pre-publication: Empirical post-structuralism, the legacy of Hegel and Althusser

THE GENEALOGY OF 'EMPIRICAL POST-STRUCTURALISM' RETOLD IN TWO CONJUNCTURES: THE LEGACY OF HEGEL AND ALTHUSSER INTRODUCTION The numerous risks associated with science and technology in fields as diverse as synthetic biology (Rajan, 2006; Cooper, 2008), pesticides (Kleinman & Suryanarayanan, 2012), pharmaceuticals (Davis & Abraham, 2010; Cooper, 2012), and climate change (Böhm, Murtola & Spoelstra, 2012; Jankovic & Bowman, 2014), have all been explained with reference to the economy. How are we to account for the omnipresence of the economy as an explanatory factor in generating risks in these otherwise unrelated areas? Posing this question is to ask, in a roundabout way, what is the epistemic value of analytical concepts such as ”capitalism”, ”class”, ”interest” and ”ideology”. The return of this vocabulary in Science and Technology Studies (STS), together with a renewed interest in studying the political economy, has not gone unchallenged. From one end of the spectrum, scholars protest that these terms are now being used carelessly, without first having been properly anchored in one of the intellectual traditions from which the terminology stems. That could have been Weberian or Bourdieuian sociology, or one of the many strands of Marxism (Birch, & Tyfield, 2013). From the opposite end of the spectrum, skepticism about general explanatory categories is voiced anew. According to this position, the concepts mentioned above lead astray by taking for granted a stable, explanatory background (Woolgar, 1981; Whatmore, 2009). This debate is difficult to grasp. The opposing positions are enmeshed in a web of related but tacit assumptions, with bearing on methodology, epistemology and ontology. The difficulty is further exacerbated by the claim of the latter camp of having superseded explanatory categories and analytical distinctions, whereby the means for conducting this debate dissolves. The political relevance of this debate, albeit highly abstract, cannot be doubted. The contested legitimacy of general, explanatory categories is integral with another topical debate in STS, namely the (im)possibility and (un)desirability of doing (ideology) critique (Latour, 2004). My argument is advanced by sketching out two conjunctures in the genealogy of STS, both rooted in different strands of Marxism. I do not address myself specifically to Marxists nor do I seek to argue for or against this tradition. I evoke the Marxist legacy because it is the key for making sense of the debates in STS over the legitimacy of overarching, explanatory categories. This intellectual tradition plays such a marginal role in academic and public debates nowadays that it takes effort to recall its centrality in the intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in France. That is to say, in the formative milieu of what became STS. This influence can nevertheless be seen from numerous thematic overlaps, as attested to by John Law: ”For here is an important input from Marxist and Marxist-influenced traditions: how to distinguish science from ideology? How to offer critique? And how to ground knowledge in ways that are not saturated by domination if there is no recourse to epistemological certainty.” (Law, 2008a, p.624) The first conjuncture of STS is the philosophical tradition of Hegelian Marxism, of which critical theory is the best-known exemplar.1 The second conjuncture goes back to Louis Althusser's structural Marxism. What makes Althusser important in the context of my argument is his ”epistemological break” with Hegel and Hegelian Marxist traditions. The rejection of dialectics was passed on to his non-Marxist disciples, most notably Michel Foucault. Hostility towards dialectics remained a constant as structuralism metamorphosed into post-structuralism. My claim is that the 1 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. thematic overlaps between critical theory and post-structualist STS owe to a shared heritage in German idealism and Hegelian philosophy, while their divergences between the two can be traced back to the ”epistemological break”. The key point of contention between them is their (mutually excluding) endorsement of either 'Totality' or 'multiplicity', where the former implies general, explanatory categories, while the latter standpoint rejects such overarching concepts. There can be merits with both Marxist-inspired political economy approaches and post-structuralist STS methods, depending on the subject matter and what one seeks to achieve with the intervention. My main concern is with a third group of interlocutors seeking a compromise between the two camps. These compromises tend to overlook the implicit and irreconcilable tenets of the respective intellectual positions, hence misrepresenting one or both of them. Institutional peace is sought at the price of intellectual clarity (Castree, 2002; Gareau, 2005; Perkins, 2007; Silva, 2013; Hornborg, 2014). John Law stands on firmer ground when he ponders over how to bring Actor Network Theory (ANT) closer to political economy approaches, only to conclude that many of the tenets in ANT must be abandoned in such an analysis (Law & Williams, 2014). Instead of a premature closure of the debate, I advocate a position of 'agreeing to disagree', where the substantial differences are clearly stated and assumed by the respective sides. Provided that the rules of scholarly engagement are respected, a confrontational dialogue may prove to be the best way forward for everyone. DEMARCATING THE OBJECT OF STUDY: POST-STRUCTURALIST STS My decision to name one of the camps 'post-structuralist STS' is likely to be challenged right away. Hence, I must start with defending my choice of demarcation. Paradoxically, a defining trait of 'post-structuralism’ in all its garden varieties is its suspicion towards defining and labelling things, including its own position. This is consistent with the refutation of larger, explanatory categories in social theory. Consequently, when objections have been made against one or another aspect of post- structuralist STS, the critique has typically been disqualified on the grounds that it takes something multiple for a single entity (Law, 2009a, p.150). The most high-profile debate in recent years exemplifying this kind of response to the critique is Shelia Jasanoff's answer to Harry Collins and Robert Evans. In their article about the 'three waves of STS', they expressed strong reservations against the second wave of STS (chiefly designating post-structuralist STS). According to Jasanoff, this critique was misguided because Collins and Evans had collapsed multiple positions into a single, coherent entity (Jasanoff, 2003, p.393). That being said, it is hard to develop an argument about just about anything, without first having assigned a name to it, and, in so doing, distinguished this entity from the rest of the world. Indeed, when post-structuralist STS writers are not responding to their critics, they too bracket the multiplicity and contingency of Being in order to be able to say something at all. A case in point is the many labels that post-structucuralist STS writers have come up with when referring to themselves. Jasanoff has suggested ”co-production” as a catch-all term for writers sharing a common, constructivist sensibility. It is significant that she defines co- production narrowly enough to exclude some writers in STS from belonging to this category (Jasanoff, 2004, p.31). As for John Law, he offers a snapshot definition of ANT as an empirical version of post-structuralism (Law, 2008b). If the label ”post-structuralism” is recognized when above mentioned writers are referring to themselves, then this label must be equally (in)valid when it is being used by their critics. The futility of seeking a perfect match between analytical concepts and Being is old news in philosophy. Failing accuracy in an absolute sense, the best that we can aspire for is to respect the tried and tested rules of acumen in scholarly debates. That is to say, to cite writers of opposing viewpoints correctly, not to attribute opinions to them that they do not hold, etc. In order not to create a strawman target of my interlocutors, I choose to 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 the post-structuralist camp within STS. The advantage with John Law is, firstly, that he has been highly consistent in his thinking over the years. Right up till today he uses the same terminology that he was part of introducing more than thirty years ago. Furthermore, Law stands out in his willingness to reflect over and discuss the difficulties of his own theoretical position, for which I commend him. One of the counter-positions that John Law and his co-writers polemize against is mainstream sociology (Latour, 2000; Law, 2008a). According to this polemic, mainstream sociology is equated with its structural functionalist wing, and a straight line is typically drawn from August Comte to Émile Durkheim to Talscott Parsons. Exceptions have been made for those traditions in sociology which post-strucutralist STS writers claim to be the heirs of, chiefly American pragmatism and ethnomethodology. To the best of my knowledge, no other branch of sociology is exempted from the charge against sociology-cum-structural functionalism, such as, for instance, Weberian sociology or Tourainian social movement studies. Presumably, these branches too are implicated by the critique of mainstream sociology. The differences between these many strands within sociology pale in comparison with the single tenet that they have in common, a tenet that separates them from post-structuralist STS. Namely, a taken-for-granted dualism between nature and society, human and machine, global and local, and so on. It is thus the sociologist excludes him- or herself from the object that he/she is studying. Out comes objective ”social facts”, or, which is the same thing, overarching explanatory frameworks. It provides a stable and elevated vantagepoint from which sociological critique can be launched. Mainstream sociology is not the only bastion of dualism, however. John Law seamlessly extends the same charge to Marxism: ”For instance, sociologists have sometimes imagined that they have the theoretical or methodological key to the universe: witness the more or less grand narratives of Parsons, critical theory, or Althusserian Marxism.” (Law & Urry, 2004, p.391) The same objection against Marxism has been made in other articles by John Law (Law, 2000, p.18). There is a strange sense of déjà vu in the complaints about sociology’s stale methodology, its unreflective dependency on the pre-given, and its failure to explain social change in its unfolding. Those were all objections that Marxists used to level against academic sociology, years before STS emerged as a discipline (Gouldner, 1973; Swingewood 1975, 187ff.). This critique harks back to Hegel’s dialectics: ”Anti-thesis such as spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and intellect, freedom and necessity, used to be important […] the sole interest of Reason is to dispel such rigid antithesis.” (Hegel, [1801] 1977 p.90). Overcoming the rationalism and dualism of Kantianism was a central preoccupation of the generation of philosophers that came after Kant. Furthermore, this ambition was part of the ‘rational kernel’ of German idealism that Karl Marx, according to himself, took over from Hegel, while discarding its ‘mystical shell’. A rebuttal of Marxism that pivots on its alleged dualism can hardly pass in complete over dialectics. Although dialectics is occasionally mentioned by post-structuralist STS writers, they invariably dismiss it. They do so in one or two sentences, without their critique being substantiated in textual evidence, and even without any reference to Hegel’s works in their bibliographies (Latour, 1993, p.57; Whatmore, 1999, p.24). When John Law and his co-writers are subjected to criticism, they have responded that their individual positions are too heterogeneous to be treated as a unified entity under a single heading. And yet, the same writers have no qualms about rebuking ”sociology” and ”Marxism” wholesale, without making any distinction between different camps within sociology, between different camps within Marxism nor between sociology and Marxism. The only distinction that counts is between, on the one hand, sociology-Marxism, and, on the other hand, post-structuralist STS. This division, we are told, rests on the latter having overcome dualistic modes of thinking. It would be too easy to end my argument with a complaint about the instrumentalization of communicative reason and the lapse in scholarly dialogue.2 Instead, I will take the claims of the post-structuralist STS writers seriously, perhaps more so than they do themselves. If taken seriously, the inconsistencies listed above can be explained by the difficulties of consistently carrying out a research program that prescribes that all analytical distinctions and explanatory concepts must be dissolved into the multiplicity and contingency of Being - at least if that research program is going to be carried out through academic writing. Post-structuralist STS writers are not the first to have criticized analytic categories and concepts for a tendency towards abstractions, for reducing and hypostatizing the richness of life, etc. This critique of concepts can only be carried out with the help of concepts. If a premature victory is declared over concepts, then they will return in an unreflective manner, with more rigidity than need be (cf. Feenberg, 2000). This qualification was clearly understood by the original critics of dualistic modes of thinking: 2 Such complaints have often been made against ANT scholars (cf. Schaffer, 1991; Bloor, 1999). Protests against insidious argumentation techniques were directed against the forerunners of this school. For instance, Émile Durkheim complained about being misquoted by Gabriel Tarde (Durkheim, [1895] 1975) and Pierre Menant analysed Foucault’s style of argument along the same lines (Menant, 1973). ”Life eternally forms itself by setting up oppositions [...]. What Reason opposes, rather, is just the absolute fixity which the intellect gives to the dichotomy; and it does so all the more if the absolute opposition themselves originated in Reason. (Hegel, 1977, p.91). A case in point is the dualism that reasserts itself in the self-representations of post-structuralist STS writers when they pitch dualistic schools of thought against non-dualistic ones. Because of this dualism, the post-structuralist camp comes out looking as unified and univocal as do the opposing block of sociology-marxism. A nuanced reading of competing intellectual traditions would have rendered the self-representations more nuanced too, because it would have unearthed the many interdependencies between academic sociology, Marxism, and post-structuralism. It is in order to fill this lacuna that I propose two historical conjunctures in the genealogy of post-structuralist STS, both rooted in a foregone, Marxist intellectual milieu. FIRST CONJUNCTURE: HEGEL AND LUKÁKS The unofficial genealogies of post-structuralist STS are piling up. They range from US military operational research (Mirowski & Nik-Khah, 2007) to Russian folk tales (Collin, 2011). I do not claim exhaustiveness with my proposed genealogy. It has merit in that it furthers my discussion about the status of explanatory categories. To substantiate my claim, that post-structuralism has an unacknowledged debt to German idealism, I offer for consideration Gillian Rose's examination of the Hegelian critique of dualism in academic sociology.3 She suggested that sociology grosso modo 3 Recently, attention has been drawn to the origins of the STS field in 1960s and 1970s social movements, out of which many were inspired by Marxism. Two examples are the group around the Radical Science Journal and labor process theory (Asdal, Brenna & Moser, 2007). Going 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 (Werskey, 2007; Sheehan, 2007). However, even as the activist pedigree of STS is being rediscovered, its roots in hegelian Marxism and critical theory remain unknown. The notable exception is of falls into two camps. One is represented by Émile Durkheim, the other by Max Weber. The two founding fathers of sociology strove to secure the autonomy of their discipline from philosophy. They did so by proposing an object of study suitable to the new discipline - ”society” or ”culture” - as the master key with which the aporias of the old discipline, philosophy, could be unlocked. Hence, both took up their respective arguments where the most advanced philosophical debates of the day, which is to say, neo-Kantianism, had left off. By then, the reception of Immanuel Kant had meandered through several generations of interpreters, notably Johann Fichte and Hermann Lotze. It culminated in two schools of neo-Kantianism, the Marburg school and the Heidelberg school. The crystallization of two schools claiming different aspects of Kant's legacy exacerbated the dualisms already present in the philosopher's own thinking. Whereas adherents of the Marburg school gave priority to the first part of the equation, to the object over the subject, the finite over the infinite, facts over values, etc., followers of Heidelberg school seized upon the second part. It is known that Durkheim was in contact with the French interpreters of the Marburg school, substantiating the claim that this was the source of his structural metacritique of facts. Likewise, Weber had links to members of Heidelberg school when he worked out an action-oriented metacritique of values. It is thus Gillian Rose traces the dualism in mainstream sociology between, among other things, facts and values. Her argument culminates in an appeal for a sociology that resolves this dualism by building on Hegel's critique of Kant and Fichte (Rose, 2009). Of course, this is the program of Hegelian Marxism, although Rose laments that it was rather unsuccessful. The philosophical underpinnings of Marx's thinking were downplayed after his death. Theory development came under the constraints of furnishing a nascent workers movement with popularizations, even before Marxism succumbed to cold war politics. The Hegelian concepts working behind Marx’s economic writings were reconstructed in György Lukács’ landmark essay course Andrew Feenberg (Feenberg, 2002; see also: Collin & Pedersen, 2015). History and class consciousness ([1923] 1972). Lukács took aim at what he considered to be the apex of bourgeois ideology: science. His critique did not stop with the natural sciences, but included the scientific pretenses of social science, especially those of fellow Marxists. His anticipations were confirmed by the rediscovery in the 1930s of manuscripts written by the young Marx, where the Hegelian influences were more explicit. Dissidents could now borrow the authority of Marx to challenge the ossified, scientific Marxism wielded by communist parties. Hegel’s name became a code-word for opposition to party discipline and Stalinism. Lukács importance for revitalizing Marxist philosophy is well known, but what was his contribution to the nascent STS field? First, his thinking influenced the philosophy of science of Imry Lakatos, who had worked as an assistant for Lukács before being recruited by Karl Popper (Dusek, 1998). Second, Lukács acted as a mentor of the young Karl Mannheim, and many of the same ideas were recycled in the latter’s sociology of knowledge (Bailey, 1996). Third, Lukács gave the chief impetus to the original members of the Frankfurth School. They developed his critique of science. To Adorno and to his associates, positivism was the furthest exponent of the unreason of reason, characteristic of the Enlightenment more broadly. Its promise to dispel myth and superstition had transformed reason into a myth in its own right. This analysis of Modernity must strike a familiar cord among STS scholars. This sketchy overview is sufficient for making the following, cautious claim: The debt of the STS field to Lukács is greater than the attention that has been paid to him by. Indeed, the absence of references to Lukács and to critical theory in present-day STS debates begs for an explanation. It is a lacuna that post-structuralist STS share with French Theory at large. As much has been testified to by no-one else than Foucault: ”Now, obviously, if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say, and I would have avoided many of the detours I made while trying to pursue my own humble path-when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School. It is a strange case of nonpenetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity. Nothing hides the fact of a problem in common better than two similar ways of approaching it.” (Foucault, 1999, p.440- 441). SECOND CONJUNCTURE: ALTHUSSER AND THE DISCIPLES To explain this nonpenetration, we need to look no further than to Foucault's mentor, Louis Althusser. In his rejection of dialectics, Althusser did not take aim at the Frankfurt School, of which he knew little. He targeted rivaling, Hegelian-inspired Marxist currents closer to home, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldman and Henry Lefebvre. To be compelling to his constituency, Althusser needed to mobilize the authority of Marx behind his argument. He claimed that there had been an epistemological break in Marx's own writing, separating an ideological-Hegelian, young Marx from a scientific, mature Marx. The latter prefigured Althusser’s structural Marxism. The textual evidence for this claim is scant. Rather, the twists and turns in Althusser's writings over the years must be seen in relation to his positioning against internal and external opponents to the French communist party, unreformed Stalinist at the time.4 As an intellectual of the party, he was charged with the task of discrediting the ”ideological” and ”humanist” writings of the young Marx, reclaimed by dissidents of party discipline and really existing socialism (Thompson, 1995). Of course, Althusser's politics was not adopted by his disciples. After fleeting involvement in 4 An account of the political fractions and alliances that underpin the theoretical positions adopted by Althusser was written by one of his former diciples, Jaques Rancière ([1974] 2011). For a later-day résumé, see Isabelle Garo (2011). various Maoist and ultra-leftist groupuscules in the years immediately following 1968, many of them became champions of anti-totalitarianism, a thin veil for anti-communism in the heydays of the Cold War (Christofferson, 2004; Wolin, 2010). What Althusser passed on to his disciples, however, was intransigent hostility towards dialectics. Whereas Althusser needed to exempt Marx from this critique of Hegel, the next generation of French philosophers was not under such constraints. They could, with greater intellectual consistency, reject both authorities. The negative sentiments about Hegelian philosophy permeate French intellectual culture to the point of it having become its trademark (Descombes, 1980; Hondt, 1968). The influence of Althusser on the general current of post-structuralism has been documented before (Garo, 2011), but this connection has not been related to the subfield of post-structuralist STS5. Aside for John Law, who amply refers to Althusser in his current writings, Michel Callon has conceded his indebtedness to the structuralist Marxist in an interview (Dosse, 1999, p.9). The bridge between Althusser and Bruno Latour is Michel Serres, who had Althusser as his supervisor at École Normale Supérieure (Schrift, 2006). Furthermore, all of them, including Althusser, took their cues from the philosophy of science of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem. Althusser borrowed his key tenet of an epistemological break (coupure épistémologique) between ideology and science from the former. Having put so much stress on their similarities, I must say a few words on how present-day post-structuralist STS writers depart from this source of origin. John Law makes a reservation that is of particular interest to my argument: ”Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser had something in common other than their radical politics 5 E.P Thompson hinged the wider significance of his critique of Althusser on that the French Marxist had lodged himself in a particular social couche that would perpetuate similarly styled analysis in the future. His words, too long to be quoted here, can fruitfully be read in the light of later-day developments (1995, p.3). and their semiotic interest in relations: both tended to imagine that the logics of narrative possibilities, discourses, semiotics, come in very large chunks” (Law, 2000, p.16) The implication being that post-structuralist STS has liberated itself from the 'very large chunks' of narratives that its forerunners remained attached to. This resumes with different terms the rejection of overarching, explanatory frameworks. Accordingly, Althusser and Foucault can be seen as way- stations in a drawn-out epistemological break, only now consumed with John Law and his co- writers. And what is here broken with, if not the core tenet in Hegelian philosophy, i.e. ”Totality”? Althusser preserved this term but gave it a different spin, now referring to a decentered whole made up of relatively autonomous levels (Althusser & Balibar, 1970, p.97-100). This definition begged the question at what point the relative autonomy of the parts became independent from the whole. Althusser had to guard himself against the implications of ”pluralism”, a damning accusation at the time because synonymous with ”liberalism” (Jay, 1984, p.410). Rather than rejecting Totality tout court, Althusser distinguished between the ”spiritual” or ”expressive Totality” of Hegel and Hegelian Marxists from his own version of Totality, which he claimed to also have been Marx's. What was be extricated here was the link between Totality and history. Althusser's Totality had neither a genetic point of origin nor a teleological point of arrival. It was an 'absent cause' that no individual or collective could represent or make sense of. In contrast, to his Hegelian-Marxist rivals, the possibility of the human subject to comprehend the Totality was the sine quo non of ideology critique. It was the pre-condition if man was ever to make history consciously (Jameson, 2010, p.340-341). This, I believe, is where we find the real bone of contention. Althusser reinterpreted “Totality” in line with the anti-subjectivist, anti-humanist and anti-historicist standpoints of structuralism. Those standpoints, although flown under a very different political flag, are faithfully rehearsed by present-day post-structuralist writers, both inside and outside the STS field. THE IRRECONCILABLE POINT OF DIVREGENCE: TOTALITY VERSUS MULTIPLICITY To sum up, the first conjuncture in the genealogy of STS, i.e. the influence from Hegelian Marxism/critical theory, was subdued at the time of the second conjuncture, i.e. with the rise of (anti-dialectical) structuralism/post-structuralism. Because this intellectual debt has gone unacknowledged, the thematic overlaps between ANT approaches and political economy approaches in STS have been overlooked by the adherents of the respective camp. A third group of interlocutors, having rightly intuited some of these overlaps, declare that the opponents in the post- structuralist and the Marxist-inspired camps are, unbeknownst to themselves, saying the same things. These interventions tend to be sympathetic towards Marxism while foregrounding the contributions that ANT, or a version of this theory, could offer. In a widely read article following this line of argument, Noel Castree proposes a union between what he calls 'relational Marxism' and 'weak ANT'. He believes that such a union would overcome the shortcomings of ANT, especially its lack of political engagement, while pushing Marxists to abandon dualistic thinking and to start treating agency and power as relational achievements (Castree, 2002, p.128). His proposal culminates in a call for Marxists to let go of their totalizing fantasies, for instance, their insistence on 'global capital'. This he believes obscures more than it reveals (ibid., p.132). In making this concession to the post-structuralist STS critique, Castree has nullified whatever it was in Marxism/political economy that he sought to rescue with his compromise. Vice-versa, if the weak version of ANT sounds more compelling to Castree than the strong one, it is because it is no longer ANT. Brian Gareau's attempt to meddle in the dispute is problematic for a different reason. He faults ANT for its lack of political engagement, but commends its attention to the materiality of social relations between humans and non-humans. Marxists can learn from ANT that actors’ roles are not given by nature but interlinked in socio-natural activities, he says (Gareau, 2005, p.133). In a similar vein, Alf Hornborg starts out by voicing strong reservations against Bruno Latour’s philosophy, but applauds it for its anti-Cartesianism. Hornborg then suggests that such a critique of Descartes was missing out at the time when Marx wrote. This explains why Marx took the separation between Nature and Society for granted. The unfortunate consequence of this was that Marx’s exempted objects and technology from his critique of capitalism (Hornborg, 2014, p.128). This last claim flies in the face of textual evidence, such as the celebrated chapter ‘Machinery and large industry’ in volume one of Capital. Furthermore, the historical approach so central to Marx’s method dates back to Giambattista Vico, who mobilized this approach in direct opposition to Rene Descartes’ rationalism (Simon, 1981). The problem with Gareau’s and Hornborg’s interventions is that they, in a hurry to close the debate between Marxist-inspired political economy approaches and post-structuralist STS, overstress the commonalities between the two camps without taking account of the tenets that are irreconcilable. What is irreconcilable boils down to mutually excluding endorsements of either multiplicity or Totality. The former is the chief tenet of materialist semiotics. If emphasis is shifted from the spatial to the temporal domain, the same thing is expressed with the word ”contingency”. Part of the attraction of ”multiplicity” and ”contingency” is that these terms seem to be open to many different viewpoints. One viewpoint which these two concepts cannot accommodate, however, is that of Totality. To be precise, the direct counterpart to ”contingency” is not Totality but ”necessity”. But the two are intimately linked, because ”Totality” implies a necessity in how the parts relate to each other and to the whole. The rejection of Totality (and necessity) is a defining trait of post- structuralist thinking in all its garden varieties (Lyotard, 1984, p.82; cf. Jay, 1984, p.515). In the subfield of post-structuralist STS, this rejection is expressed in the polemic against overarching, explanatory categories and stable backcloths of facts. “Totality” and ”necessity” have an antiquated ring to them in a world as fragmented, complex and ephemeral as ours, for which “multicplicity” and “contingency” sound more appropriate. However, even advocates for ”multiplicity” might gain a better understanding of what this concept entails by examining that which it is not, i.e. by examining the concept of Totality. In Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, this concept is of outmost importance. This was most succinctly put in Hegel's famous remark in the preface to the Phenomenology of the Spirit: 'The true is the whole'. Later on, György Lukács declared this to be the single-most important insight of Marxism, distinguishing it from atomist, bourgeois philosophy (Lukács, 1972). At this point, I must paus my argument to counter a foreseeable misunderstanding. It is predictable that ”Totality” is conflated with how ”system” is understood in structuralist and empirical strands of sociology. In the latter case, social theory postulates a synchronic relationship of a system to its elements. Categories of different order go into one another like a smaller container goes into a bigger one. Such an inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis in a form that could conceivably be falsified by observable data. In contrast, Totality is nothing but ”the movement through its differentiated moments”. Temporality is at the heart of this concept. From this follows research methods that have more in common with hermeneutics than with statistics (Habermas, 1977). The first version of the whole is synchronic, the second is diachronic. Whereas functional structuralism is vulnerable to the objection that it has hypostatized a 'stable backcloth of facts', this reproach misses the mark when addressed to Hegelian Marxism. It is in order to insert another caveat here: My attempt to sum up the opposition between Marxist political economy approaches and post-structuralist STS in the formula “Totality versus Multiplictiy” is too simple, deceptively so. It does not cut to the depth of the many related assumptions that follow in the train of these concepts, with bearing on ontology, epistemology and politics. To do so, I reformulate my formula as a question: is the world sufficiently unified and stable over time (ontology) for some aspect of it to be grasped with concepts (epistemology)? If so, a hierarchy is established between more or less adequate concepts. This in turn implies a hierarchy between groups holding on to concepts of one or the other sort. A positive answer to the above question is a precondition for the possibility of changing the world consciously and deliberatively. A negative answer to the question lies down that there are many and perpetually changing worlds. Thus are concepts denied any access to Being, and the prospects of making it accord with concepts is relinquished. It must now be clear that what political standpoint one adopts is not an optional add- on to these concepts. On it depends what kind of critique, and, by implication, what kind of politics, is conceivable. Theodor Adorno pointed to it in a comparison between two approaches to cultural critique, one ”transcendent”, the other ”immanent”. : ”The transcendent critic assumes an as it were Archimedean position above culture and the blindness of society, from which consciousness can bring the totality, not matter how massive, into flux.” (Adorno, 1967, p.31) It might now seem as if Adorno advocated the transcendent over the immanent method. In subsequent paragraphs, however, he cautions against the idea of an external vantagepoint from which the ‘whole’ of society can be rendered transparent, and praises immanent critique for being more dialectical (ibid., p.32). His message is that an all-sided critique must draw on both methods. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno investigated how the particular and material relates to the general and conceptual, giving priority to the former. He foreshadowed the post-structuralist critique of Totality, without, crucially, repudiating it in an absolute sense (Adorno, 1990; for an assessment: Grumley, 1989, p.183). In part, he hesitated to give up on the explanatory power allowed by the concept of Totality. In part, he recognised that doing so would produce its own aporias and self- contradictions (Eagleton 1996, p.10). This is another way of stating the claim made initially: A critique of concepts must be carried out with concepts. An unconditional affirmation of the local, the emergent, and the multiple turns into a new, but this time unacknowledged, Totality. Exactly this critique has been addressed to John Law’s forerunners, Michel Foucault (Grumley 1989, p.194) and Michel Serres (Hayles, 1988). We can reformulate this self-contradiction in relation to STS concerns as follows: On what grounds can it be said that the world is multiple, contingent and local, when most practitioners experience the world as unified, relatively stable over time, and divided up between a global and a local level? To do so presupposes a division between appearance (it seems as if there is only one world) and essence (deep down, there are many, unrelated worlds). As soon as this division is made, an epistemological hierarchy is reinstated between practitioners and scholars, exactly what the recourse to the local, multiple and contingent sought to banish in the first place. If Totality cannot be dispelled simply by us saying so, then the second best option might well be to learn how to live with it, by rendering it explicit, by subjecting it to critique. THE HEGEMONY OF MULTIPLICITY In what follows, I choose another point of entry by examining the politics vindicated by John Law. He has responded to accusations of being apolitical for many decades (Law, 1991). The critics have rehearsed the old argument that antifoundationalism leads to nihilism. By design, such a program undermines the foundations upon which normative value judgements, and, consequently, political engagements, can be built (Rose, 1979). John Law’s commitment to antifoundationalism as a form of political engagement in its own right is testified in his reproach against a fellow traveler, Bruno Latour. The latter has begun to urge his colleagues in STS community to contribute to the crafting of a comprehensive, common world (Latour, 2010). This recommendation conflicts with the program of multiplicity, which lays down that no such closure or priority ranking must be imposed on the plethora of subjective perspectives.6 It is to the credit of John Law that he has confronted the difficulties of his own position. He did so in a paper called The Greer-Bush Test. This time he was not responding to (left-leaning) academic critics but rather tried to disavow some unwanted admirers. Relativism was selectively endorsed by American neo-conservatives close to the Bush Jr. administration. When confronted with figures on global warming, the neo-cons echoed Fichte in declaring: 'so much worse for the facts'. America had the strength to make the facts it wanted come true. The problem that John Law confronts is the same that antifoundationalism in all its garden varieties has come up against: how to separate 'imperialist constructivists', the name he gives to the neo-conservatives, from constructivist STS scholars like himself? In order not to contradict his starting premises, this distinction must be made without passing a judgement between agreeable and disagreeable political values. John Law can quickly show that the neo-conservatives only subscribes to constructivism when it suits them. At other times, they are equally enthusiastic about scientism. John Law is convincing in arguing that the constructivist STS scholar can be told apart from imperialist constructivist by his or her 6 John Law reprimands Bruno Latour 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, 2008a, p.642). commitment to anti-foundationalism no matter the weather. Two kinds of constructivism can be distinguished on formal grounds alone, without judging the content or values of respective position (Law, 2009b). The solution is elegant, but I suspect that John Law can pull off his argument only by keeping something else fixed. What is being kept fixed is the link between necessity, on the one hand, and undemocratic values, on the other. Note that ”necessity” can take many guises: it variously appears as (technological) determinism, naturalism, universal truth claims, natural laws, or the concept of Totality. It is by identifying this plenitude of ideas with undemocratic values that an unremitting critique of the same ideas automatically lands on the side of democracy. The word automatic is key, because Law's argument requires that the STS scholar is asked to make no other value commitments than the commitment to ”multiplicity”. In the midst of an argument that exclaims that nothing may be kept fixed, a fixation has been introduced between necessity and undemocratic values. The reason that this inconsistency may pass under the radar is because of a consensus in the STS research community about the ills of necessity. Sally Wyatt called attention to this blind spot when she asked why it is, that (technological) determinism is debunked by STS scholars who follow the actors in every other regard. Should not the principle of symmetry apply to these testimonies as well (Wyatt, 2008)? No less than scientific facts, narratives about (technological) determinism are underdetermined, hence susceptible to appropriation from below (Söderberg, 2013). This conclusion is hard to refute if we pursue indeterminacy ”all the way down”. But then Law's argument breaks down. Taking a stand against determinism does not automatically land on the side of democracy. A conscious choice based on values must be made between mutually excluding bids for imperial constructivism.7 7 The same point is made by Munk and Abrahamsson: ”Yet, if we acknowledge that a choice of interventionist strategy is already signalled in the questions we choose to ask, if we acknowledge that we cannot simply leave the conditions of possibility open but that we must to This far into the argument, I want to pause for a moment and ask why so many benevolent things have been expected to follow from a deconstruction of necessity (in the guise of technological determinism, naturalism, etc.)? The deconstruction of such master narratives is the only political commitment required of a social scientist, if we are to follow the advice in The Greer-Bush Test. This implies that all the ills of the world, or, at least, all the ills that social scientists can do something about, stems from an erroneous belief in necessity. The moment the social scientist commits herself to one or another form of ”constitutionalism”, he or she bolsters erroneous beliefs in necessity and contributes to making things worse. Variations on this analysis, coached in ANT- style terminology, have been developed in many fields, ranging from climate change (Blok, 2010) to unstable financial markets (Muniesa, 2014 p.38). To make sense of this implausible proposition, we must recall once more the historical context of post-structuralism. Opposition to metaphysical ideas of necessity was not meant to be a panacea for every thinkable ill in society, from global warming to financial instability. These supplementary causes have been added at a later date, perhaps in a bid to stay relevant in face of evolving, contemporary problems. In France in the 1970s, however, the argument was wielded as a bulwark against one particular ill, although deemed to be of an importance that trumped all others. That is to say: the ill of totalitarianism. Many of Althusser’s former disciples, most notably André Glucksmann, enlisted behind this cause.8 In hindsight, the anti-Totalitarianism debate should be some extent be strategically reflexive as to what it is we are keeping them open for, then there could be consequences for our subsequent descriptions as well.” (Munk & Abrahamsson, 2012, p.58) 8 The response from the leading lights of post-structuralism was mixed. Michel Foucault lend his authority to Nouveaux Philosophes (cf. Wolin, p.342f), while Gilles Deleuze expressed his strongest reservations (Deleuze, 1977). seen against the backdrop of Cold War geopolitics and French election politics - a socialist president was on the verge of being voted into power and his allegiances to the West was in doubt (Christofferson, 2004). These concerns were wedded with the old hostility towards dialectics, now said to impose a metaphysical closure (Garo, 2011). Intellectuals were urged to side with the fragmented, the heterogeneous, the local, the multiple and the contingent, or, which is the same thing, to relinquish their pretentions for transcending the present, on pain of instigating Totalitarianism (Žižek, 2002). Efforts to link Hegelianism with totalitarianism were made on both sides of the English Channel. Karl Popper developed the liberal and scientist version of this stance in The open society and its enemies (1962). In England and in Scotland, the opposition to Totality could draw on an even older tradition of skeptical and empiricist thinking, in part a reaction to Cartesian rationalism and metaphysics. To cite but one, iconic example, John Locke: ”[...] the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs. […] When therefore we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making” (Locke, [1690] 1999, s.399). According to this classic viewpoint on science, the source of error is to be traced back to the concepts that the fragile human mind summons up to cope with the flow of (chaotic, multiple, contingent and meaningless) sense stimuli. The master concept that the flow of sense stimuli gravitates around is the human being herself, subsequently dissolved by David Hume’s analysis. Hume’s empiricism paved the way for the anti-humanism of French Theory, as Deleuze quickly recognized. John Law says as much when he describes material semiotics as an amalgam of French epistemology and English empiricism (2008a, p.632). Likewise, numerous commentators critical of ANT have seen old-fashioned empiricism and anti-metaphysics in its rejection of 'overarching, explanatory frameworks' and dualisms (Collins & Yearley, 1992, p.381; Fuller, 2006).9 If concepts, such as ”society” and ”capitalism”, are understood to be mere 'inventions and creatures of our own making', then the political implications are significant. Michel Callon has drawn the correct conclusion from his own premises: ”Capitalism is an invention of anti-capitalists.” (Barry & Slater, 2002, p.297) CONCLUSION Post-structuralist STS asserts its unique contribution vis-à-vis mainstream sociology and Marxism by lamenting the latters’ alleged reliance on dualistic thinking. The sweeping critique of whole disciplines is remarkable, taking into consideration that when post-structuralist STS is subjected to critique, its adherents insist on the irreducible multiplicity of their many individual positions. However, because of their rejection of ”modernist” intellectual traditions in toto, which is to say, of intellectual traditions that predate post-structuralism, they have barred themselves from discovering the roots (or if preferred, the hybridity) of their own tradition. A nuanced reading of neighboring intellectual traditions would have led to a more nuanced understanding of one’s own tradition too. A third group of interlocutors, reacting against the intransigent opposition between the two camps, have called attention to their many commonalities (Castree, 2002; Gareau, 2005; Perkins, 2007; Silva, 2013; Hornborg, 2014). However, the temptation to bring a premature closure on this debate, and, with that, to make peace between warring factions at the home institution, must be resisted. 9 It might come as a surprise that Althusser is characterized in this way, given that he used “empiricism” as a prejudicial term (pared with “humanism” and “historicism”). Crucially, he defined the empiricist process of knowledge as “abstracting essences from things”, i.e. almost the opposite of how this word is typically understood in philosophy (Althusser & Balibar, 1970, p.35-36; cf. Kolakowski, 1971) Such a compromise can only be sought at the price of intellectual clarity. The irreconcilable points of difference between the two camps can be summarized in the mutually exclusive endorsement of either multiplicity or Totality. The two concepts are entangled in a web of supporting presumptions from which very different conclusions about politics are precluded or derived. Nothing illustrates this better than the overarching and explanatory category of ”capitalism”. The debate over the legitimacy of this concept for explaining phenomena in the world is, at one and the same time, political and epistemological. The idea that ANT and Marxism could be cross-bred, thus combining the politics of the former with the epistemology of the latter, is utter nonsense. On this, ironically, Marxists and ANT scholars can agree against the third-party interlocutors. I end with an appeal for scholars to agree to disagree. In so doing, I pay tribute to the importance of having pluralism in methods and approaches in the social sciences. These must be chosen with an eye on the object of study and the purpose of the intervention. For instance, post-structuralist STS writers dedicated to denaturalizing factual claims in the natural sciences are making a laudable contribution, both scholarly and politically. My objection is limited to instances where post- structuralist STS writers have sought to interdict the reliance on overarching explanatory frameworks in other schools of thought. This bid for hegemony over scholarly methods is inconsistent with the lead tune of their message, multiplicity. 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