenomenon of war too. Thus, socialscientists need to fundamentally “deconstruct” the way they habitually look at the socialworld. Thus modern social theory needs to be reconsidered.Modern social theory, in the eyes of post-modernists, is rooted in the“Enlightenment project” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and has absorbed theunderlying assumptions and aspirations about the nature and purpose of social theory,namely the role of knowledge in the improvement of the human condition. TheEnlightenment occurred at the threshold of typically modern Western society, and gave itdefinitive shape to many of the ideas and procedures of modern western social science. Thepost-modernist challenge to the Enlightenment model of social knowledge involves eitherrejecting entirely, or at least seriously questioning, the following typical Enlightenmenttenets:The view that our knowledge of society, like society itself, is holistic, cumulative, and broadlyprogressive in character.That we can attain rational knowledge of society.That such knowledge is universal and thus objective.That sociological knowledge is both different from, and superior to, ‘distorted’ forms ofthought, such as ideology, religion, common sense, superstition and prejudice.22 Manual Castells, The Informational City, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989; Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War andAnti War, Survival at the Dawn of the Information Age, Little Brown, London, 1993.23 Jarvis, p.10524 Lyotard, p. xxiii.289