Real-by-Consensus vs Real-by-Resistance

Responding to William Gillis's "Did the Science Wars Take Place?", part iii

The political promise of William Gillis’s Did The Science Wars Take Place? is that what he calls radical realism is not only epistemically virtuous but also ethically compelling. It subtends and unifies an anarchist politics of individualist resistance to power, power being understood broadly as the ability to define and enforce unreasonable prerogatives: you must do as I say because [premise that does not, in fact, constitute a reason why I must do as you say].

The individual is the unit of resistance in this politics for two reasons, I think: firstly because power invariably sacrifices the individual who inconveniences it, and secondly because individual epistemic agency, beginning with the child’s first inklings that they exist in a world with consistent observable properties, is at the root of such inconvenience. This is an ethical framing that is bristlingly at odds both with conservatisms which hold that power is good because it maintains order, and those varieties of progressivism which take collective injustice and collective agency as primitives in their social ontology. While Gillis’s radicalism does not mean casually dispensing with structural oppression as a heuristic, it does mean treating it as a heuristic and being willing to take a break from it when it gets in the way of deeper understanding and more ramified individual agency. Standpoint theory is useful for precisely as long as it is useful (which is not as long as many people who use it seem to think).

I both very much like this, being of an unregenerate individualist bent myself, and am made nervous by it, because I have somewhat interiorised the leftist social norm of dismissing such individualism as puerile egotism: don’t you know, the inner voice says as if remonstrating impatiently with an obstinate child, that the foundation of your very symbolic agency is the social weave of meaning, just as the foundation of your material agency is the shared labour of society which makes your existence possible? I do of course know both of these things, but I also know that it’s possible to put words together in ways that no-one has ever put them together before, just as it’s possible to act in ways that an exhaustive account of the medium-scale material affordances of action would be able neither to predict nor to rule out. When we talk about the collective, the social, the Big Other, we are talking in heuristics about aggregate entities; in fact we are talking the language of fantasy (or, indeed, of narrative). Gillis’s scientist-as-radical both encounters and embodies, through the discipline of holding fast to what one knows, the resistance of the real to such language.

In using language like “the Big Other” and “the resistance of the real” I am of course talking (cod-)Lacanian, a dialect for which Gillis has no patience whatsoever, and in the process somewhat travestying his argument by dressing it up in the finery of my own theoretical argot. As I suggested in my previous post, Gillis’s realism may be, from a philosophically pedantic point of view, several disparate realisms in a trenchcoat, the emphasis on what is real and the modality in which, being real, it produces real effects within knowledge shifting as the argumentative context shifts. The continentalist notion of the real as “resistance” to the repletion of fantasy, something that “irrupts” within representation and displaces orders of meaning from within, may seem to align with Gillis’s sense of scientific radicalism as driving schismatically against the grain of received opinion, but it carries with it a sort of axiomatic antirepresentationalism that I think he would regard as a poison chalice. Positive knowledge, in the form of true theories about the world, is an essential component of the political radicalism he espouses. It is not enough just to be able to say “your narrative tidies away inconvenient marginal detail, which I rebelliously persist in noticing and making a song and dance about”: you also have to be able to form theories which account for the organisation of that detail at a deeper level.

What happens if you do form such theories is that the attack line changes. Power can tolerate the mere noticing of inconvenient marginal detail, because it has ready recourse to the claim that the marginal is simply abnormal and of no account in the proper scheme of things. It cannot tolerate the systematisation of such detail into a deeper ontology which invalidates its norms and prerogatives. Now the complaint is that you, in holding a systematic theory, are engaged in unwarranted totalisation, an authoritarian flex. This is of course projection: the stories power tells about the world are themselves nothing but unwarranted totalisations and authoritarian flexes (which is why postmodern skepticism towards such overweening imaginaries has a prima facie appeal to anti-authoritarians). Antirealism, and antirepresentationalist dismissiveness towards positive knowledge, are tactically useful to it in such moments.

Gillis’s discussion of sex and gender works as a kind of proving ground for his ethical and epistemic stance, and I think succeeds well in mobilising the strength of scientific theory about what constitutes the sexed being of living creatures against commonsense binarism. A positive theory about what sex is, in all its aggregate and multi-layered material and historical complexity, is a better defence against transphobic stupidities than anti-scientific and thought-terminating insistence on the primacy of subjectivity and lived experience. If such a theory can better account for a) the surface plausibility of sex-binarism, and how that heuristic gets socially consolidated into a consensus-reality image of truth, and b) the way subjectivity and the weave of social forces enters into the mix of what sex actually is for living human beings, then it “wins” by force of having stronger explanatory power than its rivals, rather than by having to be asserted as moral truth.

Notably, however, such a theory will not be a reductionist theory, in the sense of discovering a deeper-level ontological truth about sex (underneath it all there are sexons, whose combinatorial arrangement determines the space of possible sexednesses — of which there are precisely 137). It will instead be antireductionist, treating sex as a compound and overdetermined reality rather than a determining primitive. The feat of science here is thus to circumscribe the ontological commitments that a theory of sex can have, by holding a coherent picture of biological reality that cannot be coherent and binaristic at the same time. Only thus are we able to repudiate the prerogative of power (social organisation around, and reinforcing, a sexual binary) to declare that all the biological “exceptions” are merely inconvenient marginal details, and that the social articulation of such deviance (i.e. people actually being trans) can and should be morally mandated out of existence.

Perhaps inevitably given my intellectual formation I am more intuitively persuaded by Gillis’s account of the ability of scientific realism to decompose factitious totalities, and in doing so challenge “consensus reality” world-pictures, than by the claim that such realism unearths true totalities, in the form of positive physical theories about the world. But the real burden of the book is to show that you can’t have the one without the other: postmodernism offers a kind of cheap grace, glibly disarticulating false totalities but equipping reactionaries with rhetorical tools they can use to blunt the force of knowledge. Do I think that something of the poststructuralist intellectual project can be saved from this critique? That will have to be another post.