The discussion we had about the McPherson article last week in class brought to mind another example that I think helps illustrate for me how an organizational trends in the sciences (like "modularity" in computer science) can be linked to larger material forces in society.
Donna Haraway’s project in chapters two and three in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women is concerned with the complex relations between science, capitalism, abusive ideologies, and the formation of the human being. With her comparative examples of Yerkes’ and Wilson’s science, Haraway demonstrates that alternate interpretations of results exist and that each research approached their science with problems and solutions already in mind, which is ultimately reflective of abusive ideology—namely capitalism and patriarchy. By analyzing the shift in the human sciences from psychobiology to sociobiology, she is able to argue that “the field of modern biology constructs theories about the body and community” and is actually “an aspect of the reproduction of capitalist social relations,” specifically dealing with “the imperative of biological reproduction,” (Haraway, 44). Psychobiology was correlated with the logics of capitalist patriarchy and shifted during the communications revolution to sociobiology, which follows the logics of cybernetic systems theory.
To put things into conversation with Harvey, psychobiology’s focus on “scientific management and human engineering of the person” was important to the Taylorist and Fordist regimes of accumulation while the burgeoning neoliberal regime stressed the “modern ergonomics and population control,” (ibid) associated with sociobiology. By first grounding the changing landscape of scientific discourse in a capitalist-social context, Haraway is then able to lay out an interpretive framework for how we can become empowered against the production of an oppressive and subjective science while still at the same time escaping the “post-truth” world that social constructionists arguably paved the way towards by dethroning objectivity claims. If we can disentangle the complex mechanisms that structure our techno-social milieu, perhaps we can begin the political project of altering such mechanisms in order to make our lives a little bit more livable and progressively less oppressive.
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