Signalizing the Sign: Scientism, Education, Identification
As the seasons passed and his missions continued, Marco mastered the Tartar language and the national idioms and tribal dialects….And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s [Kublai Khan] mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms. ” On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “Shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?” And the Venetian answered “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”
An analysis of the concept of “identity” may be seen as a possible key to the understanding of the mechanisms for the maintenance of social order in liberal democracies. The maintenance of a social-cultural balance necessitates forms of identification which are institutionalized within categorization built upon a sharp inclination towards scientism. In the oscillation between images of Identity and Identification, the subject is captured by the complexities of signification. This paper will display a series of argumentative claims regarding the fundamental role of education governed by scientism as a rhetorical game which diverts signs into signals.
In the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Marco Polo “newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant” tries badly to describe the cities visited on his expeditions to Kublai Khan. The conversation proceeds in an atmosphere of melancholy, giving up the possibility of a transparent dialogue. Marco Polo “could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage….. pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl…”. However, “the objects could have various meanings;” In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we are presented with a contrasting view where language is described as a ‘vocabulary of things’, and a conversation becomes possible “in a great progress” by the means of ‘matching an object to a name’.
We may argue that philosophical perspectives which fixate meanings in experiential data, as opposed to philosophies which conceive the relationship between words and the reality as seedlings planted in drifting sands, reflect alternative educational systems. The former is characteristic of western democracies as regulative power in processing of information.
The concept of ‘identity’ is conditional upon these two perspectives. Approaches to ‘Identity’ as a ‘package of characteristics’ diverge from alternative views which treat the linguistic sign as a ‘hole in a net’ defined by its boundaries. The latter view links the notion of ‘identity’ with an attempt to treat the human subject as a ‘junction’ in a changeable web, reading the personal being as constructed out of “bits and pieces” of his communicative experiences.
In the purpose of defining someone’s identity in ‘positive terms’ one must utilize a codification characterized by binary oppositions, which refer to the correspondence theory of truth. These functions facilitate the mapping of subjects into specific groups within the frame of an evaluative system built upon clear-cut categorization for grading and marking, acceptance and negation.
The blurring of the distinction between the meanings of the concept “identity” and “identification” is manifested by mechanisms of science and science-education. Within the common images of science, meanings appear as signals. The crystallization of rhetorical styles dominated by scientism, can be seen as a legitimacy bestowed in advance on statements which come into view under a scientific appearance. The reason for their public acceptance is that they provide “scientific neutrality”, built upon “rationality” and “objectivity”, meanings which are in full adjustment with the liberal belief in prudence and individuals’ deliberated ‘free choice’.
Education can be seen as a key to better understanding of how utopian beliefs in human freedom of choice are induced. Although we admit the crucial role that education plays in cultural construction, it is considered to be of the lowest status in the hierarchy of academic life. Maybe the reason for its imposed inferiority is related to the fact that it is such an important marker in culture and in the construction of socio-political relationships.
Trivialization of education points to a lack of interest in searching for the latent modifications of ‘meanings in consent’. It is the ‘Symbolic Order’ which by its very nature imposes blind spots precisely around the focal points of collective groups’ repressed desires. The failure to acknowledge the subtleties of educational conduct goes side by side with an attempt to rigidify formulation in the social and the political terrains. The misrecognition of the logic of the educational process as a generator of methodological constraints appears as a symptom of ‘the lack’ (and self destructiveness) in the social sciences themselves.
Contemporary educational patterns are the background for the fixation of science images. Images which support the rules for how science should be presented. By using Lyotard’s terminology of the ‘Differend’ I would like to claim that the victims of science images are unable to make a claim against scientism, because there is a latent web of rules which imposes a shared agreement about ‘what science means’.
The agreement is between those who monopolize the patterns of scientism and those who attempt to free themselves from the dependence upon those patterns. I propose that it is not only that education itself is safeguarded within the patterns of scientism, it is also that education fortifies scientism establishing a self-maintaining system by means of the circulation of its power.
Scientism, as manifested in education, is clarified by a distinction between science and scientific education. Science education is the familiarization with the scientific discourse. Scientific education, on the other hand, is a product of scientism in the sense of planning and control under centralized patterns of behavioristic styles. The two meanings are intertwined due to images of science which are publicly accepted and based on short and clear definitions for “rationality”, and “objectivity”. Science is self-maintained via narrow definitions for rationality which relates judgments to a link between a concept to its experiential attributes. But in order to examine whether something can be considered ‘rational’, one must utilize the concept of rationality which was invented by the selfsame designers of the same widespread science images. These concepts earn their accepted meanings via the mechanisms of science education which affirm the cognitive superiority of propositions which achieve legitimacy as scientifically based upon definitions of those selfsame images. This may be compared to a situation where the police inspects itself. Lyotard stamped the title ‘the Differend’ as “the case of conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments”. The concept of ‘the Differend’ aims to illustrate precisely the logic of dominance of the discourses that are relied upon, and at the same time support experiential evidence.
“The Differend is signaled by this inability to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps the saone, is reduced to silence”.
As such, it marks a point of incommensurability. The case of scientism is typical to genres which attempt to increase harmonious consonance by ignoring alternative discourses, discourses which launch the anxiety associated with a lack of rules for a clear-cut determination. It may be said that the tendency to entrench scientism is amassing strength despite the criticism strewn from many walks of philosophical thought. But science is not simply the scientific institutions that call upon truth to support a special persuasive capacity. Science only mediates through institutional mechanisms. More importantly, it provides an archetype on which contemporary attempts at truth are based. An alternative investigation for how scientism gains its power should analyze how science presents itself to the public as that which registers what earns the status of an ‘indisputable’ information.
Education is the foundation for creating the logic of how information is processed. The educational sphere acts as a buffer that regulates an optimal consensus via the filtration of meanings in use. Science Education operates as a permanent restraint blocking possible moments of feeble doubtfulness which may cause undesirable acts of self reflection that may end in mistrust, or a total denial of the system. Debates in the field of philosophy of science have been found to be obsessive in their panic to demarcate between the scientific and the non-scientific. The necessity for demarcation preserves the criteria for what is valid as a scientific statement and what must be rejected as meaningless. These distinctions reflect the power struggle over the legitimacy of information in western societies, and they amass their authoritarian position via science images proliferated in those societies by relating science exclusively to organized factual knowledge. Positivist science images gain a foothold in public opinion on the grounds of an inclusive inclination to signify meaning as flashing referents. Views regarding clustered messages of data as raw material for free deliberation are associated with the illusory prospects speaking of information as being available to anyone who seeks it out. For example, the opening up of archives which gives the feeling of approaching historical truth. Here we should recall Lyotard’s view of the referential document, as a paradoxical message, saying something about a system of which the referent is a part.
Popular images of science are related to a fictive sense of autonomy and the belief in the possibility of emancipation for deprived groups and change. But the enchanted ‘new believer’ in a fragmentary hyperreality is even more caught up by the diffraction into more than 1000 television channels. The TV consumer is haunted by his own illusion that he is the one who can deliberately make his choice. The more a society attains a self-image of being free and liberal, the more it encourages the position of the subject as gifted with apriori rational faculties which grant him/her with the ability to judge, choose or vote.
We may propose that the role of the intellectual is to investigate the mechanisms of political and social organization that act to strengthen the belief in the machinery of scientism as neutral, objective and beyond human beings themselves. How has it been grasped that subjects accept their own ‘identity evaluation’, their own personal outline as defined by extrinsic, authoritarian scaling? How is it that students or teachers, do not feel threatened by the designed processes which implant in advance their trust in data and facts, whose interpretation, judgment, and evaluation are a ‘fixed match’? An analysis of these questions has to be grounded in the nature of a basic conflict inherent in liberal philosophy; namely, the inherent promise of the state for the safeguarding human rights to freedom, property and the maximization of self-gratification. A replacement of power by culture as a precondition for human self respect and dignity necessitates a link between rationality, commonsense and individualism. Liberal humanist education cushions people with the belief that their destiny is conditioned by their own rational judgment. The political power is preserved in accordance with the intensity of the individual’s option of freedom and emancipation, grounded in public rationalized institutionalization.
All styles of schooling reflect an oscillation between the two extreme poles – the trend toward preservation of social order and consensus on the one hand, and the individual propensity to authenticity, on the other. The difference lies only in the degree of manipulation of the subject. While the totalitarian society is exempt from convincing the citizen of the ‘imposed choice’ it forces upon him, in a society which considers itself to be free, citizens must believe that their decisions are self-originated. Science education sustains students with a confidence in methods of generalization with the aim to support the terminology of neutrality and objectivity, devoid of any constraint of a dictating authority. The assimilation of these meanings within a scientific act of verification, protects the consonant pole via the minimization of dissonant decrepitudes. The hegemony of vision, in the frame of positivistic assumptions, implies the high status of data, the centrality of scientism, and the prominence of science education.
The concept of the Double Bind assists in the understanding of the paradoxical dynamic equilibrium relating the subject to his group. All human movements and change are carried out by epigenesis (preservation) and mutation (leaping, inconsistent skipping), in an oscillation between consonance governed by harmonious rule and the dissonance created by unpredictable singularity. It is the to and fro movement between the two poles of an unavoidable alienation and the dependency on the ‘other’ on the one hand, and the permanent desire for the expression of self identity on the other hand. It can be referred to the irreconcilable dilemma of self-conscious subjectivity, reflecting upon its own subjectivity while being caught up in the dialectic of intersubjectivity. To interpret Bateson in Lacanian terminology, the consonance is assimilated in the subject via the symbolic order or meanings in use. Epigenesis functions to duplicate what is in existence, guaranteeing repetition and preservation; that which ‘remembers itself’. Reproduction and epigenesis, nailed in a contract of shared meaning, are constructive negations, a driving force for the mutation, the plunging into the abyss of the inexpressible, the kingdom of the aesthetic act. But for all that, following the rules, as a restriction on freedom, may be seen as a vehicle for the uplifting of self-knowledge reflected by another level of freedom. Regarding the epigenetic pole which reproduces the subject into the contractuality of the symbolic order, is to grasp the driving force for new creativity. For professional excellence in medicine or law for instance, one must excel in the memorization of tens of thousands of items prior to beginning the task. The mutation is created not via the replacement of something with something else but rather via overcoming the given for what does not yet exist. Educational activity is a Double Bind in the sense that repetition and reproduction occur simultaneously with the unpredictable singularity which escapes any kind of formulation.
The educational act is expressed in the Double Bind paradoxical message which blends the command for duplication “be like” simultaneously alongside the possibility of change. If within a discourse, for instance, we are compelled to obey all messages, we are confronted with the message “DO NOT READ THIS MESSAGE”, the act of obeying that message makes us disobey it. The double bind may be seen as an endless oscillation, between the message along with the “meta-message” which says something about that message.
The phrase whose referent is all phrases have a paradoxical character, as in the case of the paradox of the liar. The “liar” describes himself in the form “I lie”. If we were to present the meta-question “is the liar telling the truth”, the computer would react in this case with the confusing output: yes.. no…yes…no, until the paper runs out. Paradoxical messages are arguments which are not acceptable within logic because it bars against coming to a decision. Many messages in everyday language are paradoxical and swing between the message and its context. For example, the confusing message “be spontaneous”, “volunteer”, “be authentic”, or “be autonomous”. Paradoxical expressions oscillate in an unavoidable tension between the contingent particularity and the deterministic concern for maximum control. Epigenesis is deterministic, demanding a maximum prediction characterized by planning and inexhaustible feedback reports, practiced by means of an algorithmic sequence of operations. The unpredictable singular subject as a one time event, oscillates between the ‘longing for fidelity’ provided within models or schemes, and the ‘compulsion to choose’. The ‘Real’ is an infinite continuum of possibilities, richer than any finite number of models, woven as inductive generalizations of particular realities. Education could be seen as a ‘pleasure that comes by pain’ in a perpetual move from a conceptualized finitude into the threat of the infinitude.