WE COME OF AGE when at last, after the protected dreams and squabbles of childhood, we open the door upon the world and see it without illusion. Or so we like to imagine. Actually, all we see is that fragment framed by the door. Call the door a theory. Inevitably we are discontented by the narrowness of the frame, no matter how magnificent the artisan's work.
For the past several thousand years (arguably), and certainly for the last three hundred, it is scientific inquiry that has built the best portals for us: doors opening into an ever more spacious and beautiful universe, a cosmos that dwarfs the tawdry cellars offered by previous carpenters.
The Milky Way, hundreds of billions of stars huge and bright as our own sun, whirls us through a fog of impalpable dark matter. Its ultimate origin, as scientific theory and evidence join to tell us, was a mysterious catastrophic collapse of vacuum into energy somewhere between eight and fifteen billion years ago. 'Viewed from so cold a perspective,' astronomer Timothy Ferris has declared, 'we may esteem ourselves less but will know ourselves better.' Do we wish to hear this? (I rather doubt it.) Would it not be preferable to maintain, fashionably, that all theories are no better, that is, no 'truer' than instruments of political power, each portrait of reality as arbitrary and relative as a reshuffled deck of cards? (Absolutely not.)
The position I recommend is not without paradox. While the great high theories of science prize, above all else, the principles of symmetry and invariance (misleadingly dubbed 'relativity'), our universe of experience is plainly a ferment of ceaseless change. What have those austere principles to do with the restless human heart, the brimming human eye that gazes with wonder and perhaps indignation at darkness lit by distant stars?
The answer is startling, and gratifying, to anyone who yearns for the secure beauty of lawful order but craves disobedience and chaos. Where did the boundaries of this paradoxical world arise? 'Quite possibly from the breaking of cosmic symmetries at the moment of genesis,' says Ferris. 'We look out across a cosmic landscape riven by the fractal lines of broken symmetries, and draw from their patterns metaphors that aspire to be as creative, if not always quite as flawed, as the universe they aspire to describe.' To many textual theorists from the humanities, Ferris' words will tease the imagination without satisfying it, for those terms are drawn from exact mathematical discourses closed to most of us. Precisely what is meant, for example, by 'fractals'? By 'broken symmetries'? While it is possible to gain a sense of these profundities at second hand, each groping effort brings home the deep truth that we non- scientists dwell as dispossessed aliens amid an intellectual starscape that has been expanding feverishly for centuries. Scant keyhole glimpses available to clever, inquisitive ancient Ionians have torn explosively. Our universe is immensely greater than before, a spectacle gifted by today's wonderfully powerful theories and instruments.
So the theories of science (clambering upon each other's shoulders, or in ferocious contest) are potent, imperial, seemingly cold and inhuman, doubtless impossibly difficult for the lay onlooker. What, then, of that alternative path of textual inquiry known today simply as theory, the web of deconstructive and poststructural ideas and practices we associate with Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, their many and diverse followers?
Does this theory of the humanities, the study of cultures, stand free of the shadow of science? On the contrary, it tends to mimic the intellectual juggernaut that loomed into view some three hundred years ago and took command of our culture. Is this, then, why we begin to feel so piercing a discontent with turn of the millennium theory? (And we do feel it, if we are honest, if we keep our eyes and ears open.) It is a discontent as poignant as the bruise hugged by nineteenth century churchmen when the illusion of deity departed their emptying chapels. Weirdly, the chapel itself is filling again, in this moment of balkanised postmodernity, with clamouring, confused, simple and brilliant voices raging against the silence of heaven.
Of course, the heavens are not silent. The theories and practices of science fetch to us for the first time the billion year bellowing of the stars, their nuclear incandescence, their long cycles of ignition, daylight, golden afternoon, and endless fall into darkness. Meanwhile the deconstructive theory of text in the age of science and technology moves across the gaps of our century like a peevish ghost, a disgruntled divinity, across waters that move only with its own breath. (Yes, but that breath is from human lungs, and we love the little illusory worlds it creates, for in space no one can hear you scream...or speak your love.)
It is conceivable that critical theory is no mere envious mime of the successful theories of science, as many doubters allege all too easily, but rather the revival in high culture of that conceptual agility which held primitive cultures in bond. Only in our world has the empirical become a determinant of the final instance. Only for us, that is, are raw facts of any profound significance. For a million years it has been social truths that constrained and guided our conduct, and while the truths of science are located and deployed by social beings for social ends, they are crucially independent of human wishes. Postmodern theory would reverse that tendency, re-instating the priority of the human, the freely interpretative, over the distant, untouchable fire of the stars, the all too touchable fire of fissioned atom and polluted air.
Pre-scientific cultures 'which do not allow any single criterion to dominate (so that nature is never endowed with a veto)', social anthropologist Ernest Gellner tells us,
That lost coherence, Gellner adds,'was thematic or stylistic rather than strictly logical'. Its reasoning did not follow the severe forms of logic but of strands, complexes of hetero-geneous elements (priestly sayings, warrior duty, the turn of the seasons, birth and death) so interwoven that practical epistemology was a function of the moral order.
Elsewhere, Gellner has argued persuasively that in our century psychoanalysis is the most successful instance of this archaic approach to human explanation. It is not impossible that, on a larger scale still, critical theory, scornful of the claims of reductive, empirical science and its baleful data, is the intellectual return of that repressed hunger for coherence even if that yearning is expressed, paradoxically, in a discourse feverish with multiplicity, fracture, ingenious dissemination and pun.
Alas, the power of science and its imperial claims is not so magically dispelled. Science does not, finally, function by spells but by equations accurately mimicking in a simplified fashion, it's true, the grammar of nature. So even as we embrace the supposed liberations of theory, we are nagged by the very ease of its rhetorical victories, by its institutional engulfment in the teaching and criticism of literature, the visual arts, media studies, architecture, political and social explanation nagged and dissatisfied, indeed, by its fatal discontents.
A key crux in recent years, if only in public relations terms, was the spoof cruelly perpetrated by Professor Alan D. Sokal 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' upon a notable post- structuralist journal, Social Text. Sokal immediately blew the whistle on his own parody, a monstrous collage of good sense, gibberish and fashionable sound bites. The paper's second paragraph presented the mock claim (supported by many authentic quotes from postmodern theorists) that science is now known to be just a matter of local opinion, that the 'physical "reality"' it studies is 'at bottom a social and linguistic construct'.
His method was killingly effective. 'Like the genre it is meant to satirise...my article is a mélange of truths, half truths, quarter truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever'. The real scandal was his poststructural editors' failure to subject this comical potpourri to suitable peer review. Experts in quantum gravity (a very difficult field barely in its infancy) would have laughed aloud. But so would most competent scientists confronted with Sokal's self-confessed 'appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies;...confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words'.
Little wonder, as Sokal notes despairingly, that most of his fellow citizens have no way of telling scientific textuality from superstition, of distinguishing well grounded knowledge from wishful New Age claptrap. Two years earlier, in their strident Higher Superstition, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt had picked at some of the doleful ways in which snooty, up-market ignorance still illustrates C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' the ruinous split between the sciences and the humanities. Their assault was taken by its victims as nothing more troubling than a reactionary blast against the forces of radical change. Sokal's success proved that this was too limited an interpretation, too comfortable by half. His blackly comic composite stirred sense and nonsense into a sticky paste, which his target audience happily swallowed, proving themselves as carelessly ignorant, in their way, as the forty-two percent of those polled in the USA who didn't know where Japan is, as the late Carl Sagan reported despairingly, and the thirty-eight per cent who did not know what 'the Holocaust' referred to.
Or is this too severe? Co-editors Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross justified their blunder thus: they had simply 'read it more as an act of good faith of the sort that might be worth encouraging than as a set of arguments with which we agreed'.
Stanley Fish, pre-eminent theorist of the 'interpretive community' as the key to relativistic meaning, came to their defence, swiftly denouncing 'the improbability of the scenario [Sokal] conjures up: Scholars with impeccable credentials making statements no sane person could credit. The truth is that none of his targets would ever make such statements.' Fish added:
In significant measure, however, this defence evades the issue.'Granted,' Sokal admitted, 'not even the Social Text editors would deny the existence of an external world, or claim that "physical 'reality'...is at bottom a social and linguistic construct''. The fact remains that they published an article saying exactly this in its first two paragraphs.' The reason they did so is that, pace Professor Fish, the discourse of poststructural analysis lends itself utterly to that way of reading the world.
I write from an adjacent angle to the debate on theories of 'how to read', a perspective deriving as much from close attention to the discourses of science (especially as these are translated by working scientists for the non-scientific reader) as to those of the humanities. Arguments against thorough going cultural relativism, such as those advanced by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar in A Realist Theory of Science and subsequent studies, seem to me as salient to the status of theory as any refutation of Saussurean linguistics in favour of its post- Chomskyan replacements.
Yes, scientific theory and practice are often erroneously regarded by working scientists as entirely 'objective', although counter-intuitive in their content; see, for example, embryologist Lewis Wolpert in his revealingly entitled The Unnatural Nature of Science, and physicist Alan Cromer, in Uncommon Sense. Yet it is precisely by confronting scientific theory's socially constructed aspect that we best estimate the standing of 'theory' in theory.
Is language really arbitrary, or does it map (however inadequately) real partitions and processes in nature? If language is arbitrary, is mathematics also? Are historical sequences haphazard as well as contingent, or might human affairs resemble the weather, fairly predictable at close range, chaotically random in the middle range, but orbiting within the envelope of a determinate attractor (as a complexity theorist might suggest)? Must all 'grand narratives' of the humanities be discarded, Darwin, Marx, Freud, the dead white males, or might a parallax view from science suggest another way of perceiving world and habitus?
Those are some of the unfashionable questions I find myself posing these days. The answers I find myself canvassing might surprise devotees of theory familiar chiefly with the world according to Derrida, Foucault, de Man. They certainly surprised me.
The analytic technique I've struggled to employ in several recent books on discourse theory (The Architecture of Babel: Discourses of Literature and Science, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction and, most recently, Theory and Its Discontents) is grounded in the view that, to a much larger extent than is usually admitted, the reader really does construct the argument as well as the text. So your evolving argument, as you read my words, might well differ from 'my' own text and the argument I thought I was advancing.
Hence, I frequently urge my case by presenting evidence in the form of collage, sometimes scathingly rather than coolly framed, displaying exemplary citations alongside each other in a rhetorically heightened context which presses to a conclusion without feigning to 'prove' it. After all, it is generally agreed that the largest part of a 'proof' is structured into what one might term the generic and epigeneric contexts of construction and reception, and rather less in the force of 'logic' and 'argument' of what poststructuralism denounces as the phallocentric, logocentric varieties systematised by the ancient Greek rhetorician/philosophers. Nor is this unsettling view held only by poststructural theorists. It is now a commonplace of cognitive science accounts of the psychology of thinking.
While I certainly advance a case, and would hope that readers are able to reconstruct it successfully, I am attracted to the vision of a hypertext accessible only on computer, as yet unavailable despite stumbling pioneer efforts on the World Wide Web. In such hypertext, every individual text literally 'exists by virtue of its links with everything else, and those links are constantly being forged and broken', as Benjamin Woolley puts it in Virtual Worlds. 'Such links, through indices, quotes, references and notes, are already part of the way we use literature; in [true hypertext] they will be more sophisticated.'
As well, since my case is no more or less contrived, constructed, relative and arbitrary than any other, I sometimes use methods customarily restricted to fictions recognised as fictions (sometimes 'metafictions') but rarely applied to those fictions which the academy traditionally underwrote as logical, reasoned argument from publicly agreed evidence. That standard logic of argument, endorsed by historically contingent custom, may no longer be taken as self-evidently valid.
can and generally do help engender a coherent vision of the social and natural world. They produce a cosmos in which the natural and the social are not sharply or systematically distinguished. The tendencies of societies, especially small and simple societies, to have reasonably coherent visions of the world, to inhabit such a 'cosmos', has often been noted, not without envy. The passing away of such a coherent vision in complex and unstable societies, and its replacement by an impersonal, law abiding, indifferent Nature, is a source of much recent romantic regret, poignantly expressed. (Plough, Sword and Book: the Structure of Human History)
What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed fashioned by human beings which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.
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