ABSTRACT
Modernist criminology has been somewhat unreceptive to opening the doors to the academe. And indeed, postmodernist thought forces the reconsideration of the key assumptions guiding its enterprise. Post-Enlightenment thought had projected the path. The new modernist sciences with their notions of the individual, the juridical subject, inputs with proportional effects, the value of global knowledge, the neutrality of language and its liberating potentials, the unfolding of history, objectivity, empiricism, the calculus, and so forth, seemed to have clearly pointed the way. Topology and chaos theory, psychoanalytic semiotics, catastrophe theory, critical theory and much more need to be further developed. The contributions of feminist analysis, critical race theory, dialogical pedagogy, and constitutive theory, among others, will surely invigorate critical scholarship. Chaos and catastrophe theory have indicated that continuities and discontinuities can exist side by side, determinism and indeterminism are indeed compatible.
