The approach which dictates that the best way to discover new medical treatments is by 'mining' databanks of genetic information is - ideological?
Or is it scientific? After all 'genes make proteins' and 'proteins are the basic machinery in cells' and 'drugs must target bodily functions on the cellular/super-cellular level' so if we go and dig around in the genetic databanks, we end up with information which allows us to operate upon the body and cure disease. I'm radically shortening the descriptions here, but I'm suggesting that in some sense this is a 'scientifically valid' description - in that we are describing, in language, a hypothesis which a) is falsifiable and b) is 'technically' useful.
So this is a 'scientific' statement. But I could just as well state that this is an ideological statement, because by structuring the description in the way I have, I have done a number of political things:
a) By considering a body, belonging to a person, to be an instance of a general body described in theory, I have stated that the proper domain of understanding the body resides outside the person whose body that is, and in the mind of the scientists.
b) I have delimited the scope of my enquiry so that questions outside of the scope of my enquiry cannot be meaningfully answered (and can thus be dismissed by the arbiters of this domain of enquiry - the 'established experts' - as irrelevant). For instance, where does class struggle appear in my picture? As Levins and Lewontin say, who is to say that the proper way to cure a disease (e.g. TB) is not social revolution?
'Reductionist genetics' of the form espoused by, say, Dawkins, has often been criticised by the Marxists on this list - and rightly so. My point is not that some 'scientific methods' are allied to particular ideological aims. My point is that the process of description used in 'modern science' has political effects - it carries with it, hidden in its assumptions, its ideology.
Is it thus false? Surely not - modern genetics, and the use of genetics in drug discovery, cannot in a (to me) meaningful sense be said to be false.
So again, is this science, or is this ideology?
The distinction that seems to be offered in support of science as opposed to ideology depends on 'the real' - the world in which, if I jump off a building, I will not fly, but fall.
But is Marx's point in the 1st thesis on Feuerbach not precisely that that knowledge is precisely not immediate, but that 'sensousness' must be conceived of 'subjectively' - i.e. 'as sensous human activity, practice'. This emphasis on 'activity', on 'apprehension of the world' as something very different from a reflection of 'the real', is central to Marx. See the 1844 Manuscripts for example (it is also central to Gramsci, and particularly central to Gramsci's concept of hegemony - a fact which seems to be forgotten by many modern readers of Gramsci).
Of course, we do not apprehend the world directely, as sovereign individuals - we apprehend the world through the only kind of practice that is human - social practice. At present, for instance, there exists a particular model of the human genome. It is enforced by, for example, the editorial practice of Science, Nature, Genome Research, etc. It is not the only possible model - the centrality of the gene is not a given, but it merely a feature of the current model. While standing in this society, with my current modes of thought, it is difficult to work out other models of genetics, I can conceive of a model of cellular development where 'the gene' doesn't exist as central, or maybe doesn't even exist at all.
(This is one of the insights of 20th c. mathematics, btw - the way totally internally consistent, but logically inconsistent models of mathematics can be built. For instance, it is possible to build a mathematics where the number of real numbers is greater than the number of rational numbers (the maths you learn at school, in other words). It is also, apparently, possible to build a mathematics where this statement is not true.)
I don't subscribe to the belief that nothing matters, that everything is arbitrary - but I don't believe that the 'something matters' statement is established as truth by some Truth, either. If I lived in a catatonic state, no doubt nothing would matter to me. It is through my interaction with the world that 'something matters'. Surely the structuring of that interaction by the tools of that interactions - language, psychology, etc. - is of interest to Marxists? And surely it is no challenge for Marxists to recognise that they are within these interactions, changed by them as they change them in turn (without there being some fixed reference point from which these interactions can be observed)?
So I don't see what the problem with saying that there is no absolute, super-human, standard is. If it comes to it, I'll shoot the Queen not in the name of absolute anti-Monarchism, but because she stands in the way.
Peter P.S. maybe if Superman hadn't been killed off by dirty capitalism comic-book publishing pigs, he could have provided an absolute standard of humanity for us. :)
-- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.