The economic-scientific complex and the destructive objectification of the world
Modern natural science is, as far as we know, the most successful project in human history. But it is also by far the most catastrophic. Success and catastrophe need not be mutually exclusive; on the contrary, it is precisely the greatest success that can harbor the greatest potential for catastrophe. It is true that more positive knowledge about nature has been accumulated since the 17th century than in all the millennia before; but for the vast majority of people this knowledge has manifested itself only in negative form. Technologically applied natural science has made the world uglier, not more beautiful. And the threat that nature poses to man has not diminished, but increased in a nature that has been technologically transformed by man himself.
If the “first nature” of biological man has always been over-shaped [überformt] and transcended by culture, giving rise to a social “second nature,” in modernity this “second nature” has intervened with unprecedented violence in the “first nature” and shaped it in its image. The result is a second-order force of nature that has become even more unpredictable than the first-order force of nature with which we were originally familiar.
It is an unholy ruling alliance of economists, natural scientists, technicians and politicians that administers the scientific-technological development process in the form of the modern social system, not only ignorantly defending the independent dynamics contained therein against any critique, but also continuing to push them forward without regard for collateral damage. On the other hand, the critique of science by outsiders and dissidents remains doubly helpless, because it can neither question the social form nor the structure of scientific knowledge, but mostly limits the problem to the moral conduct of scientists, i.e. to the ethical question of “accountability.”
In contrast to this worn-out ethical enterprise, the recent feminist current of the critique of science goes much deeper. This critique shows that the epistemological paradigm of modern natural science is not “neutral” at all, but has a cultural, sexually defined matrix. The concept of “objectivity,” as can be seen from the very beginnings of the history of modern science in Francis Bacon (1561-1626), is unilaterally male-determined; and the claim associated with it is not primarily directed toward knowledge and toward an improvement of life, but toward subjugation and domination.
US-American theorists such as the molecular biologist Evelyn Fox Keller and the philosopher Sandra Harding conclude from this that the strict separation of subject and object, on which modern science is based, must be questioned. However, they are not concerned with a romantic critique of science, but rather with a “different natural science” that frees its cognitive process from the claim to subjugation. In doing so, they draw a parallel between scientific-technological and economic rationality in modernity, both of which boil down to interests in domination and exploitation.
Modern natural science and the modern capitalist economy are not directly identical, but they are similar in character and are interrelated. Beyond the feminist approach of Fox Keller and Harding, this affinity can be demonstrated both historically and structurally. The natural sciences, the economy, and the state apparatuses of modernity have a common root in the early modern revolution in military firearms. Hence the specifically masculine determination of modernity. The social upheaval brought about by the cannon exploded the structures of the agrarian natural economy with the formation of standing armies, a previously unknown large armaments industry, and the expansion of mining. This situation created not only capitalism, but also a corresponding image of nature.
The specifically modern strict separation of subject and object is the product of this history: Just as the male subject of the military revolution literally defined the world as “cannon fodder,” as a pure object of annihilation, so the state apparatus and economic rationality defined individuals as objects of administration and business management. The emergence of natural science was integrated into this development from the very beginning. It is no coincidence that early modern technological inventions were in many ways related to the military innovation of firearms; one need only think of the projects of Leonardo da Vinci, who, like many of his learned contemporaries, constructed cannons and even famously anticipated the development of submarines and attack helicopters.
But it was no mere external expediency that linked the rise of natural science to the military revolution and the capitalism it spawned; it was the epistemological basis of that science itself. Scientific rationality also defined its object as one to be subjugated; right down to the treacherous imagery of “objective” scientific language, as Evelyn Fox Keller shows. The detachment from the dogmas of theology was not a real emancipation of knowledge. On the contrary, it took place under the sign of the emerging military-industrial complex and its secularized economic theology. In this context, nature had to appear as an alien and hostile object. Objectivity thus turned into objectification, cognition into rape.
The common worldview underlying the various forms of objectification is inevitably a mechanistic one. For only mechanical objects can be fully objectified and manipulated. Just as the modern state reduces the living individual to a ghostly abstract legal person, and just as the logic of economics demands that society be reduced to the dead matter of money, so, analogously, natural science reduces natural processes to mechanical interrelations. This reductionism does not necessarily follow from the knowledge of nature per se, but it is a product of the historical tendency towards subjugating objectification.
In social practice, economic, political and scientific reductionism have intertwined to form a totalitarian structure in which man and the world are defined as hostile objects of manipulation. Economics could only be so rigorous in its use of science because scientific rationality has the same roots and inherently follows a similar mechanistic imperative. To this day, we are dealing with a military-economic-scientific complex. The manipulating subject, who, as a natural scientist, politician and economist, has completely separated himself from his objects, has had to objectify and manipulate himself: he has sunk to the level of a mere servant and executor of the independent military-industrial and economic-technological complexes.
The destructive power of these interlocking complexes and their unleashed dynamics has long since crossed the red line beyond which the economically-scientifically generated “natural disasters” begin. As natural capitalism and capitalist natural science come up against certain natural limits and attempt to break through them by force, their reductionist and mechanistic logic threatens to go beyond the creeping destruction of the natural foundations of life into the creation of directly apocalyptic technologies of self-destruction.
Until the middle of the 20th century, the economic-scientific complex had limited itself to subjecting naturally existing substances to its logic of objectification and to consuming them as objects. The moment of destruction occurred only as an indirect side effect. In the last 50 years, on the other hand, the system has proceeded not only to intervene in nature, but to produce a physically and biologically “different nature” from the ground up, because the mere external manipulation of earthly nature has been exhausted. To the extent that the economic-scientific complex recognizes no logic other than its own, and therefore no natural limits, it is insane enough to want to emancipate itself from nature altogether.
After the Second World War it became foreseeable that the fossil fuels stored on earth for millions of years would dry up, at least in an economically usable form, due to modern overexploitation. Thus, the capitalist culture of combustion threatened to reach a natural limit. The answer to this was nuclear technology, i.e. the attempt to unleash a form of energy not found in earthly nature, and, in fact, totally independent of it. The potential for major catastrophes like Chernobyl or Harrisburg is not the only self-destructive factor here. Even the accident-free operation of this technology accumulates mountains of radioactive waste, whose absolutely hostile effect on life can no longer be processed and degraded by natural processes themselves, but lasts for tens of thousands of years – a culturally unimaginable period of time. This apocalyptic dimension of nuclear technology, however, is not due to the need for knowledge of nature per se, but to the compulsive claim of modern natural science to objectify nature and to consign to destruction everything that resists this objectification.
The same logic as with regard to the energetic basis of capitalism is evident at the level of the transformation of natural substances. Until the end of the 20th century, the technological application of natural science in the economic space of capital was concentrated on the physical and chemical transformations of industrial production. Agriculture, as agribusiness, was increasingly organized along the lines of industrial capitalist production, but direct interventions in the biological “material” were largely limited to traditional methods of animal and plant breeding.
It is no coincidence that this limit was exceeded at the end of the 20th century. For in the third industrial revolution of microelectronics it has become clear that the industrial use of inorganic substances as a carrier of economic growth has been exhausted; even the so-called service society cannot compensate for this exhaustion. The reaction of the system is again excessive and irrational: organic nature, life itself, is to be broken down into its elementary components and transformed in order to create “another biology” independent of natural earthly evolution. With the help of genetic engineering, the economic-scientific complex wants to produce plants, animals and ultimately also human beings in its image, which are already “second nature” on the elementary biological level and thus literally creatures of capital with skin and hair.
Genetic engineering would not automatically follow from scientific knowledge of the genome alone. The largely unexplored interrelations are far too complex for the possible consequences of technological interventions to be controllable at this level. It is no longer a question of a limited scientific procedure on individual exemplary materials, but the entire earthly interrelation of life as such is transformed into a laboratory object. Mistakes, mishaps, or unknown mechanisms can at any time turn into uncontrollable biological chain reactions, genetic deformations, and incurable new epidemics. Humanity itself becomes a collective laboratory animal for biotechnological risk experiments. And again, natural science does not have to be subordinated externally to the economic imperative for any of this to happen. Rather, genetic engineering is also a product of its own logic of the objectification and subjugation of nature.
The frightful moment of ecological reflection has long since passed. With the energetic program of President Bush, the capitalist world power USA is returning to the reckless expansion of nuclear technology; the rest of the world will follow this program. And everywhere the inhibition thresholds for the rigorous use of genetic engineering are falling, everywhere governments are relaxing safety standards, everywhere the “ethical discourse” is languishing in the face of economic-technological “constraints.” In order to stop the apocalyptic technologies, not only a different social form is needed, but also a different natural science in the sense of Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding. If scientific knowledge cannot emancipate itself from the logic of a life-hostile objectification of nature, the economic-scientific complex will succeed in turning the earth into a physical desert.
Originally published in Folha de São Paulo on 06/17/2001
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