Notes on the Social Form of Science
Book report on like 20 pages of Mészáros's SS&FoC Vol. I nothing much to see here
Since René Descartes, as István Mészáros argues, the pursuit of science as the “mastery of man over nature” has arrived at the expense of the “conscious mastery over the material and human conditions of social reproduction” (2010, p. 28-29). Insofar as it retains this legacy of Cartesian “practical philosophy,” modern science has become not simply indifferent to the “social dimension” of human existence but constitutively excludes any “possibility of antagonistic confrontation” with the contradictory structure of social reality: all “legitimately feasible objectives of human activity must be conceptualized in terms of material advancements through the agency of the natural sciences” (ibid., p. 29). Why has this been the case? Why did science constitutively separate its ‘objective’ claims from the problem of their social mediation early on in the modern era, only to thereafter reconstruct itself as gatekeeper of the exclusive path toward social progress? Mészáros contends that, through this process of negation of social mediation and the subsequent negation of that negation, the organization of bourgeois society eternalized itself in the identification of any and all social improvement with the “agency of the natural sciences.”
With the foundational conflicts of bourgeois society effaced, any attempt to mediate this society through science—as best epitomized, for Mészáros, by the work of Max Weber—entails the reification of the political domination of the bourgeoisie as the “scientific administration” of the state. The objective of this scientific administration, in short, is never to address the roots of social conflict through an articulation of how a society really produces and reproduces itself. Rather, its objective is to temper the behaviors of “individuals”, the subjective formation of which has already long been taken for granted. That is, the task of scientific administration of the bourgeois state is to produce consensus among atomized, self-contained, and self-present citizens in more or less discursive conflict over their independently held moral, political, and/or cultural values. That conflict is rooted not in differences of “valuation,” as Mészáros says, but “fundamental differences of [collective] interest, hence calling for a radical alternative to the established order,” falls entirely out of view in the bourgeois science of society (ibid., p. 33).
Now, it is one thing to perform ideology critique and illuminate the “apologetic and manipulative” uses of science and technology in the pursuit of class domination. This can no doubt be clarifying—to demand that the formalisms of bourgeois ideology face up to their devastatingly real social content. But it is an entirely different task to expound upon the “untranscendable structural limitations of this science-oriented horizon” which presently impede social transformation. As I see it, what is at stake in the latter is not simply a questioning of the ‘capitalist use’ of science, to riff off Raniero Panzieri, but, more precisely, the very tenability of the self-activity of the proletariat to assume, contra political economy, a “science-oriented horizon.”
Now, I don’t have a good answer to this question. But the problem seems to me a significantly thornier one than can be resolved, as socialists tend to think, merely by redirecting existing scientific practices (by which I also include existing methods, concepts, and claims) away from the production of value and toward the production of social need. To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting this is on account of some hidden fallacy inherent to current scientific practices. Rather, the difficulty here concerns 1.) the history of the formalization of scientific practice during the modern epoch and its role in the alienation of workers from scientific thought, and 2.) the more general fact that our concept of “social need” has itself become so thoroughly saturated with value as its fundamental criteria, precisely given the intertwinement of the “practices of the natural sciences” with the “dominant productive activities” in our image of social improvement. Capital, put differently, tends to dictate not simply the direction of scientific advancement but has come to, in a historically unique way, ground the identity of social development as such with scientific advancement as such:
It is precisely this coincidence of the two fundamental interests of productive expansion through science on the one hand, and ideological conformity to the requirements of envisaging ‘social improvement’ only in such materially determined and socially containable terms on the other—with its powerful impact on helping to perpetuate the rule of capital—that makes the ‘standpoint of political economy’ science-oriented throughout its long history. (ibid., p. 35)
But of course it is not just political economy which assumes a science-oriented horizon. It does not take a particularly critical hermeneutics to recognize how much science has been exalted by both capitalists and socialists alike, and, moreover, how its complicity in upholding and reproducing various social antagonisms—not to mention its fundamental role in planetary ecological devastation—has so often been reduced to questions of its ‘improper’ ‘use.’ While the meaning of ‘science’ in either account may be vehemently contested, the role of science in both is to serve as an Archimedean viewpoint purged of any contaminating social mediations, a realm of “objective truths” qua natural and naturalized social phenomena and, more specific to the socialists, “material interests.”
As stated in my previous post on Hans-Dieter Bahr, the situation of science in bourgeois society is directly analogous to that of machinery. Marxists and industrial capitalists mime each other in their instrumentalist assessments of machines, as if the social history of the production of the various means of labor was entirely abstract from their potential ‘uses’. As I explained in that post, following Bahr and Alfred Sohn-Rethel we can see that this is an idealist approach to machinery—while one must avoid some sort of blunt mechanical determinism in assessing the latter, wherein machinery would be posited as merely the practical effect of bourgeois ideology, one must also recognize that machines are not neutral, standalone things independent of the world in which they are embedded but are key components of the historical process of production. Machines must therefore be understood for the contradictory relations of production concretized in their (again, as Bahr writes) “inner value-form.” Likewise, then, if we are to spare science of the entirely abstract and profoundly anti-social confines of ‘social improvement’ under capitalism—and thenceforth not simply, as the Soviets did, repeat them under the banner of a quasi-socialist productivism—we must take more seriously the question of the social form of science and, in particular under capitalism, the social form of science which denies its sociality and its historicity in abstract and ‘objective’ formalisms.
Now, again, neither scientific practices nor technologies are reducible to bourgeois ideology; rather, the point is that their conceptual and practical entanglement with the latter presents an immensely underappreciated problem. As Mészáros demonstrates, an adequately Marxist critique of science does not signal its abandonment but rather takes it to the limits of its application within capitalist society in order to then force a questioning of scientific practices. Again, then, what the elaboration of the social form of science unveils is its foundational limit: that it constitutively evades the problem of the structural antagonisms inherent to capitalist society. Modern science removes itself entirely from the question of class conflict insofar as it is formalized as ‘natural science’, thereafter addressing society from the assumed standpoint of absolute neutrality:
The ideological corollary of this shift is to transfer the problems and contradictions of real life from their painfully real social plane to the legislative sphere of formally omnipotent reason, thereby ideally ‘transcending,’ in terms of universally valid formal postulates, real conflictuality; or, when the earlier envisaged general supersession of contradictions and antagonisms is no longer plausible, to transform them into formalistically dichotomized and ‘ontologically untranscendable’ conflicts of ‘being as such,’ as in the case of modern existentialism. (ibid., p. 38)
The bloody, brutal history of scientific racism is alone sufficient to demonstrate the absurd lengths to which practitioners of modern science have gone to evade their own complicity in social domination—and, to be sure, that scientific racism has been since discredited merely evades rather than answers the question of the historicity of science. If science is a practice not merely of discovery but of production, then it, like all productive practices, depends upon specific social determinants conditioning its possibility. It therefore stands to reason that the social forms of scientific practice must undergo deep interrogation and subsequent transformation, should its identity with capitalistic ‘social improvement’ be sufficiently addressed.
As a social practice, science is informed by the totality of social and natural relationships within which it is embedded and which change over time. The historical transformation of scientific practice toward formalism (which identifies pure, mathematized formal claims as ‘objective truths’) is therefore neither coincidental nor guided by some transcendental purpose of scientific pursuits. It is reflective of broader changes in the determinations of the function, purpose, and employment of science within productive activities.
Once again, this is best observed in the application of science, now purified of its social content, to the administration of bourgeois society. As Mészáros writes, the increasing abstraction of human relations into “reified material and formal connections,” whether as espoused by political science, sociology, or any other social science, are “simultaneously mediated and obfuscated by” the social hierarchies of capitalist institutions, and most especially by the institution of private property. The “scientific administration” of land, as the key example, entails its rationalization in formally equivalent and equally alienable land parcels, the uneven barriers to access and ownership of which create new sorts of differences among the population which are subsequently negated by this abstraction. Propertization in this sense is one of the most important formalistic practices for the masking of social inequality behind the formal appearance of equality.
But the concept of property does not merely concern how land is to be distributed, nor does property refer only to the means of production more generally. Capitalist states also politically organize themselves in and through relations of property. When one investigates liberal-democratic principles not merely as abstract ideals but as real processes, it becomes readily apparent that practices of ‘equalization’, ‘liberalization’, and ‘universalization’ in bourgeois society do not directly concern real humans but rather the management of properties. Even at its most ‘critical’ and ‘self-reflective,’ the bourgeois science of society adapts this foundational philosophical basis: the primary objects of study in the social sciences are formal identities, either legal, ethnic, cultural, or political, which are essentially social titles held by and in individual persons; and, to the extent that the self-knowledge these identities produce prescribes any social improvement at all, it concerns improving the means by which these formal categories can be mediated, a question of greater or lesser tolerance for their separately ascribed and statically held desires, values, aptitudes, and so on.
At all costs, what is clear is that the “radical comprehensiveness” of the bourgeois science of society cannot “undermine the viability of a social strategy. Only if there is a contradiction between its stated objectives, on the one hand, and the necessary practical mediations as well as their appropriate time-scale, on the other, only that can constitute the ground for a justifiable critique” (ibid., p. 41). Hence, to demonstrate the “untranscendable structural limitations” of the “science-oriented horizon,” one must demonstrate clearly the irremediable contradiction between the ostensible objectives of bourgeois ideology and the mediations with which it sets out to reach them.
As Mészáros points this out by returning to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, wherein Marx recognizes that the class antagonism foundational to bourgeois society exposes the absolute limit of its existing social mediations, namely, the possible mediation of state and civil society in the “universal class” of civil servants: “If civil classes as such are political classes, then the mediation is not needed; and if this mediation is needed, then the civil class is not political, and thus also not this mediation […] Here, then, we find one of Hegel’s inconsistencies within his own way of reviewing things: and such inconsistency is an accommodation.” As Marx concludes, the very basis of Hegelian mediation of state and civil society is no real mediation at all but the real chasm of class struggle: “Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence. They have nothing in common with one another; they neither need nor complement one another.”
Accordingly, socialist transition is not and cannot be a question of simply honoring the ideals of liberalism by buttressing them with a fresh base of practical mediations adequate to their realization; rather, social transition means completely reconstructing the social and ecological relationships which the pursuit of those ideals have devastated. Relations between one another, between humans and nature, between individuals and collectives—all of these must and will be reconceptualized as consequence of any truly revolutionary transformation of socially productive and reproductive practices. What must be recognized is that this is no less true for scientific practices, in their presently formalistic character, which will likewise have to acquire an entirely different social form than the abstract formalism with which they have become increasingly accustomed since Descartes at the dawn of the modern period.