Experience

New Foundations for the Human Sciences

Scott Lash

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745695150, 9780745695143
• eBook ISBN: 9780745695181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a radical plea for the centrality of experience in the social and human sciences. Lash argues that a large part of the output of the social sciences today is still shaped by assumptions stemming from positivism, in contrast to the tradition of interpretative social enquiry pioneered by Max Weber. These assumptions are particularly central to economics, with its emphasis on homo economicus, the utility-maximizing actor, but they have infiltrated the other social sciences too.

Lash argues for a social sciences based not in positivism's utilitarian a priori but instead in the a posteriori of grounded and embedded subjective experience. His wide-ranging account starts from considerations of ancient experience via Aristotle's technics, continues through a politics of Hannah Arendt's 'a posteriori' public sphere and concludes with the contemporary – with technological experience, on the one hand, and with Chinese post-ontological thought, in which the 'ten thousand things' themselves are doing the experiencing, on the other.

This original book by a leading social and cultural theorist will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, cultural studies and throughout the social sciences.

1
HAVE WE FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCE?

1.1 In Praise of the A Posteriori

Have we forgotten experience? If there is a dominant ideology today, it is more likely than not to have roots in neoclassical economics (Harvey 2007). Neoclassicism, which is the source of most neoliberal thinking, though it emerged as a force in the 1890s, has its roots in utilitarianism. Not the empiricist Adam Smith, but the utilitarian John Stuart Mill is the author of the idea of homo economicus (Gane 2014). There is a major difference. Smith, like his mentor David Hume, starts from sense data. He starts from experience. Mill, for his part, starts from the assumption, the axiom, that we, we human beings, are utility-maximizing animals. This is unlike Smith, for whom, with Hume, we are open to sensory impressions, for whom these impressions become for us ‘facts’ (Deleuze 1991). For Mill as utility-maximizing animals – or what have become known as social actors – we are already closed. We already filter out impressions and what might become other facts, through a sort of mechanism that gives priority to utility maximization. Mathematical thinking starts from a cluster of axioms. It is with a set of operations from these axioms that we get proofs and theorems. Mill and utilitarianism, and indeed capitalist ideology, start from one axiom, that of utility maximization, from us as homo economicus. Unlike Smith’s inductive thinking, Mill’s homo economicus starts from an axiom and is thus in large part deductive. Such deductive thinking is in major part a priori. It is a closing of ourselves off from experience. It is in this sense a forgetting of experience.

If David Hume was arguably the founder of empiricism, Mill was self-consciously influenced by Auguste Comte, and with Auguste Comte, the founding figure of positivism. Unlike empiricism’s openness of the senses, openness indeed to sensation, to sensory experience, positivism as a mode of a priori thinking starts from axioms, in Mill’s case, the axiom of homo economicus. Max Weber’s (1949) famous essay on ‘Objectivity in the Social Sciences’ was of course not just about objectivity but also about value. Weber himself was a sometimes contradictory amalgam of positivist and ‘objectivist’ erklären and interpretive or ‘subjectivist’ verstehen. The methodological essay gave us both sides and promoted a social science of both erklären and verstehen, both positivism and interpretation. To the extent that method was positivist and objectivist, its inspiration was pure John Stuart Mill. Its positivism was of homo economicus. This is not a surprise. It fully maps onto Weber’s encounter with neoclassical economics. Weber’s first main methodological intervention was in the Methodenstreit from the late 1880s. The Methodenstreit, or methods dispute, was between the German Historical School of Economics and the Austrian School, featuring Carl Menger (1883), perhaps the most important founder of neoclassical economics. Weber at that point in time sided very much with Menger. The Historical School, led by its second-generation advocate Gustav von Schmoller, was no match for Menger’s analytic intelligence. But it is telling that Schmoller’s attack argued that Menger was treating humans as if they were atoms in mechanistic physics. Weber’s pivotal ideal type in his action theory was of instrumentally rational action (zweckrational), which was based on homo economicus.¹ The point for us here is that positivism and neoclassical homo economicus came from very much the same mould. It is that they share similar a priori assumptions: how both negate or at least drastically reduce experience.

If there is a dominant paradigm in the critical social sciences and humanities today, it may be the ‘new materialism’. If the old materialism of Newton and Galileo was mechanistic, then the new materialism is vibrant. It is not a mechanistic but a vitalist materialism. For it, all matter, including inorganic matter, is vital. For the new materialism, humans and nonhumans congeal together on assemblages: actor networks in which subjects are more often understood as one kind of many different kinds of objects (Bennett 2009). This new materialism has produced some distinguished work: assemblage thinking, looking at assemblages of humans and nonhumans has become a fertile method (Lash and Lury 2007; Marres 2012). Yet in this new materialism – this school, as it were, of assemblages of vital objects – there is most often little space for meaning or experience.

This new materialism is also an anti- or post-humanism. It wants to break with notions of human finitude. Hence, for example, Quentin Meillassoux (2008) cites approvingly David Hume and argues for an ontology of events that proceed outside of experience. Or in the words of Alain Badiou (2013), the founder of this speculative materialism, events ‘subtract’ from experience. But this is a rather odd reading of Hume. For Deleuze as well as almost all much less critical readings, without sense impressions there is no David Hume. Badiou’s thought, for its part, has roots in Louis Althusser’s core idea of scientific revolutions preceding philosophic revolutions: that Galileo thus preceded Descartes and Marxist science (historical materialism) preceded Marxist philosophy. Badiou is acute in his focus on Georg Cantor’s set-theoretical mathematics as a pivotal scientific revolution with fundamental reverberations in philosophy, and we might add less directly today’s computer-mediated technological experience. He is right also about the new importance and metamorphoses of infinity in Cantor. Cantor’s set theory featured infinite sets, in which for example the set of natural numbers was infinite, and the set of rational and then real numbers were ever-greater infinites. There were then a number of infinities: an infinity of infinities. Cantor’s indeed was quite a formidable scientific revolution. Logic, after Aristotle, had been for 2,300 years forged in a linguistic paradigm. Now, with Frege and Russell, logic had become mathematical. Predication becomes not about sentences and their subjects and qualities but about the predications of a set in its members. With, largely, Cantor, infinity enters scientific discourse and becomes effectively ‘secularized’. But just because there is infinity does not mean that our finite experience is not important.

The subtext in this for Badiou is an a priori deductivism, a priori thinking. Frege, but especially Russell and Hilbert and Hilbert’s disciples, not only put set theory at the heart of mathematical and philosophical thinking, but they consider this and their attached propositions to be descriptive of reality, at the basis of the real. This was an effective Platonism, in which the real was not so much the good and the true among the forms but instead the mathematical and mathematically informed predications themselves. Russell, Hilbert and indeed Badiou were in different ways frank about this. In this sense, and an important one, the new materialism can also be understood as ‘speculative realism’, in which the mathematical structures both material and real. But what if we take this thinking, as Alan Turing and technological experience do, one step further into the just as important scientific revolutions in Heisenberg and especially in Gödel? Gödel’s incompleteness was an equally fundamental break with Cantor’s set-theoretical assumptions in Frege, Russell and Hilbert. Gödel proved that no consistent set of axioms could account for all of the true theorems it generated: that the only way a set of axioms could account for all these true theorems was if the original group of axioms was inconsistent. This put a void of indeterminacy into mathematical space. Gödel referred to the transformational rules, the operations by which the axioms generated the theorems, as ‘algorithms’. Alan Turing, along with John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, shifted Gödel’s paradigm from science into engineering, where algorithms became operations for handling data. This space of indeterminacy along with recently noticed phenomena of machine inductive learning from data again opens up the possibility of experience (Mirowski 2002).

So, in contrast to the a priori of both homo economicus positivism and so much of critical theory, this book is a bit of a manifesto for the ‘a posteriori’. It advocates a social science and human science that is basically a posteriori. This book, while at odds with The Republic, has more than great respect for Plato’s Laws, Symposium and Phaedrus, even with his, as it were, pure theory of number. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1961 [1912]) understands not the profane’s categories of classification, but instead the rites and rituals of the sacred as real. Not the profane, but instead the sacred was Durkheim’s real. And we know that the Pythagoreans were also a religious cult. In this sense we are sympathetic to Plato’s unremitting a priori. This said, this book is fundamentally Aristotelian. Its a posteriori is Aristotelian. In Chapter 2 we feature a technics that with Aristotle starts from the particular and then moves to the general or universal. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s (2002) three modes of knowledge are technē, praxis and episteme. Here technē, which is making, reasons from the particular to the universal. So, does praxis, which is a doing, comprising both ethics and politics. Episteme, or cognizing, for its part is a priori and deductive. Its method is axiomatic, its paradigm geometry. In Michel Foucault’s work, all of the normalizing and governmentalizing discourses of modernity come under the heading of episteme. In modernity, this episteme of what have become Kant’s categories synthesizes with matter in Newtonian physics. A century later the episteme’s a priori synthesizes with ‘social matter’ to give us neo-Kantian social-science positivism (Foucault 1966). As a counter to such governmentality through episteme, Foucault counterposes, like Aristotle, a version of technē, in his technologies or technics of the self. Here Foucault (1988) gives us an a posteriori, an anti-positivist, basically empiricist critique of episteme. In this, Foucault is on the side of experience.

If Plato gives us the Good as an Idea, as a Form, then Aristotle brings these forms into juxtaposition with matter as the good life. Plato’s good becomes instantiated in Aristotle’s good life. Chapter 5 below on politics of experience moves with Hannah Arendt’s (1958) Aristotelian a posteriori, starting from the particular case or event or experience and moving – through reasoned, rhetorical and pluralistic speech – to the universal or general. Arendt gives us a very particular reconstruction of the public spheres.

The shift of the a posteriori from empiricism to pragmatism is one also from knowledge to politics. In Chinese, empiricism is jingyanzhuyi and pragmatism is shiyongzhuyi. Jingyan is experience and shiyong ‘true use’. Arendt’s public spheres begin in experience and end in pragmatism-like practice, always starting with Dewey and the particular issue and moving to the universal. In the technological age, mediating this move from the particular of political data to the universal of use and action is, with Noortje Marres’s Material Participation (2012), a combinatory of people and things, of subjectivities and technologies to the constitution of a myriad of publics.

1.2 Substance

Experience has to do with substance. Experience is downgraded of course in Plato’s Republic. What we experience is mere doxa or opinion whereas the true and especially the good are a question of forms, which – though we can arrive at them through dialectic – have their origin in the heavens. In Aristotle, we have less the good than the good life. And this good life is a matter of experience. It is a question of everyday practices, of associations (institutions), the family, tribe and especially the polis. It is through the concreteness of participation in these associations that we realize the good life. Already we have the beginnings of the juxtaposition of substance and form: the form of the good, the substance of the good life. In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel (1972) – drawing implicitly on Aristotle – contrasts the abstraction and formalism of Kantian morality with, again, ‘ethical substance’, itself a matter of the everyday, embedded experience in what Hegel saw as Sitten – that is folkways, habits, customs. Again, there is the juxtaposition of form and abstraction, on the one hand, and experience linked with substance, on the other.

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, substances are understood in terms of matter and form, of formed matter, and – alternatively and consistently – in terms of the four (material, formal, efficient and final) causes. For his part, in what many have seen as the pivotal passage in the Preface to Phenomenology, Hegel (1977: 26) saw the transition from antiquity to modernity in terms of a move from substance to subject. In antiquity, we understood substances in terms of their forms, which were their properties or predicates: in modernity, we have subjects with their predicates. Aristotle distinguished between substantial and accidental forms: a substance’s substantial forms or properties are those without which the substance would not be what it is. Its accidental forms are properties that are not thus necessary. If ancient logic and ‘grammar’ were about substances and their predicates, then modern grammar is about subjects and their predicates, in particular their verbs and their objects. Kant, and later neo-Kantian positivism, says we experience things only in terms of their properties: that we cannot experience things-themselve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Four Types of Experience
• 1: Have We Forgotten Experience?
• 2: Experience in Antiquity: Aristotle’s A Posteriori Technics
• 3: Subjective Experience: William James’s Radical Empiricism
• 4: Objective Experience: Methodenstreit and Homo Economicus
• 5: Hannah Arendt’s A Posteriori Politics: Free Will, Judgment and Constitutional Fragility
• 6: Forms of Life: Technological Phenomenology
• 7: Aesthetic Multiplicity: The View and the Ten Thousand Things
• 8: Conclusions
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement