It is one of those strange synergies that interests me with Debord’s related comments on Science and capitalism. Where he says: “It is sometimes said that science today is subservient to the imperatives of profit, but that is nothing new. What is new is that the economy has come to declare open war on humanity attacking not only our possibilities for living but our chances of survival. It is here that Science – renouncing the opposition to slavery that formed a significant part of its own history - has chosen to put itself at the service of spectacular domination. Until it got to this point Science possessed a relative autonomy. It knew how to understand its own portion of reality; and in this has made an immense contribution to increasing economic resources. When the all powerful economy lost its reason – and it is this which defines these spectacular times – it surpassed the last vestiges of scientific autonomy, both in methodology and in the practical working conditions of its ‘researchers’. No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens…”

“The power of an ideology is not only measured by the answers it can provide but by the questions that it is able to suppress…” Gunther Anders in 1956…

Now we can see that we need only understand this phrase when looking at the dominant ideologies within capitalism, in our own societies. That extending its reach into those understandings which aim at a purer critique of capitalism, of liberal parliamentary democracy is unnecessary. Because we now that what is going to be suppressed must be… When applied to the ideologies of the scientific, political, economic and religious it works only to well…

The most important  question to be resolved is this: whether science can give us, and if so in what way, the certainty of the objective existence of so-called external reality. For common sense the question does not even exist; but from what has the certainty originated ? Essentially from religion; but religion is an ideology, the best rooted and most widespread ideology, not a proof or a demonstration. One may maintain it is an error to ask of science as such the proof of the objectivity of reality, since this objectivity is a conception of the world, a philosophy and thus cannot be a scientific datum… Gramsci Q11.37

…To make science the basis of life, to make science into the conception of the world par-excellance, which lifts the veil  formed by ideological illusion and leaves humanity face to face with reality as it actually is, means falling back into the  concept that the philosophy of praxis needs philosophical supports outside itself. But in actual fact  science too is a superstructure, an ideology. Can it not however , be said that, in the study of superstructures, science occupies a privileged position since its  reaction on the structure is of a particular kind, being an extension and continuity of a development, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, when science obtained a position on its own in the public esteem ? That science is a superstructure is also demonstrated  by the fact that it as whole periods of eclipse, obscured as it was by another  dominant ideology, religion, which  claimed that it had absorbed science  itself;  thus the science and technology of the Arabs seemed pure witchcraft to the Christians. Further and notwithstanding all the efforts of the scientists, science never appears as a bare objective notion - it appears in the trappings of an ideology; in concrete terms, science is the union of the objective fact with a hypothesis or system of hypotheses which go beyond the mere objective fact. It is true however that in this field it is relatively easy to distinguish the objective notion from the system of hypotheses  by means of a process of abstraction that is inherent in scientific methodology itself, in such a way that one can appropriate  the one without rejecting the other. This is why one social group can appropriate the the science of another group without accepting its ideology (the ideology  of vulgar evolution, for example), so the observations pf Missiroli (and of Sorel) are wide of the mark.

Gramsci Q11.38

Althusser conceives of ideology as a representation of men’s lived relation to their conditions of existence and that this relation is an imaginary one. This thesis is a result of the contestation of humanism/historicism: in displacing the constitutive subject He must also displace the classical conception of ideology as a false recognition of the real… The imaginary relation supposes a subject who lives that relation. The imaginary is a concept which presupposes recognition; it is both an image and a spectral reality….#Hirst on
law and ideology 1979…

‘fine and good’ Zes interposed. ‘…First: put the bacillinzed canned foods on the domestics market as well. Secound: non matter what the cost, finish construction of our extra-high-powered Super Ex within days. Third:as soon as that’s done, switch from science to politics. #Krzhizanovsky. 1926.

I have,for my sins been in meetings that have been less honest than this…

‘You have to assume that you don’t have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information they default…’ Martin Wheatley.

That the spectacle believes in irrationality is hardly news of course, still as the above quote from one of the UK’s financial regulators demonstrates that it now no longer believes in rational choice is rather a critical moment.  The default is irrational choice, the mass consumer is regarded as being incapable of rationality… Bourgeois ideology at its finest, where both rationality and irrationality exist and are fundamental to the existence of the spectacle and yet where there own ideology blinds them from the obvious understanding that there is no such thing as irrationality in the spectacle…

The crucial thing in @khaoid’s post is the last question - how does one answer that question without alienating the non-marxists, the non-communists amongst you ? Can I just speak of evaluating and answering it with the essential ‘grand-narrative of human-emancipation’ ? or is that unacceptable for you post-modern human beings ?

To clarify a little further I think the following may help…The sociology of scientific knowledge emerged in the 1970s it “…differentiated itself  from contemporary positions in the philosophy and sociology of science in two ways. First it insisted that science was interestingly and constitutively social all the way into its technical core: scientific knowledge itself had to be understood as a social product. Second SSK was determinedly social and naturalistic….” Andrew Pickering (1992) At this point you can already see how science with and because of its social nature can be considered as an ideological practice. It’s a small step from thinking of how the social implies ideology, to considering how research practices and the scientific outputs must also be considered in such a way. Science speaks through a medium fashioned by those who determine what language is permitted, what texts are reproduced. Language therefore is tainted by the the established order - educational, government, mass media, social media, established science. (The taint is understood as being best described as ideology).

In fact I believe this is only marginally different from Deleuze’s description of how a “…tool remains marginal, or little used, until there exists a social machine or assemblage which is capable of taking it into its ‘phylum’….” Gilles Deleuze (1977/87) The example that Deleuze uses here is the ‘stirrup’ which is historical and uncontentious, when applied to something more contemporary such as genetics and placed within the last 200 years of Western Capitalism - from Mendalism to pharmacy Genetic testing kits, from slavery to racism… it becomes significantly more difficult to explain and utilize.

Hence the use of ideology, which is a conceptual apparatus already deeply embedded in everyday life. Whereas a ‘social machine or assemblage’ always has to be explained before it becomes usable when discussing the issues with a non-technical, a philosophical audience.

This is as brief as I could make it without being crassly representational, which is not my intention. In a sense we might consider ideology at a minimum as a representation of human beings lived relations to their condition of existence and that this relation is an imaginary one. But this suggests that there is something else, non-representational. But in truth as referenced below what is hinted at as not being representational, which might be art, truth and science is precisely what is considered as most ideological, science, truth, philosophy, mathematics and so on.

Negri and Hardt put it rather well “ This is not really a matter of ideology critique if by ideology we still understand a realm of ideas and language that is superstructural, external to production. Or rather in the imperial regime ideology, critique becomes directly the critique of both political economy and lived experience…..Knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real (re)appropriation of knowledge”

Understandings of ideology in marxism have always tended to emphasize the realisation in social relations of theories of knowledge. The concept of ideology as part of an epistemological discourse has always involved the distinction of true and false(ideological) notions of reality. Politically this derives from the attributing of truth to certain forms of social consciousness. This is considered insufficient as there can be no such distinction in my use of the concept because to be precise there is no epistemological distinction between science and ideology. Science is understood as always already being ideological, just as all discourses are considered to be ideological. Thus the following formula are all equally ideological (M-C-M), T¹ > T¹¹ and EMC² just within different discourses, fields of knowledge.

A discourse bears and imposes an ideology, and in turn every ideology finds its discourse. As a consequence of this we can understand why every dominant class, gender and so on pays attention to the practice of language, image and information and controls its distribution and its forms. Even though this statement seems simple enough people on the whole wish to restrict this to the classical simple forms of news, media, law and such forms as literature. From this we can understand perhaps why a dominant class, a dominant order has its favourites (language, literature, science, engineering, philosophy and so on) and why it aims to control any other language… see (Kristeva and Hjemslev)

This is, we remind you, extended into all those areas of human culture which you might wish to consider non-ideological. So that whilst some might still believe that we can consider that the real and the true can pre-exist our consciousness, social or otherwise, this is rejected as delusionary and more importantly unhelpful. Because hidden in this a notion of originary meaning there is something real beneath the objects of morality, ethics, science, metaphysics, mathematics… I am indifferent to such claims, that for instance the mathematics and logics that I use on a daily basis somehow touch on a real that is non-ideological. Science and mathematics which are rightly considered to be the privileged areas of knowledge in our society are as ideologically bound as any and all other aspects of human society. (see SSK and science).

A final reference to Georges Dumezil’s ideological proposition - “since 1938, when it was first recognized that the ideological structure of the “three functions” - administration of the sacred, physical force, and abundance and fecundity – had a common Indo-European character, a comparison of the theological and mythical expressions of each of these functions for the various peoples of the Indo-European family has been undertaken….” Deleuze and Guattari avoid this explicit statement by re-reading Dumezil in (ATP 12) with the introductory ‘in his definitive analyses of Indo-European mythology’. What they read as mythology I would suggest that Dumezil by using the concept of ideology places as more real, being intrinsically bound up with our languages, images and knowledges. It is critical I suggest that we recognize and accept the extremely long duree of ideological forms and functions, even as we aim to control and minimize the damage that the three functions produces.

Quotes:

Ideologies are Social relations, not a distorted version of reality…

So that if we then insist on the heterogeneity of ideological social relations and their effects we are not trapped in the real (hirst?)

In the present it is not acceptable to consider that science and technology occupy a privileged place in our society…(Kofman)

Who hasn’t come across the following idealism …’We set out from real active men, and on the basis of their real-life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes of the life process’ (Marx)

‘Will the language of science finally speak properly of ideology, after having made use of metaphors and analogies for its didactic ends ? ’ (Kofman)

A glass of liquid at temperature TI is placed in a room at temperature TII such that . The disequilibrium produces a field potential that results in a flow of energy in the form of heat from the glass to the room so as to drain the potential until it is minimized (the entropy is maximized) at which time thermodynamic equilibrium is reached and all flows stop. refers to the conservation of energy in that the flow from the glass equals the flow of heat into the room. (From Swenson, 1991a. Copyright 1991 Intersystems Publications. Adapted by permission).

“Neoliberalism is not about the principles or ideology but a social order aiming at the power and income of the upper classes. Ideology os a political  instrument. Considered from this angle there was no change in  objectives. In neoliberalism the state (taken here  in a broad sense to include the central bank) always worked in favour of the upper classes…  The treatment of the crisis is no exception, only circumstances and consequently the instruments differ. That a deep and lasting structural crisis might usher in a new social order, the expression of distinct class hierarchies and compromises, is another issue.” Dumenil and Levy

Neoliberalism is  understood as a new liberalism. What is happened as I type this is the ongoing development of a replacement dominant discourse, a new ideology to replace neoliberalism. A neomanagerialism is the preferred liberal solution (listen to the Tory liberal George Osbourne and the running dogs of the labour party. The centre-right version they represent is beginning to admit that ‘we aren’t all in this together’.

The alternative is already known….

To start with of course I have to accept that for Object Orientation Philosophy I am the classic enemy which most philosophers have to define and name to legitimise their sophistic terrorism, in this particular instance declaring them in the infantile way of philosophers to be the enemy ‘a correlationist’, just as for Badiou I am as he describes it a ‘Democratic Materialist’ or sometimes in that stupid way of his ‘aristocratic’, or as was once fashionable the ‘dialectic’.

Nonetheless, and of course in some senses there is nothing in the summary statement at the beginning of this with which I see any violent disagreement, we are all supposed to be for the post-human with its partial critique of humanism, the argument for an understanding of objects, the decentreing of post-humanity along with humanity, the argument for materialism and against sophistry and so on.

Object Orientation is simply not being careful enough for it is behaving in the same way as any other fashionable philosophical and ideological proposition does, making a case for its position within the academe, establishing a place for itself within the spectacle. The ideological proposition, the idea that ‘the failure to take nonhuman agencies into account as part of the glue that holds social systems together dooms us to ineffectual critique and practice’ is impossible to accept in an unquestioning fashion when I am reading the representation from within the network heart of the spectacle, when the network society is beamed inescapably into our lives. Because there is nothing nonhuman about the human constructed network.

So let’s be clear apart from its position within the spectacle as the latest in a long line of fashionable and spectacular philosophical concepts – the underlying belief that there is a truth at stake here, that Object Orientation is truth is rejected. Because we have to reject the irrelevant proposition that OO is “adequate to explain why social systems hold together as they do and therefore to effectively strategies ways of changing oppressive regimes” because what OO defines as “correlationist social and political thought” including such useful concepts and tools as ideology, cultural Marxism, discursive and semiotic constructivism) – is simply to useful and usable to be replaced by a materialism founded on an unnecessary misnaming of human constructed objects as “nonhuman”. All the examples that were produced in the discussion were human constructed objects, rice, grain and even if I extend the list into objects not constructed by human beings – this does not help support the underlying implication raised yesterday: That Object Orientation is the means of obeying Marx’s famous requirement that we change the world, not that we need to stop philosophizing.

Equally significant is that the list of names – consists entirely of what we should, with some admiration, call the anti-dialectical line of thought. Though it is questionable even a little laughable to call them ‘marginal’. Is this because the dialectical line of thought including such luminaries of the total critique of capitalism as Debord, Lefebrve and so on sit so uneasily within the philosophical and academic world, within the spectacle itself ? Or is it that the straw man presented again here is based on something more problematic – that the nonhuman is to vague a concept, not reductionist enough, unable to differentiate between something constructed by human beings and something which isn’t. Perhaps it would read better for me if, as Hallward told me once, Object Orientation brings equivalence into the foreground – because in philosophical terms it does this insufficiently for me. You may argue that in the sections where you speak of ‘single flat and immanent plane’ this is sufficient, and I would probably consider it in those terms but the discourse, the discourse as it begins – the banal labeling, the use of human constructs to justify the plane and the supposed purpose contradicts the theoretical concept of the plane which requires more overt equivalence and a greater generosity and less stereotyping than the ‘correlationist’ labelling allows.

Naming your enemies in such an inherited fashion carries a cost… you refuse us even when in our anti-humanism we go much further than you are doing.

“Despite the deeply rooted faith in free-market economics and the so-called discipline of the markets, the crisis initiated a chain of interventions from central institutions. There is nothing surprising about  this sharp reversal away from the basic tenants of the neoliberal creed. Neoliberalism is not about principles or ideology but a social order aiming at the power and income of the upper classes, Ideology is a political instrument. Considered from this angle there was no change in objectives. In neoliberalism the state always worked in favor of the upper classes… That this crisis might usher in a different social order is a different issue.”

The phasing here is important because i tend to think of neoliberalism as an ideology or discourse, whereas here the emphasis is on a social order. With the consequence that the set of discourses that make up neoliberalism are understand through their goals. Perhaps its a more useful abstraction…  However it does begin to explain why the central issue with Tim Jackson’s Prosperty Without Growth is ideological. Because there is no central universal of human emancipation it can potentially become merely another supporting toolset for a social order aiming at the support of power and income for the ruling  classes. The evidence to support this is the preface…