<nettime> science, public policy, and language

[brian carroll <human@architexturez.com>]

 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)
 
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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.

 
                                   *  *  *

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