blah-feme

scientism and paranoid reading (2)

Beginning with the proposition, then, that the aristocracy of the scientistic turn is not just discursive, but also material, we need to ask what might appear at first as if a simple question: why? This question is calling not just for a simple diagnosis, but a crucial starting point in the critique of the epistemology of capitalism.

The traditional Marxist critique has always fallen at this point: for Marx, (at least at certain moments in his oeuvre) Socialism inevitably operates as a kind of science, a rationalised operative system that must deliver a clean and functional social model for living. The need now, it seems to me, is to go beyond that vulgar rationalism and to understand the relationship between power and resistance as a relationship that is abso;lutely internal to the system itself: in other words, Marx's critique of capitalism has operated always from within, as a symptom of that system.

The point here, without seeking to abandon the most useful elements of a critical Marxist model, would be to re-inscribe critical action into a broader configuration of the political such that it can operate beyond the epistemological straight-jacket of scientism. Where, in the rationalist model of living, might there be room for dirt, for randomness, for transgression? without attending to these matters, social theory from the left is stuck in a rationalizing idealism that in a very important sense belittles what might be termed (not unproblematically) the human.

The human in this new world, would be more than just a universalising principle, other than to note its structuring rather like the Hegelian not-all: it can never be captured as a singular unitary modality of being, never fully articulated through the symbolzations of science. It would operate as a space that is always already more than, ill-suited to, the modeling of societies, of living, of being, always in some sense dissonant (or at least not fully consonant).

Scientism finds such notions abhorrent, since its urge (put very crudely) is to capture and still the world, to explain it. The naive turn of scientism is a naivete that comes of its privilege, of its enthronement at the heart of the contemporary Western episteme.

That turn, as perhaps more materially embedded than ever, is also a turn that points to a certain impoverishment, a symptom of what we used to call its decadence. When science no longer needs to address the fundamental question of its own epistemological underpinning, when the question as to how science might be said to retrieve truth fades under a blistering confidence, that is the point at which it becomes a new kind of dogma, a new theology (and it is no surpise that the Christian right finds its home in the most scientist power of the modern era, the U.S.).

The material ground of this turn, it seems, to me, is a crucial place to start to look to understand how science maintains itself - the economics of epistemological coercion are crucial to the survival of capitalism as we understand it today. Start there and you might begin to unravel something...

scientism and paranoid reading (1)

We on the left are usually quite paranoid: I suppose a truly critical turn in one's personality would be a turn to paranoia of some sort. This is point made by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recently in her challenging short piece "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You" (Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 1-37.) and reworked in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). The main thrust of this piece, though, despite it having been misread again and again as some kind of disavowal of critical reading, is to point up the complexity and difficulties of thinking critically, of maintaining a space that might in some sense (however fantastically) maintain a distance from the object of scrutiny or, in some sense, might hold on to the notion of critical-political space, however transitory and, at worse, illusory.

There are at least two ways this problem has been worked through (the two that I will use here trace the shape of the discourse around this question and are chosen strategically). The first is to go the way of the right - that is to believe profoundly in the givenness of the present (or at least to work as hard as possible to persuade others of this), all its injustices, its inequalities, as in some sense the best we could imagine. In this reading, Sedgwick seems available to a call for the end of bad-tempered paranoid reading in favour of playful and celebratory modes.

The leftist critique of that would probably go something like this:

The present, in all its glorious diversity and richness, is nonetheless built on a radical injustice that must be uncovered at every turn, in every moment of political action. The injustice is radically dispersed, inculcated in every moment of exchange, every point of inter-human contact, every discursive instance. In this mode of reading, everything becomes a symptom: it is a paranoia writ large, a paranoia raised to the level of a politics. Hence, for the left, the right constitutes a way of being that radically curtails he possibility of political action and which refuses the possibility of critical active engagement of one's environment.

What follows, then, is decidedly paranoid, and, as with all paranoia, it begins with a strategic hyperbole:

They are all out to get us. No, really they are. In fact, the awfulness of our times is constituted in the very fact that they already have us.

At a recent conference, for example, I was struck by the overwhelming political inertness of academic discourses across the board. I am constantly surprised by this, and it never fails to bring me up short. At this conference in particular, we were treated to a number of what might be termed 'scientific' or at least 'empirical' papers. They all worked on their own terms - they set up a hypothesis, showed how they had rigorously tested it and then discussed some results, musing what those results might tell us about the field as a whole.

I was particularly struck in these papers not by the things they said, but by what was censored out (both during the paper itself and afterwards in questions): the question of ideology in its broadest sense seems to be something that most participants (with one or two notable exceptions) really did not want to get into. I guess the terms in which ideology critique is set up are in some sense always antagonistic to 'pure science', but I feel ever more energised by the refusal of that critical turn in science. How, for example, might the intervening in someone's world with uncomfortable technologies to test something about consciousness ever be neutralized of ideology? Why seek to avoid it? What programme might such avoidances be serving?

I think one way to think this, in true paranoid terms, is to look at the material ground of science: in most Western countries and in many developing countries also, research in the sciences is viewed as some kind of nirvana from which will flow wealth generation, social good and strategic interest. In comparison, those of us that work in the arts and humanities know that research funding is extremely patchy and highly competetive. This works as a kind of class structure - the privilege of funded research is thus always such that it does not question its ground. Maintain a discourse in abject poverty for 50 years and its ground shifts and represents itself in new forms over and over, like a castaway grasping for land...

The aristocracy of the scientistic turn, then, is not just discursive, but also material.

I'm going to be working this through over the next few weeks....