I wrote up this reading response for a class. It’s just a short reading response, and my friend Francesca made fun of me for its clunky language (“a few years ago 🤓” and “I used to hate the word ‘science’ 🤓”,) but I still decided to post it because it sums up a lot of my perspective on science, technology, and objectivity.
The class is focused on qualitative research methods, and this piece responds to the class’ larger appraisal of qualitative methods as performing a kind of work that quantitative methods cannot.
A few years ago, I took a class Solidarity Infrastructures, hosted by the School for Poetic Computation. It was a great class. In any case, one of our lectures was labeled “always already infrastructuring,” meant to turn our attention to the ways (computer) infrastructures is being set up by all of us, always. It was inspired by a short memo called “always already programming” referencing the ways we are always configuring our computers, electronic devices, but also the world at large.
The emphases that we should not code from the video this week is useful in that it turns us towards a more flexible and unbounded analysis and away from artificial containers provided by language, but I feel it’s necessary for us to embrace the ways such a complete departure is impossible, as the above memos try to emphasize. Quantitative logic is present in so many ways — from even this week’s readings’ inclinations to describe a method as a proper noun, make into an acronym, and thus categorize different methods, making legible a certain approach by differentiating it neatly from others. More broadly, the argument that qualitative research should not be “an objective study of subjectivity” (as Packer says) because such a study is impossible, inaccurate, and unfaithful to the true nature of language is unsatisfying to me because it still presumes some kind of true nature of language or subjectivity that “objective” methods cannot capture. It’s a paradoxical criticism that also stops short of recognizing that “objective” methods themselves are always “subjective” to begin with.
I used to hate the word “science,” thinking it was a cover word for capitalist logics of differentiation-through-unity (e.g. a logic of differentiated identities like race under some idea of a meritocracy that unites us all) and domination. (I still believe that, for the most part). But over the past year I’ve been trying to move towards a new meaning of “science” based on open and freely moving critique. The cultural theorist and critic Stuart Hall, a giant in cultural studies and post-Marxist cultural theory, advocated for this approach under a banner of “Marxism without final guarantees” — arguing that Marxists needed to move away from dogma in their method and towards a continual “detour through theory” to make sense out of present conjunctures. For Hall, “the paradigm of perfectly closed, perfectly predictable, systems of thought is religion or astrology, not science.” Derogatory marks on the perfectly legitimate nature of religion and astrology aside, Hall makes no criticism of Marxism’s scientific premise itself.
This perspective is somewhat specific to Marxisms, which generally presume an objective reality (material relations) that can be excavated through a historical-materialist approach. While understanding the massively divergent nature of human knowledges that make sense out of those conditions, a premise that material conditions of today may be in some way related to those of another period or place in a sense larger than any single vantage point is necessary for the kind of world-historical analysis Marxisms try to bring. That may not be for everyone, but it is compelling for me, and some concept of “science” is useful for me as a result.
To tie this back to Packer’s video — although it is certainly useful to push readers away from coding (because categorizing is not, in itself, analysis), I’m not sure how much we gain by trying to move away from quantitative logics altogether. I worry that we may find ourselves falsely believing we have rid ourselves of the bogeyman of quantitative logics and forgetting that quantitative logics are constructed from many of the same historical forces that gave rise to today’s qualitative methods. I’m much more in favor of a science that knows itself as situated (in Haraway’s terms) and malleable — a practice of labeling and coding while knowing these categories are bullshit and made-up but still useful to us; a practice of open and fearless critique that is itself open to being criticized, reinterpreted, and seen as simply one perspective among many.