Meeting Polemics with Irenics in the Science Wars

Author(s): Emily Martin

Source: Social Text , Spring - Summer, 1996, No. 46/47, Science Wars (Spring - Summer,
1996), pp. 43-60
Published by: Duke University Press

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 Meeting Polemics with Irenics in the Science Wars

According to Webster's, a polemic is "an aggressive attack on, or the refu- Emily Martin
tation of, others' opinions, doctrines or the like." In today's academy, pro-
fessors and students often have cause to be polemic, but seldom have
cause to remember that polemic has an opposite.1 Webster's defines that
opposite, irenic, as "fitted or designed to promote peace; pacific, concilia-
tory, peaceful." Recent skirmishes in the Science Wars have seemed to me
so polemically bitter on all sides that rather than sending back another vol-
ley intended to hurt and destroy, I want to try moving irenically toward
common ground.
I will do this by discussing a few recent occasions in which I have
been involved in the Science Wars. The first was an occasion when

defenders of natural science directed a polemic in my direction; the sec-

ond, an occasion when I delivered a polemic at the natural sciences
myself; and third, an occasion when I exchanged polemics with other
practitioners of the social sciences.

Moments from the New York Academy of Sciences

Conference, "The Flight from Science and Reason"

At this conference,2 explicitly designed to awaken unaware scientists to the

"clear and present danger" posed to them by social constructionist analy-
ses of science in anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies, I listened
quietly in the audience. I had just completed a cultural study in which I
treated scientific forms of knowledge as one strand among the many that
make up knowledge about the body, health, and the world in the contem-
porary United States. In that study I did participant observation in a
research immunology lab in which there were mutually respectful relations
between me and the scientists, technicians, and graduate students.
Because I had so recently experienced cordial working relations with nat-
ural scientists, I was discomfited by the barrage of negative sentiments
some participants expressed at this conference, sentiments so negative
that they seemed intended to leave no room for cultural studies of science
at all. Some examples follow.

Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 and 2, Spring/Summer 1996. Copyright ? 1996 by
Duke University Press.

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 * While discussing means of increasing science literacy among the
American public, James Trefil revealed his dream that people would have
film clips of scientific information in their heads. These film clips would
be played automatically whenever people heard scientific words like star or
proton.3 Why, I wondered, must he insist that knowledge only flows one
way, out from science to the rest of us, and why must he imagine that this
knowledge is best impressed on passively waiting minds? Why did Trefil
and others at this conference ignore recent findings in anthropology and
cultural studies that knowledge production occurs at all times and places,
inside and outside the natural sciences?

* Numerous speakers made plain their contempt for popular culture.

Alternative medicine was said to be practiced by "fascists, autocrats, and
bizarre magicians"; quoting Poe, Gerald Weissman remarked that "con-
ventional ideas are foolish"; and Sheldon Goldstein commented that we
are living in a "new age of unreason" and that, among the public, "logical
thought itself is in bad order." Most speakers seemed to agree: the public
knows nothing. How, in the face of this, could I ever get across my own
admiration and amazement for the complexities of how nonscientists
struggle to develop knowledge of health and the body, often incorporating
sophisticated readings of current biomedicine? How could I make clear
that many alternative practitioners, far from aiding and abetting a con-
spiracy against science, are eagerly seeking understanding of their empir-
ical observations through nonreductionistic biomedical disciplines, such as
immunology?
* Numerous ominous predictions were made that social construc-
tionism's questioning of the authority of science as the preeminent arbiter
of truth risks leading us to another Third Reich. As Weissmann put it,
"Once the restraints of reason are cut, the public is prey to the wanderings
of a debauched brain." Richard Lewontin (1995, 265) pointed out, in
the face of similar warnings from Gertrude Himmelfarb, that the Third
Reich was surely founded on a passionate belief in an absolute Truth,
exactly the opposite of the relativist, comparativist, and situational under-
standing of values fostered by social constructivism.4
A number of responses to the tone and content of this conference
have gone through my mind. Can the participants' dedication to a Truth
that can be known only by science and that exists completely indepen-
dently of politics, culture, or history be questioned by pointing out their
reliance on links to thoroughly political right-wing organizations and foun-
dations? The list of participants at the New York Academy of Sciences
conference overlaps heavily with the list of participants at an earlier con-
ference in a similar vein funded by the National Association of Scholars
(NAS).5 Conveners of the New York Academy conference are frequently

44 Emily Martin

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represented in the pages of the NAS's journal, Academic Questions, and are
frequently actively promoted in the weekly NAS science newsletter on
the Internet. It is by now well documented that the membership of NAS
overlaps with the leadership of major conservative organizations such as
the Madison Center for Educational Affairs (Messer-Davidow 1993,
47-50). In addition, the NAS receives major funding from conservative
foundations such as Bradley, Coors, Olin, Smith Richardson, and Scaife
(Messer-Davidow 1993, 60; Cowan and Massachi 1994, 11).
More important than this particular conference's evident link to pow-
erful right-wing funds, organizations, and agendas is the question of
whether the many practicing natural scientists the conference organizers
were trying to reach would share their attitudes at all. It is possible that the
participants in this conference, determined to present a caricature of cul-
tural studies, feminism, and cultural anthropology, could by doing so elicit
a horrified reaction from natural scientists. However, in my experience,
most practitioners of science are intrigued by cultural studies of science
when it is presented in a subtle way. During my fieldwork, for example,
reproductive biologists used my insights about cultural stereotypes that get
into accounts of the egg and the sperm to ask new research questions;
immunologists used my findings about understandings of the immune
system in the wider culture to prepare for their presentations to Con-
gress. In the following, therefore, I direct my remarks not to the organiz-
ers of this conference or their allies, but to the practicing scientists they
are trying to enlist.

Moments from My Life as a Lecturer

on Cultural Studies of Science

Far from always being a silent target of polemics in the Science Wars, I
have actually been responsible for hurling many polemics myself. On
many occasions as a visiting lecturer on college campuses, in particular as
the guest of medical students, I have had as my main purpose the upset-
ting, and dislodging, of biomedicine's received wisdom about the body.
Once when I was invited to speak to a group of medical students at
Johns Hopkins Medical School, I introduced the idea that the fundamen-
tal models medicine uses to imagine the body are filled with historically
specific cultural content. In the ensuing discussion, a male student from
Puerto Rico picked up the polemic I had hurled and threw it again, at one
of his white-coated professors. His mother, he told us, was a subject in the
first trials of oral contraceptives in Puerto Rico. He detailed her suffering
as a consequence of taking high-dose hormones and bitterly castigated

Meeting Polemics with Irenics 45

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 U.S. medical research for so ruthlessly using Third World populations as
experimental subjects. His professor, one of the principals in the develop-
ment of the pill, was enraged. He lashed out at the student, telling him he
knew nothing, forcing him to acknowledge he had not read the literature
in the medical library on the development of the pill, and insisting that he
had no right to criticize the science that had saved so many women from
death or damage in pregnancy and labor. The student was utterly
silenced, at least for the moment.
On another occasion, after I lectured about the cultural presupposi-
tions in biomedicine to the first-year class at Ohio State Medical School, a
group of second-year female medical students told me about something
that disturbed them deeply. During gross anatomy, their instruction sheets
told them to cut off the breasts of the female cadavers and throw them

away. They had been bold enough to question the instructor, who told
them the breasts were not interesting anatomically and so the time it
would take to dissect them was not justified. They had been silenced, but
now, armed with fresh ammunition, they began to lay plans for a new con-
frontation.

At stake in these modest skirmishes is what counts as knowledge and

who gets to determine this. Clearly, from the side of the professors, what
counts is determined by current professional medical standards, what has
been published, and what is proving productive in the ongoing process of
research. What counts for the students in these incidents is deeply felt
personal experience that is not adequately acknowledged in ongoing sci-
ence-recollections of a mother's pain from side effects that for her and
her son were anything but on the side, and fears of susceptibility to breast
disease, fears which are growing, along with rising rates, especially among
young women.

To begin to talk irenically instead of polemically, is there any way

these accounts can be read across each other? Is there any way to encour-
age the doctors to acknowledge that the students also "know" some-
thing-something the current state of accepted knowledge may have
missed? In short, is there any way to begin to encourage the identification
of common ground between the practitioners of science and the critics, if
for no other reason then for the sake of students like these who are caught
in the middle? After all, these young men and women, having gone
through college recently, have often been well exposed to feminism, cul-
tural studies, and the like, yet they still want to be practicing scientists.
Even amidst the polemics of the "Flight from Science and Reason"
conference, one practicing scientist was able to eloquently delineate com-
mon ground between cultural studies of science and science itself. Dudley
Herschbach, Nobel laureate in chemistry, toted up a list: as in the human-
ities, scientific articles certainly use rhetoric to make their points, and this

46 Emily Martin

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should be celebrated; like a work of art, a scientific experiment can have Within the world-

spiritual value in that it can change the way we see the world; like literary
criticism, science could be seen as a form of translating or decoding lan- view of its

guage. Science tries to decode the many strange and difficult tongues in
which nature speaks. practitioners,

As Herschbach expressed it, science is like a pathway up an unex-

belief in the reality
plored mountain, which could be called truth or understanding. Truth
waits there for us scientists until we discover it. Perhaps if we put these of the mountain
remarks of Herschbach's together with a remark by Stephen J. Gould
quoted approvingly by one of the conference organizers in the NAS pub- of knowledge
lication Academic Questions, we can add to the common ground Her-
schbach began to identify. Gould is quoted as saying that a scientist "has that science
to be some sort of realist, if only for the sake of one's motivation, 'because
99 percent of the time the scientist's work is so boring, and there are all discovers is a sine

those mouse cages to be cleaned up again at the end of the day'"(Holton

1995, 15). In other words, within the worldview of its practitioners, belief qua non of doing
in the reality of the mountain of knowledge that science discovers is a sine
science. Is there a
qua non of doing science. Is there a way, in the interest of opening com-
mon ground, that we critics of science can stop trying to dissuade scien-
way, in the
tists from having this worldview? Richard Rorty describes knowledge not
as getting reality right but as acquiring habits of action for coping with interest of
reality (Rorty 1979; Jenkins 1994). In this vein, the habits of action nec-
essary for most natural scientists to cope with the reality that is the sine opening common
qua non of their practice include detailed record keeping; precise mea-
surement of time, quantity, and space; repetition; replication; and reduc- ground, that we
tion. The worldview that supports these habits and makes them necessary
is that, when using these tools, you get down to the bones, you find real- critics of science

ity.
In a parallel way, the worldview often found among practitioners of can stop trying to
another discipline, cultural anthropology, is that what reality is taken to be,
dissuade scientists
down to the bones, depends on ways of seeing that differ. The habits of
action that support and are necessitated by this worldview include empa-
from having this
thy, shared insights, vivid and effective writing, imagination, poetic inter-
pretation, and understanding things in context. To exercise the effort nec- worldview?
essary to participate imaginatively in another world, one must believe that
meaning statements are irreducible. So if a psychologist or neuroscientist
says that a myth, say, is really caused by repressed anxiety or disrupted
brain waves, the anthropologist might well object. Such an account would
dissolve the understanding of meaning that was gained by the anthropo-
logical account. The anthropological way of knowing is thus made irre-
ducible and irreplaceable; the anthropological epistemology is no less sit-
uated in the practice of its discipline than that of a natural scientist.

Meeting Polemics with Irenics 47

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 Moments on the Sidelines in the
Science Wars, Social Science Version

The struggle for common ground must go on not just between the natural
sciences and the humanities, but also within the social sciences. This
became clear to me when I was invited to give a lecture sponsored by the
School of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago on feminism and
the social sciences.6 I was astonished at the polemically bitter reaction to
my talk. I had made the point that feminism has changed what counts as
the production of knowledge by transforming (not just adding to) the
very tenets of what counts as knowledge, and by transforming ways in
which the academic institutions into which feminists and feminism have

been incorporated produce knowledge. As a consequence, feminism

would be properly described as a structure of change, or a paradigm of
transformation. I argued that, just as the ethnography of science suggests
that knowledge production, informed by diverse situations, is going on at
all times and places, inside and outside the natural sciences, the same
could be true for the domain of social science. The traditional domain

about which the social sciences sought knowledge, the public sphere,
might be rehabilitated to become one diversified by race, gender, age,
and class, in such a way that its members could be seen as participating in
the production of knowledge about society. This would depend on realiz-
ing that the people social scientists have been studying not only live their
own lives but can analyze them, that their "untutored minds" are not
necessarily mired in pure experience. If this structural change in the social
science view of knowledge could take place with the help of a feminist
paradigm of transformation, the ways in which the institutional forms of
the social sciences "police" or accommodate knowledge production would
change.
To make the prospect of changing what counts as knowledge in the
public sphere more concrete, I turned to an example from my recent
fieldwork in the neighborhoods of Baltimore. One person, whom Gramsci
might have called an organic intellectual (1971, 330), illustrates particu-
larly well how, through ethnography, we can see that "the public" contains
theorists who analyze their experience. John Marcellino, a community
leader in an integrated, poor working-class area, discussed his experience
of health care:

I got bad teeth, ok? And one of the things all poor people have is bad teeth,
because of being poor, ok? . .. [I]t's one of the first things I noticed when I
started moving around, because when I talk to Indian people, they got bad
teeth. You know what I mean? And I go down south, and they got bad teeth,
so it's one of the things that poor people share all over the world in common,
we all got bad teeth. You know what I mean? (laughs) And I, what I come to

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 realize it's for a number of reasons. One is, I think that government doesn't
want us to have, they don't care about our teeth . . . I never could figure it
out, it just pissed me off, you know what I mean, but I figure it's one of the
ways of distinguishing poor people from the rest of the population is we all
got bad teeth (laughs) . . . And so you won't get rid of the drug abuse or the
prostitution or the crime or stuff, until the people who live here are no
longer here. And that to me is the same as the underclass thing, disposable
people . . . As soon as they can't figure out a need for us, they'll get rid of us.

[What's the need for you right now?]

We still make money for somebody or another. They still need us some, like
they needed people to come up out of the south to work in the mills, so they
attract them all up. Now there's not as much need for the people to work in
the mills, they need some people in the service economy, they try to retrain
S. but if not they're no use, they'll put you in jail... they'll choke you off
so that you can't make a living doing anything else, so they get rid of you, or
you know, hopefully you'll go back to Virginia or somewhere else, right?
You know, you'll crawl in a crack or you won't have children or something.

Marcellino is pessimistic about the ability of this community to survive:

We think it [AIDS] could kill us. It could just kill a lot of people in our com-
munity, that's what I think about . . . like the way to not get AIDS is to not
touch people, you know what I mean? . . . we learn that it's real specific in
terms of how you can catch it. You know like being monogamous and only
having one partner, . . . that's not usual in our community, particularly
among young people and, you know what I mean. It's not usual, and then
you have all this interaction between needle users and folks involved in pros-
titution, and a lot of interaction in the community, and so it's not like sepa-
rated, it's not like, well there's a needle community up here and people shoot
up, and they don't have nothing to do with our community. They're part of
our community, and having relations in our community, and there's people
who, you know, are involved in male prostitution, you know what I mean?
And they're over here, you know, and there's a gay community over there,
you know, it's integrated in our community. So our fear was, oh my God,
you know, when I first heard about it I thought Jesus, we're going to be like
death ... then they said it can be seven years before you know you have it,
and I thought well Jesus Christ then, we're really in trouble. Cause now, all
these people got it, but nobody knows they got it, right? And eventually it's
going to be like, you know, all of a sudden it's going to be like, you know, like
a butterfly, you know? [It's a] little thing and all of a sudden . . . one day, it's
all going to be, you know, all through the community.

This man's account of the fate of his particular local community, in which
he speaks for and with many others, reaches from the specificities of work-

Meeting Polemics with Irenics 49

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 ing-class interdependency to the fear of the community's death through
the agency of a microorganism, whose spread is enhanced by the com-
munity's very interdependency. His account is linked by implication to
differential survival in the society: some will have good jobs, healthy bod-
ies, strong immune systems, and protected living spaces and will live.
Others, with none of these things, will die. His account speaks about the
state, public health, science, medicine, capitalism, and an ethos of neoso-
cial Darwinism, in which some are seen as "unfit" disposable people and
some are seen as fit people of "high quality.'7 Marcellino is doing critical
theory, in the sense specified by Marx in 1843: "The self-clarification of
the struggles and wishes of the age" (quoted in Fraser 1989, 113).8 Self-
clarification implies that people located in different social circumstances
produce different sorts of knowledge. Through specific experiences
located in specific times and places, people can reach partial but analytic
knowledge about forces, institutions, or powers much larger and stronger
than they are.
However compelling the problems Marcellino raises (and the fact that
he is able to articulate them), by itself his story would not count as doing
"social science." What counts as "science" is in part an effect of institu-
tions (giving credentials, granting authenticity, and so on). By himself
Marcellino has none of these things. This is where the institutionalization
of feminism in the academy plays a small but crucial role. In this particu-
lar example, it is my position in a university, itself made possible by the
activities of earlier generations of feminists, that gives me the time and
resources to talk to people like Marcellino and to publish books and arti-
cles (and give lectures) in which I argue that what he says should begin to
participate in what counts as social science.
The attack on this lecture by senior social science faculty and admin-
istrators at Chicago was uncompromising. One dean even dropped into
his (presumably) childhood cockney accent as he launched an invective at
me. The reasons for this hostility are complex. I believe they lie in the fact
that the social sciences are themselves deeply implicated historically in the
conceptions of the natural sciences and in natural science notions of truth.
When feminism entered the scene in the social sciences in the 1960s and

1970s, most canons of discovery and proof were based as closely as pos-
sible on the natural sciences. Objectivity was taken to be desirable and
achievable; quantitative measurement was thought to yield the most sig-
nificant results. A properly value-free discipline, it was taken for granted,
could reveal reality (Zalk and Gordon-Kelter 1992, 5).
This "scientism" of the social sciences was fed, just as it was in the
natural sciences, by fears of feminization. As Dorothy Ross explains in her
recent history of the social sciences, the aggressively masculine language
of penetrating, knowing, and controlling nature (and now society) helped

50 Emily Martin

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set the "masculine boundaries of sociology against the feminine precincts
of social work and reform" (Ross 1991, 394-95).
One way feminist scholarship upset this enterprise was to complicate
the universal "man" who was the object of study. In studies of kinship,
psychology, work, politics, and so on, a new object of study was created:
"woman." "Woman" often did not behave according to the generalizations
discovered for "man." Creating a new universal "woman" to combat the
old universal "man" would eventually turn out to have its difficulties, but
at the time it served the important function of raising these questions:
How value-free was the science of the social sciences? (Or did the social
sciences actually reproduce ideological discourses that justified and recre-
ated the social relations of gender? [Zalk and Gordon-Kelter 1992, 9].)
How limiting was the strong preference of the social sciences for the study
of public over private matters and for matters of the mind over matters of
the body? And what could be learned by reversing these preferences,
making women the foremost objects of study, women's personal experi-
ences the source of data, and the body rather than the mind the subject of
analysis?
These were not the only positions feminist approaches turned on
their heads. From the early days of American social science, the belief was
that only social science could show the way toward the good, the rational,
society. "The true social standard.., lay in the fullest development of the
organic society, and only science could discover and enforce its condi-
tions" (Ross 1991, 368). Individual feelings were an inadequate measure
of the social good. There was a total distrust of "untutored" human
nature and a desire for complete control of "wayward human experience"
(Ross 1991, 368-69). Science provided a model of "disinterested" dis-
course in contrast to the "self-interested" discourse of the citizenry out-
side science. "In the name of science one thus could (and can) still treat
public opinion as mere opinion. . . . A specialized non-public science
[was] deployed in the service of administrative rationality and in competi-
tion with the public sphere" (Calhoun 1992, 36).
By paying attention to that quintessentially "wayward and self-inter-
ested" subject, woman, and by using her "untutored" experiences as a
way of questioning the rationality of social scientific conclusions about the
public good, feminism in the 1960s and 1970s questioned the tenets of
knowledge that had been fundamental in the social sciences. In so doing,
and because of the unmistakable contribution to knowledge made by this
work, feminism and feminists slowly began to be included in the academy,
in its curriculum, faculty positions, and publications.
Following the dislodging of "universal man" came the dissolution of
the category "universal woman." During the late 1980s and 1990s this
category, which had served earlier decades of feminism very well, dis-

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 solved. In one social science discipline after another, "woman," created as
an object to dislodge "man," fell apart under the impact of awareness of
diversity, whether based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or postcolonial
status. Rayna Rapp (1992, 85) explains:

All . .. unified, universalist, notions of womanhood are suspect, for they are
built to the measure of everywoman, who too often turns out to be a white,
Anglophone, feminist scholar in disguise.

An enormous proliferation of studies from differently situated points of

view made clear that socialization, kinship, marriage, politics, and every-
thing else were experienced very differently (even within the confines of
the United States) depending on whether a woman was working class
(Stack 1990), Jewish (Prell 1990), fundamentalist Christian (Harding
1990), African American (Carothers 1990), Asian American (AWUC
1989), Italian American (Di Leonardo 1984), Appalachian (Stewart
1990), Hispanic (Fernandez-Kelly 1990), lesbian (Newton 1993), dis-
abled (Hillyer 1993), or transsexual or post-transsexual (Stone 1991), to
name but a few.

In the face of all this, it became clear that the unitary term feminism
masked a diversity of feminisms; that even if all women wanted improve-
ment in their lives, they might not agree on the meaning of "improve-
ment" (Fox-Genovese 1993, 235). Just as earlier the "universal intellec-
tual" who spoke for the universal and abstract "male" was no longer
acceptable in the face of the category "woman," so now the universal
feminist intellectual became unacceptable. Feminism had once again-
this time from a position more solidly within the academy-challenged the
tenets of knowledge, tenets ("everywoman" and the "universal feminist
intellectual") it was responsible for creating.
At this point we can see that developments in feminism closely paral-
leled developments in science studies. At the same time as the category
"woman" was coming apart, so was the category "science." This hap-
pened by means of interdisciplinary work in the social studies of science,
in which historians, sociologists, and, more recently, anthropologists have
joined hands (Hess 1992). The new wave of feminists in this crowd
(unlike their predecessors) bypassed the study of the social sciences per se
and went right for the jugular of the natural sciences. To this group, work-
ing in the 1980s, there seemed little point in bothering with social science,
since its methods were derived from the natural sciences and since at this

time social science had little power in Euro-American culture generally

compared to natural science.
This new research has dramatically revised our understanding of nat-
ural science. It is as if we once thought of science as an isolated medieval

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walled citadel, and this walled citadel turns out to be more like a bustling Ethnographic
center of nineteenth-century commerce, porous and open in every direc-
tion. While science likes to be thought of as a luminous citadel, alone on a research has

hill, in actuality many powerful collectives and interested individuals dot

shown that the
the surrounding hillsides. Not only are they nearby, but they interact with
the world inside the citadel of science frequently and in powerful ways.
strict, fixed
Ethnographic research has shown that the strict, fixed borders between
the pure realm of knowledge production and the "untutored" public do borders between
not hold up to scrutiny. The walls of the citadel are porous and leaky;
inside is not pure knowledge, outside is not pure ignorance. This means the pure realm of
the way is opened for a more complex, less flatly antagonistic attitude
toward science than prevailed among feminists earlier. Scientific knowl- knowledge
edge is being made by all of us; we all move in and out of the bustling city
of knowledge production. Of course, the Chicago social scientists and the production and
organizers of the "Flight from Science and Reason" conference would
the "untutored"
probably still find this view flatly antagonistic: others might yet be
intrigued.
public do not

hold up to
Toward a Little Common Ground

scrutiny The walls

In social constructionist science studies, whether via cultural studies, fem-
inism, or anthropology, a common goal is to understand the particular
of the citadel are
form and content of core natural science concepts in their relevant histor-
ical contexts. It was apparent at the conference that someporous
scholars have
and leaky;
interpreted this effort as an attack intended to obliterate the natural sci-
ences. More moderate responses also occur: in my research,inside is not pure
scientists
would often find my questions and analyses strange and sometimes even
uncomfortable, but usually more interesting than threatening.knowledge,
I want to
continue opening up common ground with these scientists by pointing out
outside is not
that social constructionist accounts of the natural sciences are part of a
larger enterprise which includes producing social constructionist accounts
pure ignorance.
of the social sciences and humanities. In what follows, I will describe the
emergence of social constructionist accounts of some central concepts in
the intellectual home territories of science studies. If the intent here is to

better understand the nature of human cultural activity-not to obliterate

disciplines but to go beyond their limitations-perhaps the same could be
imagined to be true for the natural sciences.
First, some background is necessary. As we have seen, after the fall of
"universal man" we were left with "man and universal woman." What was
left after the fall of "universal woman" and "universal science"? This was

the context for the burgeoning of what is known as identity politics. With
an emphasis on "inventing a new language.., and defining new bodies of

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 knowledge ... to replace the institutional forms of knowledge that oppress
certain communities or social groups" (Escoffier 1993, 32, 40), an intense
need arose for specific knowledges possessed by particular communities.
In identity politics, "'experience' emerges as the essential truth of the
individual subject, and personal 'identity' metamorphoses into knowledge.
Who we are becomes what we know; ontology shades into epistemology"
(Fuss 1989, 113).9
It follows that we can only know what we experience and that singu-
lar experiences cannot be lumped with other singular experiences without
producing violent distortion. As Judith Butler puts it, "The very category
of the universal has only begun to be exposed for its own highly ethno-
centric biases" (Butler 1992, 7). Any time an example or paradigm is
made to stand for a whole, the example or paradigm "subordinates and
erases" that which it seeks to explain. The whole appears to be produced
by the example, made to stand for it, and this is a "gesture of conceptual
mastery" (5).
Insofar as identity politics is based on a notion of an inner essence,
which some people have and some people do not and could never have, it
is an essentializing politics. The inner essence, the identity, operates as a
given (Alcoff 1994). Those who doubt the value of identity politics argue
that what may be gained through its ability to mobilize political action is
lost in its tendency to remove the inner essence from examination. As Joan
Scott puts it, "Making visible the experience of a different group exposes
the existence of repressive mechanisms, but not their inner workings or
logics; we know that difference exists, but we don't understand it as con-
stituted relationally" (Scott 1992, 25). Understanding it relationally would
include understanding how the group came to be repressed (in relation to
forces, attitudes, or beliefs), where the repression came from (in relation
to other groups, family structures, state policies, and so on), and when it
occurred (in relation to other historical processes).
To avoid the essentialism of identity politics, some feminists are advo-
cating more fluid concepts of the person. Linda Alcoff (1994, 117)
stresses that identity can change over time:

The concept of positionality allows for a determinate though fluid identity of

woman that does not fall into essentialism: woman is a position from which a
feminist politics can emerge rather than a set of attributes that are "objec-
tively identifiable." Seen in this way, being a "woman" is to take up a posi-
tion within a moving historical context and to be able to choose what we
make of this position and how we alter this context. From the perspective of
that fairly determinate though fluid and mutable position, women can them-
selves articulate a set of interests and ground a feminist politics.

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 Similarly, Teresa De Lauretis (1986, 14-15) stresses that multiple
identities can coexist in the same person:

The female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sex-
ual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and
often enough at odds with one another .... Once it is understood . . . that
these differences not only constitute each woman's consciousness and sub-
jective limits but all together define the female subject of feminism in its
very specificity . . . these differences . . . cannot be again collapsed into a
fixed identity, a sameness of all women as Woman, or a representation of
Feminism as a coherent and available image.

But these moves do not solve the problem for other feminists, who
fear that making the self temporally changeable and internally diverse
risks losing an effective acting self altogether. We would end up with a
"subject [with] no internal coherence, [no] . . . means for self-knowledge;
instead the subject [would be] seen as dispersed in (multiple) texts, dis-
cursive formations, fragmentary readings and signifying practices, end-
lessly constructing and dislodging the conceit of the self" (Dirks et al.
1994, 12).
Some worry that this fragmented view of the subject merely reflects
the kind of person and society created by the condition of postmodernity.
This worry is the more acute because notions of a fluid, changeable, and
flexible self are found very widely in popular culture (Martin 1994).
There is a tendency to "celebrate and transcendentalize the decentered
and fragmented subject" which is actually an effect of late capitalism. It
may allow escape from the essentialized subject, but only by means of los-
ing any kind of acting subject at all (Harvey 1993; Dirks et al. 1994, 14).
The important point is that we in cultural studies scrutinize our own
concepts, just as we do for concepts in the natural sciences. To the extent
that concepts of the flexible, fluid, multiple self are part of the general cul-
tural context of late capitalism, feminist or cultural theories based on
some version of this kind of self participate in rather than critically analyze
contemporary culture. The discomfort of this realization begins to open
up a form of common ground with the natural sciences: it is akin to the
discomfort scientists express when we try to put their concepts in histori-
cal context.

If we can be adequately analytic about contemporary views of the

subject, we may avoid one serious consequence: benefiting the new global
order driven by the interests of multinational corporations, because "its
extraordinary emphasis on personal expression in effect drives the logic of
modernist individualism to its ultimate conclusion" (Fox-Genovese 1993,
246, 253). As Jody Berland argues, "To embrace fragmentation uncriti-
cally runs the risk of duplicating the move to a market-driven consumerist

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 model of human populations in which the fragmentation of conventional
identities is a fine art" (Berland 1992). Paula Treichler agrees: "To cham-
pion postmodernist fragmentation and dispersion does sometimes deflect
attention from realities that should be brutally (rather than strategically)
essentialized" (Treichler 1992, 62).
My own view is that the way forward lies in attending to and incor-
porating in our explanations what Treichler calls "realities that should be
brutally . .. essentialized." I would take these realities to mean large-scale
political-economic forces abroad on the earth, structural forces that can
be universal in their scope and that are often damaging in their effects.
They would include the increasing concentration and mobility of capital,
which often lead to emiseration of the poor; and the concomitant restruc-
turing of the organization of work, both inside corporations and factories
and in the spread of "homework." They would also include vast alter-
ations in how information is stored and retrieved, and in the extent to
which biological research focuses on genetics. "Brutally essentializing"
these forces might mean naming them, identifying their core features, or
describing their various effects. In the process we would be using many of
the tools common in the natural sciences: detailed record keeping, precise
measurement of time, quantity, and space, repetition, replication, and
reduction.10 For example, counting, measuring, and making controlled
comparisons allow us to understand what it means to say that in the
United States the economy is expanding and more jobs are created every
year. The economy is expanding because the wealthiest 40 percent get 68
percent of the income, creating enough consumer power to keep compa-
nies in business but leaving 60 percent of the population unable to partic-
ipate (Peterson 1994). This helps explain why many people feel as if they
are living through a depression. As an example, there is the family with
three children who between them hold four jobs but make only $18,000 a
year (Johnson 1994). "When it was noted that two million new jobs were
created last year, the husband quickly put that statistic in perspective.
'Sure, we've got four of them. So what?'" (Herbert 1994). Embedded in
this account are techniques of knowing we share with natural scientists:
acknowledging that these techniques are necessary to shed light on
processes of large-scale oppression opens up another small amount of
common ground between us.

Conclusion

Toward the beginning of this essay, I argued that a focus on the habits of
action necessary for disciplines like the natural sciences or cultural anthro-
pology to gather knowledge as defined by their worldview would begin to

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open some common ground and avoid fruitless polemics. Feminism and
cultural studies could also come to be understood as ongoing projects,
involving a "motivated and stylized" frame of mind that one actively works
at in order to be located in a position to both analyze and see how effective
action could be taken (Gupta and Ferguson 1994). For feminism and
cultural studies, the goal would not be a pure "positionality" that engages
in constant shifting and flexible positioning for its own sake, but a moti-
vated positionality collectively sought, in which diverse kinds of alliances
could be forged with others (even natural scientists) over a variety of
(changing) common interests. In the same spirit, the wont of natural sci-
entists to believe their techniques of knowing can get down to the bones of
reality could be regarded as a motivated positionality necessary to support
the more arduous aspects of the discipline their way of knowing requires.
A benefit would be that the natural sciences could actively use, for partic-
ular purposes, the insights of cultural studies of sciences without having to
betray the entire basis of their discipline. From my experiences with a
variety of practicing scientists-including the young medical students I
described earlier who are confronting their professors about broadening
the social responsibilities of medical researchers and increasing the
responsiveness of medical research design to social problems-I know
this can happen.

Notes

I thank Richard Cone, Rayna Rapp, and Mary Poovey for giving me helpful and
illuminating responses to portions of this essay.

1. The term was called to my attention by Stefan Collini (1993).

2. Held at the New York Academy of Sciences, 31 May-2 June 1995.
Among the main organizers were Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, the authors of
Higher Superstition:The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. My earlier
work was briefly discussed and dismissed in Higher Superstition (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 125-26.
3. In the absence of a tape recording or published proceedings, paraphrases
and brief quotes from speakers at the New York Academy of Sciences conference
are based on my own notes.
4. For a published account that links multiculturalism's questioning of
authority to fascism see Brasor 1995.
5. Some of the papers presented at this conference, "What Do the Natural
Sciences Know and How Do They Know It?" are published in Academic Ques-
tions 8 (1995).
6. The conference, held 31 May-2 June 1994, was called "Boundaries and
Trespass: Conventions and Creative Revisions in the Social Sciences."
7. As in a recent newspaper article about universal standards of beauty
(Angier 1994).

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 8. Letter to A. Ruge in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore
(London: Watts, 1975).
9. Fuss 1989 and Spelman 1988 are useful sources on the complex implica-
tions of identity politics.
10. For an account of the social power of statistics in recent history see Asad
1994.

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