Another take on science....

[Ralph Dumain]

I noticed something interesting about the family of theorizing loosely 
grouped together as "postmodernism"--had an interesting conversation about 
it back in July 1997.  I wouldn't stake my life on reconstructing my 
argument now, but my position was something like this: Some of this theory 
capitalizes on its ambiguous status as metaphorical/symbolic/mythical and 
literal/scientific.  It's basically a translation of some piece of 
information from its original symbolic/metaphorical form into another 
symbolic/metaphorical framework.  This, I claimed, was a form of theory 
that was neither fish nor fowl, lacking the virtues of both the literal and 
the metaphorical, and furthermore, that it constituted a form of social 
regression, a backtracking from the achievements of modern scientific 
thought.  Well, an asshole grad student suckled on Foucault who happened to 
be in the room got so furious hearing this he butted into my one-on-one 
conversation with someone else to protest vociferously at my cheek at 
making such a statement.  He was writing his dissertation, after all, and 
how dare I utter such horrid uncredentialed words.

I've noticed in my encounters with Lacanians and with the crap I took the 
trouble to read, that the whole ideology of this crowd--and make no 
mistake, it is ideological in the most egregious sense of the word--owes 
its magic to the ambiguous status I sketched (admittedly too sketchily) above.

Once you understand these people's blindnesses and gimmicks it's not hard 
to see through them, and the childishness their pseudo-sophistication 
masks.  This is why I disagree with you about style and civility.  Reap 
what you sow--I say.

I'm not familiar with this Stephan Fuchs: the description of the book on 
amazon.com is rather abbreviated, don't know what to make of it.  Sociology 
of science is another can of worms ... I once let Bruno Latour have it to 
his face, but that's another story.  Horkheimer wasn't a slouch, as I can 
see from a brief glance at other essays in the same book: he confronts 
Bertrand Russell, the logical positivists, and so on.  Given what he was up 
against, I can understand.  The problem I think maybe we can begin to 
grasp, is that, if we put ourselves back imaginatively into the 1930s, 
living in a moment of constricted options, there is just so much anyone so 
positioned could do.  A distinction that needs to be elaborated is that 
there were other ways of conceiving of scientific theory other than what 
the positivists had to offer that if, had Horkheimer had other options to 
draw upon, he might not have had to get locked into a debate with them and 
hence be constricted by what he was opposing, not to mention the 
limitations of the German idealist tradition he drew upon.  I mean, if so 
many of us are in 2003 still caught up in these limitations, should we be 
so harsh about Horkheimer's limitations in 1937 or whenever?  One has to 
have gone through a whole epoch and view it retrospectively before its 
fundamental contours can even be named.  But we here now should develop the 
imagination to discern them, name them, sum up the experiences of an epoch 
with a view toward plunging into the unknown future.

At 01:14 PM 4/10/2003 -0400, Neil McLaughlin wrote:

>I have to admit that I agree with a fair amount of what ralph says on this
>list,
>even though I would dissent from his style of discourse. Style and civility
>issues
>aside (and these are not unimportant issues!), I must say that I also find
>the Lacian approach to psychoanalysis and critical theory unhelpful.   I am
>involved in an interdisciplinary research team at my university on the topic
>of globalization where social sciences meet humanities scholars, and as part
>of that, I made a confession and a new year's resolution. The confession is
>I don't really fully understand a lot of the post-modern critique of
>modernity that i read, and in particular I really don't fully understand the
>Lacanian perspective. My new year's resolution is in two parts: first, I am
>going to try to open my mind to these new ideas without assuming they are
>stupid (either the ideas or the people!), and secondly I am going to ask
>people directly to explain what they mean when they speak in language that I
>don't follow.  So I am asking. Could someone explain what the Lacian
>perspective has to offer for understanding the present dilemmas of modern
>society, the war, the social psychology of modernity and capitalism.  What
>can we get from Lacan, that we could not get from Fromm, say?
>As a matter of historical interest, I have seen letters exchanged between
>Fromm and the American liberal sociologist David Riesman, where Riesman was
>offering to set up a meeting between Lacan and Fromm. Fromm had no interest
>in meeting Lacan, by the way...
>What did he miss out on, if anything? Can someone suggest an answer here,
>without simply repeating the tired old cliches about American ego psychology
>and the Americanization of psychoanalysis by Fromm, Horney and Sullivan...
>
>On the issue of science, I personally think that we need to think far more
>sociologically about science than Horkheimer did. Stephan Fuchs's new book
>Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society (2001) raises valuable
>questions about how we think about science in ways that, for me, make many
>of the old positivist debates uninteresting...
>
>
>Neil McLaughlin