Sprocket 8: Science
Poor old science. On the one hand it is a concept known to us all. The concept of knowledge that is open in three senses. Firstly it is open to us all. True sciences are therefore the joint property of the scientific community. A ‘fact’ can be picked up, used or ran with as and when one wants it. Secondly the knowledge is open in the sense that there is a public, and known series of processes linking the facts together. A good science is one then that all minds can locate themselves it. Or perhaps, all minds which posses a certain amount of knowledge can. The system is then not one that imposes a social hierarchy or occult series of initiations. Or perhaps it is does it is only that people actually follow from an arguments and remain within a system which is oriented beyond every humanity as such. Science is the series of thought then that allow the system of thinking to be known and directly shared, by those capable for thinking it. Finally science opens out to a world of experience and counter checking. A scientific explication is always provisional. But here one need a few more caveats. He provision is not merely that it is the product of any experience. It is not. it is rather the product of a very carefully crafted series of experiences, designed to counter check the over all process, and allow other possible truths within to the overall explanation. Science therefore (or east good science0 seeks to test itself (or unpick itself) not only in the established fact, but also in the establishment of the fact. It in this move, this moving beyond the individual which are doing the thinking in the science which to cast a net over the world as an net or series o yes, able to watch from many perspective, and formulate a theory based on this massing of observation.
The scientist it then one who des not watch as themselves or even in the singular, They watch as the technician, and as the statistician They watch form the position of the observer beyond the one reality, is a shadow world of knowledge and intervention. A position that is very powerful, as it allows the haunting eyes of the observer to move beyond the pesky, and by and large pointless problems of objective or subjective truth. What matter I not the external reality of the think (colours are after all merely a product of our perceiving). What matters is rather the collectivising position to perceive from, and the durability and predictability of that perceived perceptions become a reliable stuff for thought. They become a thing one can build I machine like explanation of the universe,. They become less mysteries and more patterns, in building a world around us. That s the perspective of science is the perceptive that allows perceptions o leak away from context and from event, and into labs up and down everywhere, in eye located in any head. Thought becomes then a system of collectivisation of experience.
This leads to science blood brother engineer. This takes that mass perspective, and turns it into a spins it across perspectives. the very generalized net of perceiving that science creates, becomes the powerhouse for creating new and different perspectives, or conjugation of the same set of facts That is once a material is no longer about the here and now, it rips across other potentiality, other things it could do or be formed into. here the rues for observation, and the creation of that place beyond simple truth come into their own. once a material is not being merely judges for what it is, but really for how it appears within a mass observation, then its component or perhaps better elements observed, come in a sense up for grabs, A material is not merely is not merely itself it is a ragbag of sticky non-stickiness, or hardness and softness, of movement and stillness or passive or activeness. These qualities then have essentially as much reality as the material itself. Or t leas there is nothing to stop them being what is real in the material. The possibility then opens up to abstract from the materials its qualities and to set them up as that which is real over and above the stuff they come from materials become then, under the orbit of engineering not merely potentiality, but also resources quality mines. A place where other qualities are there for the abstraction, and ultimate mining.
Science therefore pushes reality away form this or that thing or this or that perception, and into a maze work of eyes and echoing thoughts between them .Bt also in doing so it fundamentally shifts the nature of the real The real is that which qualifies to be seen within this maze work. This seeing, this stuff is as likely to be the reality of quality of a stuff, as it s the stuff itself. A fact that rendered a world open for abstraction, and exploitation as qualities are taken up and articulated apart from their materials.
This then creates the final shift. If a quality is taken to be that which matter, then the role of that stuff in ethnically giving or containing hat quality, becomes itself something that can be synthesized. The ;substance of initial stuff is then merely the initial way that quality come to human notice that same quality can just as well be produced or supported in other qualities and across a technological apparatus. We can then maturate qualities in factories designed to activise’ the otherwise passive role of initial stuff. That is we create an endless series of apparatus for the manufacture of quality (as if there where an infinity of initial stuffs).
Science then from a maze work of eyes, activated not only stuffs, as spinning qualities but also then supports those qualities in an abyss so manufacturing. They become something open to the come place, and for everyone. They in effect become democratized on open to us all.
And yet here the problems really start. All these moves are open to othering of science. These others feed of that uncertainty (which is not doubt, so much as the willingness to be wrong), and allow in that space other factoids to flourish. Factoids that will then invariably claim to be sciences master.
Firstly, the open of a science is of course rather tricky. T does not fit neatly into hat other science of modern life- the sciences of possession and ownership, and security. For the first then, there is a demand that truths be names and it possible copywrited. This truth is then made to matter, as the human perspective. All experiences needs to be paid for, and therefore ought to be owned. The very ‘openness of the knowledge becomes a commodity. Community of scientists 9the researchers for a firm) becomes yet another thing to but and to earn. What is more we all assume this must be the case. Experiment must b paid for somehow. Capitalism therefore somewhat brutally assets its power of ownership over its troublesome bother, ho could mage rather well within owning.
And here it needs o b said It capitalism power that it can make this move. Perhaps the real reason why Capitalism (more than democracy) flourishes at the moment that It is the only system capable in the name of money, to own the science. I defines an axis where whatever is done is don in the name of money, and therefore into the name of an individual somewhere. I can therefore create or better foister upon that maze work of eyes degree of individuality that might otherwise be lacking or simply unthinkable or unattainable. So that safe in this power it lets science do what it does, and only muscle in and individualizes when needs be (at defined point) I was this iron fist inside a laissez Faire approach, that other systems (communisms and tyrannies0 find so difficult to replicate. Here of course capitalism is helped by to factors, Firstly it opens out a concern about money that we all can be made o share. Was we all worry about having enough or wanting more (including the scientists) we all understand how it needs controlled, and accept it. But also Capitalism great power is always that open ended mass producing stuff. I is therefore very goods as synthesizing stuff, and owning the result. It therefore finds an easy place, as the system that allows for the machines that take on the role initial’ stuffs’ to support qualities by. The scientific system then rather easily slips into he world of capitalism mass production (no surprise really, they arose together and so reflect one another).
Science is therefore endlessly and rather too willing usurped by that othered science of human greed and desire economics and business. The problem is though that this owning of science bring to the fore to other deep fracture lines, one personal and the other global.
On the level of the personal science very clearly place a weird baron knowledge. To actually know something is open to everyone, if they are prepared to work hard enough. Or at least it is they have enough’ understanding. Trouble is of course here this opening is dangerously tautological proposition – Science is open to other ho understand, and understanding is defined in the ability to locate oneself in a knowledge. To those who do not have it, this process is as mystical and obtuse as any other. Sciences first great move, is then lost within a howl of individuals who failing the understanding its, feel science to be merely obscure, difficult and arbitrary, an hen what their own obscure (and hierarchical) systems to be given as near equal status as damn it.
Here the problem is not really that science is threatened by either ‘country knowledge’ (which is often rather empirical science cross this tradition and myth) or even mystical science. The problem comes rather when capitalists wake up to the fact that there is money to be made out of this resentment . One can pose and a champion of the people and their right to ignorance, and quietly clean up and the mass product of quackeries and vitamin curies. This movement then sells back to a disgruntled folk their own knowledge, there own folk industry, and their own ignorance More than that of course it attempts to rip off that scientific ability to advance knowledge within a certain context, but own of course the aim is to wage a war of the behalf of ignorance and gullibility. New cures are discovered and new legends are created. The problem with such creation once again is not that they happen (the spinning of legends is always there, always present), so much as it happens to make rather murky organization money and do so through knocking the difference that make science itself special. We are always up against an odd war, which is apparently being waged against that very system that allowed us so much. Alternatively, the media have learnt that there is money to be made out of partial ignorance. Invent a survey (no matter how cod) so long as it has a sudden impact (either surprising or confirming for fact), and you have a story. A story that appeals to a mass market by either inforcing existing prejudice but also, by allowing members of the public to pose as sudden experts and cod scientists. In effect ignorance can also be marketed is rubbish knowledge.
What is more, this state of mind rather creates two other conditions. Firstly the problem with daffiness is always flexibility. Simple capitalism-cum-mystical’ solutions Rather dogmatic solutions are then shed into, and held in spite of evidence. The demand for tolerance, and the feeling that science has somehow usurped truth, tends to breed a welter of very simply solutions, which cannot respond adequately to the world and need then defend themselves using all the tradition methods of violence ( real or verbal) and exclusion. Secondly and just as problematically, the suddenness and ease of these moves looses sight of sciences greatest asset, namely its ability to delight in what is not known as such as what is known. Science is after all if it is anything a delight in being wrong, and a revelling in finding new facts, and new ways explain. This wonderful delight is transformed by this commercial alchemy into the prejudice that as scientists do not know everything, then anything ought goes, no matter how daffy. Ignorance becomes confused with doubt and confused again with uncertainty., and the actual power of science is lost. The restful is that what ought to be its great legacy to everyone (no matter their level of ‘understanding’), that is the ability to relate to what one does not know (yet) is drowned within a quest of too simple solution ands democratic demands to parity between unequal.
This rather personal move then becomes confused with that other effect of capitalism, namely necessary globalization. It is one of the great and rather poignant cries of humanity that they never really asked to have matter transformed by science, an make into an industrial replicable phenomena. More than that, no one every could ask anything else in the planet. A worry that comes then in two forms.
On the one hand there is a clearly mystical worry about the nature and kinds of stuff. At its heart this worry rejects that initial transmorphing of matter into the make-work of eyes, and wants it stuff real and its qualities rather fixed. There the appears then in sciences method a very easily sacrilege of something, call it matter or call it the planet. There is then a desire to reassert that word we now at some point in the system, a demand which has an easy appeal to the planet and mother nature (or her variants). We become then her errant children – the ones that forgot that stuff really ought o be merely stuff (and not something to play with willy nilly). Ob he other hand, there is something genuinely worrying about the hooking our of a system of knowledge that generates endless new angles on stuff, and a system of mass production that can produce those stuffs willy nilly. This is a system which likely to manufacture without a worry about the effect. Effect do not in make the money, is this stuff and their synthesis that do that. Greeds, which almost be definition see only an immediate, is then rather a tricky way to organize a system which can generate so many immediates, and in doing so that expand to alarming degrees the consequences of our own inability to move beyond that present desire. A worry, which is genuine and real and had by scientist and on-scientist like. The worry that there I something wrong somewhere with what we are doing, and with our environment. A worry that greed still defies….
Pity then poor old science caught as it is in the grip of its blood brother Capitalism, who has always financed it, and allowed (within bounds)its existence. This bounding has then magnified the sense in which was cut off from the world in the first place, and opened out new marketing opportunities for cod science and for ignorance. What its then so interesting about our times is ht the very system of capitalizing has come under so much strain, just at the moment when in the name of global warming science is making a concerted effort to escape the tradition bonds of big-business and nation state. One can only wonder where the connection lies, and whether Capitalism will orchestrate those power of ignorance it reply ( the right both endorses quack cures and rejects global warming). A interesting battle indeed, and can only hope science is not too lost within it.
