What Eliot Spitzer Teaches Us

One of the big themes in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is his skepticism of science (and we shouldn’t forget that Vonnegut studied mechanical engineering). There is a very telling passage (it would be even more telling if I could find it) when the main character is sitting in a bar and overhears a discussion about the recent discovery of DNA, yet no one reacts to the news. No one cares, because it hasn’t altered their lives in any inexorable manner. I had always been a strong supporter of the so-called “Enlightenment,” whatever the hell that means (and after all, who wants to call themselves “unenlightened”?), and I’ve always enjoyed Vonnegut’s books, but was nonetheless skeptical of his Neo-Luddism. Yet, as is clear to me now, I could only appreciate his insight in retrospect.

There is much talk today amongst the bourgeoisie about the role of science in the sphere of the political, from debates over evolution to stem cell research, as if these were somehow the most pivotal political issues at stake. And then you have radical reductionist materialists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have become quite fashionable amongst large swaths of the very same libertine intelligentsiia. Yet, and I am hardly the first to point this out, the opposition between science and the new “fundamentalisms” (usually delimited to religious or political “totalitarianisms,” hardly ever the democratic one, which is spread by tanks and cluster bombs…) is fairly obviously overstated, and I think this has become an uncontroversial claim. And the problem isn’t the stupid pseudo-Leftist one that science is really just another form of religion, and all of that twaddle. The problem is rather that, as a rule, no one who is “seriously” oppressed (in the sense of being one of today’s “Excluded” slum-dwellers) is really concerned with upholding the virtuous nature of Scientific Reason. The contradiction is that in refashioning the debate between this science-fundamentalism binary opposition, the bourgeoisie seem to be positioning themselves in the status of victim, the same logic which dominates their liberal multiculturalist ideology. They are perceived as the victim of unchecked religious fervor, which is typically then associated with the stupid poor masses. In other ways, too, however, this straight out class antagonism is often side-stepped or obfuscated by a confrontation with the wealthy conservatives who are seen as manipulating the working-class people, such that one exclaims, “If only they knew the truth, the world would be a better place.” This view is perhaps even more patronizing, as it suggests that not only are the masses poor and stupid, but they are also passive. Their stupidity even precludes them from acting, so they can only find a real voice through their rich lords. Consequently, when they talk about science qua the political, they are not really talking about science at all. Instead, what they are really after is the right to preside over the mastery of the canaille, a right they see as their own rather than the proto-fascists.

It is a difficult issue to navigate, however, because on the one hand I’m not interested in defending any anti-scientific position, like, for example, doubting evolution. With science one cannot be “for” or “against” it, that is the entire point. This reached humorous levels under High Stalinism, when experimental physics research of “free-floating radicals” was outlawed due to a misunderstanding of what “free-floating radical” meant. The problem, then, is a paradigmatic one: who will be responsible for asserting a claim to Universality? The biggest problem with arguing that science should occupy the status of a Universal, as it was in the Enlightenment (another indication, following Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis,” that we are regressing back to the 19th century), is that it essentially requires a new domain of authority. Because science inhabits a privileged, largely academic discourse, those who “know,” who have the special knowledge, occupy the (Lacanian) position of “subjects supposed to know.” They are like Sherlock Holmes-esque figures, the same sort of logic which aptly fits the dynamics of the TV show Monk. Why is this? It’s because the assumption is as follows: “Wow, I don’t understand what the hell a legless Russian trapese artist has to do with a mysterious murder, but I’m sure Monk does, and he will put all of the pieces together.” The formula is always the same: Monk spots what appears to us and the idiot cops (interpellated “subjects supposed to believe”) as a meaningless stain, which for him exposes the entire logical chain (akin to the anamorphosis that takes place in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors). So essentially, when one insists on the primacy of scientific discourse as a new political paradigm, it is implicitly an assertion of political authority.

This assertion of political authority disguised as Reason, and, unbeknownst to it, in the service of its cunning, perfectly fits the depoliticalizing trend of the past decades following the collapse of Actually Existing Socialism and the ordaining of the End of History. It involves eliminating the political will of the masses and dismissing the real problems of today’s new, slum-dwelling proletarian, instead opting to address them as a “human rights” concern, to incorporate them into state bureaucracy and so on. It involves eliminating political antagonism, which is understood as another form of totalitarian fundamentalism (like Hugo Chávez’s socialist project in Venezuela). And it involves instituting the program of the liberal utopia.

So what is the truth of the liberal utopia? To go back to the example of the detective novel, the truth seems to lie in the passage from classic detective novel to the film noir universe, where the detective is no longer outside, as it were, of the seedy underbelly of criminal life, but interjected within its perverse machinations. This is the example we learn from the recent scandal involving Eliot Spitzer: the faults of one expert administrator expose the entire perverse core of the logic underlying the liberal utopia; so-called inflexible ethics merely mask the prostitution rings, child molestation and other seeming “aberrations” that occupy the lives of the bureaucratic elite.

The only goal then, following Badiou, is to continue to insist on the primacy of the communist hypothesis:

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis … Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.¹

1. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. ↩