Barbelith Underground > Head Shop

Okay, I want to go back mostly to Lurid's first post and try and make a position statement from the 'cultural studies' side which might be a basis for further discussion, so that maybe we can agree what we are arguing for and against, rather than arguing past each other, which tends to be a pitfall of these discussions (I talk more about this at the end of what's turned out to be an extremely long post). But just to start off with - where I'm disagreeing with you or picking up on your phrasing, Lurid, it's mostly because I want clarification, or because I feel I can clarify something you're asking about or something you seem to be assuming which I think needs to be made explicit - not because I am rejecting your entire position.

In fact the rejection of empiricism, say, seems like a gift to the right - I think the Iraq War is a perfect example of this. More generally, I am a left winger because I think it makes more sense. And the rejection of elementary, widely accessible arguments seems to work toward the support of a particular kind of elitism which, if one looks to their context in academia, seem a touch suspect.

Hmm. It kind of seems to me like you're blurring over an important distinction between "reason", "empiricism" and "common sense" - what I want to call Enlightenment science (reason/empiricism) is not the only system that "makes sense" (I think being a deconstructionist/ Frankfurt school Marxist/ critic of the Enlightenments "makes sense", for example). In fact, it looks to me like you want to have it both ways: you defend reason and empiricism, insofar as you do, on the grounds that they're common-sensical and everyone gets them ("elementary, widely accessible"), and other philosophical systems (including critiques of rationalism and empiricism) are obfuscatory, elitist and "academic". But at the same time, you agree that common-sense actually is at odds with reason and empiricism - everyday understandings and deployments of "scientific fact" are as far from biological theory and findings as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is from Lacan.

Given that part of the critique of reason/empiricism is precisely attempting to reach an understanding of the interrelation between empirically-backed statements and the ways in which empiricism and reason are appealed to in the culture to support non-empirical things, I'm always surprised when 'science' people seem to be so unsympathetic to it, and I really hope this thread might start to put into place a better understanding of where we agree as well as where we might have irreconcilable differences.

I find the distrust of reason and empiricism perplexing, for instance, yet it seems a fairly trendy theme to equate these things with certain forms of oppression.

I would agree with you that this is "trendy" if you show me somewhere where this is being done badly, and where reason and empiricism are actually being equated with certain forms of oppression - just as I think you would agree with me that it's invalid to claim that all men have better spatial awareness than all women, or whatever. But I don't have any examples of it being done badly in front of me to agree with you (I don't mean that there aren't any examples, there are tons of them) so I think it would be more useful for me to explain a couple of the ways in which it has been done well.

Firstly, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, as I've said before, should be the basic reference text for any discussion on this point - unfortunately, I don't know it nearly well enough to do it justice, but it would be a good one for the next Headshop reading group. First two points, from the title: (1) it's a dialectic, not a "rejection". (2) It's Enlightenment, not "reason or empiricism". 'Enlightenment' is a historically specific cultural construction of the relation between humans and nature. It produces empiricism and reason as the privileged forms of that relation - by "privileged" I mean that their usefulness and their obviousness as the basis of argument come about partly because they are beyond question in a certain way. But the crucial points about "Enlightenment" are

(a) it is historically constructed - as people pointed out in the "scientific method" thread, humans and animals have been living in a world which acts in predictable ways for thousands and millions of years without the philosophical system of the Enlightenment. Not having reason and empiricism as defined and constructed in the Enlightenment did not mean the Ancient Romans were living in a world of absolute moral relativism, let alone a world without technology.

(b) it is historically constructed as a whole system. What authorizes us to separate out reason and empiricism from all the other philosophical, social and cultural dimensions on which they rely? This is based on Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, where he points out that science, by definition, cannot justify its own existence - because science is enabled by a particular philosophy of relation to the real world for which it cannot account, since that philosophy is a different language game. It must rely on a legitimating narrative - on concepts which are not in themselves scientific, like progress, truth, exploration, etc. Science itself cannot account for the connections between science and its outside: but science cannot be done without a relation to its outside. You have to be able, for example, to draw a distinction between "men" and "women" in the first place before you can carry out experiments to see how that distinction works and in what it consists. Or you have to want to cure cancer for social/cultural reasons before you work on a cure for it.

Okay, here's Horkheimer and Adorno on enlightenment:

The loyal son of modern civilization's fear of departing from the facts, which even in their perception are turned into cliches by the prevailing usages in science, business and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation. These usages also define the concept of clarity in language and thought to which art, literature and philosophy must conform today. By tabooing any thought which sets out negatively from the facts and from the prevailing modes of thought as obscure, convoluted and preferably foreign, that concept holds minds captive in ever deeper blindness. It is in the nature of the calamitous situation existing today that even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it

And the same sort of thing, more succinctly:

The impartiality of scientific languge deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics

Again, this is not saying that "science is bad". It is talking specifically about some of the effects of the impartiality of scientific language. The first quote, too, is talking about science in relation to art, literature, and philosophy, and critiquing not science as a self-contained discourse (although it can't, in fact, sustain itself as a self-contained discourse because it exists in the world) but the ways in which its philosophical system of thought and language is related to the apparatus of power and to "common-sense", communication and other (non-scientific) cultural forms.

Finally:

Enlightenment stands in the same relation to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. The "in-itself" becomes "for him". In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neither it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation... Magic is bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves.

A similar sort of thing to this happens in Said's Orientalism. The breakthrough critique of empiricism that Said makes in Orientalism is in his methodology: he doesn't look at the mass of argumentation produced about the Orient by the West and compare it to the "real" Orient and show, point by point, how it is inaccurate. Again, this doesn't amount to a "rejection of empiricism", since Said relies on the idea that Orientalism creates an "Orient" which is different from the empirically existent set of cultures, languages, nations and histories it purports to represent. It is, though, a critique of empiricism, since he does not go on simply to use the same methods to create a more empirically accurate model of the Orient. Instead, he shows how Orientalism, in its reliance on empiricism and reason, functions to produce an idea of the Orient as a single entity - and an entity which is available as an object of Western knowledge - and how those ideas have operated in the colonial and postcolonial context to reinforce the power relations between West and East. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, he does not reject science, but looks at the effects of the impartiality of scientific language. It's a shifting of the terms of the debate to create a new language game. This is where speech act theory, which I referred to briefly earlier in this thread, comes in.

A scientific or empirical statement can be looked at in two different ways. (I always get the terms mixed up here, so if anyone wants to take this argument further and knows which terms are currently being used, please correct me for clarity/consistency.) The French terms are enonce and enunciation, corresponding roughly to what I'll call "statement" and "speech act". The privileged category of speech act is the performative, which is a statement which performs what it says (eg "I now pronounce you man and wife"). Derrida (among other people) argues that any statement can be seen as a performative, eg: "Light can be modelled as either a wave or a particle" (statement) contains the implied performative "I say that light can be modelled as either a wave or a particle" (speech act). Now science is very good at autocritiquing and correcting at the level of the statement, but it cannot do anything with the level of the performative, which is part of a different language game: who says what about what; how subject and object and the relation between them are defined; who has the authority to speak; how the statements are authorized, circulated and received and the effects they have on the world.

(Aside: Someone mentioned Sokal in another thread - the Lacan/torus one, I think - and it reminded me that I've had Fashionable Nonsense out of the library for months, and I will read it when I get the chance, but in the meantime I was driven demented by him not bothering to learn the basic concepts of the disciplines he was critiquing (oh, the irony) - viz., saying that CS people say that science is "just a discourse". What is science if it's not a discourse? (If you have an answer to this, Lurid, I'd be really interested.) In the "feminist critiques of science" thread, science was perpetually being defended on the basis that it is a coherent discursive formation: it has a set of rules for generating statements and a set of rules for critiquing those statements, and it works very, very well at that. That is, it's an extremely successful language game. Now, calling science a "language game" should, surely, demonstrate not that it's "just a game" but that language games are very serious things with very real effects.)

In fact, both 'science' and 'cultural studies' are, at their best, using rigorous thought and operative language to mobilize a discipline against itself, or to create a system of thought which resists existing power relations and their cultural formations. That autocritical function is written into the program for producing statements which is the scientific method. But the scientific method alone does not account for the way science works in the world, and it seems to me to be (for one thing) unempirical and unscientific to pretend that it does. I kind of consider Derrida's philosophy of language to be "proven", so in much the same way that Darwinian biologists get pissed off with Creationists, I can't understand why anyone would pretend that language and communication work to guarantee a transmission of meaning when they don't. Or that scientific knowledge isn't constructed and communicated in language. (That's all very compressed, I know, but please don't assume that the only conclusion you can draw from that set of ideas is that "science is wrong" or that "everything is only language": that's not the case at all, or if it is then it transforms our ideas of what language is beyond recognition.)

So... I would say that this constellation of theories is the basis for the "alternatives" to reason and empiricism that are circulating in 'postmodern' thought.

Okay. That's kind of a position statement. I hope it's helpful at least in narrowing down what you want to know, Lurid, or where you think potential areas of disagreement/agreement might lie. More and more over the last few years, partly through having a very good friend doing a PhD on biology and deconstruction in the philosophy of humanism, I've been evolving some ideas about this, which were kick-started in the immediate past by (a) going to a day symposium on biology and literature (where, for the record, there were three cultural studies people and three biologists who were complete arses, and two CS people and one biologist who were excellent). What it's made me think is that the 'straw man' thing really does have to stop. Both CS people and science people, in a lot of cases, are arguing against the same thing: I don't want to defend idiot moral relativism or Men are from Mars any more than you want to defend eugenics or determinist evolutionary psychology. So I don't see why, rather than holding each other responsible for the worst excesses of our respective disciplines/philosophical formations, we don't try and argue collaboratively and see what happens. For example, I was a bit annoyed when you responded to me saying:

when a culture is using all the means it has on hand to insist that men and women are "different", the empirically-backed pop-scientific rhetoric is serving the same function as the linguistically-backed rhetoric and the common-sense rhetoric. And I don't think empiricism in itself can save us from that.

by saying, firstly, that you disagreed, and secondly that empirical concerns are clearly insufficient. Now, I really don't mean to nitpick, but it seems to me that we are both saying that empiricism is insufficient. Where is the disagreement? What are you trying to defend, and what do you perceive as the thread to it? I'm asking not because I want to start a fight but because I want to stop one.

Similarly, and I can't resist bringing this up again though maybe I shouldn't, Bill and I had what for me was a pretty intense and ugly fight here. Now, the point I was trying to make - and I don't think Bill would disagree with it, though I could be wrong - was that the thought/feeling separation comes from a different language game from neurology, and that his post sounded to me as though it was saying that we could only use, in the analysis of a text, categories which had equivalents in neurology. I was questioning the relevance of neurology in this case, not its value per se.

He thought my reaction was knee-jerk, thoughtless anti-science; I thought his reaction to me was knee-jerk and thoughtless. But it would have been a lot more useful for both of us to get past that and work out where we agreed, rather than me blaming Bill for all scientific determinism and him blaming me for all the knee-jerk anti-science rhetoric of the Left.

I hope this isn’t too long and/or wandery and/or repetitious of what I've said before. I seemed to need to say all of this in order to continue sorting through my position.

I might point out that "love" is used by all sides to justify their position but since the same could be said of any other point of view, it can only be a limited criticism.

I would agree that that is true to a certain degree, but usually this particular L-word itself is not invoked. As I see it, here, now, we have a hyper-masculinity culture at work, especially in the U.S., both in the academy and in politics. We really don’t trust anything that smacks of being “soft”—i.e. feminized. Love, and its companion, empathy is like the queen of soft things in its common usage. Again, I’m still speaking in very general, probably far too broad of strokes, but Bush can get away with publicly crying on occasion and calling himself compassionate, because most of his image-construction is dedicated to re-affirmations of a kind of manliness—and the Iraq war is about that kind of hyper masculinized sensibility.

Since Bush has always already proven he’s a real man in the latter sense, his occasional, carefully staged public displays of emotiveness are seen as humanizing, rather than as feminizing. A democrat, or any female candidate from either party, cannot risk such emotional outbursts at all, and must at regular points show themselves to be tough. Distanced. (Think Michael Dukakis in an armored tank.) Because, at least in part, they are assumed, a priori, to be too entangled with, sympathetic to the Other.

In this hyper-masculinized context, really seeking to know a place or a subject matter, really being intrigued by it and genuinely curious is for sissies. Real men just blow up their problems. And if they make mistakes, well, it is too bad. Really. But better safe than sorry.

I think that’s pretty much the take on the Iraq War amongst many average people, here, at least amongst those who still basically support it anyway. The torture at Abu-Ghraib and other places in the world is for many Americans the hard price of living in the world. We’re making a grand omelette, and those are the eggs one needs to crack, Alas. Egg heads, on the other hand, who come in after the fact and point out flaws like no WMDs or the research into the flawed nature of evidence gained through torture, are equally deserving of cracking. They need to go live in the real world.

Here’s how I’d summarize the basic, right wing reaction to the flawed knowledge base in the Iraq war: “One wishes it weren’t so, but the ‘objective’ reality is that (many of) those prisoners, the eggs of our neocon omelette, needed cracking (i.e., “they weren’t in prison for traffic violations” one US congressman said). One sees this ‘reality’ only if one is not too empathetic. It, in fact, may help if we have no one who actually speaks Arabic working in the region. If they know they language, they may start to care about the people. We can’t trust those who really know. They stop being able to do what needs to be done.”

My own interest in this issue comes from a repeated teaching experience. As a good (or evil?) CS person, I regularly show students how illusory, or at least elusive, the ideal of objectivity is—particularly if defined in a hardlined way as the goal of removing the human, perceiving subject from the process of observation. I demonstrate that this is primarily, to my mind, a rhetorical move. State your observation in such a way as to suggest it is not an observation but a disembodied fact, and it seems more solid, “harder.” (I.e., we’re back in the realm of Deva’s excellent CS position statement: looking at how the language cues of impartiality help to reinforce existing power relations.)

To be fair, however, there’s a logic to making “fact” statements (which are perhaps performative, as Deva claims): “The sky is blue” can perhaps be tested, contested; “I perceive the sky is blue” can’t really be tested, contested in the same way because it is framed as a perception. To test it, I would have to be able to get a machine like the one in Being John Malkovich and see the world through your eyes. That’s not possible, both CS and science people agree.

Once I have convinced at least one doubtful student to reconsider objectivity, then, someone inevitably comments: “ok, yes. But even if it’s impossible to be entirely objective, isn’t a worthwhile goal to have? To try to get rid of bias—to try to come as close a possible to achieving what I call the disembodied ‘eye in the sky’ view point? Isn’t that still a good goal?”

I can see why they think this, in my own definition of love/understanding I have stated that full understanding is impossible but the longing for more, deeper understanding is still a worthwhile goal. But I cannot agree with them. Some distancing, in the form of gathering as many perspectives as possible on any given matter is worthwhile—completely necessary. But I believe the fetishisizing of that distance, and the trope of the disembodied viewer is deeply dangerous. It costs us too much.

I’m still trying to sort out the connections and distinctions between dream of complete empathy—the John Malkovich dream—versus the dream of complete objectivity—the white-jacketed scientist who erases hirself in hir prose . . . Perhaps both have their dangers—in fact it may be the same danger? There’s an erasure going on in both cases, note . . .

In conclusion (finally!): The failure on Iraq seems to me to have less to do with the undermining of rationality in the pomo funhouse of perspectival thought than with a much more basic, old-fashioned gender trouble. I’m not sure if this applies to other areas where most academics may be better served, from Lurid’s perspective, by joining forces for political ends. I, too, don’t want Christians coming in and deciding that “intelligent design” (Creationism by any other name) must be taught as another valid perspective in biology classes—as they threaten to do in the Midwestern US where I live. That feels like more complex territory, perhaps?

But even as I sympathize with Lurid’s frustration, I’m standing by my original focus on the embodiedness of knowledge and its communal-composition as the way through to solving even that dilemma. I keep feeling like Deva’s points have an intersection here, that I’m not able yet to articulate. I keep feeling like, despite my empathy for Lurid's point of view, I’m not willing to retreat yet, even strategically, short-term, from many of the basic CS insights Deva’s put forth, even though she’s right that the “good” CS is part and parcel with the “bad.” And I seem to think that all of what I'm saying, above, points to some way forward. But this is all still evolving for me.

All of which may be a sign of my own (cracked?) egg-headedness… Comments?

Left, right?