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Social Text
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
Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 and 2, Spring/Summer 1996. Copyright ? 1996 by
Duke University Press.
44 Emily Martin
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
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.
46 Emily Martin
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,
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.
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
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
48 Emily Martin
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.
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-
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
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.
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
52 Emily Martin
hold up to
Toward a Little Common Ground
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
54 Emily Martin
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.
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
56 Emily Martin
Notes
I thank Richard Cone, Rayna Rapp, and Mary Poovey for giving me helpful and
illuminating responses to portions of this essay.
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