Power, Pesticides, and the Will to Proof: How Anthropocentrism Plays With Lyotard’s Postmodern Science
Power, Pesticides, and the Will to Proof: How Anthropocentrism Plays With Lyotard’s Postmodern Scientific Knowledge
Description: In this paper, I argue that scientific knowledge and anthropocentrism produce a mutually reciprocal salability in three especially significant Lyotardian ways. Firstly, because modern science is wholly compatible with the anthropocentric separation from and superiority of humans from nature, its procedure alone substantiates and normalizes the tools by which anthropocentrism can fortify its moves for power; the discursive moves at this basic level are so salient that they are difficult to pinpoint, as flagrant as the near-constant usage of “animals” to mean any and all creatures which are not human. Secondly, a scientific knowledge tainted by an anthropocentric procedure inevitably makes itself susceptible to yielding similarly anthropocentric results, thus the ever-expanding market of practical ways by which to assert our anthropocentric dominance, from pesticides to cages, is produced along with a language by which we can ideologically justify them. Finally, science, by its skeptical nature and methodical will to proof, cannot escape its own language and practice which requires non-human animals to prove themselves worthy of mere consideration against the crushing weight of an autodarwinating anthropocentric global society.
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According to Lyotard, the hegemony of computers produces a new criteria for determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge statements” where the “relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume... the form of value,” a form already witnessed in the capitalistically-rendered relationship between commodity producers and commodity consumers (4). Furthermore, in this new form, he says, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange,” thus “knowledge ceases to be an end to itself, it loses its ‘use-value’” (5). Though the characterization of knowledge here as “produced in order to be sold” is of course interpreted in a direct economic sense, this aspect is also related, in late-stage global capitalism, to a secondary ideological saleability: that is, compatibility with a market of ideas, controlled by dominant narratives that lay claim to the story of the world, which preliminarily guide the movement of economic forces (5). Thus there is a significant and retraceable fissure between the classical conception of knowledge as aspiring to truth and wisdom, and the new postmodern knowledge, which instead pursues power by method of Lyotard’s metanarrative of language games wherein knowledge is evaluated by its capacity (or lack there-of) to substantiate strategic discursive moves and plays (10).
This metanarrative of language games encompasses both the more tolerant narrative forms of knowledge as well as the more stubborn scientific knowledge. Indeed, although the scientist looks disparagingly upon narrative’s disinterest in argumentation and proof and concludes by classifying such as “savage, primitive, underdeveloped, [and] backward,” (27) in actuality “scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all” (29). In this way, scientific knowledge—despite its multifold insistence on its own fixed neutrality and steadfastness in the face of exogenous forces—cannot circumvent the metanarrative of language games and is thus also culpable for the swapping of knowledge as an end-to-itself in exchange for the saleable and power-securing knowledge of the times.
But toward what sort of power might science intend? In Jill Godmilow’s short essay film What Farocki Taught (a color- and anglophone-ized shot-by-shot remake of Harun Farocki’s Nicht Löschbares Feuer), we see a twofold exploration of the way that science collaborates with power. The first is the more direct way, in which the scientific knowledge and production of napalm by the Dow Chemical Company was, in the 1960s, valuable only insofar as napalm was being used in Vietnam—that is, not as an end-to-itself but military- and geopolitical ends—precisely, such deployment of this deadly, disfiguring mixture was aimed at the American domination of a global set of language games, where the U.S. hoped to parade its military power across the global stage (with suspicious success) by virtue of safeguarding the free market.
In the second, we see that it is the ultra-fragmented division of labor in the production of napalm (as well as other weapons, like nuclear bombs) that, for each working individual, eclipses their contributions to these weapons of mass destruction; each scientist, technician—even the secretary who answers the telephone and relays messages to the suits—has, in Godmilow’s view, a role to play, and plays it indeed. To put it in more Lyotardian terms, the increased division of labor made it difficult, if not impossible, for scientists and technicians to recognize both the power they helped reaffirm by supplying the knowledge for American plays in the global language games, as well as the opaque source of power governing them (let alone the ways in which these powers were part of the same power structure). “Regarding the crimes in Vietnam,” reads a title card, “they feel like observers”—that is, until after the napalm had been burned, the bombs diffused, and it was far too late for a realization to mean much of anything. It is worth acknowledging too that the second relationship between scientific knowledge and power is also reminiscent of a Foucauldian conception of power insofar as this power seeks to reproduce itself through fragmentation and subsequent micro-acts of discipline with intentionally murky origins.
