SCIENCE Discourse
and Ideology in Modern Society Stanley
Aronowitz University of Minnesota Press.
Minneapolis CHAPTER
1 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
AS HEGEMONY When my daughter Nona was two
years old, she frequently exclaimed, after a fall, "the chair did it," or,
as she bumped into the wall, "the wall did it." On September 11, 1986, the
New York stock market plunged eighty-six points. The next day, after a
drop of thirty-four points, a New
York Times story read, "wide use of computers contributed to slide."
According to the writer, trading on the stock market is often detonated by
signals supplied by a computer program. It's a "split second"
automatic process; in appearance, at least, large institutional
traders such as pension plans and major banks respond to the slightest
movement of interest rates without significant reflection. On this
particular day, when stock traders came to their offices, "they were met
by a big jump in interest rates . . . (which) immediately dragged down the
price of futures contracts for stocks."1 This triggered sales
of current stocks by the money managers and widespread purchases of
futures contracts. As the large investors unloaded stocks, others followed
suit and stock prices plummeted. The investors respond to the computer as
my daughter might explain bumping into the wall. Of course, the Times and the analysts they
consulted allowed that national and international economic troubles might
be an underlying influence on the serious fall of stock prices that week,
but from the point of view of investors, it was their computer that seemed
to make the decision to sell. That we live in a computer age
no one seems to doubt. Yet, along with the paeans of praise heaped upon
this electronic device, there is But the computer seems to have
a mind of its own, especially if the controllers are guided by its
information. Many, including some computer scientists, have already
begun to compare computers to the Golem of the medieval ghetto or the
monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. Far from remaining a stunning
but subordinate tool, the computer frequently jumps the track,
subverting human purposes that set it in motion. Like the machines that
characterized the Industrial Revolution, computers are just the
latest occasion for the displacement of fears that "things" are out of
control, that their human origin has been lost, and that it is too late
for salvation. My stock market example is by
no means the heart of the matter. For those who would not speak of
Chernobyl or Three Mile Island should also keep silent about the wonders
of technology. Naturally, those who continue to defend the use of nuclear
technology for supplying power attribute the problems at these sites to
"human error," just as Union Carbide company officials blamed workers and
inadequate supervision for the disaster at Bhopal, India, in December 1984
which killed several thousand people and injured another
200,000.3 The phrase "human error" usually refers to those who
operate equipment; when an airplane crashes, the pilot or maintenance
mechanic is nearly always blamed. Almost never is "human error" blamed on
the design of the aircraft or the basic judgment that nuclear energy is a
safe bet. When technology is involved, managers and the media rarely ask
whether the premises of the machine in question are valid. For example,
government officials are prepared to ask whether an adequate
evacuation
There are many reasons why nuclear
power and air travel became privileged technologies in fuel production
and transportation. I do not wish to dispute the economic and political
arguments employed by corporations to persuade the many governments, including
that of the United States, that these technologies were more efficient
than existing means of energy production. For our purposes, the criterion
of efficiency is closely linked to concepts such as cost savings, whose
major component is saving time-time in the extraction of raw materials
from the earth, a labor-intensive activity, or, concomitantly, the time
saved by traveling 650 miles per hour rather than 100 or 200 miles per
hour, the current maximum of rail transportation. Yet, rails have suffered
at the hands of trucks which are, by any conventional standard, more energy-wasteful
than trains. The contradictory arguments made on behalf of various methods
of transport belie pure efficiency criteria: it may be that choices of
technology are made entirely independent of "rational" production decisions
but obey a different rationality, the power imperative. Some students of the
introduction of nuclear energy technology in advanced industrial societies
have raised an entirely different set of arguments why this dangerous,
even disastrous, way of obtaining energy has received such powerful
support. The argument is that the decisions to "go nuclear" transcend any
possible rational criteria, measured by economic or technical
considerations. Instead, these critics claim that the basic impetus for
the introduction of nuclear-powered energy is rooted in the hierarchical
structure of society. Those at the pinnacle are able to impose a logic of domination on the rest of
us by simply repeating their falsehoods through every avenue of public
debate and discourse. This explanation removes the discussion of
causality from the domain of instrumental reason. It is not this or
that interest that has triumphed, tragically, in the corridors of power.
Power itself carries its own demand, which exceeds, with impunity, the
boundaries of reason. In effect, power sets new rational codes without
reference to ideology.
If this is true, none of the
by now conventional rational criticisms are adequate to the situation.
One convention is to show that some interests can expect to reap huge
profits from the introduction of certain technologies. Another appeals
to the cult of efficiency as the supreme instrumental arbiter of social
choice. Each of these positions generates
These examples are not, strictly
speaking, commensurable but are invoked to illustrate the range of issues
that are emerging to question technology and its twin, modern science.
Now the statement that science and technology have become inseparable
is certainly controversial, especially among those who would insist that
science is autonomous from the concerns of power and ideology. The division
between science and technology is meant to protect science from its implication
in the matrix of economic and political considerations, which are generally
recognized to influence - if not determine - the course of technological
development and its dispersion. It is still true, however, that most students
of science, while acknowledging the influence of what is often labeled
"cultural factors" on the process of knowledge acquisition, insist that
economic, political, and ideological questions must be strictly demarcated
from considerations bearing on the content of scientific knowledge. Instead,
the term "scientific community" has become identical with "social context."
Indeed, recent developments in the social study of science have narrowed
this context to the laboratory, leaving other "external" influences aside.
Despite developments over the past thirty years which try to establish
a relation between scientific discourses and the historical and other
social conditions within which they function, support for the proposition
that science and the scientific milieu is relatively autonomous is still
powerful. In Part III, I shall explore developments in the philosophy,
history, and social study of science that have challenged the idea that
what counts as knowledge of the external world is attained by means of
scientific procedures alone. As we shall see, most investigators of science
remain tied to the concept of science as a distinct knowledge sphere and
have barely touched its relation to technology. The great exception, of
course, is Critical Theory, the foundation of which is to establish this
The assertion that Western culture
is thoroughly technological derives from the German "romantic" critique
of the Enlightenment, a critique which members of the Frankfurt School
share with strains of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-Kantian
thought, especially Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After arguing
that the "rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment is now out of the question,"
Husserl nevertheless is quick to add, "but their [the Enlightenment philosophies]
intention, in its most general sense, must never die out in us"; the intention
is a "humanity based on pure reason."4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno follow a similar line of argument. They lament the Enlightenment,
which created a new science and technology that could dominate nature
in order to promote the flowering of reason, but that led instead to its
eclipse. The end of reason was rooted in the belief, current even today,
that nature could be reduced to pure object, possessing mere quantitative
extension. The mathematicization and mechanization of the world picture
was undertaken by seventeenth-century science in the service of prediction
and control. In the process, according to Husserl, we lost contact with
the "life world" in a series of dualisms: mind and body, quantity and
quality, mathematic relations and human relations. For the Frankfurt School,
the logical result was positivism - the alienation of human reason from
itself.
Whereas Husserl's critique remains
at the level of philosophic discourse, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse ascribed these dichotomies to the rending of society by social
domination. The domination of nature fulfills a human project, the domination
of people by people. Science and technology are practices that mirror
the social world.
Still, the Frankfurt School
was criticizing the enlightenment from within. Although Marcuse was
ambiguous concerning science, claiming at one point that a new science
free of technological domination needed to be created, he proclaims in
the final chapter of his One Dimensional Man that science
and technology "are great vehicles of liberation" if only they can be
subordinated to new ends to replace those of domination. These ends "would
operate in the project and construction of machinery and not only in its
utilization." Technology can be instrumental "in the reduction of toil
- it remains the very base of all forms of human freedom."6 Thus,
the sharpest critics of science and technology hesitate at the door of
irrationalism and will not cross the threshhold, however harsh their evaluation
of the gloomy record
The warfare between what has
been called "science" and other discourses that purport to explain the
natural and social worlds is a story many times told. As Gaston Bachelard
has argued, science is constituted by its break from competing discourses
that claim to explain the same objects.7 Physics, for example,
breaks with forms of "irrationalism" but also with metaphysics. As Bachelard's
contemporary, Karl Popper, has commented, "metaphysics offers meanings
that may be helpful to other aspects of human affairs, but not science.8
Science, for Popper and Bachelard, is established by statements that can
be subjected to refutation (in Bachelard's terms, "empirical validation").
It is the spirit and practice of relentless self-criticism that marks
science off from other discourses, including traditional philosophy. For
recent philosophers of science, even these procedures do not guarantee
that the results are identical with "truth," only that they are demarcated
thereby from other discourses. Within true science, there may be serious
and often profound disputes of interpretation. But what all scientists
share is a community rooted
in method. The primacy of shared methods guarantees the reliability of
what counts as science. In Parts II and III we shall explore these assertions
in more detail. For now, it is enough to suggest that what those dedicated
to Western scientific ideology mean by the term "science" reduces to two
procedures: mathematical calculation and experimental validation/falsification
of results. Mathematics ensures the rigor of investigation, establishing
measurable relations and, in Bachelard's words, "gives body to pure thought."
Mathematics is "the realization of the rational." However, lest science
fall victim to Descartes's unwarranted "refusal to base thought on experience,"
experimentalism restores to observation its role as final arbiter of knowledge.9
Presumably, neither philosophy
nor religion fulfills either of these criteria. Modern science demarcates
itself, not by reconstituting the object, but by defining rationality
in a specific way. At the same time, given the power of all metaphysical
discourses in everyday life, it is obliged to make room for the extrascientific
so long as these spheres are clearly subordinated to scientific rationality.
In the knowledge hierarchies of postfeudal societies, modern scientific
rationality is the privileged discourse, and. all others are relegated
to the margins. As a result, institutions of the state as well as the
economy -- education systems, government bureaus, the law and criminal
justice systems -- emulate scientific procedures within the constraints
imposed by their
The rise of Protestantism in
leading industrializing countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
seemed to provide moral sanction for the preeminent position of modern
science as knowledge. Religious institutions now viewed themselves as
supplicants in an increasingly secular age and understood their role not
so much as deflectors but as moral guardians for individuals damaged by
the blandishments of money and power. The type of knowledge offered by
religion was confined to the ethical sphere; it concerned itself with
matters of family life, personal grief, and, when it felt obliged to take
social action, it was remedial rather than transformative. The great denominations
of Protestantism relinquished that which Catholicism had struggled to
retain: a claim on epistemological as well as ontological truth. However,
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the triumph of world capitalism
over the remnants of the old feudal aristocracy in eastern and southern
Europe forced even the recalcitrant Catholic and other orthodox churches
to accommodate to the new order.
By the late nineteenth century,
industrial production depended on scientifically based technologies; the
craft traditions, of which early manufacturing was merely a form of rationalization,
were themselves subordinated to the new technology; the motive force of
production, energy, was no longer mechanical -- really an extension of
hand or water power -- but became electrical, the principles of which
derived from "pure research"; engineering replaced artisanal knowledge
in designing the mode of transformation of raw materials into end products;
in turn, the intellectual foundation of engineering became physics and
chemistry, which themselves were institutionalized into large laboratories
sponsored by and controlled by the state and large corporations. Thus,
science itself no longer is only a hegemonic ideology of the new social
order of capitalism and its industrial stage, but becomes integrated into
the practices and discourses of production. The inter-changeability of
science and technology is, of course, either denied or ignored by most
philosophers and scientists, but their growing convergence extends beyond
the workplace.11As scientific discourse permeates state and
civil society, scientific culture spills over beyond the laboratory. Business
dares make no decisions that are not grounded on mathematical calculation
that provides projections; legislators enact laws based on "data" generated
by scientifically trained experts Raymond Callahan has noted, referring
to education, that technological
Science education is accorded,
in the current anxiety over the loss of America's erstwhile preeminence
in industrial production, a primary role in the long road to restoration.
In the 1980s, as the defense budget of the United States has increased
dramatically, engineers and scientists are in demand in military-related
industries. Consequently, despite enormous pressure from government and
industry on schools, teacher recruitment in science and math has lagged,
primarily because salaries are far below those offered by private industry
and research institutions. Reversing its steadfast policy of reducing
federal expenditures and advocacy of scaled-down public services at all
levels, the Reagan administration saw the virtue of making an exception
for the teaching of science and math.
These illustrations do not exhaust
the extent to which technological culture penetrates the social world.
Right after World War II, as America assumed a position of economic, political,
and military dominance in the world, secularism -- always closely related
to the growth of modern science and technology -- seemed to have triumphed,
irrevocably, in the cultural sphere as well. Church attendance dropped
sharply, and religion in this most religious of modernized societies seemed
finally on the wane, a century after its final marginalization in most
industrialized European countries.13
Technological culture may not
provide salve for the spirit, and it may do nothing to fill the void left
by the marginalization of religious morality, but, as even its most severe
critics are forced to admit, it gives rein to the pleasure principle.
As Marcuse observed, in advanced capitalist societies, especially the
United States, "the defense structure makes life easier for a greater
number of people and extends man's mastery over nature."14 Although
his description of technological society as a "comfortable, smooth, democratic
unfreedom" was adopted by some as a reason for opposing the prevailing
setup, millions who had been condemned to deprivation during the decades
of industrialization welcomed technology as a savior.
Goethe once quipped, "He who
possesses science and art also has religion; but he who possesses neither
of these two, let him have religion." 15 The vision is a thoroughly
pluralist one. Science and art are to exist alongside religion, which
as Freud noted, echoing Goethe, was the possession of everyman, defined
as someone lacking the means to sublimate the irrepressible pleasure principle.
For the nineteenth-century poet or scientist, the idea that religion would
one more time raise its claim to yield reliable knowledge of the external
natural world was unthinkable. Freud is quite clear: the belief in the
supernatural is an "untenable" doctrine but better for the common folk
than alcohol or drugs. Just as long as it is not taken seriously as more
than an opiate. 16
But this is precisely what has
transpired in the past decade. Despite the unambiguous triumph of the
scientific worldview and the totalizing effects of technology, science
and technology are experiencing unprecedented attack. For the past fifteen
years, counterenlightenment religious movements have taken on worldwide
and revolutionary proportions. Far from disdaining politics as beneath
their ethical missions, some Jews, Moslems, and Christians alike have
laid siege to the state, demanding that public life conform to religious
precepts and that the separation of church and state be ended. The theocratic
state, once consigned by scholars, politicians, and jurists to the past,
is loudly proclaimed as the present and future by the new movements, and
has already captured important outposts in the Middle East -- within the
Moslem, Christian and Jewish worlds -- and is rapidly becoming the sine
qua non of political victory for parties in the United States.17
Here, it is not only that lawmakers adopt biblical criteria for
establishing the rules of punishment; this is an old story in America.
The doctrine of retribution opposes itself to the idea that the criminal
may be subject to rehabilitation. In retrospect, liberal assumptions about
crime seem a brief interlude in an unbroken history of deep-seated, religiously
based conservatism in American law and political
Take a case in point. In the
course of his attack against creationist accounts of development, Futuyama
makes two arguments: "anyone who believes in Genesis as a literal description
of history must hold a world view that is entirely incompatible with the
idea of evolution, not to speak of science itself. . . where science insists
on material, mechanistic causes that can be understood by physics and
chemistry, the literal believer in Genesis invokes unknowable supernatural
forces." 19
The second argument is, for
Futuyama, more important: "if the world and its creatures developed purely
by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has
no purpose or goal. The fundamentalist, in contrast, believes that everything
in the world, every species and every characteristic of every species,
was designed by an intelligent, purposeful artificer, and that it was
made for a purpose."20 Futuyama defends evolution and the whole
of science as holding that "mechanisms," not teleology, govern events
in nature. These mechanisms free science from reliance on Aristotelian
final causes and rely
Surely, the propositions of
evolutionary theory are incompatible with creationism. For modern biological
science, there is no question of plan or purpose in nature (although as
Alexandre Koyre shows, Newton was convinced that physical laws corresponded
to God's plan even if teleological explanation had no place in physics).21
However, many evolutionists and philosophers of biology have come
to insist that Aristotle's idea of final cause, so vehemently rejected
by the early evolutionists, had a place in modern scientific theory. Stephen
J. Gould remarks: It is still unfashionable in
biological circles to use such words as 'design,' 'purpose,' or
'teleology.' Since final cause is so indispensable a concept in the
elucidation of adaptation, and since natural selection can produce a
well-designed structure without any conscious intervention of God's
superhuman wisdom or the sub-human intelligence of the animal in question,
one would think that these terms would again be admitted into orthodoxy.
Evidently, however, we are still fighting the battle with theologians that
we won in deeds almost a century ago.22 Futuyama may be one of those
still fighting the battle, but in his zeal to distance evolution from
theology, he succeeds only in making his ideas into the mirror image of
his opponent's. Francois Jacob puts the issue colorfully. Commenting on
the role of sexual reproduction as the "aim" for each organism and for the
history of organisms, he concludes, "For a long time, the biologist
treated teleology as he would a woman he could not do without, but did not
care to be seen with in public. The concept of the programme has made an
honest woman out of teleology."23
Today, the metaphors of program
and system to describe the processes of heredity and organic evolution
have opened a new debate concerning the question of causality in biological
science. The earlier belief that science could dispense with causal explanation
in favor of description was intended to remove from natural science what
Laplace termed the "hypothesis" of God's design. What has been termed
"essentialism" is not so easily removed. The religious counterattack against modern science may be misplaced, but it resonates
Perhaps the most broad-based
skepticism has arisen in the field of medicine. There are several issues
here: at the most fundamental level is the question of the traditional
medical model of diagnosis and treatment. According to this way of seeing,
the human body is a machine (in the older version) or a computer program
(in the up-to-date model). The parts are relatively autonomous, making
possible a treatment regimen that ignores the relations of the parts to
the whole, except in cases of side effects which can be counteracted.
In the old mold of medical practice, the relation of the person to the
environment and the emotional state to the physical state are irrelevant.
In the first instance, unless severe hunger is observed, nutritional issues
are not factored into diagnostic practice. The context of medical practice
itself -- treating individuals -- does not permit the effects of such
"external" phenomena as pollution, work environments, quality of life
based on economic circumstances, end stress related to working or family
life, to become objects of treatment.
Medicine, based on the findings
of molecular biology, adopts a systems approach to both diagnosis and
treatment. In the more ecological mode, the human body is an open-ended
system that is determined by its genetic code,
but may be influenced by the
environment with which it has homeostatic relations. In the less interesting
version, the body is a dosed system consisting of information networks
that are only peripherally subject to external influences. Francis Crick's
version of the basic requirements for life includes the Darwinian idea,
adapted from Thomas Malthus, that the organism must compete for water,
food, and other life-sustaining resources. But, In the final accounting,
its capacity for survival, he argues, is its internally generated information
system which is built up from its molecular structures.24 Second
is its capacity to mutate In the wake of changing conditions, a capacity
Of course, medical applications
of molecular biology are only one of the major changes initiated by this
new discipline. More controversial, and surely more problematic, have
been the new technologies of genetic engineering which present themselves,
in their visionary manifestations, as fulfilling the dream of both nineteenth-century
eugenics and modern medicine to eliminate disuse by altering those traits
that make humans less competitive in a changing physical environment.
According to Jeremy Rifkin, "we are virtually hurling ourselves into the
age of biotechnology." Molecular biology has succeeded in changing the
heredity of the gene, transferring genes from one organism to another
and, perhaps, more powerfully, has synthesized cells through engineering.
Its most recent applications in food technology promise to eliminate the
need for chemical preservatives. Molecular biology is a science
with a purpose and design: it seeks to transform life by recombining DNA
which it has postulated as the core of life. This aim surely violates a
wide spectrum of religious principles but also raises profound ethical
issues. For, even if altering or remaking life were to be judged a worthy
social purpose, the question is to whom are scientists performing these
tasks to be accountable? This issue is in the process of adjudication by law and the courts in the
United States, and the results are, to some, horrifying. The industrial
state Of mind has dominated these discoveries and in the United States,
this means private ownership and control of the means of production
(splicing) and of the product (altered organisms). Indeed MIT has recently
forged an extensive series of arrangements with some major biotechnology
firms. In return for huge grants for research the university has agreed
that the patents for discoveries will belong to the
Two major issues are raised
by these developments. The first is whether we can afford to free the
new discoveries associated with bio-technologies from rigorous public
control, assuming we could identify an appropriate regulatory agency.
The second strikes to the heart of the conflict between modern science
and religion, but has also been framed by nonfundamentalists who, nevertheless,
hold to ethical beliefs that are counter to some types of scientific investigation.
Simply stated, the issue is whether modern science has a right to alter
our relationship with nature, sui generis. On the one side, the
fundamentalists argue against any scientific discoveries that may violate
the word of God as they have interpreted it. For those who would reject
such objections on the grounds that they are "irrational," the alternative
does not imply accepting the new biotechnologies. For if the aim of bioengineering
is to transform our relation to nature, especially our own "nature," then
the claim of science to be free of purpose, to be engaged in some anterior
conception of "pure" science is most suspect. If modern science does not
imply the intervention of supernatural powers, it nonetheless cannot escape
interrogation of its underlying ethical assumptions, neither with respect
to the content of its propositions, which it calls "laws" of nature, nor
with respect to its responsibility for the results of its investigations.
What is at stake here is the
question of entailment. If
molecular biology chooses to link its discoveries in DNA and RNA research
to industrial tasks, are we not justified to ask whether such discoveries
do themselves entail ethically problematic purposes? This becomes especially
relevant at a time when universities, the traditional seats of scientific
research, are making agreements with large corporations and the government,
which provide the bulk of the funds for their work. Under these circumstances,
the claim of free inquiry becomes difficult to sustain. Yet, it would be a mistake to
declare that science and technology are entirely determined, in their
content as well as their uses, by the hands that feed them. Science is a
complex, multivaried activity. Its relation to what it "observes" is never
unmediated: that is, the economic, political, and social environment
in which people "do" science and technology intervenes between
cognition and its object. Alexandre Koyre,
Indeed, difficulties experienced
by partisans of a picture of nature as a unified field have generated
major debates within physics. It is generally recognized by physicists
themselves that few of its discoveries are exempt from the variability
brought to them by interpretation. The facts do not speak for themselves
and, through this door, marches religion and other metaphysical doctrines
as well as philosophy. In Part Ill, I shall discuss the relation between
philosophies and the social conditions that may give rise to them, challenging
Koyre and others who wish to preserve the internalist account of science
by limiting the context of discovery to purely intellectual influences.
Suffice it to mention here that many who speak of nature as a unified
field tread dangerously close to teleology, and even God, as the ultimate
purpose. David Bohm, a theoretical physicist, asserts the formal unity
of all natural phenomena, defining physical laws as tending toward the
absolute through the study of partial, relative phenomena; most important,
he defends causality in nature as an unlimited principle. That is, for
Bohm, order, not randomness, is inherent in nature, the truth of which
can be grasped by science. Although he has no recourse to the supernatural,
Bohm insists that there are "hidden variables" in quantum mechanics that
belie the picture of randomness and indeterminacy put forward by such
thinkers as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.28 In short, the struggle between
mechanistic science and religion reappears in different form within
science itself. As I have shown, teleology is almost respectable in
biology, and one of the great debates initiated by Einstein
(unwittingly) and Heisenberg (with some hesitation) is whether God plays
dice with the universe. Some of the key interpretative struggles
within physics are whether we may posit real time and space, and whether
the intervention of "subjectivity" removes these categories from the realm
of objectivity. More broadly, the question remains: what do we know when
we know something? If our knowl- Social ecology and radical
feminism, two social movements of considerable political and
ideological weight in many advanced industrial societies have, from an
ethical standpoint, challenged the content and results of contemporary
science and technology. Both have their roots in the 1960s and early 1970s
when a general skepticism about the autonomy of science was invoked
because of the subordination of much of the scientific community to
military requirements, and the propping of scientific research and
technological innovation by industry. Yet, the content of their critique
differs from the assertion that the problem of science and technology
consists essentially in the uses to which discovery and innovation
are put. Instead, social ecology and radical feminism have mounted a
fundamental critique of the scientific worldview, especially the
contention that science and technology are neutral instruments that can be
separated from the context in which they are developed. Social ecology
argues that science and technology, by virtue of their subordination to
the interest of the domination of nature, share responsibility with the
state and capitalist corporations for the "death of nature," a metaphor
that describes the increasing danger to life wrought by scientifically
based technology. Rather than blame the growing problem of environmental
pollution merely on the lack of state regulation, ecologists argue that
technologies of boundless domination are leading to ecological
disaster. On the one hand, the idea of nature as pure "object" has been a
normal presupposition of practical physics insofar as it has enabled
nature to be defined by categories of pure extension in the service of
prediction and control. On the other hand, the imperiousness of molecular
biology consists in its eugenic ideology, its eagerness to play God by
altering the distinctive characteristics of our species. Ecologists
explain the rebelliousness of nature as a reaction to human interventions
that disturb its internal relations and its homeostatic relations with
various species of life. The consequences of the industrial logic that
marks contemporary biology can be dangerous to life. But the explanation
given by social ecology for this state of affairs transcends the purview
of social policy. What enables science to engage in life endangering
activities is a belief that humans may insure their future by subjecting
the gene to engineering, just as earlier industrialists exploited
nonrenewable raw materials to advance various ends, including profits and
the promise of liberation
Ecology takes two directions
on this issue. One is to argue from what might be called a historical
standpoint: this is no longer the age of the individual thinker puttering
in the laboratory under conditions similar to those of the artist. While
scientific procedures may be considered quite distinct from those of the
artist (except perhaps the composer of music), the creative side of science
was, at the time of Galileo and even Lavoisier, commensurable with that
of art. Scientific and artistic work requires months, perhaps years, of
drudgery. But the process of scientific discovery in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and even well into the nineteenth, was marked by
individual effort. The scientist, like the artist, worked alone or with
very small groups. Then comes Pasteur, in the later years of the century,
a professor who, as Bruno Latour reports, attaches himself to forces of
industry and the state and makes science a social force.29 Latour's
narrative of Pasteur's claim that he had made a serum that cured an anthrax
epidemic in France was not validated through reproducible experiments
made by scientists but by three institutions possessing the power to certify
such a claim: the scientific community, of course; milk processors and
producers requiring some relief from a costly and nearly devastating outbreak
of the disease among cattle; and the state. Latour's conclusion is not
that "society" influences the course of science, but that the laboratory
becomes a model for social power. Drawing on FoucauIt's thesis
Science lends itself to integration
because it shares, with the rest of society, the teleology of domination
over nature. Its incorporation into industry and the state may be necessary
for the survival of nations, considering the world economic and political
order. But, as these ecologists contend, such a close relationship between
science and the forces of order means that industry has been able to multiply
its productive powers by geometric proportions over industrial production
in the (relatively) prescientific age. Specifically, the transformation
of physical, chemical, and biological knowledge into instruments of economic,
political, and military power is the foundation of our ecological crisis.
It does not matter that the
scientific community ritualistically denies its alliance with economic/industrial
and military power. The evidence is overwhelming that such is the case.
Thus, every major industrial power has a national science policy; the
United States military appropriates billions each year for "basic" as
well as "applied" research. The National lnstitutes of Health provide
vast sums for research that will be transformed into industrial technologies
by private corporations which, in turn, make products for industry and
for mass consumption that often spell disaster for the environment. What
distinguishes this indictment from the criticisms of environmentalists
is the demand by ecologists for new social arrangements that embody a
radically new principle in our collective relationship to nature. Their
demand for an ecologically pacific natural environment threatens the organized
complexity of the marriage of science and industry in every country. The
collective nature of scientific research is made possible only by the
investments of the state and large corporations. Better to halt this form
of science and return to science as art. Under such circumstances, a way
of life would come to an end, for scientific and technological development
underlies rising standards of living in the most industrially developed
countries. Beyond the standard of living is a whole concept of culture
based upon consumption, our notions of the relation- Ecology's critique of science
and technology, while not ostensibly religious, suggests that ethical
neutrality with respect to the results of scientific enterprise is not
justified. The ecological position, in its most sophisticated formulation,
challenges the idea that any form of human knowledge can be separated from
its consequences. If one finds that science has made an alliance with
prevailing forces of destruction to further the interest of domination of
humans, its position as an unassailable, almost sacrosanct discourse
must be overturned. Murray Bookchin, perhaps America's most trenchant and
global ecological theorist, puts the case: In our discussions of modern
ecological and social crises, we tend to ignore the more underlying
mentality of domination of each other and by extension of nature. I refer
to an image of the natural world that sees nature as "blind," "mute,"
"cruel," "competitive," and "stingy," a seemingly demonic "realm of
necessity" that opposes "man's" striving for freedom and self-realization.
. . . This all-encompassing image of an intractable nature that must be
tamed by a rational humanity has given us a domineering form of reason,
science and technology.31 To this image, Bookchin
opposes "an ecological standpoint: nature as a constellation of
communities . . . freed of all anthropocentric moral trappings, a
participatory realm of interacting life forms whose most outstanding
attributes are fecundity, creativity and directedness marked by
complementarity."32 Bookchin
clearly identifies traditional notions of reason, science, and technology
with the identification of nature with the capitalist marketplace (itself
linked to conventional evolution theory, which, as I have noted, is
adapted by Darwin from The explosion of the modern
feminist movement since the late l960s has generated what is perhaps the
richest body of social theory in the last twenty years. This is not to
ignore the extraordinary work of Simon de Beauvoir or earlier theorists
of feminism such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman,33 or the many feminist
novelists whose critiques of marriage and the family were framed within
conventional literary forms. Feminist theory has sought to explore the
position of women in the West as well as the Third World in a great number
of intellectual fields. Feminist historians have sought to debunk the myth
that there is no "her" story in economic, political, and cultural terms.
Since, as Walter Benjamin remarked, history is written by the victors, the
hidden story of women's struggles for equality and escape from the yoke of
male domination has to be told by other women who will explore the
underside of dominant narratives. This history joins the general movement
of social history that has succeeded in uncovering the lives of working
people, black slaves, and other "invisible" groups denied a public
identity by those who are the appointed guardians of official history.
Sociologists and anthropologists have explored the lives of women engaged
in homemaking, and have sought to restore to that activity the name
labor."34 Others have theorized the equal social weight of the labor of
biological and social reproduction -- especially child rearing -- with that
of material production, arguing
that women participate as workers in both spheres but have been
systematically
The attempt to find women's
voice in science, especially in scientific discovery, proceeds according
to at least two major roads of inquiry. First is to assert that women
have participated in science and technology, if not as equals, at least
in considerable depth. The figures of geneticist Barbara McClintock, organizational
and technological theorist Lillian Gilbreth, physical therapist Sister
Elizabeth Kenny, and physicist Marie Curie are invoked only to illustrate
the range of contributions that women have made to scientific and technological
discovery. Citing Erik Erickson's question, "what will happen to science
if and when women are truly represented in it -- not by a few glorious
exceptions, but in the ranks of the scientific elite?" Evelyn Fox Keller
is quick to remind us that despite McClintock's contribution to understanding
the mechanism of inheritance, she is still the exception, and that science
is dominated by men.36 Extensive study of McClintock's difficult
travail as a genuine theorist rather than practitioner of normal science
was meant to illustrate that, as a visionary, she faced resistance from
a scientific elite ensconced in its own assumptions and prejudices against
women, and that the moral neutrality of scientists could not be assumed
despite the possibility that McClintock offered new knowledge. Keller's
interest is to show that sex and gender relations bear on the exclusion
of women from scientific communities and that these relations are deeply
rooted in the ideology of Western culture, inscribed in its most eminent
philosophical works -- that woman is other, is identified with nature,
and is an object of domination. Francis Bacon, one of the formative figures
in the development of modern scientific ideology, was also a key proponent
of the identity of science with male power. Nor was he exceptional. Keller's
reading of Plato's Symposium and
Phaedrus reveals the close relationship of male sexuality and the production
of knowledge. Knowledge for Plato is erotically based, but closed to female
participation37
While affirming that gender
has become a crucial element in the exclusion of women from science, Keller
rejects the idea advanced by some feminist writers that Western science
is male science. In feminist theory, this concept seeks to remove from
Western science the mantle of objectivity by proving that its antiecological
practices -- and, even more significant, the mathematicization of nature
and the scientific This is an example of one
vision of what has become known as the "feminist standpoint." In the
materialist account, the sexual division of labor in which women have been
made subordinate to men in all aspects of their existence -- material
production, social reproduction, especially in their enforced role of
chief, if not sole, child rearer -- has consequences for the character of
knowledge. Knowledge is gender differentiated, according to Nancy
Hartsock, because the sexual division of labor forces women to occupy a
different position in the social structure.39 This position is
not induced by the biological differences between men and women but is,
instead, socially constructed. She acknowledges these differences but
argues that we can never know the degree to which they might influence, if
not determine, the forms of knowledge until sexual divisions are
abolished.
This is the "objectivist" account
of the feminist standpoint insofar as it does not rely for its argument
on the actual consciousness of women. Rather, following Marx and Georg
Lukacs, the structure of Hartsock's argument reiterates the view that
social being determines social consciousness but substitutes women for
the proletariat. Otherwise, one would have to adopt the viewpoint that
knowledge is free of its material preconditions, that there is an unmediated
relationship
Hartsock does not spell out
the implications of such a view for the relation of gender and science,
but her account bears on the production of knowledge. Even though Hartsock
distances herself from culturalist versions of feminism such as those
offered by Merchant, Mary Daly, and Susan Griffin -- all of whom represent
the fall of civilization in terms of the transformation from maternal,
or female, images and myths to those of masculinity -- she adopts their
theory of knowledge while framing it within Marxist concepts of historical
materialism. Her criteria for the concept of feminist standpoint is totally
derived from the presuppositions of Marxist theory in its Lukacsian form,
including the idea that the standpoint of the exploited or the oppressed
makes possible the unmasking of prevalent social relations that produce
oppressive conditions of life. That there is a specifically woman's experience
of the world is beyond question. What needs to be interrogated, however,
is whether this experience produces a feminist epistemology. Like Merchant,
Hartsock reads masculine epistemology into the history of Western philosophy.
Hegel's master-slave dialectic, in which the self is formed through a
"life and death struggle," is ascribed by Hartsock to class and masculine
relations, thus denying its universality. Males are afflicted with dualistic
consciousness; they live in, but are not of, the family. Their formative
experiences are of an abstract character "and a denial of the relevance
of the material world to the attainment of what is of fundamental importance:
love of knowledge, or philosophy (masculinity). The duality of nature
and culture takes the form of a devaluation of work, or necessity, and
then primacy instead of a purely social interaction for the attainment
of undying fame."40 Beginning with a materialist account of
women's position in social reproduction, Hartsock finds common ground
with cultural feminism's attack against science as the realm of the abstract
and the identification of women with nature. But she goes further to link
masculinity to the pursuit of knowledge as an abstract ideal. In this
paradigm, women are concerned with the affective realm, men with the cognitive;
women are consigned to the concrete, men to the abstract. Women are nature,
males culture. Of course, these antinomies are the elements of masculine
ideology. But Hartsock does not stop there. For her critique of the Women's construction of
self in relation to others leads in an opposite direction --toward
opposition to dualism of any sort; valuation of concrete, everyday life; a
sense of a variety of connectedness and continuities both with other
persons and with the natural world. If material life structures
consciousness, women's relationally defined existence, bodily experience
of boundary challenges, and activity of transforming both physical objects
and human beings must be expected to result in a world view to which
dichotomies are foreign.41 In other words, there is a
feminist standpoint which radically transforms the nature of
knowledge. This is so because science derives from its philosophical
presuppositions, which, if we are to follow Hartsock's logic, are rooted
in the conditions of material existence. Hartsock omits discussion of the
concrete knowledge that can be derived from this standpoint and of the
degree to which it would differ from that proposed by the male worldview;
she does not provide a method for arriving at that knowledge. For the
present, we must confine ourselves to the structure of her argument.
Hartsock's critique, unlike those of ecofeminism and cultural feminism,
stands firmly on the twin sciences of psychoanalysis and Marxist theory of
historical change, historical materialism. These are, of course,
derivative of the abstract, universal premises of enlightenment philosophy
of science. For both, the self is constructed out of the manifold
relations into which it enters; it is not a thing, sui generis. Freud and Marx share
the idea that the self is a reified construction masking deeper relations
that are to be uncovered by scientific investigation. In each case,
we are constrained to employ abstract, a priori categories such as the
psychic structure with its three parts (Freud) or the mode of production of
material life with its two elements being forces and relations of
production (Marx). In each case, the domination of nature becomes the
precondition for the formation of self; it is the structuring relation
within which class or psychic relations fight it out. So, if we are
to follow Hartsock, her own theoretical sources are intimately entwined
with masculine forms of knowledge, and the price of appropriating these
modes of knowing must be calculated. Her own description of the categories
of the feminist epistemology are strikingly similar to those produced
by the cultural feminists. Women are concrete; their relation to
nature is continuous rather than dualistic; "dichotomies are foreign"
to their way of
In a future work, I explore
the substance of feminist and ecological claims about science. For the
present, it is sufficient to open the discussion. Religious, ecological,
and cultural feminist objections to modern science differ in many ways.
What unites them is their condemnation of the failure of science to come
to terms with its own social and political commitment. The virtue of feminist
critiques of science is that they try to go beyond the tendency prevalent
among ecologists, environmentalists, and others, to confine their objections
to the uses without challenging the philosophical presuppositions of science
the content of contemporary scientific theories, or the methods of science.
Merchant has provided a critique, parallel to that of the Frankfurt School,
which focuses on the metaphysical foundations of modern science and suggests,
following the lead of Adrienne Rich that the pejorative metaphor of women
as "other" to male reason "divested of the trappings of patriarchy, gives
rise to a distinctively female bond with nature."43 If the
feminist critique of science as a but not the form of reason
is right, it may occupy no privileged position with respect to knowledge
of nature. It is a way of knowing, burdened with presuppositions permeated
with the interest of (male) domination of women/na-
In sum, the mechanical and reductionist
worldview of natural science is under siege from three major movements
that have questioned the gulf separating scientific knowledge from moral
and ethical considerations. Among the weapons of criticism employed by
these movements, none is more powerful than the readings of the canon
of scientific philosophy since the post-Socratics. The evidence of what
Max Black calls "models and metaphors" in the laws of science reveal the
extent to which the categories of myth still pervade science and, particularly,
its inability to eliminate human purpose from the multiple issues surrounding
scientific discovery. To be sure, science itself has
provided the impetus for much of this work. For, as historians and
philosophers of science have tried to demonstrate, recent profound
changes in the scientific picture of the world have reinserted the subject
into scientific discovery, have revived once hated theories, and have
introduced uncertainty about the question whether science "needs" a
teleological hypothesis to explain its discoveries. The reinstatement
of teleology and neo-Lamarckian ideas in biology, uncertainty in physics,
parapsychology and the religious connection to the big bang theory in
cosmology points to scientific communities that are philosophically
and even metaphysically rent. While the public face of science remains
resolutely rationalistic, doubt is creeping in; some scientists have
launched their own movement against corporate and military control over
research, demanding once again a return to the autonomy of scientific
work. And, as was true of physics and biology in the past, the merger of
theoretical science with philosophy has reappeared, even as some
philosophers of science insist that they have nothing to offer the
acquisition of positive knowledge -- their role is merely to clear up
misunderstandings.
Since the relativity and quantum
mechanics debates of the first third of the twentieth century, in which
theoretical physicists openly clashed on questions of interpretation of
the results of discovery, historians,
Perhaps it was the mechanical
correspondence theory of scientific truth employed by Marxism after Marx
that resulted in the deafening silence with which mainstream philosophers,
historians, and social scientists greeted its accounts. When Marx and
the Marxists are discussed, it is only to dismiss them as in Koyre's summary
refutation cited above. The mainstream tradition in the sociology of science,
represented by Robert Merton and the Columbia school, confines its explorations
of the social context of science to studies of the scientific community,
particularly "institutional and ethical factors" such as the
Although social studies of science,
including the older work of Merton, do not ignore Marxism, it is also
true that the historical perspective on science and technology that has
been closely identified with the Marxist tradition is marginal to this
work. As I shall show in Part III, historiographic works on science, following
Koyre and Kuhn, remain embedded in the problem of intertextuality, that
is, the relation of scientific ideas to philosophy, or, more broadly,
the prevailing mentality of a historical period. Missing in these accounts
are concrete studies in the social relations of science that go beyond
the laboratory or professional contexts within which scientists act. In Part 1, I discuss the
theory of scientific discovery emanating from Marx and Engels. As we shall
see, controversies concerning this question within Marxism reveal
differences of interpretation as wide as those in the philosophy of
science and technology. Moreover, as I shall show, Marxism, following
Marx's own ambivalence, mirrors the debates in every discipline concerning
the general question of what constitutes science; the relevance of social
relations to the form and substance of scientific knowledge, that is, to
what counts as knowledge; and, more broadly, the relation of science to
what is called "society."
I follow with an examination
of the Marxist tradition, in its "orthodox" version emanating from the
theorists of the Second and
At the same time, Marxism is
constantly confronted with a disruption not experienced by other perspectives.
This consists in the problem of reconciling its own claim to be a "science,"
in the sense of nineteenth-century physics or chemistry, with its equally
powerful axiomatic proposition that nature and history are constituted
by the social relations of production, and that the production of the
material means of social existence is at the same time the production
of humans themselves (including their mental life). Thus, if social production
is not merely the instrument through which humans survive the vicissitudes
of their external environment but constitutes the multiplicity of their
social relations, Marxism provides the clue to a radically different conception
of scientific knowledge than is contained in its own aspirations. For,
under this axiom, not only science, but Marxism itself, must be comprehended
within the framework of social relations. Both its axiomatic and its theoretical
structures must be understood as aspects of prevailing relations of production.
In this regard, the referent of scientific knowledge, is not only the
object of investigation or, as in recently discovered quantum mechanics,
the observer, but also the social matrix within which modes of thought
are constituted. That most of the leading theorists of science and technology
in the Marxist perspective have been unable to situate their own "paradigm"
reflexively, that is, to understand the extent to which Marxist science
contains ideological elements or, at the very least, is dependent upon
the character of those relations that constitute it, attests to the power
of the enlightenment faith that nature (and human nature) may be comprehended
directly. As I shall show in Part 11, on neo-Marxist science and Soviet
science, even when they acknowledge the social constitution of scientific
facts, the historical relativity of scientific knowledge is attenuated
by a strict adherence to a realist epistemology; according to which the
correspondence of Scientific propositions to the material world may be
established through experimental or mathematical proofs. There are, of
course, exceptions, but these have had little lasting influence on Marxism
as an intellectual movement.
One may notice striking commensurabilities
with this development in the non-Marxist historiography, sociology, and
philosophy of sci-
Nevertheless, whereas Kuhn,
for example, alludes to social
and cultural influences on paradigm shifts in science, Marxism specifies
these in terms of economic, political, and ideological determinants. And,
it is precisely because Marx himself generates categories that make a
social analysis of science and technology possible, that Marxism, despite
its ambivalence, has produced the only coherent social theory of science,
a theory which has scandalized its opponents (for example, Karl Popper).
Only recently, however, have some working in the Marxist tradition been
willing to extend theory to the production of scientific knowledge. Others,
notably the structuralist and analytic schools, have directed their energies
to affirming Marxism 's scientificity by declaring that the social aspects
in its development are of little or no interest, except insofar as they
illuminate the degree to which Marxist propositions conform to canon of
scientific evidence and proof.
In chapters 2 and 3 I examine,
in detail, Marx's theory of science and technology. Except for comments
in letters and his notes for Capital
published as the Grundrisse,
Marx offers no separate theory of science and technology. Rather,
his theory is imbedded, almost coded, in the rich description of the labor
process developed in the first volume of Capital and in the crucial sections
on accumulation. As we shall see, Marx understands science in terms of
the domination of capital over labor. Science is subsumed under capital
in the period of the transformation of the labor process from manufacturing
to modern industrial production. Chapter 4 traces the subtle shift in
Marxist theory of science from its role in production to an epistemological
inquiry closely connected to the status of Marxism itself as a science,
and also considers the role of the productive forces in the transition
from capitalism to socialism, a preponderant concern of leading theorists
of early twentieth-century socialism, who, taking Marx literally, foresaw
that the role of science in the new social order would be even more central
than it had hitherto been in advanced capitalist societies.
Part III traces parallel developments
in non-Marxist discourses on science. Here, we shall see the battle joined
principally at the epistemological level, since those perspectives that
I loosely group under the tentative rubric of liberalism have no specific
social theory of economic,
political, or scientific discourse. In fact, I argue that a distinction
between Marxism and liberalism at the ideological level lies precisely
in the absence of a distinctive liberal social theory of science. Since
enlightenment ideology, especially its scientific and technological modes,
proceeds from the presuppositions of individually driven market relations,
on the one hand, and claims concerning the universality of reason, on
the other, social theory is occluded from this antinomy. At most, liberalism
appropriates conservative communitarianism as a social site. But indigenous
liberalism implies that society is constituted by individuals and that
individual choice is the foundation
Clearly, this conception of
the social derives from possessive individualism. There are really no
"structures" of social life, no relations that transcend individual determination.
More recently, Michel Foucault has advanced the idea of discursive formation
which links social groups to discourses arranged spatially. Foucault's
insistence on the inextricable link between knowledge and power suggests
that various discursive communities are also political/economic formations
and, more generally, that what counts as knowledge is entwined with domination.
Although Foucault is usually catalogued within post-Marxism, there is
no question that the referent is still historical materialism, even if
the primacy of the economic is denied.
However, there can be no returning
to the letter of historical materialist theories as they were articulated
by Marx and Engels. For as we shall see, both are imbued with the enlightenment
ideal of science as somehow resistant to the infusion of the ideologies
produced in course of the production and reproduction of capitalist social
relations. This view is attributable not only to the context in which
studies of language and discourse as sources of ideology were still in
their infancy, but also to the problems posed by evolutionist ideology.
According to this ideology, humans stand at the pinnacle of the natural
order; their unique stature is owed to their capacity to produce means
of subsistence, and thereby to produce their life. In the production of
all aspects of existence, science is the master discourse and Marxism
underscores itself as the authentic representation of mastery in the social
field, and, as metascience, in the so-called natural field as well. At issue in this book are both
propositions and evolutionary ideology: I argue that science is a labor
process like others; that its practices constitute an intervention of a
specific kind, whose contrast with types of social and natural
interventions cannot be arranged hierarchically on a scale of truth or
adequacy; and finally that science is a discourse that narrates the world
in a special way. |