http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/hsc1.html HOW SOCIETIES CONSTITUTE THEIR KNOWLEDGE:
PROLEGOMENA TO A LABOUR PROCESS PERSPECTIVE
by Robert M. Young
Everywhere I turn there are programmes, books, articles, announcements - even jobs - concerned with the problems of 'science and society'. They take all sorts of forms but have a common feature: they treat the issues dichotomously. On one side there lie science, technology and/or medicine and on the other ethics, values, culture. Medical schools are hiring 'ethicists'; engineering departments are setting up research and teaching on values. There is even an American think tank called The Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, and Washington has a Kennedy Institute of Bioethics. The British Government Central Policy Review Staff (1978) has assessed the impact of new technologies on employment and 'the quality of life' and has established a Technical Change Centre, while the US Government granting agency called Ethics and Values in Science and Technology (EVIST) was said to be the fastest-growing one before the advent of Reagan's deregulation (AAAS, 1978). Indeed, the Thatcher/ Reagan era threatens to wind down many such watch-dog initiatives just as they were getting going. There are works celebrating The Republic of Technology, while The Coming of Post-Industrial Society prepares us to be governed by experts whose social contract with the rest of us will make it tolerable that certain scientists will be Playing God with genetic engineering. What is common to all such concerns is that they attempt to relate the existence, development and consequences of the scientific, the technological and the medical to society, culture, values. The problems are seen as ones of influence, interaction and control. My quarrel with all this is that we'll continue to mystify the deeper issues until we change the question and take a new path to answering it.
Some say that these concerns are a post-Vietnam/Watergate/CIA/Lockheed scandals fig leaf over capital's private parts, or a band-aid to cover a gaping wound, the sides of which are a long way apart: power and profit on one side, democracy and public interest on the other. I am arguing that as long as we are trying to relate the scientific and the evaluative, we'll remain entrapped within a framework which, in my view, perpetuates the problem. The question isn't, 'How are science and society related, and how should they be?' but 'How do societies constitute their knowledge and how should we reconstitute them?'
I'll start with a powerful current example. Micro-processors are already bringing about fundamental changes in the labour processes of all sorts of industries. Factory production, the printing industry and office work are never to be the same again. The changes in the jobs and in patterns of employment are likely to be as sweeping as those brought about by the creation of the modern factory system itself. Yet societal and cultural controversies over the consequences of a very esoteric technology are occurring at the point when jobs of whole workforces are already being threatened. I mean this literally in, for example, the cases of typesetting and clerical work (APEX, 1979; Glenn & Feldberg, 1979; Barker and Downing, 1980). The workers whose livelihoods are under a cloud only hear of the existence of silicon chip technology once the word processing equipment comes on to the market, and employers are attempting to install it. The logic of the position is utterly simple. In principle, all sorts of processes could have been automated by vacuum tube computers — or even by the original mechanical calculating engine designed by Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century. But it was too complicated and expensive and, until recently, slow. Generations of automating technologies have made all this less and less expensive, with more and more information and procedures stored increasingly compactly and processed unbelievably quickly. The microprocessor has a silicon chip a few millimetres square with the electronics of a small computer etched on it. It is so small and so cheap that it is suddenly worthwhile to use it for any process which can be reduced to a set of instructions, however complex. This is a quantitative advance of such a magnitude that it is qualitatively changing production, services and consumption. For example, you can soon do all your shopping, all economic transactions, all getting of information and all reading, as well as book your holidays, on your own home computer terminal and visual display. This technology is not merely imagined or planned; it exists and is being installed, using telephone terminals and conversion of current television sets.
A great deal is being written about microprocessors, but nothing I have read touches on what I want to say. The public process of the evaluation and potential alteration of its consequences has only become possible at the point of application of the constituent technologies. We have science, technology and industry developing things, and then we have something else called 'social impact'. Unless and until these matters are amenable to public controversy during the process of origination — not just during the process of application — there is literally no hope of science technology and medicine serving the needs of society rather than the needs of the circulation and expansion of capital. It is of the essence of the structure of the capitalist mode of production that this change should not be possible in a private enterprise economy. The most active movements calling for the control of science and its fruits are environmentalists and consumerists. They play an important role, but they have no access to the process of origination of new knowledge and technologies. That process is controlled by investment, entrepreneurial and research grant awarding bodies which are at many removes from forums in which most people have any say. <...> In the remainder of this essay I want to examine the approaches to the inter-relations between science and society which are currently available and to trace an odyssey from the 'science and society' model to a more promising one rooted in the analysis of the labour process. I should stress at the outset that I am not saying that at present knowledge is not socially constituted; I shall try to show that it is. I am saying that the present setting of goals and asking of questions is sequestered from democratic social processes by the institutional and economic structures of capitalism (as well as by the decision-making processes of mixed economies and of nominally 'socialist' societies). Our first task is to learn to see the current social constitutions of knowledge through socialist eyes and how that process is systematically obscured by the prevailing models which artificially separate knowledge from its context. Then we can see what we're up against in trying to gain control of that social process and change it. As I have tried to show in my other writings, part of the problem is the comprehensiveness of the con. As with 'The Sting' and Watergate, anyone trying to figure out what's going is very likely to suffer from a failure of audacity of imagination and simply cannot get his or her mind around the sheer scope of the version of reality which the confidence trickster is foisting upon us. It involves the framing of whole disciplines, e.g., ethology, sociobiology; whole families of disciplines, e.g., the functionalist human sciences; a whole world view: the metaphysical foundations of modern science. I do not mean, of course, that these approaches are false but that they are constituted historically within the mode of production, which structures basic assumptions and whole approaches to concepts and areas of investigation. Nor do I mean that they could or should be replaced by some set of value-neutral, non-ideological perspectives; I am arguing for a socialist world-view.
This essay is an attempt to provide a bridge between the critique of some existing perspectives in the history, philosophy and social studies of science and a different approach which has been developed, on the whole, in non-academic contexts and publications. It is, as much of my recent individual and collective work has been, a mixture of exploratory, polemical and didactic writing — conducting an argument, developing a position, attempting to work out bases for strategy and practical struggles. Matters relevant to this process extend from the intimately personal to recent institutional experiences and current history and to the broadest and deepest issues in formal metaphysics. This essay consists largely of prolegomena or path-clearing, attempting to show a way from existing approaches to one which is only adumbrated here. The path leads us to the divide between ways of interpreting the world, to a perspective which, if adopted, is inseparable from attempts to change it.