All That Is Solid

Lyotard, "de-realisation", and William Gillis's "Did The Science Wars Take Place?" (iv)

In my first post in this series of reflections on William Gillis’s “Did The Science Wars Take Place?” I set up, fairly deliberately, a call-back to Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, which I am now going to exercise. I did this by singling out narrative as a focus of concern, rather than “discourse” or “language”, thereby shifting attention away from the “linguistic turn” more broadly, or what Badiou calls “idealinguistery”, and towards a particular type of language use with particular purposes and effects.

Lyotard’s account of postmodernity turns on an understanding of narrative as performing the function of legitimation with respect to truth and social authority. The claim isn’t “everything is stories”, but “teleology is an artifact of narrative, and teleology is what gives coherence to the kind of social project which pictures knowledge as developing within the context of inevitable progress towards an Ideal end”. The postmodern condition is then the condition under which such projects founder, and their projected ideal coherence of knowledge, underwritten by teleology, splinters into distinct regimes of truth-seeking and truth-asserting activity. There is no longer a general suturing of aesthetics to science and politics under the general aegis of human emancipation or civilisational self-realisation: each has its own avant-gardes pursuing experimentation, looking in different ways for something which is not visible or available within the existing order of presentation.

When it comes to language, Lyotard’s analytic tool of choice is pragmatics: he pictures language use as a constantly branching concatenation of phrases, each of which is co-ordinated around by the pragmatic “posts” of sender, addressee, referent and “sense”. Different “phrase regimes” have different pragmatic norms and stable priors (what counts as bedrock reality for that way of speaking), and are able to indicate different aspects of the world, painting diverse world-pictures which are also bound up with different pragmatic orientations. However, Lyotard does not hold that a phrase regime completely encloses what it is possible to think or perceive, in a “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” sort of way. While a phrase regime may support a linguistically circumscribed presentation of reality, it is also possible — and this is the work of avant-gardes, as Lyotard sees it — to present that something is unpresentable in the terms a given phrase regime makes available.

Lyotard thus sets up a conflict between those who want to reintroduce stable pragmatic priors that everybody can agree on, knitting together different phrase regimes into a single sphere of transparent communication, and those who instead seek to activate and intensify “differends”. A notable type of differend is the incompatibility between the way perpetrators of systematic social violence represent reality, and the way those on the receiving end of that violence do so. The victims, Lyotard says, cannot fully articulate the wrong that is done to them in the language of their victimisers, because that language does not recognise them as a subject that can be wronged, but rather as a problem to be solved or an enemy to be liquidated.

We might look to the phrase regime of human rights to resolve this, holding as a stable prior that every speaker is in the position of a universal kind of human subject: to dehumanise someone, to bar their access to speak from this position, is already to do them harm (“epistemic violence”, in contemporary jargon), and prepares the ground for harming them further in more material ways. But this universalism was historically supported by a legitimating framework — a narrative — which posited this universal human subject as an overarching ideal, a category in which we were striving to include every human being. If we can’t resort to narrative teleology to help us out, how do we uphold the rightness of this vision against that of various ethnonationalisms which hold that “we” are the subjects of history, and “they” are disposible Untermenschen?

Here is where I think the key difference arises between Lyotard and reactionary thinkers such as Alain de Benoiste, who work from similar premises towards very different conclusions. For the reactionaries, there is simply no reason not to adopt a framework of ethnic chauvinism. They agree with Lyotard that any attempt to re-introduce a global normative framework, a narrative providing a common destination with room for all, would amount to nothing more than an exercise of “terror”. But they are equally uninterested in the work of avant-gardes (as Lyotard pictures them) who seek points of rupture where this or that manner of speaking, this or that way of picturing a world, breaks down and thought is obliged to take the limits of its provided apparatus into consideration. And it is this orientation towards the “sublime” that, in Lyotard, carries the real ethical and aesthetic weight: an attempted rescue of the “honour” of thought in diminished circumstances.

It would be tempting to say, at this point, that Lyotard’s “sublime” and Gillis’s “radical realism” are sorta kinda the same thing, since both try to tunnel through or shatter inadequate world-picturings and equip thought with deeper and more ramified capabilities. A neat ending: it turns out the real postmodernism, the good kind, was saying the same thing as Gillis all along. But of course this doesn’t quite work, and it’s worth considering why not.

What is the place of scientific endeavour in Lyotard’s picture of affairs? He talks about “capitalist technoscience” as an endeavour which, lacking an effective narrative to yoke it to any positive social project, is driven by an intrinsic criterion of performativity: does it produce profitable outcomes? But his pragmatic analytic approach leads him to hold a picture of what science does which amounts to pointing at things and talking about them: establishing a domain of facts which are equivalence classes of outcomes of successful indicatives. To the extent that there is a “reality” convoked by the technoscientific phrase regime, it is (per Lyotard) a rules-based consensus around which facts stand as reliably established. Physical reality impinges on the process through which this consensus is arrived at by acting as pragmatic constraint on pointing and talking: an indicative (“look, an aardvark!”) will not be successful if its referent fails to appear where one is pointing, or if no-one knows what an aardvark is supposed to be. In a telling comparison, Lyotard says that the scientist’s rules for establishing reality do not differ very significantly from those of the historian. What is either type of knower (or any other type of knower) doing besides pointing at things and talking about them?

Now it’s evident that Lyotard doesn’t regard art and literature as beholden to convoking a pragmatically constrained consensus reality in this sort of way, because for him these are the domains in which avant-gardes intervene to disrupt the stable prerequisites of verbal and pictorial representation. Language is freed not only from reference, but also from the notion that it a “communicative medium” through which a subject addresses an addressee using a shared set of verbal tokens. Art no longer depicts things, beautifully as may be, but rummages about in liminal zones for traces of unrepresentable trauma. But science? Just the facts, ma’am. There is no sense here of what is involved in scientific theory’s compression and coherence, the way it reaches after generality. It is reduced to providing an inventory of indicable worldly particulars, then making up schemes for categorising them.

I don’t think that realism/anti-realism opposition cuts to the heart of the differend here. Lyotard is comfortable with the idea that “capitalist technoscience” (which Gillis would probably call simply “engineering”) is engaged with a domain of facts, and is not at liberty to choose its own facts: it is constrained by the immanent criteria of performativity (the planes must fly, the blinking lights must illuminate) and, at the level of brute empiricism, by the physical conditions on which the “success” of indicative statements depends: the producibility and reproducibility of evidence. But does it “think” in the way that avant-gardism in the arts and literature “thinks”? Beyond the identification and instrumental utilisation of facts, is it capable of producing new ways of understanding?

A common complaint about the soi-disant “disruptors” and “innovators” of Silicon Valley tech firms is that “tech” for them really is nothing but instrumental reason (and often barely even that — more a sort of theatre of instrumentality, performed before venture capitalists who hope that the ghost of profit will deign to visit the performance). And I think Lyotard’s discussion of “capitalist technoscience” and the nihilism of its central imperative — which boils down, he says, to “gaining time” — still has something to say to our present moment in that regard. But Gillis makes a serious case that science, fundamental physical science especially, “thinks”; that in doing so it is doing something much deeper and more interesting than shuffling factitious categorisation schemes around so that they can reify the social hierarchies du jour. The difference is that where Lyotard’s avant-gardes demonstrate, through activations of the sublime, that a regime of presentation breaks down at some limit or other, physical scientists build positive theories which deeply resynthesize what has been observed and theorized in the past.

Lyotard’s theorisation of postmodernity was an attempt to draw together two very sweeping observations: firstly, that the meta-level consistency of social narratives was breaking down, and formerly credible projects of civilisational self-realisation no longer seemed coherently realisable; and secondly, that the avant-gardes of the late C20th were responding to this exigency in a way that resisted simple nihilism or eclecticism, that refused to capitulate to the equivalence (in terms of taste, or truthfulness) of everything the market could display on its infinite carousel. Much alleged “postmodernism” turned out to be simple celebration of this equivalence, and an “anti-realism” that amounted to simple denial that anything had any intrinsic properties at all that might make a difference to the consumer. The “science wars” were arguably part of a broader assault on the “intrinsic”, in the name of a global derealisation of goods.

What’s interesting to me about Gillis’s “radical realism” is that it shows how scientific radicalism, in its own way, derealises familiar objects and categories, from tables and chairs to genders and nationalities; only doing so through continual resystematisation rather than dissolving the referent into networks of symbolic mediation. The intrinsic is not conjured away but complexified. And this process of ramifying and extending our cognitive tooling is bound up with the process of ramifying and extending our practical agency, inasmuch as the latter depends on the navigational capabilities afforded by the former. I think this is the true ambition of Gillis’s project: to demonstrate that science and practical emancipation are conjoined processes, without having to resort to myth or teleology to justify either in terms of the other.