![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of “racism” as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include the “physical,” the “biological,” and the “symbolic.” A sufficiently lush and nimble conceptualization of human action requires consideration of the interaction of all three modes in theory and in practice. The theory of modal materialism is illustrated through a consideration of the discourse of race and genetics as it was recirculated and modified in 2005 and 2006 by publications in the journal Science, and which were amplified for a larger reading public through circulation in the New York Times.
Keywords:
Acknowledgements
This essay is gratefully dedicated to Michael Calvin McGee, whose genius did not live long enough. Michael expressed high expectations for his students, which we were not able to fulfill in his lifetime. Both the high standards he modeled and his expectation that we could meet them continue to inspire us to these efforts.
Notes
1. Nicholas Wade, “Brain May Still Be Evolving, Studies Hint,” New York Times September 9, 2005, national edition, sec. A.
2. Patrick D. Evans, Sandra L. Gilbert, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Eric J. Vallender, Jeffrey R. Anderson, Leila M. Vaez-Azizi, Sarah A. Tishkoff, Richard R. Hudson, and Bruce T. Lahn, “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” Science 309 (2005): 1717–20; and Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Sandra L. Gilbert, Patrick D. Evans, Eric J. Vallender, Jeffrey R. Anderson, Richard R. Hudson, Sarah A. Tishkoff, and Bruce T. Lahn, “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo Sapiens,” Science 309 (2005): 1720–22.
3. I use capital letters to designate all racialized groups, whether based on differences of color or ethnicity. The use of so-called “continental labels” requires capitals for some racial designations (typically based on ethnicity) but not others. Thus it is, for example, that The Chicago Manual of Style recommends capitalizing ethnic differences but leaving differences based on color in lower case unless “the writer strongly prefers” otherwise. In my judgment, the failure to capitalize “white” effaces the raciality of whiteness and to avoid that my “strong preference” is to capitalize all such distinctions. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 325–6.
4. C. Dobson-Stone, J. M. Gatt, S. A. Kuan, S. M. Grieve, E. Gordon, L. M. Williams, and P. R. Schofield, “Investigation of MCPH1 G37995C and ASPM A44871G Polymorphisms and Brain Size in a Healthy Cohort,” NeuroImage 37 (2007): 394–400; Nicholas Timpson, Jon Heron, George Davey Smith, and Wolfgang Enard, “Comment on Papers by Evans et al. and Mekel-Bobrov et al. on Evidence for Positive Selection of MCPH1 and ASPM,” Science 317 (2007): 1036a; and Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov, Danielle Posthuma, Sandra L. Gilbert, Penelope Lind, M. Florencia Gosso, Michelle Luciano, Sarah E. Harris, Timothy C. Bates, Tinca J. C. Polderman, Lawrence J. Whalley, Helen Fox, John M. Starr, Patrick D. Evans, Grant W. Montgomery, Croydon Fernandes, Peter Heutink, Nicholas G. Martin, Dorret I. Boomsma, Ian J. Deary, Margaret J. Wright, Eco J. C. de Geus, and Bruce T. Lahn, “The Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM and Microcephalin Is Not Explained by Increased Intelligence,” Human Molecular Genetics 16 (2007): 600–608.
5. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); and William H. Tucker, “Burt's Separated Twins: The Larger Picture,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 43 (2007): 81–86.
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and III, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1969; original copyright 1947), 39.
7. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 39.
8. A proper defense of this claim would require a manuscript all by itself, but for some relatively contemporary examples, consider Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984; Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Rhetorical Bodies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
9. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman & Company, 1982), 26, 25.
10. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50; and Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), 123 (emphasis added).
12. Deleuze, Spinoza, 127.
13. Davi Johnson, “Mapping the Meme: A Geographical Approach to Materialist Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 32.
14. Johnson, “Mapping the Meme,” 31.
15. Johnson, “Mapping the Meme,” 45.
16. Johnson, “Mapping the Meme,” 28.
17. The case of images and other symbolic systems is more complicated. Some of the issues are developed in Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
18. Johnson, “Mapping the Meme,” 31 (emphasis added).
19. Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110–30; and Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric.”
20. Much of the relevant literature is summarized in Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1991) and Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2004).
21. Lahn is quoted in Michael Balter, “Profile: Bruce Lahn: Brain Man Makes Waves with Claims of Recent Human Evolution,” Science 314 (2006): 1871. All reference to Balter's statements about these articles are from e-mail messages, cited with his assent, September 27–28, 2007, and May 18, 2008.
22. In the conventions of their respective genres, the names of their bodies are assigned to the discourses under the assumption that they served as a kind of driving force and organizing node for the production of this discourse. In the case of biology, the team leader's name comes last in the publication order as an indication that they organized the laboratory or research agenda.
23. For the present, interests might be understood as particularly configured congeries of biological drives.
24. I thank Jamie Landau for drawing my attention to the fact that Louis Althusser also described a modal materialism, though he did not develop the analysis in depth, and I do not share his interpretation of “ideas,” among other divergences. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State,” 40.
25. Preliminary efforts can be found at the Transilience Project website, http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Transilience/Transilience.html/.
26. Martin Bernal, “Race in History,” in Global Convulsions: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Winston A. Van Horne (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 75–92.
27. A wide variety of versions of this argument with regard to the functioning of science have been published. Some of the range is captured in the following: Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, ed., Feminism and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979).
28. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001).
29. The relation of discursive and non-discursive matter is not representation, but rather a two-way street between flows and circuits of discourse and the other forms of matter in the world, based on more and less local utilities.
30. Evans et al., “Microcephalin,”1717–20; and Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM,” 1722.
31. Evans et al., “Microcephalin,” 1717.
32. Evans et al., “Microcephalin,” 1717, 1719.
33. Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM,” 1720. The articles actually trace haplotypes, which are co-occurring stretches of DNA, but the phrase “version of gene” or genotype probably captures the meaning for this readership more clearly.
34. Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM,” 1721.
35. Pamela Sankar, Mildred K. Cho, and Joanna Mountain, “Race and Ethnicity in Genetic Research,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 143 (2007): 961–70; and Celeste Condit, “How Culture and Science Make Race ‘Genetic’: Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous,” Literature and Medicine, 26 (2007): 240–68.
36. Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang, “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race, and Disease,” Genome Biology 3 (2002): 1–12.
37. James F. Wilson, Michael E. Weale, Alice C. Smith, Fiona Gratrix, Benjamin Fletcher, Mark G. Thomas, Neil Bradman, and David B. Goldstein, “Population Genetic Structure of Variable Drug Response,” Nature Genetics 29 (2001): 265–69.
38. Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM,” 1722. They gave formulary attention to other potential causes.
39. The broader discourse about genetic variation and its links to race is complicated because of the insertion of the amelioration of “health disparities” as a potential usage, discussed in Condit, “How Science and Culture,” 240–68.
40. Wade, “Brain May Still Be Evolving.”
41. Wade, “Brain May Still Be Evolving” (emphasis added).
42. Sarah A. Wilcox, “Cultural Context and the Conventions of Science Journalism: Drama and Contradiction in Media Coverage of Biological Ideas about Sexuality,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 225–47.
43. Richard Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York: Scientific American Library, 1982).
44. See, e.g., Krina T. Zondervan and Lon R. Cardon, “The Complex Interplay among Factors that Influence Allelic Association,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5 (2004): 89–100.
45. Ning Yu, Feng-Chi Chen, Satoshi Ota, Lynn B. Jorde, Pekka Pamilo, Laszlo Patthy, Michele Ramsay, Trefor Jenkins, Song-Kun Shyue, and Wen-Hsiung Li, “Larger Genetic Differences within Africans than between Africans and Eurasians,” Genetics 161 (2002): 269–74.
46. David Goldstein, e-mail to author, February 17, 2006.
47. Evans et al., “Microcephalin,” 1717.
48. This is the “falsification” account of science codified by Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
49. See Gould, Mismeasure of Man; Marks, Human Biodiversity; and Amy Sue Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women's Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27 (1997): 625–68.
50. Dobson-Stone et al., “Investigation,” 394–400; Timpson et al., “Comment on Papers,” 1036A; and Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Evolution Not Explained,” 600–8.
51. Michael Balter, “Profile: Bruce Lahn,” 1871, 1873; and “Links between Brain Genes, Evolution, and Cognition Challenged,” Science 314 (2006): 1872.
52. Mekel-Bobrov et al., “Ongoing Evolution Not Explained,” 600–8.
53. Mildred Cho, “Natural Selection and the Lay Press: The Case of Lahn's Findings on Genetics and Cognition” (paper presented at the Translating ELSI Conference, Cleveland, OH, May 3, 2008).
54. Francis Bacon, “The Great Instauration (Translation),” in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 249.
55. Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 247, 249.
56. Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 249.
57. See, e.g., Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).