The Genealogy of “Empirical Post-structuralist” STS, Retold in Two Conjunctures: The Legacy of Hegel and Althusser

Abstract

Recent discussions in science and technology studies (STS) about the risks of science and technology have led to political economy occupying centre stage. Closely related to political economy as a field of investigation are a number of overarching concepts, such as class, capitalism and interest. However, reliance on such concepts is rejected in post-Actor Network Theory STS. This stand-off over overarching categories can be traced back to two conjuntures in the genealogy of STS. First, the influence of Hegel and his concept of “totality”; and second, the influence from anti-hegelian French epistemology with its celebration of the opposite concept, that of “multiplicity”.

Keywords:

• political economy
• post-structuralist STS
• Hegel
• Althusser
• multiplicity
• performativity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adam Netzén, Carl Cassegård, Anne Barron, Finn Collin and Darrin Durant along with the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In calling this the “political economy” camp, I want it to be loose enough to include STS scholars who occasionally talk about “capitalism” without referring to themselves as “Marxists”, or use the term “society” without being a card-carrying member of one or another sociological school. To put it differently, in this camp I include everyone who, in contradistinction to scholars in the post-structuralist STS camp, are not on principle opposed to using overarching, explanatory categories (cf. Birch and Tyfield, 2013).

2 Adrian Wilding has argued that among the protagonists of German Idealism, Bruno Latour’s philosophy has more affinities with Schelling than with Hegel (Wilding, 2010). I find his case compelling, but this qualification is not decisive for the argument that I am making here.

3 So as not to make the same error myself, that is, making a strawman of my post-structuralist interlocutors, I focus on the works of a single writer, John Law. When need be, I extend my discussion to his co-writers and close associates. Many other writers could have served as the figurehead of this camp within STS. The advantage of choosing John Law is, firstly, that he has been highly consistent in his thinking over the years, still today employing the same terminology that he helped to introduce more than 30 years ago; and secondly, that he stands out in his willingness also to reflect on and discuss the difficulties of his own theoretical position (2009b). I commend Law for his intellectual honesty, but it also makes him an easier target than if I had singled out one of his many colleagues.

4 The reader is entitled to ask whether sociologists and Marxists are not also guilty of making sweeping statements about rival schools of thought. The problem is more pressing for post-structuralist STS writers, however, because they claim to be able to register Being in its multiplicity, without the mediation of concepts, overarching frameworks, artificial boundaries, etc. In contrast, Kant’s critique of Hume’s empiricism is the starting point of (neo-Kantian) sociological theory and Hegelian Marxism.

5 More than a question of form, one might suspect that insidious debating techniques accurately reflect the teachings of a Machiavellian theory of knowledge. Indeed, Bruno Latour has often been reproached on this score, for instance, by Simon Schaffer (1991) and David Bloor (1999). Tongue in cheek, it can be noted that similar complaints were raised against Latour’s forerunners, Althusser (Aarons, 1973) and Foucault (Menant, 1973). Indeed, Émile Durkheim lamented that his writings were deliberately misrepresented by Gabriel Tarde (Durkheim, [1895] 1975, p. 173).

6 John Law is an exception in that he acknowledges an indebtedness to Marxism: “For here is an important input from Marxist and Marxist-influenced traditions: how to distinguish science from ideology?” (Law, 2008, p. 624). However, what he is referring to in this passage is Althusserianism rather than Marxism, with implications that I will expound upon below. Most of his fellow travellers in the post-structuralist STS camp, notably Bruno Latour, are categorical in rejecting Marxist influences (Latour, 2004; cf. Noys, 2013).

7 This is not to say that every Marxist source has been passed over in silence in the self-representations of the STS research community. It is commonplace to note that the Edinburgh School took its cues from Marxism. However, this school owes more to an analytical and Wittgensteinian tradition, alien to critical theory. Other Marxist sources that have a recognised place in the family tree of STS is the Radical Science Journal, anchored in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and labour process theory, out of which grew human–machine interaction design programs (Asdal et al., 2007). Further back in time, critiques of science were pioneered by English communists in 1930s, most notably the natural scientist John Desmond Bernal and the poet Christoffer Caudwell (Sheehan, 2007; Werskey, 2007). Even as the activist-cum-Marxist pedigree of STS is being rediscovered by STS scholars, the philosophical underpinnings of the same intellectual tradition remain largely unexplored. The notable exception is of course Andrew Feenberg (Feenberg, 2002; see also: Collin and Pedersen, 2015).

8 An account of the political factions and alliances that underpin the theoretical positions adopted by Althusser was written by one of his former diciples, Jaques Rancière ([1974] 2011). For a latter-day résumé, see Isabelle Garo (2011).

9 One such disciple was André Glucksmann, who had his books endorsed by Foucault (cf. Wolin, 2010, p. 342f). Gilles Deleuze expressed strong reservations about the Nouveaux Philosophes, something that might have contributed to the growing chasm between him and Foucault (cf. Deleuze, 1977).

10 Even the argument that economic theory is performative—which Callon draws on to expose the critics of neoclassical orthodoxy as naive believers in truth and falsehood—can be found in Reading Capital:

What political economy does not see is not a pre-existing object which it could have seen but did not see - but an object which it produced itself in its operation of knowledge and which did not pre-exist it: precisely the production itself, which is identical with the object. (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, p. 24)

11 How about a qualified, as opposed to an absolutist, rejection of concepts and dualisms? That is, a position where the need for making analytical or heuristic distinctions is grudgingly accepted? Such an outlook would conform to “weak ANT” as construed by Castree. In fact, it is the default position of many social theories, from Max Weber’s ideal types to Adorno’s negative dialectics. If followers of ANT espoused this intellectual position, then their claim to novelty and their charge against the epistemological naiveté of mainstream sociology and Marxism would vanish into thin air.

12 The reader might ask what the link is between “totality” and “concepts”. It is through concepts that human beings attempt to grasp the totality of a situation. If the post-structuralist STS writers’ insistence on multiplicity is granted, then it is not just totality, but the use of concepts tout court, that must be relinquished.

13 The falling-out between John Law and his fellow-traveller, Bruno Latour, is illustrative of this. When the latter urged his colleagues to contribute to the crafting of a comprehensive, common world (Latour, 2010), the former responded in the following way:

In some measure this is because parts of his recent writing—for instance his Politics of Nature (2004)—engage with ‘large scale’ debates (in this instance to do with ecology and political theory). This is a response that implies, however, a shift in idiom from specificity and the idea that there are no generalities outside links between such specificities, to a willingness to talk (for instance in this case) of constitutions as more or less general procedures for adjudicating the competing claims of not very stable human and non-human realities. If this kind of intervention is becoming more common then it may be that STS is shifting its intellectual character, or (depending on your point of view) displaying signs that it is starting to lose its soul. My own prejudices lead me to the latter view. (Law, 2008, p. 642; cf. Munk and Abrahamsson, 2012, p. 58)

14 It might come as a surprise that Althusser is characterised in this way, given that he used “empiricism” as a prejudicial term (paired with “humanism” and “historicism”). Crucially, he defined the empiricist process of knowledge as “abstracting essences from things”, that is, the opposite of how this word is conventionally understood (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, pp. 35–36; cf. Kolakowski, 1971).

15 E.P. Thompson’s call to his colleagues to stand firm on theory has lost none of its pungency for present-day researchers in environmental studies. The need for theory is actualised by the surge of “agnotology”, that is, the mobilisation by corporations and think tanks of radicalized epistemological doubt about the possibility of establishing causality in order to defeat environmental regulations and the precautionary principle (Oreskes et al., 2008).