Digifesto

In a previous post, I argued that Beniger is an unideological social scientist because he grounds his social scientific theory in robust theory from the natural and formal sciences, like theory of computation and mathematical biology. Astute commenter mg has questioned this assertion.

Does firm scientific grounding absolve a theoretical inquiry from ideology – what about the ideological framework that the science itself has grown in and is embedded in? Can we ascribe such neutrality to science?

This is a good question.

To answer it, it would be good to have a working definition of ideology. I really like one suggested by this passage from Habermas, which I have used elsewhere.

The concept of knowledge-constitutive human interests already conjoins the two elements whose relation still has to be explained: knowledge and interest. From everyday experience we know that ideas serve often enough to furnish our actions with justifying motives in place of the real ones. What is called rationalization at this level is called ideology at the level of collective action. In both cases the manifest content of statements is falsified by consciousness’ unreflected tie to interests, despite its illusion of autonomy. The discipline of trained thought thus correctly aims at excluding such interests. In all the sciences routines have been developed that guard against the subjectivity of opinion, and a new discipline, the sociology of knowledge, has emerged to counter the uncontrolled influence of interests on a deeper level, which derive less from the individual than from the objective situation of social groups.

If we were to extract a definition of ideology from this passage, it would be something like this: an ideology is:

I maintain that the theories that Beniger uses to frame his history of technology are unideological because they are not expressions of motives. They are descriptive claims whose validity has been tested thoroughly be multiple independent social groups with conflicting interests. It’s this validity within and despite the contest of interests which gives scientific understanding its neutrality.

Related: Brookfield’s “Contesting Criticality: Epistemological and Practical Contradictions in Critical Reflection” (here), which I think is excellent, succinctly describes the intellectual history of criticality and how contemporary usage of it blends three distinct traditions:

1. a Marxist view of ideology as the result of objectively true capitalistic social relations,
2. a psychoanalytic view of ideology as a result of trauma or childhood,
3. and a pragmatic/constructivist/postmodern view of all knowledge being situated.

Brookfield’s point is that an unreflective combination of these three perspectives is incoherent both theoretically and practically. That’s because while the first two schools of thought (which Habermas combines, above–later Frankfurt School writers deftly combined Marxism is psychoanalysis) both maintain an objectivist view of knowledge, the constructivists reject this in favor of a subjectivist view. Since discussion of “ideology” comes to us from the objectivist tradition, there is a contradiction in the view that all science is ideological. Calling something ‘ideological’ or ‘hegemonic’ requires that you take a stand on something, such as the possibility of an alternative social system.