© Immanuel Wallerstein 1998. (Iwaller@binghamton.edu)
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II. The Challenges
I shall present to you six challenges that in my view raise very serious questions about the set of axioms I am calling "the culture of sociology." I shall present them in the order that they began to have an impact on the world of sociology, and more generally on social science, which was sometimes long after they were written. I wish to emphasize at the outset that these are challenges, not truths. Challenges are serious if they put forward credible demands on scholars to reexamine premises. Once we accept that the challenges are serious, we may be stimulated to reformulate the premises in ways that make them less vulnerable to the challenges. Or we may find ourselves forced to abandon the premises, or at the very least to revise them drastically. A challenge is thus part of a process, the beginning and not the end of the process.
The first challenge I shall present I associate with Sigmund Freud. This may seem surprising. For one thing, Freud was essentially a contemporary of Durkheim and Weber, not someone who came significantly later. For a second thing, Freud has in fact been well incorporated into the culture of sociology. Freud's topology of the psyche - the id, ego, and superego - has long been something we use to provide the intervening variables that explain how it is that Durkheim's social facts are internalized inside individual consciousnesses. We may not all use Freud's exact language, but the basic idea is there. In a sense, Freud's psychology is part of our collective assumptions.
I am not however interested now in Freud's psychology but in Freud's sociology. Here, we tend primarily to discuss a few important works, such as Civilization and its Discontents, and they are important to be sure. But we tend to ignore the sociological implications of his modes of diagnosis and therapy. I wish to discuss what I think is Freud's implicit challenge to the very concept of rationality. Durkheim called himself a rationalist. Weber made rational-legal legitimation the linchpin of his analysis of authority. And Marx was devoted to pursuing what he called scientific (that is, rational) socialism. Our formative thinkers were all children of the Enlightenment, even when, as in the case of Weber, they raised gloomy questions about where we were heading. (But the First World War caused much gloom for most of Europe's intellectuals.)
Freud was not at all a stranger to this tradition. Indeed, what was he about? He said to the world, and in particular to the medical world, that behavior that seems to us strange and irrational is in fact quite explicable, provided one understands that much of the individual's mind operates at a level Freud called the unconscious. The unconscious, by definition, cannot be seen or heard, even by the individual himself, but, said Freud, there are indirect ways of knowing what is going on in the unconscious. His first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), was precisely on this topic. Dreams reveal, said Freud, what the ego is repressing into the unconscious.[12] Nor are dreams the only analytic tool we have at our disposition. The whole of psychoanalytic therapy, the so-called talking cure, was developed as a series of practices that could help both the analyst and the analysand become aware of what was going on in the unconscious.[13] The method is quintessentially one derived from Enlightenment beliefs. It reflects the view that increased awareness may lead to improved decision-making, that is, more rational behavior. But the road to this more rational behavior is by recognizing that so-called neurotic behavior is in fact "rational," once one understands what the individual intends by this behavior and therefore why it is occurring. The behavior may be in the opinion of the analyst suboptimal, but it is not thereby irrational.
In the history of psychoanalytic practice, Freud and the early analysts treated only, or at least primarily, adult neurotics. But following the logic of organizational expansion, later analysts were ready to analyze children, and even to treat infants who had not reached the age of talking. And still others began to find ways of dealing with psychotics, that is, with persons presumably beyond the capacity to enter into straightforwardly rational discussion. Freud himself has some interesting things to say about acute neurotics and psychotics. In discussing what Freud calls the "metapsychology of repression," he indicates the multiple forms that repression can take, the various transference neuroses. For example, in anxiety hysteria, there might be first a drawing back from the impulse and then a flight to a substitutive idea, a displacement. But then the person might feel the need to "inhibit...the development of the anxiety which arises from the substitute." Freud then notes that "with each increase of instinctual excitation the protecting rampart round the substitutive idea must be shifted a little further outwards" (Freud, 1957, 182). At this point, the phobia becomes still more complicated, leading to ever further attempts at flight.[14]
What is being described here is an interesting social process. Something has caused anxiety. The individual seeks to avoid the negative feelings and consequences by means of a repressive device. This does relieve the anxiety, but at a price. Freud suggests that the price is too heavy (or is it that it may be too heavy?). What the psychoanalyst is presumably trying to do is to help the individual confront what is causing the anxiety, and thereupon to be able to relieve the pain at a lower price. So, the individual is trying rationally to reduce pain. And the psychoanalyst is trying rationally to lead the patient to perceive that there may be a better way (a more rational way?) to reduce pain.
Is the analyst right? Is this new way a more rational way to reduce pain? Freud ends this discussion of the unconscious by turning to still more difficult situations. Freud exhorts us to see "how much more radically and profoundly this attempt at flight, this flight of the ego, is put in operation in the narcissistic neuroses" (Freud, 1957, 203). But even here, in what Freud regards as an acute pathology, he still perceives it as the same quest, the same rational quest for the reduction of pain.
Freud is very conscious of the limits of the role of the analyst. In The Ego and the Id, he warns quite clearly against the temptation to play "prophet, saviour and redeemer"[15] Freud manifests a similar sense of restraint in Civilization and its Discontents. He is discussing the impossibility of fulfilling our necessary task of trying to be happy. He says: "There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved" (Freud, 1961, 34). He adds that choices pushed to an extreme lead to dangers, and flights into neurosis, concluding that: "The man who sees his pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years can still find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate attempt at rebellion seen in a psychosis" (Freud, 1961, 35-36).
I am struck by several things in these passages of Freud. The pathologies he observes in the patient are described as flights from danger. I underline once again how rational it is to flee from danger. Indeed, even the most seemingly irrational flight of all, that into psychosis, is described as "a desperate attempt at rebellion," as though the person had little alternative. In desperation, he tried psychosis. And finally, there is only so much the analyst can do, not only because he is not, may not be, a prophet, but because "every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he may be saved."
We are not in a congress of psychoanalysts. I have not raised these issues to discuss either the functioning of the psyche or the modalities of psychiatric treatment. I have intruded these passages from Freud because of the light they throw on our underlying presupposition of rationality. Something may be described as rational only if there are other things that may be described as irrational. Freud wandered into the arena of what was socially accepted as irrational, neurotic behavior. His approach was to uncover the underlying rationality of this seemingly irrational behavior. He continued into the even more irrational, the psychotic, and found there too an explanation we might call rational, once again the flight from danger. Of course, psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that there are better and less good modes of dealing with danger. The different responses of the individual exact different prices, to use Freud's economic metaphor.
Pushing, however, the logic of the search for the rational explanation of the seemingly irrational, Freud led us down a path whose logical conclusion is that nothing is irrational from the point of view of the actor. And who is any outsider to say that they are right and the patient is wrong? Freud is wary about how far the analyst should go in imposing his priorities on the patient. "Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." But if nothing is irrational, as seen from someone's point of view, whence the hosannas for modernity, for civilization, for rationality? This is such a profound challenge that I would argue we have not even begun to confront it. The only consistent conclusion we can draw is that there is no such thing as formal rationality; or rather that, in order to decide what is formally rational, one must necessarily spell out in the ultimate detail of complexity and specificity the end that is intended, in which case, everything depends on the point of view and the balance of concerns of the actor. In this sense, post-modernism in its most radical solipsistic versions takes this Freudian premise to its final destination, and without giving Freud the least bit of credit for this in the process, be it noted, probably because they are unaware of the cultural origin of their assertions. But of course, such post-modernists are not taking the Freudian challenge as a challenge, but as an eternal universal truth, the grandest of grand narratives, and with this kind of self-contradiction this extreme position self-destructs.
In the face of Freud's challenge, some have thrown up their hands with glee, and have become solipsistic, and others have fallen back on repeating the mantra of rationality. We can afford to do neither. Freud's challenge to the very operationality of the concept of formal rationality forces us to take more seriously the Weberian pendant concept of substantive rationality, and to analyze it in greater depth than Weber was ready to do himself. What Freud has challenged, what in fact he has perhaps demolished, is the usefulness of the concept of formal rationality. Can there be such a thing as abstract formal rationality? Formal rationality is always someone's formal rationality. How then can there then be a universal formal rationality? Formal rationality is usually presented as the utilization of the most effective means to an end. But ends are not so easy to define. They invite a Geertzian "thick description." And once given that, Freud is hinting, everyone is formally rational. Substantive rationality is precisely the attempt to come to terms with this irreducible subjectivity, and to suggest that nonetheless we can make intelligent, meaningful choices, social choices. I shall return to this theme.
The second challenge with which I wish to deal is the challenge to Eurocentrism. This is very widespread today. It was seldom mentioned thirty years ago. One of the first persons to raise this issue publicly and among us was Anouar Abdel-Malek, whose denunciation of "Orientalism" (1963) predates that of Edward Said by more than a decade, and who has devoted his life work to suggesting what he has called an "alternative civilizational project" (1981, xii). I would like to discuss what he has argued, particularly in Social Dialectics (1981). I choose to discuss his work because Abdel-Malek goes beyond a mere denunciation of the misdeeds of the West to an exploration of alternatives. Abdel-Malek starts with the assumption that in the transformed geopolitical reality, "[p]repostulated universalism, as a recipe, simply will not do."[16] In order to arrive at what Abdel-Malek perceives of as "meaningful social theory" (1981, 43), he suggests we employ a non-reductionist comparativism, comparing what he sees as a world consisting of three interwoven circles - civilisations, cultural areas, and nations (or "national formations"). For him, there are only two "civilisations," the Indo-Aryan, and the Chinese. Each contains multiple cultural areas. The Indo-Aryan contains Egyptian Antiquity, Greco-Roman Antiquity, Europe, North America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab-Islamic and Perso-Islamic zones, and major parts of Latin America. The Chinese includes China proper, Japan, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania, and the Asian-Islamic zone.
If the key factor for Abdel-Malek is "civilization," the key concept is "specificity," and this requires, in his words, adding a "geographical thread" to the historical (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 97). But having said that, he then adds that the central problem in general theory and epistemology is "to deepen and define the relations between the concept of time and the constellation of notions concerned particularly with the density of time in the domain of human societies" (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 156). Although one can compare civilizations in terms of production, reproduction, and social power, the crucial difference is relations with the time-dimension, wherein we find the greatest "density of manifest, explicit specificity. For here we are at the very heart of culture and thought...." He speaks of "the all-pervading central constitutive influence of the time-dimension, the depth of the historical field" (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 171-172).
The geographical challenge thus turns out to be an alternative concept of time. Remember that, for Abdel-Malek, there are only two "civilizations" in the sense he is using it, and therefore only two relations to the time-dimension. On the one side is the Western vision of time, an "operational view," which he traces to Aristotle, "the rise of formal logic, the hegemony of analytical thinking," time as "a tool for action, not as a conception of man's place in historical duration..." (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 179). And "on the other side of the river," we find a non-analytic concept, where "time is master," and therefore cannot be "apprehended as commodity."[17] He concludes with a call for a "non-antagonistic yet contradictory dialectical interaction between the two banks of our common river" (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 185).[18] Where does this leave us? It leaves us with two banks of a common river - not at all the vision of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. It leaves us with irreducible specificities about which we can nonetheless theorize. It leaves us with a civilizational challenge about the nature of time, an issue that was not even an issue for the classical culture of sociology. And this brings us directly to the third challenge.
The third challenge is also about time, not about two visions of time, but about multiple realities of time, about the social construction of time. Time may be the master, but if so, for Fernand Braudel, it is both a master we have constructed ourselves and yet one which it is difficult to resist. Braudel argues there are in fact four kinds of social time, but that, in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, the overwhelming majority of social scientists perceived only two of them. On the one hand, there were those who considered that time was essentially composed of a sequence of events, what Paul Lacombe had called "histoire événementielle," a term best translated into English as "episodic history." In this view, time was the equivalent of a Euclidean line, which had an infinite number of points on it. These points were the "events," and they were located in a diachronic sequence. This is of course consonant with the ancient view that all is constantly changing at every moment, that explanation is sequential, and that experience is unrepeatable. It is at the basis of what we call idiographic historiography but it is also the basis of atheoretical empiricism, both of which have been widespread in modern social science.
The alternative widespread view of time is that social processes are timeless, in the sense that what explains events are rules or theorems that apply across all of time and space, even if at the present moment we cannot explicate all these rules. In the nineteenth century, this view was sometimes referred to as "social physics," in an allusion to Newtonian mechanics which provided the model of this kind of analysis. Braudel referred to this concept of time as "la très longue durée" (not to be confused with "la longue durée"). We might call this eternal time. Braudel discussed Claude Lévi-Strauss as his prime example of this approach, but of course the concept has been widely used by others. Indeed, one might say that it constitutes the prevalent usage within the culture of sociology, and is what we usually mean when we speak of "positivism." Braudel himself says of this variety of social time: "if it exists, [it] can only be the time period of the sages" (Braudel: 1972, 35).
Braudel's basic objection to these two concepts of time is that neither of them takes time seriously. Braudel thinks that eternal time is a myth and that episodic time, the time of the event, is, in his famous phrase, "dust." He suggests that social reality in fact occurs primarily in two other kinds of time which have been largely ignored by both idiographic historians and nomothetic social scientists. He calls these times that of the longue durée, or structural time, long but not eternal, and that of the conjoncture, or cyclical, middle-range time, the time of cycles within structures. Both these times are constructs of the analyst, but they are also simultaneously social realities that constrain the actors. Perhaps you feel that Durkheim, Marx, and Weber were not entirely resistant to such Braudelian constructs. And to some extent, that is true. They were all three sophisticated and subtle thinkers, and said much that we ignore today at our peril. But as the three were incorporated into what I am calling the culture of sociology, there was no room for socially-constructed time, and hence Braudel represents a fundamental challenge to that culture.
As the challenge to Eurocentrism forces us into a more complex geography, so the protest against ignoring social time forces us into a far longer time-perspective than we have been accustomed to use - but always one, I remind you, that is far less than infinite. No doubt the emergence in the 1970's of what we now call historical sociology was a response, at least in part, to the Braudelian challenge, but it has been absorbed as a specialty within sociology, and the implicit Braudelian demand for greater epistemological reconfiguration has been resisted.
The fourth challenge has come from outside social science. It has come from the emergence of a knowledge movement in the natural sciences and mathematics that today is known as complexity studies. There are a number of important figures in this movement. I shall concentrate on the one who has in my view stated the challenge most radically, Ilya Prigogine. Sir John Maddox, the former editor of Nature, took note of Prigogine's singular importance and asserted that the research community owes him a great debt "for his almost single-handed persistence over four decades with the problems of non-equilibrium and complexity" (1997). Prigogine is of course a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, awarded for his work on so-called dissipative structures. But the two key concepts that resume his perspective are "the arrow of time" and "the end of certainties."[19]
Both concepts seek to refute the most fundamental assumptions of Newtonian mechanics, assumptions that Prigogine thinks survived even the revisions required by quantum mechanics and relativity.[20] The non-Newtonian concepts of entropy and probabilities are to be sure not recent ones. They were at the basis of chemistry, as it developed in the nineteenth century, and indeed in a sense justified the distinction between physics and chemistry. But, from the point of view of the physicists, the resort to such concepts indicated the intellectual inferiority of chemistry. Chemistry was incomplete, precisely because it was insufficiently deterministic. Not only does Prigogine refuse to accept the lesser merit of such concepts but he goes much further. He wishes to argue that physics itself must be based on them. He is intent on spearing the dragon in its inner rampart, assserting that irreversibility, far from being noxious, is a "source of order" and "play a fundamental constructive role in nature" (Prigogine, 1997, 26-27).[21] Prigogine makes it quite clear that he does not wish to deny the validity of Newtonian physics. It deals with integrable systems, and holds within its "domain of validity" (Prigogine, 1997, 29). However, this domain is limited, since "integrable systems are the exception" (Prigogine, 1997, 108).[22] Most systems "involve both deterministic processes (between bifurcations) and probabilistic processes (in the choice of the branches)" (Prigogine, 1997, 69), and the two processes together create an historical dimension recording the successive choices.
Just as we are not in a congress of psychoanalysts, so we are not in a congress of physicists. If I raise this challenge here among us, it is largely because we have been so accustomed to assuming that Newtonian mechanics represented an epistemological model which we ought to emulate that it is important to recognize that this epistemological model is under severe challenge within the very culture in which it originated. But, even more important, it is because this reformulation of dynamics inverts completely the relation of social science to natural science. Prigogine reminds us of Freud's assertion that humanity has known three successive hurts to its pride: when Copernicus showed that the earth was not the center of the planetary system; when Darwin showed that humans were a species of animal; and when he, Freud, showed that our conscious activity is controlled by our unconscious. To this Prigogine adds: "We can now invert this perspective: We see that human creativity and innovation can be understood as the amplification of laws of nature already present in physics and chemistry" (Prigogine, 1997, 71). Notice what he has done here. Prigogine has reunited social science and natural science, not on the nineteenth-century assumption that human activity can be seen as simply a variant of other physical activity, but on the inverted basis that physical activity can be seen a process of creativity and innovation. This is surely a challenge to our culture, as it has been practiced. Furthermore, Prigogine also speaks to the issue of rationality that we have raised. He calls for a "return to realism" that is not a "return to determinism" (Prigogine, 1997, 131).[23] The rationality that is realistic is precisely the rationality that Weber was calling "substantive," that is, the rationality which is the result of realistic choice.[24]
The fifth challenge which I wish to discuss is that of feminism. Feminists say to the world of knowledge that it has been biased in multiple ways. It has ignored women as subjects of human destiny. It has excluded women as students of social realities. It has utilized a priori assumptions about gender differences which are not based on realistic research. It has ignored the standpoint of women.[25] All of these charges seem to me to be just in terms of the historical record. And the feminist movement, within sociology and within the larger domain of the world of social knowledge, has had some impact in recent decades in rectifying these biases, although of course there is still a long way to go before these issues become non-issues.[26] However, in all this aspect of the work of feminists, they have not been challenging the culture of sociology. Rather they have been utilizing it, and simply saying that most sociologists (and more broadly, social scientists) have not been respecting the very rules they established for the practice of social science.
This is no doubt a very important thing to have done. Yet, I think there is something even more important, wherein feminists have very definitely been challenging the culture of sociology. This has been the assertion that there been a masculinist bias not only in the domain of social knowledge (where, so to speak, it might have been theoretically expectable) but also in the domain of knowledge of the natural world (where in theory it should not have existed). In this assertion, they have attacked the legitimacy of the claim to objectivity in its sanctum sanctorum, a claim that is central to the classical culture of sociology. Just as Prigogine was not satisfied to be permitted to have chemistry as an exception to the determinism of physics, but has insisted that physics itself is not and cannot be deterministic, so feminists are not satisfied with having social knowledge defined as a domain in which social biases are expectable (if undesirable); they are insisting that this applies equally to the knowledge of natural phenomena. I shall deal with this issue by discussing a few feminist scholars whose background (that is, whose initial training) was in the natural sciences, and who therefore lay claim to be able to speak to this issue with the necessary technical knowledge, training in, and sympathy for natural science.
The three I have chosen are Evelyn Fox Keller, trained as a mathematical biophysicist; Donna J. Haraway, trained as a hominid biologist; and Vandana Shiva, trained as a theoretical physicist. Keller relates her realization in the mid-1970's that what had previously seemed to her a patently absurd question suddenly took precedence in her intellectual hierarchy: "How much of the nature of science is bound up with the idea of masculinity, and what would it mean for science if it were otherwise?" She then indicates how she will answer this query: "My subject ... [is] how the making of men and women has affected the making of science." Thus far, we are no further than the sociology of knowledge or the sociology of science. And Keller says quite correctly that posing the question merely in this way will result in a "marginal" impact at most on the culture of natural science. What needs to be shown is that gender affects the "production of scientific theory" (Keller, 1985, 3-5).
Can this be done? Keller looks to the intervening variable of the psyches of the scientists. She speaks of "the intra-personal dynamics of 'theory choice'" (Keller, 1985, 10).[27] Keller has no difficulty showing how the founders of Baconian science suffused their work with masculinist metaphors, involving a virile mastery and domination of nature, and that the claim of scientists to be different from natural philosophers on the basis that only scientists eschewed the projection of subjectivity simply does not stand the test of analysis.[28] Keller thus observes "androcentrism" in science, but refuses to draw the conclusion either of rejecting science per se or of calling for the creation of a so-called radically different science. Rather, she says:
My view of science - and the possibilities of at least a partial sorting of cognitive from ideological - is more optimistic. And, accordingly, the aim of these essays is more exacting: it is the reclamation, from within science, of science as a human instead of a masculinist project, and the renunciation of the division between emotional and intellectual labor that maintains science as a male preserve (Keller, 1985, 178).
Donna Haraway starts from her concerns as a hominid biologist and attacks the two somewhat different attempts of R.M. Yerkes and E.O. Wilson to transform biology "from a science of sexual organisms to one of reproducing genetic assemblages" (Haraway, 1991, 45). The object of both theories, she argues, is human engineering, in two successively different forms, the differences merely reflecting changes in the larger social world. She asks about both theories, human engineering in the interests of whom? She calls her work one "about the invention and reinvention of nature - perhaps the most central arena of hope, oppression, and contestation for inhabitants of the planet earth in our times" (Haraway, 1991, 1). She insists she is speaking not about nature as it is, but about the stories we are told about nature and experience, in whose telling biologists play a key role.
I will not try to reproduce her arguments here, but simply draw attention to the conclusions she wishes to draw from this critique. Like Keller, she refuses to draw from her critique of "biological determinism" an exclusively "social constructionist" view (see Haraway, 1991, 134-135). Rather she sees the social development of the twentieth century as one in which we have all become "chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism," to which she gives the name of cyborgs. She says that hers is "an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" (Haraway, 1991, 150). The boundary breakdowns she sees are those of human and animal, or human plus animal (or organism) and machine; of the physical and non-physical.
She warns against "universal, totalizing theory" which she calls "a major mistake that misses most of reality," but she also claims that "taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology..." (Haraway, 1991, 181).[29] The theme of responsibility is central to this challenge. She rejects relativism not in the name of "totalizing visions" but in the name of "partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology" (Haraway, 1991, 191).[30]
Vandana Shiva's critique is focused less on scientific methods proper than on the political implications that are drawn from science's position in the cultural hierarchy. She speaks as a woman of the South, and thus her critique rejoins that of Abdel-Malek.[31] She opposes to the idea of "man's empire over nature" the concept of the "democracy of all life," which she says is the basis of "most non-Western cultures" (Shiva, 1993, 265). Shiva sees the preservation of biodiversity and the preservation of human cultural diversity as intimately linked, and is therefore particularly concerned about the consequences of the contemporary biotechnological revolution.[32]
I am struck by two constants in the challenge as formulated by Keller, Haraway, and Shiva. One is that the critique of natural science as it has been practiced is never translated into a rejection of science as a knowledge activity, but rather into a scientific analysis of scientific knowledge and practice. And secondly, that the critique of natural science as it has been practiced leads to a call for responsible social judgment. Perhaps you feel that the case for gender bias in natural science is not proven. Here, I think Sandra Harding makes the appropriate response: "Improbable as [attempts to show how Newton's and Einstein's laws of nature might participate in gender symbolization] may sound, there is no reason to think them in principle incapable of success" (Harding, 1986, 47).[33] The key phrase is "in principle." It is on this note of appeal to the most basic practice of science, submitting all claims to empirical verification, that the challenge of feminism to science stands. By its doubts about any a priori assumption that gender is irrelevant to scientific practice, feminism poses a fundamental challenge to the culture of sociology. Whether it poses an equal challenge to the culture of natural science, one they will take into account, remains to be seen.[34]
The sixth and last challenge with which I shall deal is perhaps the most surprising of all, and the one least discussed. It is that modernity, the centerpiece of all our work, has never really existed. This thesis has been put forth with most clarity by Bruno Latour, the title of whose book is the message: "We Have Never Been Modern." Latour starts his book with the same argument as that of Haraway, that impure mixtures are constitutive of reality. He speaks of the proliferation of "hybrids," what she calls "cyborgs." For both, hybrids are a central phenomenon, increasing over time, underanalyzed, and not at all terrifying. What is crucial for Latour is overcoming the scholarly and social segmentation of reality into the three categories of nature, politics, and discourse. For him the networks of reality are "simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society" (Latour, 1993, 6).
Latour is often misread as a variety of post-modernist. It is hard to see how an attentive reader could in fact make this error. For he attacks with equal vigor those he calls antimodern, those he calls modern, and those he calls postmodern. For him, all three groups assume that the world in which we have been living for the last several centuries and in which we are still living has been "modern" in the definition that all three groups in common give to modernity: "an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time [in contrast to] an archaic and stable past" (Latour, 1993, 10).
Latour argues that the word "modern" hides two sets of quite different practices: on the one hand, the constant creation by "translation" of new hybrids of nature and culture; and on the other, a process of "purification," separating two ontological zones, humans and nonhumans. The two processes, he argues, are not separate, and cannot be analyzed separately, because paradoxically it is precisely by forbidding hybrids (purification) that it becomes possible to create hybrids, and conversely it is by conceiving of hybrids that we limit their proliferation.[35] To sort out the so-called modern world, Latour recommends an "anthropology," by which he means "tackling everything at once."[36]
Latour conceives of the world in which we live as based on what he call a Constitution, which renders the moderns "invincible" by proclaiming that nature is transcendent and beyond human construction, but that society is not transcendent and therefore humans are totally free.[37] Latour believes that, if anything, the opposite is true.[38] The whole concept of modernity is a mistake.
No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the present perfect tense[39] is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history. I am not saying we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into the "era of suspicion." No, instead we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they claim to come after a time that has not even started! (Latour, 1993, 47).
There is something new, however; it is that we have reached a point of saturation.[40] And this brings Latour to the question of time, which as you may see by now is at the center of most of the challenges:
If I explain that revolutions attempt to abolish the past but cannot do so, I again run the risk of being taken for a reactionary. This is because for the moderns - as for their antimodern enemies, as well as for their false postmodern enemies - time's arrow is unambiguous; one can go forward, but then one has to break with the past; one can choose to go backward, but then one has to break with modernizing avant-gardes, which have broken radically with their own past....If there is one thing we are incapable of carrying out, we now know, it is a revolution, whether it be in science, technology, politics or philosophy. But we are still modern when we interpret this fact as a disappointment (Latour, 1993, 69).
We have all, says Latour, never ceased to be "amoderns" (1993, 90). There are no "cultures," just as there are no "natures"; there are only "natures-cultures" (Latour, 1993, 103-104). "Nature and Society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures, of collectives" (Latour, 1993, 139). It is by recognizing this and making it the center of our analyses of the world that we can go forward.
We are at the end of our recital of the challenges. I remind you that for me the challenges are not truths but mandates for reflection about basic premises. Do you have some doubts about each of the challenges? Most probably. So do I. But together, they constitute a formidable attack on the culture of sociology, and cannot leave us indifferent. Can there be such a thing as formal rationality? Is there a civilizational challenge to the Western/modern view of the world that we must take seriously? Does the reality of multiple social times require us to restructure our theorizing and our methodologies? In what ways do complexity studies and the end of certainties force us to reinvent the scientific method? Can we show that gender is a structuring variable that intrudes everywhere, even into zones that seem incredibly remote, such as mathematical conceptualization? And is modernity a deception - not an illusion, but a deception - that has deceived first of all social scientists?
Can the three axioms, derived as I have suggested from Durkheim/Marx/Weber, the axioms that constitute what I have called the culture of sociology, deal adequately with these questions, and if not, does the culture of sociology thereby collapse? And if it does, with what can we replace it?
12. "We have learnt from psycho-analysis that the essence of the process of repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious" (Freud, 1957, 166).
13. "A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifiable ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience....
Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded
as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of
consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object. Like the physical, the psychical is not
necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be" (Freud, 1957, 167, 171).
14. "The ego behaves as if the danger of a development of anxiety threatened it not from the direction of an instinctual impulse but from the direction of a perception, and it is thus enabled to react against the external danger with the attempts at flight represented by phobic avoidances. In this process repression is successful in one particular; the release of anxiety can to some extent be dammed up, but only at a heavy sacrifice of personal freedom. Attempt at flight from the demands of instinct are, however, in general useless, and in spite of everything, the result of phobic flight remains unsatisfactory" (Freud, 1957, 184).
15. "The battle with the obstacle of an unconscious sense of guilt is not made easy for the analyst. Nothing can be done against it directly, and nothing indirectly but the slow procedure of unmasking its unconscious repressed roots, and of thus gradually changing it into a conscious sense of guilt....It depends principally on the intensity of the sense of guilt; there is often no counteracting force of a similar order of strength which the treatment can oppose to it. Perhaps it may depend, too, on whether the personality of the analyst allows of the patient's putting him in the place of his ego ideal, and this involves a temptation for the analyst to play the part of prophet, saviour and redeemer to the patient. Since the rules of analysis are diametrically opposed to the physician's making use of his personality in any such manner, it must be honestly confessed that here we have another limitation to the effectiveness of analysis; after all analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or the other" (Freud, 1960, 50-51).
16. "The initial inspiration...lies and remains deeply rooted in the transformation of the world in our time, in the rise to
contemporaneity of the Orient - Asia and Africa, together with Latin America....
The central difficulty facing social theory at the time of Yalta, the climax of Western hegemony, was how to generate ways
and means of tackling the hitherto marginalised societies and cultures belonging within the non-Western civilisational
moulds. Prepostulated universalism, as a recipe, simply would not do. It was neither able to interpret, from the inside, the
specificities at work, nor was it acceptable to the major formative tendencies within the national schools of thought and action....
A non-temporal social theory can only obtain in the subjectivist epistemological productions of professional ideologists,
divorced from the real concrete world, from the objective dialectics of human societies in given historical periods and
places, and from the geo-historical formative influences deeply at work in the hidden part of the iceberg" (Abdel-Malek,
1981, xi, xiii).
17. "On the other side of the river, the conceptions of the Orient were structured through a different process realised in a
totally different environment.
If we study the historical-geographical constitution of the nations and societies of the Orient - Asia, around China; the
Islamic area in Afro-Asia - it will be clear immediately that we have before us the oldest sedentary and stable societies of
socio-economic formations in the history of mankind. A group of societies came to be established around the major rivers,
facing wide openings to the ocean and sea, thus enabling the pastoral groups to move towards a more stable,
agricultural-sedentary mode of production and social existence....It is crucial here to consider the relevance of 'durability',
of 'societal maintenance' through centuries and millennia to these objective basic elements....
Time is master. Therefore the conception of time can be said to have developed as a non-analytical vision, as a unitary,
symbiotic, unified and unifying conception. Man could no longer 'have' or 'lack' time; time, the master of existence, could
not be apprehended as commodity. On the contrary, man was determined and dominated by time" (Abdel-Malek, 1981,
180-181).
18. Abdel-Malek is not rejecting all of Western modernity. Indeed, he adds this warning to the Orient in its confrontation with the West: "If the Orient wishes to become master of its own destiny, it would do well to ponder the old saying of the martial arts in Japan: 'Do not forget that only he who knows the new things while knowing the ancient things, can become a true master'" (Abdel-Malek, 1981, 185).
19. The End of Certainty is the title given to the English translation of his work in 1997. But the original French title was La fin des certitudes (1996), and I think the plural form is more consonant with his argument.
20. "As is well known, Newton's law [relating force and acceleration] has been superseded in the twentieth century by
quantum mechanics and relativity. Still, the basic characteristics of his laws - determinism and time symmetry - have survived....
By way of such equations [such as Schrödinger's equation], laws of nature lead to certitudes. Once initial conditions are
given, everything is determined. Nature is an automaton, which we can control, at least in principle. Novelty, choice, and
spontaneous action are real only from our human point of view....
The concept of a passive nature subject to deterministic and time-reversible laws is quite specific to the Western world. In
China and Japan, nature means 'what is by itself'" (Prigogine, 1997, 11-12).
Note here the similarity to Abdel-Malek's insistence on two different civilizational relations to the time-dimension.
21. "Probability plays an essential role in most sciences, from economics to genetics. Still, the idea that probability is
merely a state of mind has survived. We now have to go a step further and show how probability enters the fundamental
laws of physics, whether classical or quantum. ...
[Arguments that entropy is a measure of ignorance] are untenable. They imply that it is our ignorance, our coarse graining,
that leads to the second law [of thermodynamics]. For a well-informed observer, such as the demon imagined by Laplace,
the world would appear as perfectly time-reversible. We would be the father of time, of evolution, and not its children. ...
Our own point of view is that the laws of physics, as formulated in the traditional way, describe an idealized, stable world
that is quite different from the unstable, evolving world in which we live. The main reason to discard the banalization of
irreversibility is that we can no longer associate the arrow of time with an increase in disorder. Recent developments in
nonequilibrium physics and chemistry point in the opposite direction. They show unambiguously that the arrow of time is a
source of order.
The constructive role of irreversibility is even more striking in far-from-equilibrium situations where non-equilibrium leads
to new forms of coherence" (Prigogine, 1997, 16-17, 25-26).
22. "[O]ur position is that classical mechanics is incomplete because it does not include irreversible processes associated with an increase in entropy. To include these processes in its formulation, we must incorporate instability and nonintegrability. Integrable systems are the exception. Starting with the three-body problem, most dynamical systems are nonintegrable (Prigogine, 1997, 108).
23. "Our thinking constitutes a return to realism, but emphatically not a return to determinism....
Chance, or probability, is no longer a convenient way of accepting ignorance, but rather part of a new, extended rationality....
In accepting that the future is not determined, we come to the end of certainties. Is this an admission of defeat for the
human mind? On the contrary, we believe that the opposite is true....
Time and reality are irreducibly linked. Denying time may either be a consolation or a triumph of human reason. It is
always a negation of reality....What we have tried to follow is indeed a narrow path [IW: heed the words: narrow path]
between two conceptions that both lead to alienation: a world rule by deterministic laws, which leaves no place for novelty,
and a world ruled by a dice-playing God, where everything is absurd, acausal, and incomprehensible" (Prigogine, 1997,
131, 155, 183, 187-188).
24. It is interesting at this point to return to Braudel to see how his formulations, written three decades earlier, use language that is very similar to that of Prigogine. He wishes to describe his attempts to blend "unity and diversity in the social sciences" by a term he says he borrows from Polish colleagues, that of "complex studies" (Braudel, 1980c, 61). He describes histoire évémentielle, the kind he considers to be dust, as "linear" history (Braudel, 1980b, 67). And he tells us to embrace Gurvitch's view of global society, in a model that reminds us of bifurcations: "[Gurvitch] sees the future of both [the Middle Ages in the West and our contemporary society] as hesitating between several different destinies, all radically different, and this seems to me a reasonable assessment of the variety of life itself; the future is not a single path. So we must renounce the linear" (Braudel, 1980a, 200).
25. I cite two summary statements of what feminist scholarship is about. Constance Jordan (1990, 1): "Feminist scholarship is predicated on the assumption that women have experienced life differently from men and that difference is worth studying." And Joan Kelly (1984, 1): "Women's history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore history to women."
26. See Joan Kelly again (1984, 1): "In seeking to add women to the fundaments [verify] of historical knowledge, women's history has revitalized theory, for it has shaken the conceptions of historical study. It has done this by making problematical three of the basic concerns of historical thought: (1) periodization, (2) categories of social analysis, and (3) theories of social change."
27. "Reading laws of nature for their personal content uncovers] the personal investment scientists make in impersonality;
the anonymity of the picture they produce is revealed as itself a kind of signature....Attention to the intrapersonal dynamics
of "theory choice" illuminates some of the subtler means by which ideology manifests itself in science - even in the face of
scientists' best intentions....
The fact that Boyle's law is not wrong must, however, not be forgotten. Any effective critique of science needs to take due
account of the undeniable successes of science as well as of the commitments that have made such successes possible....
Boyle's law does give us a reliable description,...[one] that stands the tests of experimental replicability and logical
coherence. But it is crucial to recognize that it is a statement about a particular set of phenomena, prescribed to meet
particular interests and described in accordance with certain agreed-upon criteria of both reliability and utility. Judgments
about which phenomena are worth studying, which kinds of data are significant - as well as which descriptions (or theories)
of those phenomena are most adequate, satisfying, useful, and even reliable - depend critically on the social, linguistic, and
scientific practices of the judgments in question....
[S]cientists in every discipline live and work with assumptions that feel like constants...but are in fact variable, and, given
the right kind of jolt, subject to change. Such parochialities...can only be perceived through the lens of difference, by
stepping outside the community (Keller, 1985, 10-12).
28. "[I]t is a thesis of this book that the ideology of modern science, along with its undeniable success, carries within it its own form of projection: the projection of disinterest, of autonomy, of alienation. My argument is not simply that the dream of a completely objective science is in principle unrealizable, but that it contains precisely what it rejects: the vivid traces of a reflected self-image" (Keller, 1985, 70).
29. For Haraway, this "means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts....This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia" (Haraway, 1991, 181).
30. She concludes that "bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries
materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping processes; 'objects' do not pre-exist as such. Objects are
boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain
remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.
Objectivity is not about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world
where 'we' are permanently mortal, that is, not in 'final' control" (Haraway, 1991, 200-201).
31. "The White Man's Burden is becoming increasingly heavy for the earth and especially for the South. The past 500 years of history reveal that each time a relationship of colonization has been established between the North and nature and people outside the North and nature and people outside the North, the colonizing men and society have assumed a position of superiority, and thus of responsibility for the future of the earth and for other peoples and cultures. Out of the assumption of superiority flows the notion of the white man's burden. Out of the idea of the white man's burden flows the reality of the burdens imposed by the white man on nature, women and others. Therefore, decolonizing the South is intimately linked to the issue of decolonizing the North" (Shiva, 1993, 264).
32. "While science itself is a product of social forces and has a social agenda determined by those who can mobilize
scientific production, in contemporary times scientific activity has been assigned a privileged epistemological position of
being socially and politically neutral. Thus science takes on a dual character: it offers technological fixes for social and
political problems, but absolves and distances itself from the new social and political problems it creates....
The issue of making visible the hidden links between science technology and society and making manifest and vocal the
kind of issues that are kept concealed and unspoken is linked with the relationship between the North and the South. Unless
and until there can be social accountability of the science and technology structures and the systems to whose needs they
respond, there can be no balance and no accountability in terms of relationships between North and South....
To question the omnipotence of science and technology's ability to solve ecological problems is an important step in the
decolonization of the North" (Shiva, 1993, 272-73).
33. "In social inquiry we...want to explain the origins, forms, and prevalence of apparently irrational but culturewide
patterns of human belief and action....Only if we insist that science is analytically separate from social life can we maintain
the fiction that explanations of irrational social belief and behavior could not ever, in principle, increase out understanding
of the world physics explains....
Counting objects and partitioning a line are common social practices, and these practices can generate contradictory ways
of thinking about the objects of mathematical inquiry. It may be hard to imagine what gender practices could have
influenced the acceptance of particular concepts in mathematics, but cases such as these show that the possibility cannot be
ruled out a priori by the claim that the intellectual, logical content of mathematics is free of all social influence" (Harding,
1986, 47, 51).
34. Jensen says in a review of five books on these questions: "Except primatology, mainstream sciences have virtually ignored feminist attempts to rename nature and reconstruct science. Beyond suggesting models and taxonomies that are less hierarchical, more permeable, and more reflexive than the male prototypes...it is not clear what feminist revisions and reconstruction of science will entail. Feminist practices may generate new ways of being in the world...and thereby give birth to new ways of knowing and describing the world. Or, perhaps the ultimate achievement of the new epistemologies will be to map the limits of language and knowledge; to chart the embeddedness of knowledge in structures of (gendered) power-relations" (1990, 246).
35. "What link is there between the work of translation or mediation and that of purification? This is the question on which I should like to shed light. My hypothesis - which remains too crude - is that the second has made the first possible: the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes - such is the paradox of the moderns....The second question has to do with premoderns, with the other types of culture. My hypothesis - once again too simple - is that by devoting themselves to conceiving of hybrids, the other cultures have excluded their proliferation. It is this disparity that would explain the Great Divide between Them - all the other cultures - and Us - the westerners - and would make it possible finally to solve the insoluble problem of relativism. The third question has to do with the current crisis: if modernity were so effective in its dual task of separation and proliferation, why would it weaken itself today by preventing us from being truly modern? Hence the final question, which is also the most difficult one: if we have stopped being modern, if we can no longer separate the work of proliferation from the work of purification, what are we going to become? My hypothesis - which, like the previous ones, is too coarse - is that we are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially" (Latour, 1993, 12).
36. "If an anthropology of the modern world were to exist its task would consist in describing in the same way how all the branches of our government are organized, including that of nature and the hard sciences, and in explaining how and why these branches diverge as well as accounting for the multiple arrangements that bring them together" (Latour, 1993, 14-15). The subtitle of the original French version, which was left off the English title, is Essai d'anthropologie symétrique (1991).
37. "Because it believes in the total separation of humans and nonhumans, and because it simultaneously cancels out this
separation, the Constitution has made the moderns invincible. If you criticize them by saying that nature is a world
constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access
to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that Society is transcendent and that their laws infinitely
surpass us, they will tell you that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands. If you object that they are being
duplicitous, they will show you that they never confuse the Laws of Nature with imprescriptible human freedom" (Latour,
1993, 37).
I have corrected a howler of a mistranslation by referring to the French original (Latour, 1991, 57). In the English text, the
third sentence reads, quite incorrectly: "If you tell them that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands, they will
tell you that Society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us."
38. Latour further clarifies this paradox by looking at its expression in the world of knowledge: "Social scientists have for
long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system 'naturalization.'
Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come
from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things. Fortunately, social scientists know better and they show
that the arrow goes in the other direction, from society to the objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for
the projection of our social needs and interests. At least since Emile Durkheim, such has been the price of entry into the
sociology profession.
The difficulty, however, is to reconcile this form of denunciation with another one in which the directions of the arrows are
exactly reversed. Ordinary people, mere social actors, average citizens, believe they are free and that they can modify their
desires, their motives and their rational strategies at will....But fortunately, social scientists are standing guard, and they
denounce, debunk and ridicule this naive belief in the freedom of the human subject and society. This time they use the
nature of things - that is the indisputable results of the sciences - to show how it determines, informs and moulds the soft
and pliable wills of the poor humans" (Latour, 1993, 51-53).
39. Again an error in the translation. The English text reads "past perfect tense," but this is a mistranslation. The French text reads "passé composé."
40. "[T]he moderns have been victims of their own success.... Their Constitution could absorb a few counter-examples, a few exceptions - indeed, it thrived on them. But it is helpless when the exceptions proliferate, when the third estate of things and the Third World join together to invade all its assemblies, en masse. ...[T]he proliferation of hybrids has saturated the constitutional framework of the moderns (Latour, 1993, 49-51).
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