It is hard to imagine a landscape more remote from Russia in the early twentieth century than the West Coast of the United States in the late twentieth century. In place of scarcity, a bright abundance. Some central nodes to the military industrial complex were born and grew there, particularly in the aerospace industry, not to mention the Air Force’s own private think-tank, the RAND corporation. And as California prospered, so did its finest universities, such as Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley, not to mention Berkeley’s rivals at the peak of the public University of California system. Pump enough Pentagon money into this cluster of institutions and the result is Silicon Valley.
It is hard to imagine an organization of knowledge and labor more remote from what Bogdanov was proposing at the Socialist University after the Bolsheviks came to power, or even from that extensive and effective apparatus that the Soviet Union actually constructed after Stalin died. But in its own terms, the Californian military-industrial complex worked. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the dominant forms of power, economy, even of human life, owe their existence to what Donna Haraway calls the techno-science that issued from a handful of research universities in the Cold War years. It was not pure serendipity that brought Paul Feyerabend to Berkeley to teach the philosophy of science in the midst of an astonishing flowering of both pure and applied science. The term techno-science highlights how implicated science is and was in particular moments in the history of technology.
Feyerabend’s grasp of this part of the picture was never strong. Perhaps he was fatally hampered by his endemic hatred of all things Marxist. Perhaps the new world would not reveal its workings to someone so touched by the old. More useful in this regard is the work of Donna Haraway. Born in the 1940s, trained as a biologist, radicalized during the Vietnam War years, and lodging at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980, Haraway is, on her own admission, a product of both Cold War techno-science and the struggle in and against its imperial consequences. Haraway: “I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements.”
If for Bogdanov the catalyst that diverted him from the life sciences was the labor movement, for Haraway it was feminism. Haraway: “Feminists re-appropriate science in order to discover and to define what is ‘natural’ for ourselves. A human past and future would be placed in our hands. This avowedly interested approach to science promises to take seriously the rules of scientific discourse without worshipping the fetish of scientific objectivity.”
There is an interesting tension here, even a productive one. With some startling exceptions such as Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, most strands of Western Marxism taken up by critical thinkers in the United States in the postwar period were allergic to techno-science. Even among radical social scientists of this period, knowledge of, and commitment to, some version of natural science as a mode of inquiry was rare, and where it existed it was not often combined with such a strong commitment to a thoroughgoing critique of the existing form of science.
Haraway’s is a very different intellectual formation to the one that grew out of the influence of Herbert Marcuse, who taught at the other end of California to Haraway, in San Diego, from 1965 until he was forced to retire in 1970. While there are détournements of Lukács and Marcuse in Haraway, they are very much applied to understanding two immediate phenomena: new kinds of techno-science, and the rising social movement of feminism. What formed at the juncture was feminist science studies.
Science? Technology? Goddess preserve us! There are plenty of feminisms that try to take their stand against techno-science from without, as if it had some prior and given claim to speak for nature. Haraway: “Feminist theory has repeatedly replicated this ‘naturalizing’ structure of discourse in its own oppositional constructions.” A useful attribute of feminist science studies is that it tends not to make the assumption that there is something inherently radical about philosophy, or culture, or play or poetry over and against the scientific and technical. It does not take sides in advance within the existing intellectual division of labor. It is, among other things, a practical critique of that division of intellectual labor. “Destabilizing the positions in a discursive field and disrupting categories for identification might be a more powerful feminist strategy than ‘speaking as a woman.’”
It retains a sort of double discomfort, asking critical questions in a scientific zone, and speaking knowledgeably about actual sciences in a humanities zone. This is irritating, and usefully so. Feminist science studies persistently recasts the objectivity claims of the sciences, and does so, to make it worse, without dismissing the scientific endeavor. It is so much harder to dismiss a critic who takes a knowledge practice seriously, who wants not to abandon objectivity, but wants a stronger one, grounded in making a more extensive series of mediating links in the production of knowledge available for scrutiny.
This is irritating in another way as well. Haraway: “Marx insisted that one must not leap too fast, or one will end up in a fantastic utopia, impotent and ignorant. Abundance … is essential to the full discovery and historical possibility of human nature. It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning.” This is what Platonov knew from daily experience. Surplus feeds the body which feeds the soul. There can be no retreat into the superstructures when there is no food, shelter or safety. The production and reproduction of our species-being, whatever it may be, has to be a central concern of any critical knowledge. Given the rising inequality, poverty, and hunger in twenty-first-century California, to which the state has responded by mirroring its great universities with a series of equally great prisons, questions of material need that were so palpable to Platonov return at the heart of the empire.
~~Molecular Red: Theory For the Anthropocene -by- McKenzie Wark
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