Notes on
Aronowitz, S. (1980) 'Science and
Ideology'. In McNall, S. and Howe,G.
(Eds.) Current Perspectives in Social Theory,
vol. one (no publication details, sorry).
Dave Harris
It is common to find in Marxist theory, in
Habermas as well as Althusser, that science is
never the same as ideology, that the bourgeoisie
can never have a science of capitalism.
Marxism by contrast appears as both a science and
an ideology.
Habermas discusses science and ideology in Towards
a Rational Society, addressing Marcuse's
notion that technology simply is domination, the
domination of nature and the domination of man,
and that it emerges through a process of
rationalization in Weber's sense (which includes
its ultimate irrationality). Habermas wants
to criticize the notion of ideology as no longer
the world view of a definite class, but as
containing utopian elements as well. This
implies the development of science and
technology is fully rational, without any
irrational bits, dominated by a purposive
rationality rather than the need to legitimate
political power. However, science is left
without clear ends, with a focus on means and the
collapse of the means/ends relation. This
opens the risk of instrumental rationality as a
form of domination. The base is fused with
the superstructure in modern capitalism too, so we
need new categories for analysis—labour and
interaction. Marxism is anachronistic, the
forces for change are not found solely in
production because we already have new relations
of production—technical ones. It is futile
to pursue ideology critique, and we need to focus
on interaction instead. There are no
internal contradictions in labour any more either,
leading to the admittedly Kantian view that
politics is a matter of judgement or aesthetics
rather than reason. Science is neutral for
Habermas in the sense that of course it involves
domination, but this is a necessary price to pay.
The split between labour and interaction is the
issue, for Habermas, even more important than the
split between mind and body which it
inherits. There is a definite separation
between communicative capacity and labour, because
labour is fundamentally hostile to
communication. As a result, labour alone is
never capable of revolutionary praxis.
Instead, we should aim for a more cultural, mental
kind of liberation, free from technical
domination. Generally, politics cannot touch
technology. However, the notion of
autonomous politics really belongs only to
academics and students who can escape production
for a while. The return of material scarcity
particularly explodes this idealist form of
politics, producing new problems for technology
and for science as legitimate. Analyses like
that of Bravermann shows the specific forms of
domination at work in labour.
Louis Althusser also moves away from the notion of
class struggle and criticizes the ideological
sections in Marx. The anti-epistemological
bits are best developed in Reading Capital,
where Althusser rejects the a priori
notions found in humanism and doubts found in
Husserl and others about how or where knowledge is
possible. Science has overcome practically
the problems of subject/object relations, and is a
social practice that can grasp the real world,
through its critique of ideology, and its
insistence that objectivity is a knowledge
effect. There is still a real world, but no
simple correspondence to it. Instead, the
knowledge effect acts as a kind of proof, linked
to the notion that discourse can develop
systematically, within some usually hidden
system. Ultimately, however, this requires
some guarantee to be offered by a scientific
community, leading to a strange convergence
between Althusser and Kuhn [extended further by
seeing the notion of the epistemological break as
akin to a paradigm shift]. Structures
constrain social relations and ordered discourses
about them, and studies which ignore these
structures are clearly ideological, offering only
imaginary relations. Class struggle is also
ideological, since Marxism is really value
neutral, a structured discourse aiming at
producing new knowledges.
However, this analysis finds it difficult to
explain how new knowledge arises as ideological in
the first place: there seems to be a mechanism
like the role of the unconscious in Freud.
This is recognized in Mepham's analysis, where
ideological discourse is to be deciphered like a
dream. Just as the unconscious has its
defence mechanisms, so does ideology. This
is why we need symptomatic readings of ideology.
It's possible that ideology and science are also
linked in a transhistorical way, for Althusser,
with the gap between them as eternal, not just the
product of particular kinds of false
consciousness. Since there is a structure
linking lived relations and the real, science is
always needed [because commonsense cannot grasp
it?]. This is not unlike Kuhn again, who
also sees the historical and social context as
external to the development of science, but he is
not so naive about the autonomy of science as
Althusser is—for example, he sees progress only in
the eye of the beholder, and Kuhn is at least open
to empirical argument. [There is also an
aside comparing Althusser adversely with Peirce,
who is also much more interested in the mechanics
of the production of truth, 89].
Technology too must be neutral for
Althusser. Technology cannot be seen as a
reification, because no mechanism to reify is
allowed: ideology is found in necessary forms of
social life, and there is no room for processes
like commodity fetishism which mediates
reifications in capitalism. For Mepham too,
the category of value of labour is also
ideological, but it appears real, an example of
something transhistorical, not actually rooted in
the commodity form, but in structured discourses
of appearance (91). We should be involved in
deciphering the cognitive task rather than in raw
social or historical mechanisms, because it is
only possible through cognition that science
triumphs over experience. Only science can
grasp the real, although it is quite rational for
non scientists to assume that the real is just
what appears.
Overall, both Althusser and Habermas are limited
in not seeing the deeper connections between
science and ideology, that science is also
ideological. Gramsci is much better.
He agrees that ideology is necessary to any given
social structure and that it creates the terrain,
rather than just being superstructural. Both
science and ideology should be seen in their
political context, though. Science
transforms the world because it discovers a new
reality, while ideologies are attached to classes:
we are familiar with the classic claims that class
ideologies claim to be universal—but so does
science. We should think of a proletarian
science instead, trying to beat bourgeois science
at its own game—uncovering reality.
Science is a form of praxis after all, and this
should make a proletarian version possible,
interested in, possibly at the service of,
emancipation [I think, 93] [Althusser of course
also argued that we should see science as produced
from ideology by a process of production—the
'generalities model']. Hegemony is the
general theory of ideology, which sets the limits
to the terrain. Althusser is on the right
lines here suggesting that ideology in general is
not just 'produced by the metonymic extrapolation
from the forms of appearance of "real"
relations… that become materialised in
social institutions for the self
reproductive… the ideological
state apparatuses' (93 -4), but it is class
action produces these isas. Class
intellectuals generate a concept or language which
sees such events as natural, and this is what
penetrates the social world.
We can also consider science as a matter of social
relations. If we focus on the experimental
method, it is clear that it is central to
falsification but there are problems: objects have
to be constituted first, and experiments involve a
reduction of variables [Adorno's
point]. So there is an intervention at
the heart of it. The relation with the
object is vital, as we know from Heisenberg.
Scientific procedures themselves therefore mediate
in the experiments. Modern physics now
denies the correspondence between nature and
mathematical regularities [I think this is used as
an attempt to rebuke Althusser's apparent
admiration for science].
In conclusion, we can argue that both science and
ideology are social, and both reproduce
capitalism. The choice of scientific object
is determined by social and political
forces. There is an intent to dominate which
leads to metonymic processes of the kind described
above. All ways of knowing are therefore
ideological, and some sort of intervention is
necessary—in the case of science, it is done on
the basis of purposive rationality. The
nature and form of results are themselves
historically located rather than as they appear,
as neutral forms in mathematics. Scientific
discourse itself generates internal unities and
resolves ambiguities or anomalies. The
science/ideology split is not a matter of becoming
more reflexive, or abandoning presuppositions, and
this extends to Gouldner's critique of
Marxism. Gouldner says that Marxism could
not be self critical if it was to appear as a
revolutionary doctrine in the 19th century [but
should be now]. Science is actually
connected with magic, and only takes on a more
specific and objective form because it is
harnessed to production and domination. The
concept of truth should become one of offering a
critical exposition of the relations that produce
science and ideology in context. We need to
explain appearances: natural science does this
already, and so do critical sciences, but the
issue is one of emphasis and intent.
more social theory
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