Cultural Collisions

Postmodern Technoscience

Raphael Sassower

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135222338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Cultural Collisions Raphael Sassower brings postmodernism face to face with technoscience and considers the viability of public works, such as the Superconducting Supercollider, in a postmodern age. Contending that technoscientific projects are contingent upon economic and political support, and not simply upon their scientific feasibility, Sassower illuminates the cultural context of postmodern technoscience vis-a-vis an examination of postmodernism and the philosophy of late 20th century science.

Chapter 1

THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPERCOLLIDER

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Introduction

As subsequent chapters will illustrate, there is a certain inevitability to the ontology about which even postmodern technoscientists have to speak, as well as to the material conditions under which its performances are observed. Whether we continue the Marxist tradition and speak of political economy in scientific terms, or adopt a postmodern orientation that discards the necessity of using a scientific vocabulary to legitimate a discourse (and a practice), we may wish to examine more carefully what some of my more general comments may mean in the political arena of late twentieth-century America. It is in this light, then, that I recommend examining the fate of the Superconducting Supercollider, a project whose genealogy and eventual demise may inform us about the ideological backdrop against which policy decisions are made. Moreover, I believe that this project sheds some new light on the debate concerning Big Science whose own genealogy is intimately connected in America to the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Finally, this chapter also intimates what will appear at the closing of this book (Chapter 7) where I try to argue that the artistic nature of postmodern technoscience puts a different set of burdens and responsibilities on intellectuals in general and academics in particular.

Let me begin, as so many nowadays are fond of beginning their discursive explorations, not with Marx (whose texts are less frequently quoted than they were two decades ago) but with Nietzsche (who is presumed to be responsible for everything worthwhile in the intellectual world):

Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge. (Nietzsche 1974,240)

I partially examine (in Chapter 3) Nietzsche's claim concerning the need for magicians and alchemists, astrologers and witches, not only in the sense understood in the history of science (e.g., by Newton) or in the sense of oracles and prophets (Sassower 1993a, Ch. 2), but also in the Romantic sense of the past century. His contention applies equally well to the contemporary culture of technological feats. My sense is that postmodern technoscience, however defined in the following chapters, is a way of addressing Nietzsche's contention about the discrepancy between science's promise of discovering hidden treasures and the fulfillment of this promise. This leads me directly to public perceptions, political policy-making processes, and the eventual confrontation between the discourses and communities of science and politics (Sassower 1993a, Ch. 5).

Postmodern technoscience is neither an assemblage of the various critiques of science and technology that have emerged in the late twentieth century, nor an attempt to provide a chronological break between modernism and a successor age. Instead, it is an attempt to introduce and infuse the study and practice of technoscience with a sense of the attitudes and orientations commonly perceived to be underlying the works of postmodernists (however broadly defined), and perhaps, following Bruno Latour, that of premoderns (more on this in Chapters 2–4). Among these attitudes it may be important to inject an inspired use of the imagination in addition to more common ones, such as the multiplicity of interpretations, the deprivilegizing of all discourses, and the contextualization of judgments to particular situations without an appeal to universal and permanent foundations.

Once understood culturally and contextualized into specific situations and conditions, the activities that come under the label of technoscience can be appreciated in their postmodern garb, one that refers to them as cultural artifacts with no more nor less validity and credibility than any other forms of expression and modes of behavior. As such, then, postmodern technoscientific activities are open to public scrutiny and debate in ways that may have been inconceivable only a few decades ago.

For example, the New York Times reported in July of 1992 that Congress might not approve in the 1993 fiscal year $8.25 billion for the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas (Browne 1992). How should this piece of technoscientific information be approached? Is it necessary to contextualize this piece of economic information in the terms suggested by physicists who are supporters of the project, some of whom promise great discoveries, or in the terms of other physicists who claim that such an expenditure is unwarranted? Should we compare this figure to some other budgetary figures for the same fiscal year? What warrant should we afford to the rhetorical expressions sounded in some public quarters? I shall return to this case in the next section.

Here are some figures worth noting: The National Endowment for the Arts was supposed to have a budget of $176 million for 1993; the National Science Foundation $2.3 billion; Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission $7.2 million; Office of Government Ethics $8.6 million; and the entire Department of Education $6.8 billion. I have selected these numbers for comparison because they are closely related to public perception and interest as they were directed toward this technoscientific research. They do not compare the Supercollider project with an Air Force bomber or other Department of Defense expenditures, even though they are always related, at least since World War II, to scientific research and development. Should a select group of physicists, one of eighteen identifiable sub-fields in physics, receive support that is almost fourfold the support of the entire scientific community?

Back to Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, there have been three reasons—for him they constitute three sets of errors—for the promotion of science: first, “it was by means of science that one hoped to understand God's goodness and wisdom best”; second, “one believed in the absolute utility of knowledge”; and three, “one thought that in science one possessed and loved something unselfish, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent” (Nietzsche 1974, 105–106). Science displaces the social and ideological role of religion at least as a practice that craves divine revelation, assumes it to be beneficial for human beings here and in the afterlife, and claims to bring together individuals into a community of inquirers.

Without mentioning Nietzsche, Robert Merton in fact concurs with these reasons for the appeal of science to society, showing how science in seventeenth-century England was supported by the Puritans, how there was a great deal of engineering interest in scientific research, and how the notion of human curiosity and the search for Truth have driven western civilization to new horizons of national support for science and technology (Merton 1968, IV). A similar sentiment is echoed by the “gentlemen of science” in nineteenth-century Britain, one that gave rise to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and to the establishment of an intimate link between political institutions and the scientific community (Morrell & Thackray 1981).

Has the atomic bomb changed our optimistic views of technoscience? Has the destruction of the environment brought us closer to the pessimism, sometimes confused with nihilism, so often associated with post-modernism? That is, a pessimism that is Romantic in nature (that of Rousseau or of Nietzsche) and is nothing more nor less than the flip side of the Enlightenment's optimism? To some extent, and in the spirit of postmodernism, it may be useful to supersede the binary opposition set up between optimism and pessimism and between the Enlightenment and Romanticism respectively. Perhaps what remains at stake is the rhetoric of promise and glory, of future adventures in the name of science, that overlooks the technological apparatus with which this promise must be fulfilled. This is not to say, as some would say about the development of nuclear energy, that the very ideas of science are bound to inflict the horrors of their technological application. On the contrary, there is no science without technology, so that the very conceptions of scientific theories are intimately connected to technological conditions (Ormiston & Sassower 1989, Ch. 1). Post World War II, there is a postmodern technoscientific world that is a “two-faced Janus,” as Latour calls it (Latour 1987), one whose optimism is laced with pessimism so that neither disposition ever overcomes the other.

Even traditional philosophers of science, such as Stephen Toulmin, have become aware of the impracticability of holding onto some particular pre-World War II binary oppositions. As I will discuss in the next chapter, though trying to denote “post-modern” science in chronological terms, Toulmin is sensitive to the implications of transforming the human relation with the world from that of a “spectator” to that of a “participant” (Toulmin 1981). The participation that Toulmin recognizes is analogous to that of Latour (1986), for both appreciate the concerns of the “fathers” of quantum mechanics such that laboratory experiments and measurements interrupt the activities of natural phenomena so that instead of “discovering” something out there, scientists in fact “create” or “establish” something right here.

The Superconducting Supercollider

The first report in the New York Times, a bellwether of American perceptions of political trends and investigative reporting pitched to the middle and upper middle class, appeared in September 1983, under the provocative title: “Physicists Compete for the Biggest Project of All.” The Nietzschean promise appears in the opening sentence: “Put simply, the project would be the biggest endeavor in the history of pure science, a colossus that would rival the building of the pyramids and the construction of the Panama Canal.” It was reported that the projection is that a “circular tunnel will stretch anywhere from 60 to 120 miles,” and that “its total cost might run from $2 billion to $4 billion.” (Broad 1983) What President would not wish to become a Pharaoh, especially for the low cost estimated at that point?

At the end of January 1987, the New York Times reported that the Reagan Administration announced its intentions to ask Congress for about $6 billion to build a giant “atom smasher,” a much higher price-tag than originally estimated in 1983. The front-page article continued in the following manner:

The device, a Superconducting Supercollider in a 52-mile oval tunnel, would dwarf existing machines used to probe the secrets of matter and energy. [in 1983 it was 60 to 120 miles.]

The project to build the world's largest research machine, in which subatomic particles moving at high speed would collide and burst, is as scientifically significant as America's 1969 manned landing on the moon, Secretary of Energy John S. Harrington said.(Franklin 1987)

The rhetoric has not changed since 1983: largest machine in the world (biggest in 1983), dwarf other research devices, comparison with the manned spaceship in 1969 (pyramids and the Panama Canal in 1983), and the probing of the “secrets of matter and energy.” What else could one do for the sake of good old-fashioned patriotism? The Secretary of the Department of Energy became a spokesperson for the $6 billion in funding, justified in part by the need to be on the cutting edge of science and, as we read a bit later, by the creation of 4,500 jobs and a staff of at least 2,500 scientists. So it made scientific and economic sense to embark on this project, at least for those Keynesian New-Dealers who knew that public projects stimulate the economy by providing jobs that lead to increased consumption which leads to increased production.

Yet even the rhetoric of a cabinet member did not silence all criticism. Some critics acknowledged that the project would necessarily divert funds from “less glamorous, but equally important,” areas of research, while providing “no guarantees that the giant facility will yield more discoveries than current or planned facilities.” Dr. Arno Penzias, a Nobel laureate in physics at the Bell laboratories, was quoted as a leading critic worried about the sacrifices that would be made in order to facilitate the completion of this project.

The SSC project, as it was called by 1987, rivaled another fantastic project undertaken by the Reagan Administration, the so-called Star Wars (SDI) project. In February 1987, the New York Times reported that $5 billion had already been spent on the antimissile program, and that another $5.9 billion was being requested for that fiscal year (Broad 1987). Mind you, though this was a top-secret project established to fight the evil empire, the Soviet Union, and world communism, it was unclear how effective, if at all, this expensive project would be. From this perspective, what was a mere $4 to $6 billion if the SSC project could ensure the glory of science and the legacy of a presidency? Recall John Locke's admiration for the monuments of the master builders of his time (i.e., Newton), and imagine the desire to facilitate the creation and establishment of new monuments that would enhance an American reputation around the globe. What the British empire was for the nineteenth century, the United States could finally become at the end of the twentieth century, and this stature would not be limited to the horrible atomic bomb in World War II, but would be accomplished in the name of pure, basic science!

By April 1987 there were enough scientists involved in the project to call into question its entire design and the material used for conductivity. Some suggested the possibility that new magnets might allow the tunnel to be only five as opposed to fifty miles long. At issue was not only the timetable and costs projected by the administration, but the sense that by the time the SSC was constructed it would be obsolete (Gleick 1987). Socalled pure, basic science was saddled with the significant concerns of engineers, so that technology was no longer portrayed (as in classical textbooks) as the handmaiden of science but as an integral partner or ingredient in the very conception of experimental designs. Hence the need to speak of technoscience.

But these concerns seem to have been overlooked by the time the Department of Energy announced on November 10, 1988 the site where the tunnel would be built. Out of thirty-five sites in twenty-five states originally proposed, and out of seven finalists, Texas was chosen. Senator Phil Gramm, a Republican from Texas, described the significance of the project in poetic language: “In high-energy physics, we, today, are basically looking at the fuzz on the peach; we know very little about the inside of the peach.” (Franklin 1988) Because Gramm was a Republican Senator when Vice President George Bush (also of Texas) was elected President following a two-term presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan, it is hard to believe that politics did not influence the process of site selection.

It is cited that the State of Texas offered $1 billion in incentives to reduce the total cost of the project, a project that by this juncture had received only $200 million. Why would the voters and legislators agree to such an incentive? It was estimated that in addition to the original construction funding for the local labor market, there would be a federally funded budget of about $270 million annually. Simple arithmetic shows that the entire SSC project was an investment for the future and not a current expenditure in the state or federal budget.

By May 1990 two variables changed enough to cause some journalistic alarm, if not change the minds of politicians committed to the project. First, the project's cost estimate climbed to $8 billion from previous estimates of $4 to $6 billion, and second, Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society, conducted a national poll of 3,332 scientists and found that only 2% responded favorably to the construction of the SSC, as compared with 4% of the same sample group responding favorably to the expenditures related to Star Wars (Browne 1990). If even scientists did not speak in unison, how could the general public have been convinced that the most expensive project in basic or pure science was worthwhile?

Since they were not approved individually by congressional committees, other scientific projects undertaken by the Department of Defense were not under public scrutiny, so the prominence awarded to the SSC project balanced its potential results in light of its costs. While Star Wars had ideological appeal, the SSC was conceived as the new playground for scientific nerds. Moreover, Star Wars had the classic TV series Star Trek as a visual counterpart and explanatory device in popular culture. There was no visual or popular appeal to an underground tunnel in the middle of Texas. And finally, while Star Wars was construed as a military deterrent that could save the world, the SSC project had the potential to revive images of Los Alamos and the nightmares of another Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Assuming that scientists are self-policing, as the ideals of scientific inquiry and the scientific community have been understood traditionally, it should come as no surprise that any scientific project, expensive or not, will have critics. If consensus among scientists cannot be expected (see Fuller 1988, Ch. 9), can there be some consensus among economists and politicians? By June 1990 it seemed that even the political arena found enough dissenters to argue that $8 billion was too much to spend for the SSC project. Therefore, one could either choose to drop the project or find sources outside the Federal budget to fund it. Congressional commitments and presidential aspirations remained bound to the State of Texas and to national pride, perhaps in that order. So the alternative chosen by the Bush Administration was to approach Japan as a possible investor-collaborator in the project. Japan was asked to invest no less than $2 billion. At this juncture the calculation was as follows: $5 billion from the United States government, $1 billion from Texas, and $2 billion from Japan and other countries (Sanger 1990). In October 1990, an unlikely candidate emerged as a potential $200 million contributor: the Soviet Union. The target of Star Wars just a few months earlier, the Soviet Union turned into a potential investor in the SSC after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In October 1991 the Japanese were asked to contribute $1 billion, and in exchange they demanded a bigger role in a number of other joint projects.

What used to be rhetorically a patriotic cry for scientific supremacy by the United States was toned down and relabeled in the popular press an “international project” by October 1991. The press suggested a Japanese “equity interest” in the project and estimated Japan's financial commitment to be between $1 and $2 billion. There was almost a tone of desperation in the media, for it became clear that the United States would not pay the full cost of the now $8.4-billion project and therefore that it might not be funded at all (Sanger 1991). A conciliatory voice from the Bush Administration made its rounds in the press, so that the very completion of the project, no matter under what conditions of compromise, was considered more important than the claims made ...