brian carroll on Thu, 26 Apr 2001 05:55:14 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] science, public policy, and language |
the following posts is from a 1995 archive from the design-list which is relevant to net.time and its scope and critique of issues. it is by a professor Donald Geeseman, who taught a class on 'science and the state' at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. i was given permission to publish the essay back in 1994 or so. given the nature of things today, it seemed worthwhile to send this out into a new network of ideas to see if any- one speaks this same strategic language, so to speak.... bc (the gender-neutral edits are my own, from 1995) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://lists1.cac.psu.edu/archives/design-l.html Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 06:05:24 CST Sender: "Basic and applied design (Art and Architecture)" <DESIGN-L@PSUVM.PSU.EDU> From: "carr0023@gold.tc.umn.edu" <carr0023@GOLD.TC.UMN.EDU> The following messages with subject A/Science are the transcript of a speech given at a national meeting of biologists in Washington D.C. ____________________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s In a consensual and descriptive sense science is the orthodoxy. As such it enables and sanctifies much action. Broadly construed science informed instruments are the legitimate mode of public action. Within these conditions of knowledge and action governance has trans- formed. All its purposes and their agencies have constituted themselves around the material, conceptual and organizational manifestations of scientific knowledge. All elements of the polity are profoundly affected: the church, its knowledge discredited, is reduced to vestigial respectability; the margin between public and private enterprise vanishes, both practically and theoretically, in the presence of scientific abstractions; political parties become purely structural, as do nation states, their historical rationale no longer being a serious basis for action; universities lose their critical detachment by overt inclusion in the political economy; the rational- ization of law, morality, and even the humanities is sought for in calculi of efficiencies; and the significance of the public is seen as best reckoned in terms of its scientific and professional capital. In this context governance becomes problematic, and the relationship between science and political authority fundamental. Through governance (hu)man's will to power is both articulated and constrained. Science has sublimed that will to power, and the consequences are radical. _____________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .2 * * * Here the market is understood as a technology of process, formerly informed by craft, now by science. It thus becomes obvious why the law in its service to the market must accept efficiency. The state is necessarily limitless taking its agenda, as it does, from science which itself knows no limits. The form of the state is recepticular; it names only the containment of actions, which are exhausting. The power of the state resides in its capacity for action which is sustained by science. The condition of the state is the state of science, as it once was the state of God. Democratic institutions may exist, but are no longer political, being structural instead, and a consideration of efficiency. The polity like the market is seen as a technological endeavor. Power accrues rapidly in the state but diffusely, tending not to aggregate easily, because of the extensive nature of the science in which it is vested. * * * The accomplishments of recent political movements are not anomalous. The environmentalists were almost animist and deficient in theory. Their antique idols were simply mounted down by the state and recast as science and utility and such was the nature of their victory. The rights move- ments have eroded the former heirarchies based on sex, class, age, race and culture, but the hierarchies of science and state have been the implicit beneficiaries of the displaced power. * * * This description is an attempt to take stock of the relationship between science and state. By its nature it is unacceptable in the terms of the state it seeks to describe. Apostasy is so. Its politics are in its language and in the power of naming. Science is the orthodoxy, but it is largely quiet on the question of itself. In a world of artifice, science is the central feature. But how shall we know it, then if not in terms of itself? * * * In a world of imminent and impending artifice, the question of the state must be reopened. * * * __________________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .3 It is perverse that within the state of science, what is called value, is not, in fact, valued, and that what now unacknowledgedly partakes of that meaning and committment are only science and its issue. And it is similarly perverse that just as values are not valued, in that precise same way, are politics not political. * * * The knowledge of the individual takes what legitimacy it has from science; the actions, from technique. Beyond the public content, the individual is conceived as a sacred vessel of appetites and self interest, preferences and opinion, whimsies and caprice. These being insubstantial are seen as behavioral attributes, appropriate for technical adaptation. The sacredness of the individual is not specific, but is anonymous in character; the mathematical agent of some transactional regularities. * * * The objective plane is the space of science. It is, above all, a public space, but existentially apart and quite literally Over There. When a person can perceive the world in that plane, (s)he has become a scientist. When a person can perceive him(her)self in that plane, (s)he has become self consciously public, perfectly anonymous and truly modern; -- the voyeur and the scientist's dream. A state constituted about the objective plane is rationalized around anonymity rather than belief. This defines the dilemma of education. * * * ___________________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .4 * * * Mathematics is a peculiarly internal endeavor that seeks to create abstract systems of foliative knowledge that are perfect in the consistency and the perception of their issue. Positive science is a public enterprise that directs itself at the objectification and reductionist observation of categories of phenomena. It is a process intended to produce intersubjectively valid descriptions of precision and regularity. It is hence rigorously attuned to the detection of error. These separate commitments to perfect knowledge, internal and external, are joined in modern science, and serve as the basis for its legitamacy, thus installing mathematics as its high theology. Sciences treating phenomena that resist mathematical construction are necessarily seen as deficient. Categories that defy objectification and observation are perceived as residual, quaint and of vanishing importance. * * * Art, like morality, having no revealed legitimacy, becomes only a phenomenological category for appropriate study. ___________________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .5 * * * As the state increases in extent it must vanish from view since fewer margins exist at which it is detectable. The state thus finally becomes certain, and can be only proved or disproved in its own terms. When no alternative can be posed, politics is reduced to the question of technical function. * * * Though values in a state of science are phenomenological and insubstantial, they retain potentials for action, and as such are included in a general motivational category to be subsumed by the rationalizations of process where by its prescription they reassume a value of technical terms. * * * To the extent that technologies, even as science informed instruments, are quite literally human extensions, and confine one, as one's own body does, to a relationship with action that is both purposeful and naive, then to that extent the search for critical ambiguities (or ancient falls) in technical practice is doomed to fail. This is not to say, however, that technical artifacts cannot be seen as the god head of the science that informs them. * * * Action now proceeds from technical instruments, the political portion of which is considered processual and concerns the aggregation of unlegitimized commitment. A process, thus conceived, reconciles the potentials for action implicit in unlegitimized commitments, with the capacities of rational means. From what then, does a process derive its legitimacy, if not from science? Invoking the exceptional moral expectations imposed on process does little to resolve the question. In a state of science the appropriate idiom is prescribed. * * * ___________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .6 * * * The press and media are circus; celebratively public, exhibitionist and voyeur, a surrogate discourse for crowds; only political, but with- out political content, thus appropriate complement to the bread of the market. * * * Since Descartes, the revealed word is mathematical. The sacredness of the individual is thus revealed as that of (s)he who counts and is counted. * * * When birth and death are at last fully rationalized, the ordering of the anonymous individual will be complete, and the singularity of life illusive. * * * The irony of the conveyance of rights is that it enables the state's rationalization of the category specified in the conveyance. * * * The irony of environmentalism is that it seeks to rationalize itself, and thus necessarily is transmuted by what it sought to confront. * * * The state projects rational order. Thus, in the state, the goal of education is not to enlighten, but to order and discipline. * * * __________________________________________________________________________ C o m m e n t a r i e s .7 * * * It is insufficient to posit man as an empirical object. Social science to succeed in theoretical modes must resolve the mixed agencies of language. Historicism is a futile endeavor without a theory of language to ground it. In the absence of that theory, social science can only succeed by bringing society to the rational terms of a game. From this economics derives its authority. The state depends upon this success. * * * For the game to persist, the reflexive aspect of language must be restrained. This is accomplished in the state through the critiques by science of committed knowledge, and by the markets universal transmutation of commitment into statistical ordinalities, the net result of which is to purge the language of any competing codes of legitimacy, but at the expense of a debauching of the language. The disciplines are well named and serve as the security forces of the state. Synthesis and politics are hostile to their partitions, and are hence heretical. * * * Thus in its final rationalization, the power of the state is not physical. War, in violating that expectation, is perceived as a process- ual taboo. * * * There is a scene in a wax museum at Tours in which a heretic is being horribly tortured in the presence of spiritual and secular representatives. The internal context of the scene is one of presumed goodness. It is hauntingly reminiscent of a modern surgery in context- ual organization, and manifestly revelatory of the terms in which power is rationalized, and expository of the social sciences. * * * _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold