Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

The Map Is Not the Territory

My colleague Carl Janiski, over on the Cyborg Democracy team blog, calls my attention to a mapping of "a coming biopolitical realignment of the blogosphere" by one “TangoMan” at the blog Gene Expression. Here's a snippet from the original piece:
After the realignment I see four subgroupings forming two sides of the new political spectrum. The Progressives will be an alliance of the Libertarian Right, bloggers like Megan McArdle, Rand Simberg, and Glenn Reynolds [ah, yes, righteous intellectual Giants, all] who value freedom and liberty and would be against state intervention in human procreation and the New [aka, "only just slightly"] Liberals, bloggers like Butterflies & Wheels, Kevin Drum, Mark Kleiman and Matthew Yglesias (unsure of Matt after his performance on the Summers flap) whose aim in politics is to use the state to help individuals and who would likely embrace genetic engineering as a vehicle to remediate many social problems and push for government funding for the disadvantaged.

Opposing the Progressives will be the Dogmatists. [One can't help but wonder with whom the author's sympathies finally lie, so subtle and fine are the classificatory nuances brought in play here.] This side of the political spectrum will see a heretofore unthought of alliance between the Religious Right and the Race, Gender & Culture Warriors of the Left for whom political identity is impossible without an enemy to battle against. [Pause here, and drink in the zaniness one more time before proceeding.] The Religious Right will be comprised of anti-evolutionists who simply couldn't tolerate human intervention in what they see as their god's perogative and these bloggers are represented by The Evangelical Outpost, Tacitus, Hugh Hewitt, Donald Sensing and Ben Domenech. The Leftist contingent will be comprised of bloggers like those at Crooked Timber, Daily Kos and Atrios who share the Marxist [?] perspective of shaping mankind through ambitious social and political efforts and can't abide the notion that substantive differences are the result of evolutionary pressures. ["substantive differences"? Hmmmmmmmmm, whatever could we mean by that, I wonder?]


“This breakdown,” (no pun intended, I'm sure, to my regret) writes Carl, diverges slightly from the Technoprogressive / Bioconservative axis that CybDem readers are familiar with, in that it locates the root of the left wing divide not on the man vs. nature spectrum, where the anti-technology environmentalists are at odds with technoprogressives, but on the nature vs. nurture spectrum, where parts of the intellectual left are at odds with evolutionary science.” In a comparable vein the portentiously monikered "Godless Capitalist" is approvingly quoted in the original piece blogviating: “In my opinion, the reason that ‘genetic’ is a bad word in universities today is that it is synonymous with ‘immutable’ and is thus anathema to extreme nurturists. Once genetic engineering is demonstrated to succeed, those who opposed IQ testing and sociobiology out of pique over the ‘unfairness’ of inborn differences will change their positions overnight. The last barricade will have fallen.”

I have to say I consider this whole mapping almost mindbogglingly facile (although Carl’s comments, with some of which I still take strong issue, seem more provocative and useful overall). There are so many things I find myself wanting to say simultaneously in response to this!

For one thing, are we really, truly still refering to everybody even slightly left of center in America as a "Marxist"? Can that word actually have a meaning, please?

For another thing, is it really possible that we are taking seriously an analysis that claims to find a convergence aborning in the anti-enlightenment religious right and the secular feminist and anti-racist lefts?

Carl trots out the nature/nurture distinction (which, by the way, is like a vaudeville bit with whiskers on it at this point as far as I'm concerned), and I agree with him that it illuminates well the project this mapping exercise is up to, but I cannot for the life of me understand what mobilizes curious claims about "genetic" being a "bad word" in our universities, or the conjuration of a cabal of "extreme nurturists" hostile to Darwin (is "Godless Capitalist" talking about Nel Noddings or something?)... Is it that anybody in the so-called "intellectual left" who affirms the relevance of the "nurture" end of things or refuses outright scientistic reductionism is thereby somehow "at odds with the results of evolutionary science"?

For just which serious scientists and thinkers is the "verdict" of evolutionary science a demand for perfectly deterministic and reductive accounts of social, cultural, and psychological phenomena? Isn't that crapola confined largely to the sad disasters in the so-called "Brights" movement? Surely there is still plenty of room among reasonably scientifically literate people for serious contructivist accounts of historical and cultural forms arising in their specificity from complex social causes, broadly (and certainly sometimes not so broadly) bounded but never exhaustively determined by evolutionary pressures?

What planet are people on? Honestly.

It's bad enough to hear people calling neocons "postmodern" somehow just because they lie so much all the time. (I notice, for example, that the blog "Butterflies and Wheels" finds its way onto this little mapping exercise, and I think the stubborn refusal of even many genuinely technoprogressive types to actually engage with the critiques that get caricatured as "postmodernist" is in fact crucially of a piece with the other wongheaded assumptions that drive this profoundly misrepresentative charting of the technopolitical scene, and so please bear with me a moment as I may seem briefly to veer abstrusely off-topic, and then I'll return to the more conspicuous connections drawn in this mapping.)

To digress just a moment, yet one more time, "Postmodernism," to the extent that it means anything, is a suspicion of metanarratives (that's an actual definition, folks, from an actual academic -- Lyotard -- actually affirming the label for once, rather than the usual know-nothing smears).

Pragmatists and others often blithely dismissed by critics as "postmodernists" share a suspicion of the idea that the descriptions we are warranted in asserting as true now will necessarily remain the best on offer, or that descriptions we take as true can be consistently counted upon to be affirmed as true by all who are honest and well-informed because they are underwritten somehow by a reality that has preferences in the matter of how it is described.

The pragmatists and other post-Nietzscheans ("postmodernists" for those of you who really must cling to the cartoon characterization of difficult works you want any excuse not to read) of the "intellectual left" are of course exactly and obviously right about all this, and it is illustrated, among countless other places, by the ways in which religious, market, and military fundamentalists are successfully playing fast and loose with such truths, to everybody's cost, right here, right now.

As far as I know, neither Duncan Black of Eschaton nor Markos Moulitsas ZĂșniga of the Daily Kos has actually ever shown any particular fondness for or engagement with the "postmodern" thinkers or sensibilties together with which they are being coralled in this kooky mapping exercise, but I would really love to be shown an example in which they demonstrate the attitude of which they are likewise accused (and which presumably connects up with "postmodernism" somehow in the paranoid know-nothing worldview that is actually being mapped therein), that they "can't abide the notion that substantive differences are the result of evolutionary pressures."

You won't find any of it, because of course it isn't even remotely true....

Unless, of course, this is the part where I have to listen to how great and misunderstood The Bell Curve is again, or why the brown people really truly deserve to be ruled by the pinker people? Is this the dank moldy coding of "substantive differences... result[ing] from evolutionary pressures" playing out here?

I'm sorry to lug out so predictably the insinuation of racism here (and probably, given the nod to the recent Summers hullabaloo, misogyny) and certainly I'm eager to be disabused of such suspicions, but if that's not the ugly insipid stupidity hovering around this analysis, I cannot imagine what the author is talking about when he discerns hostility to evolution in these writers. I can't imagine the claim is about rage in the blogospheric left to sensibly Darwinian accounts about opposable thumbs.

And it's a real kick to discover that Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are given the blessing in this analysis, while Atrios and Kos are assimilated by the anti-science Borg brigade. There is of course no basis for this in fact. The first two are moderates, the last more consistently radical lefties (and not by much, really, Atrios a touch more than Kos), that is all.

I especially enjoy finding market libertarians locating themselves at the heart of this brave "new" mapping of the technocultural terrain. Market fundamentalists just love casting themselves in the role of maverick, neither typically "left" nor "right" (World's Shortest Most Self-Serving Political Quiz, anyone?) and while they themselves can go on endless tears in that self-congratulatory vein, it's not like anybody else has ever bought that classificatory crack they're dealing, even when Virginial Postrel sexes it up as "dynamism" against "stasism" or in this latest biopoliticizing or (possibly via Zack Lynch and that atrocity exhibition William Safire) "neuropoliticizing" circle-jerk. Nope, market libertarians are on the right. Not to put too fine a point on it, they think the moneyed elites with whom they identify deserve to rule the world. That's why conservatives (who largely believe the same thing, but sometimes also want more specifically only the whites, the males, the fundamentalist Christians, or some pet combination thereof who also happen to be moneyed elites to rule) are pretty much the only people who give the market libertarians the time of day, even if they are chuckling into their sleeves about the impractical uncompromising "idealism" of the market libertarian ideologues whenever the knives come out. Why complicate these things unecessarily, especially when there is clearly so much else for people to learn?

For example, let us take up this term "biopolitics," to which the original piece alludes, as does the Alyssa Ford piece which, in turn, provoked it. The radical democrat and socialist-feminist bioethicist James Hughes is probably the single person with whom I agree most and one of the people I admire most on the scene of techno-politics (as my readers have heard me affirm many times here on the blog), but let's be careful to think through what is happening when we say "biopolitics" begins with him (a claim I very much doubt he would make himself).

Uh, remember Donna Haraway's "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"? 1988? Remember that moment in Harway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985) when she wrote: "Michel Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field"?

Both incredibly influential and still luminously relevant essays appear in Haraway's collection Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. That last quote is doubly interesting here because it is a moment (over twenty years ago, mind you) in which "biopolitics" is figured as an already well-known and fully-constituted field against which she is striking out into altogether new territories to make sense of the political implications of prosthetic practices. But, I suppose, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway don't count, being too radically lefty, "Marxist" despite their contrarian critiques of Marx, in league with the anti-Darwinian fundamentalists despite their forceful and secular critiques of superstition, just "postmodernist" foes of truth, even as they engage on and on in the most serious and committed way with documenting, theorizing, grappling with the practices in which people engage when they produce truth.

1 comment:

Dale Carrico said...

First off, my thanks to Carl for responding with such care.

He writes:

"I said... that parts of the intellectual left find themselves at odds with evolutionary science."

Okay, who are we talking about here? Do you mean "small parts," "sweeping parts," "definitive parts," "marginal parts"? I'm happy to admit there are academicians who don't understand science very well who nevertheless presume to criticise it and come off as silly for their pains. But I assume you mean to suggest that there is a dark cloud over the academy in some deeper, broader sense, given the stakes that seem to be in play here.

Help me concretize this. Do you mean Judith Butler (my advisor and a hero of mine)? Do you mean Donna Haraway (another hero)? Are we talking about Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty, Katherine Hayles, Michel Foucault?

Just who are these clone armies of anti-Darwinian zealots who have so many science types (especially, one has to note, the ones who end up being market libertarians and neoconservatives in their politics) so interminably and enthusiastically up in arms?

Sometimes it feels like the "Butterflies and Wheels" crowd is outraged that every person who reads and approves of Donna Haraway (of whom I am very enthusiastically one) didn't just shoot ourselves in the head over the Sokal Affair.

You know, one can comfortably think people who get too exercised about "memes" and "evolutionary psychology" and "bionomics" are a bit misguided and sometimes rather dim indeed without likewise denigrating the actual science of actual evolutionary biology.

To the extent that the so-called "Science Wars" are just a modest backroom in that sprawling blood-splattered mansion that is the "Culture Wars" is it really so hard to figure out who's who and what's what here?

Sure, there are people who write ethnographically and figurally and otherwise critically about scientific practice who do not know enough to contribute as scientists to the disciplines about which they write (many of them, but not all of them, in interesting and useful ways nonetheless).

This doesn't mean that there aren't likewise many humanistic intellectuals who could do just that, or who certainly understand the science quite as well as any seriously educated layman in many of the disciplines about which they write.

The figures I have named above are all influential public intellectuals (apart of course from poor dead canonized Foucault) to the extent that anti-intellectual America permits even a semblance of such a thing, and they are often explicitly numbered among the rogues in the gallery mobilized in the discourse of those who deride the so-called "fashionable nonsense" of the humanistic American academy.

I know well the work of every single one of them, and when I hear the rancorous uncomprehending things some folks say about them, when I see the absurdly decontextualized snippets many of these so-called "champions of scientific culture" rail about, it is hard for me not to simply assume that much of this hostility to the humanities (so-called) amounts just to a temperamental distaste for the kinds of nuances literary and philosophical intellectuals like to work through, conjoined to a deep defensiveness about their ignorance of work that otherwise doesn't much interest them.

Often a conservative hostility to the (to my mind, scarily) waning influence and dwindling purse of the academy as a cultural location that attracts progressive and democratic temperaments piggybacks on all this resentment and discomfort in ugly mischief-making ways.

I venture to say that every single one of the figures I have named above is profoundly serious, contributing significantly to what deserves to be championed in the enlightenment project, offering up critical tools through which progressives can engage with emerging forms of knowledge-making and resist emerging forms of exploitation in global technocultures.

You write:

"This assessment of a genuine problem on the left is as accurate as it is banal"

Of course one can locate instances to support anything, but I simply disagree with you that this is a genuine or widespread problem, and I think it is only the charge itself which is banal, and, being untrue, frankly amounts to a tired smear. Rather like the one in which corporate conservative shills endlessly whine about "the liberal media."

I think the educated left is conspicuously the most vocal force defending science against climate-change denial and abstinence education promoted by conservatives against the verdicts of consensus science, defending stem-cell research, supporting investment in digital networks, medical research, renewable energy.

If the intellectual left resists the version of technological progress championed by market libertarians in particular it is because we know that technological development that is not regulated to keep it safe will likely be unsafe, not regulated to keep it open and transparent will likely be enclosed from the commons by restrictive intellectual property and corporate secrecy and hence the occasion for fraud and corruption, that those who benefit most from technology will not be the ones who risk most or are harmed most in its development unless those in power are forced to be fair by accountable government.

I think what is criticized as "anti-science" by its self-appointed champions tends mostly to be a perfectly reasonable distate for scientistic reductionism that is altogether different from a respect for legitimate scientific practice and the verdicts of consensus science.

Also, I think much of the work of science studies and technocultural theory and the emerging varieties of techno-ethical discourse is documenting the ways in which technological development guided by and in the service primarily of globe-girdling corporate profit-making exacerbates injustice and eventuates in otherwise avoidable harms.

To the extent that this work provokes adverse publicity, progressive activism, regulation and reform it is disliked by multinational corporate elites and those who serve them.

You point out that broad worries about a humanistic hostility to science "has already been given a book length treatment by Peter Singer." I hope that if I manage to generate a fraction as much powerful analysis and provocation in the service of justice and general welfare in a distinguished academic career I may likewise be forgiven the occasional mis-step or mis-diagnosis or over-reaction.

You write:

"[W]e all know the difference between over-reductionism and good analysis of social phenomena based on historical science. Red herring much?"

I didn't mean to throw out a red herring at all. Color me perplexed. Does Donna Haraway get the Good Housekeeping Seal as "good analysis"? How about Bruno Latour? How about Katherine Hayles? How about Michel Foucault?

Do rhetoricians get to write about science and technology according to their own lights and not get tarred with the brush of anti-science zealotry and hostility to Darwin?

Be careful how you answer. You risk becoming an "enemy of science" yourself with some of these people who you imagine to be nonreductive and open to at least some social, cultural, and literary analyses of science if you say these writers do worthy work. But if they are examples of what you are diagnosing as the anti-science bias of the humanities, then my criticism was in my view anything but a red-herring.

You quickly offer the aside:

"[Ignoring your wild-ass digressions into "postmodernists" and neocons]"

As I am sure you see by now, for me the discussions of "postmodernity" and "neoconservativism" are very much of a piece with the rest of the critique I am trying to puzzle through here.

I know we have a lot of saucers spinning on poles at this point, but I can't help but think that part of reason people on different "sides" of this issue talk past each other is that it is simply so difficult to try to disarticulate the knot of moral, ethical, epistemological, cultural, political assumptions that are jostling against one another when we push one another's buttons here.

At least occasionally it is well worth it to try, nevertheless.

I wrote:

"I would really love to be shown an example ... that [DailyKos and Atrios] "can't abide the notion that substantive differences are the result of evolutionary pressures."

You replied:

"Atrios swears he doesn't -- no idea about Kos."

Are you saying I am right to suspect there is no evidence or are you claiming to have such evidence? I'm not quite clear which it is.

You continue:

"The point of the analysis thought is that those on the left who cannot absorb and learn to apply the insights of evolutionary psychology will be the ones who wind up opposing genetic technology on misguided egalitarian grounds and will therefore be on the same side of the issue as the religious conservatives, even if they get there through different paths."

Well, at least part of the point was to map a terrain through exemplary figures who seem not in fact to advocate the things they presumably represent on the map, suggesting the map is a purely ideological fiction in my view.

I don't disdain "evolutionary psychology" altogether, certainly, but I can't get behind the reductionism that one often hears in those who champion it.

I think this is one of those areas when you would resent being corraled together with such reductionists (though surely you admit they exist?) while I would resent being corraled together with those who criticize without understanding the relevant science (though I happily grant such people exist).

Where our resentments get fraught will be that I discern the default culture of enthusiasm about evolutionary psychology to be reductivist and dismissive of the more humanistic kinds of work of my own professional cohort, while I suspect you perceive many of the people I respect and with whose work I engage in a serious way to be superficial and uninformed in the way some marginal figures certainly are.

In other words our respective investments are coloring our sense of the cultures in which we have found a home, as well as the culture of those who seem most characteristically to denigrate the work to which we are devoting our own energies.

I am living proof that someone who fails to drink the kool-aid of evolutionary psychology can nonetheless support technoprogressive developmental and scientific politics, and my own commitment to universal social democracy (I am hoping and also assuming that such is not what you mean by "misguided egalitarianism") has certainly not distracted me from advocating for morphological freedom and consensual prosthetic practices as radically as almost anybody I know.

You may be happy to hear that I have little difficulty receiving an enthusiastic (if sometimes forcefully but usefully critical) hearing for many of my ideas from the "left intellectuals" of the reputedly anti-science anti-technology academy. I only wish the self-appointed champions of scientific culture who decry the "fashionable nonsense" of my colleagues extended a comparable generosity to the work of the dedicated and interesting and brilliant thinkers to whom I am indebted but whom they find alien and hence, I guess, scary and hence, I guess, worthless.

You concluded your comment by charging that I had provided not a "single legitimate objection" to your case. I cannot know whether or not I have managed anything like one in this response either. But you can be assured that I am doing my level best.