Sorry wdmn but I disagree your first sentence. Most natural sciences and also many other sciences are not politicised in my opinion. e.g. Physics?
Perhaps you mean that much research is starved of funding through governmental policies.
Nanning, I don't want to derail this thread too much, but I will offer up a response that I hope will be stimulating to some, while far from complete (though far too long).
Yes, not politicized means exactly that we don't think of them as political (and this is itself a political movement). We've depoliticized science for at least 4 centuries. It is a fundamental part of "modernity" that we think of economics, politics, science as separate spheres, just as we think of ourselves as both part of and separate from nature: at once subject to its laws, which we learn with science, while also free to organize ourselves as we deem fit (cultural animals), so long as we remember that the two realms must be kept distinct!
What is politics? Or, a more manageable question, "with what does politics concern itself?"
Isn't politics the way in which we organize society and the state (the polis)? The systems and methods we set up defining power relationships within the polis, which voices will be heard, who will have the right to make decisions (i.e. who is sovereign)?
When we think of science as being apolitical we usually mean that it is transcendent, absolutely sovereign, and so we want to grant it a voice that speaks with absolute authority that must be respected no matter your ideology. So then what political role do scientists have within the polis? Are they disinterested, neutral, dressed in beige, as inhuman as their facts, only concerned with Truth and nothing else? Are they priests of nature who speak for it wielding their instruments as the shaman wields a drum, and who must be obeyed; i.e. to which we are subject (political subjects)? Are they agents of the state, asked to unravel secrets of nature in order that the polis might achieve more power (as was done with the Manhattan project, for example)? Are they dangerous heretics threatening the democratic order by speaking with a voice that tramples the will of the people; are they -- as some climate deniers will insist -- corrupted agents, seeking power and money through the manipulation of data and instruments? Is RCP 8.5
just a scientific model, or is it a rhetorical device designed -- as all RCPs -- to be used as a tool of persuasion? Do scientists really not care, are they "neutral" sitting on the sidelines, with no skin in the game? Or do they hope that their work will wield power, that it will be taken seriously, as Fact?
No matter how we choose to answer these questions, the work of the scientists bears on the collective: from the way that we discuss things, to the way the our economy functions, to the way that we have sex, and so to the way that power is distributed.
I can think of no better example than the physics of greenhouse gasses to draw out this point. It turns out that there has been a great divide over whether our measurements of these gasses, and our understanding of the physics of how they work, should bear on the organization of our society. It turns out that in order to keep making the measurements and gaining insight into the physical responses of components within the climate system (such as ice sheets), the scientists need funding, that one can as easily smash the equipment by defunding the scientists as by storming their laboratories. The scientists, it turns out, are a branch of the government, and their efficacy depends on whether or not they recognize that their struggle for (the) power (of their work) is a political one. Even scientists could find their heads in the guillotine (figuratively or literally).
Does the non-human compound CO2 have a force, a political voice? Yes, but is it that of a backbencher, or that of a king? Or something else altogether?
I would suggest that right now many of our poleis have descended into a state of a cold civil war (that could warm up quite rapidly in some instances). Our social contracts are torn to pieces over a disagreement over what sort of political agents the scientists and their facts are, and to what extent the voice of the people is to be subject to them. Too much, it appears, was left out of our constitutions.
If anyone wants to read more on the subject, I recommend the book, "We Have Never Been Modern," by Bruno Latour, which is available here:
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Latour_Bruno_We_Have_Never_Been_Modern.pdfFrom that text:
"every ethnologist is capable of including within a single monograph the definition of the forces in play; the distribution of powers among human beings, gods, and nonhumans; the procedures for reaching agreements; the connections between religion and power; ancestors; cosmology; property rights; plant and animal taxonomies. The ethnologist will certainly not write three separate books: one dealing with knowledge, another with power, yet another
with practices. She will write a single book...
...
Native Americans were not mistaken when they accused the Whites of having forked tongues. By separating the relations of political power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason and reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire."
Show Posts
2 Likes
