Philip E. Agre

Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
pagre@ucsd.edu

 

Wright, Will. Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

 

Attend any public hearing about a local environmental controversy, and almost the first thing you’ll notice is a clash of contrasting discourses. Some participants, particularly from industry, will speak the language of technical reason: risk factors, powers of ten, bureaucratic procedures, the costs and benefits of industrial facilities. Many other participants, particularly from the communities around those facilities, will speak the language of experience and democracy: stories of past misfortune, fears about a world that doesn’t make sense to them, and the right to control their own lives (see Cone et al. 1992, Downey 1988, Gismondi and Richardson 1991, and Killingsworth and Steffens 1989). Beneath each discourse, typically, is a highly evolved practice of orchestrating or subverting the established mechanisms of social legitimation, as well as a worked-out view of scientific knowledge and its place in society. Community by community across the United States–and increasingly around the world–organizations such as the Chemical Manufacturers Association equip factory owners with rational arguments and soothing rhetoric at the same time as organizations such as the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste equip community activists with coalition-building tactics and a nearly absolute rejection of experts and their expertise (Greider 1992). Immediately evident in these encounters is what we would be fully justified in calling a crisis of reason, occasioned in thousands of separate instances by concerns about the sustainability of industrial society.

 

This is the political background against which Will Wright has written his ambitious new book, Wild Knowledge. Wright’s goal is a critique and reconstruction of both scientific knowledge and institutional legitimation around the ecological imperative of sustainability. The fascination of Wright’s enterprise is immediately apparent: understanding and practicing the notion of sustainable society requires us to reopen some long-standing and painful questions about the relation between society and nature. In what sense are human beings part of nature? To what extent is human history conditioned by natural history, and what role does human history play in the biological and physical evolution of the earth? Wright’s concern is not the substantive answers to these questions–he does not assess the reality of global warming, much less the utility of any given regulatory approach to preventing it. Instead, he wishes to dig deeply into the concepts of humanity and nature in order simply to make intelligible the notion of a social-natural history (cf. Cronon 1991), and in particular the notion of sustainability as an attribute and a goal of social action.

 

His book defies classification. If it stands in any single tradition, it is the feminist and otherwise radical critique of science by authors such as Merchant (1980) and Easlea (1980). Although it is reasonably lucid and self-contained, it will probably not be appreciated by anybody who is not already sympathetic to such ideas; for example, one must pretty much accept a priori that science and technology, as a mindset, are the cause of our environmental problems–and not, in particular, the cure for them. His book is not a work of historical or otherwise empirical inquiry, but rather a wholly–even austerely–conceptual analysis. And although it addresses central issues of social theory, its treatment of that tradition is shaky, as will become clear in a moment. Nonetheless, Wright’s book is important and challenging, and required reading for anybody with a conceptual interest in environmentalism as social practice.

 

Let us now consider Wright’s argument in roughly the order in which he presents it. His point of departure is the argument in his previous book, The Social Logic of Health (1982), in which he points out that the notion of “health” transcends the bounds of any particular scientific-medical theory of disease, and as such stands as the always-available social-natural grounds for contesting the legitimacy of medical institutions and their practices and expertise. Alternative health-care practitioners (midwives, acupuncturists, herbalists, and others) may not have an easy time acquiring official sanction for their activities, but they do have, in discursive and social terms, somewhat solid ground for demanding it. Wright’s method is to extend this argument to environmental issues, with “sustainability” playing the same role as “health.” Like “health,” “sustainability” deeply intertwines “social” and “natural” issues. Indeed in many areas, such as occupational health, the two concerns combine, bringing biology and politics into much greater proximity than either of them is, at present, capable of acknowledging.

 

Wright argues that scientific and social knowledge are artificially distinct categories, and that they are indeed actually incoherent unless conceived as continuous with one another. The critical issue for Wright is language– the language within which science, technology, religion, and social theory are framed and through which social institutions are legitimated. Science in particular has, since Descartes and Newton, understood itself as speaking a special, mathematical language. As a result, the scientist, qua subject of scientific inquiry, understands knowledge as the asocial, ahistorical mathematical representation of reality. All the same, Wright observes that when scientists and philosophers are called upon to provide some justification for science, they appeal to its “success” in technological terms. But the religions of traditional cultures have their own kind of success, namely success in sustaining the social-natural relations by means of which these cultures reproduce themselves in their natural settings. These two types of success are complementary: industrial technology has not proven sustainable, and religious worldviews have been unable to make room for the benefits of technical innovation.

 

This is a good point to stop and listen to Wright’s own prose, whose style is of a piece with the nature of his project:

 

Both religion and science have incorporated a fundamental reference to language into their respective ideas of knowledge, implicitly recognizing that knowledge is inherently an issue of the formal structure of language. But both have distorted that formal reference, interpreting it instead as a substantive appeal to a particular form of language, and so referring the idea of knowledge to a sacred, magical form of language rather than to the formal structure of language. For religion this magical language has always been the ordinary, traditional language of daily life, where knowledge of the magical words gives knowledge of the sacred social-natural order, with its necessary moral commitments to traditional acceptance and ritual. And for science this magical language is mathematics, where the magic of perfect observation gives knowledge of the external natural order, with its necessary technical commitments to individualized criticism and efficiency.(112-13)

 

Many readers may demur; exactly what kinds of science and, more importantly, what kinds of religion are supposed to fall within these generalizations? Does Wright subscribe to the outdated anthropological stereotype of traditional cultures as uncritical and ahistorical? It is hard to tell. Throughout the book, words like “science,” “religion,” “language,” “legitimation,” “sustainability,” “nature,” and “reality” recur constantly without ever being fully unpacked into a definite embedding in a disciplinary practice or literature, much less a concrete empirical reference. The book is composed in sentences of thirty-odd words organized into long paragraphs, each of which systematically develops a definite point involving a particular set of the book’s key words. The effect sometimes resembles Buddhist scripture, with a hypnotically unfolded internal consistency which could easily be mistaken for a verbal game unless it is applied in the context of an actual practice.

 

But let us continue. To motivate the underlying politics of scientific knowledge, Wright recounts the by-now familiar early history of science understood as mathematical observation and knowledge. Early theories of gravity, for example, were consciously understood in their day as positions in a political contest. Although the concrete political reference of these theories has fallen away, the politics of scientific subjectivity remain. Wright’s argument for the incoherence of this form of subjectivity turns on the notion of “mathematical observation”:

 

For science knowledge is an issue of the observing human mind, and yet the human mind is typically influenced by social and cultural ideas, ideas that involve values and beliefs and that are not strictly and neutrally derived from objective nature. Thus scientific observation must establish a neutral and objective connection between mind and nature, a connection systematically purged of all contaminating social influences. . . . Such an objective connection can be made through observation, but only through a special kind of observation, a kind that is uniquely focused on nature and without social content. This is mathematical observation, the only kind of observation that can directly connect the rational mind with objective nature. Mathematics is found to be the special, necessary lens through which nature must be observed, since nature is defined as being exactly a structure of mathematical entities and relations. . . . For scientific knowledge, then, the idea of the mind is connected with the idea of nature through the idea of mathematics. . . . The mind must become mathematical if it is to achieve valid knowledge, and so the idea of objective nature imposes a mathematical structure on the scientific image of human beings, as the detached, receptive subjects of scientific knowledge.(75)

 

Given the impossibility of actually attaining these direct correspondences between a purified mathematical mind and a manifest mathematical world, Wright refers to this notion of mathematical observation as a kind of magic, comparable rhetorically if not logically to the magical systems of traditional religions. But this argument goes by too quickly. Many scientists would object that Wright’s notion of mathematical observation elides the whole substance of actual scientific practice based on experiments and replication. The point is not that experiment directly observes the mathematics of nature, only that it allows for defeasible inference of it, subject to replication and extension of the results by others in similarly equipped laboratories elsewhere–perhaps in wholly different cultures. Wright’s proposed alternative, that

 

human beings must be conceptualized as having a formally necessary but substantively contingent relationship with their world, a relationship through which knowledge is always formally possible but also always possibly mistaken (173)

 

is more or less what scientists refer to as the “falsifiability” of theories. But Wright is not mistaken, exactly; the point is that he is not so much presenting an argument as referring to one that has been made with greater thoroughness by a variety of authors, for example Latour (1987), who conceive of physical phenomena not as independent realities objectively glimpsed, nor as idealist entities arbitrarily constructed, but as conjoint social-natural entities stabilized in highly organized social-natural settings.

 

Beyond this internal claim against the coherence of scientific subjectivity, Wright follows numerous other authors by appealing to the reintroduction of consciousness into physical theorizing by quantum mechanics. But here again he is moving too quickly, inasmuch as the long-established and newly resurgent “many worlds” model of quantum phenomena (Everett 1957; cf. Drescher 1991) accounts for the evidence without giving any special role to consciousness or treating observation as anything but another form of physical interaction.

 

Wright’s complaint, in short, is that the mathematical language within which scientific knowledge is framed deprives that knowledge of its human qualities: its social embedding; its historical specificity; its reference to broader human concerns, particularly the concern for the social-natural sustainability of human social and technical practices; and its susceptibility to critique on these grounds. Whatever the difficulties in his argument for this point, his proposed solution is altogether intriguing: scientific knowledge, he feels, should be reunderstood as a matter of human beings saying things in human language –not an artificially restricted mathematical subtype of language, but language as such, in the fullness of its rhetorical, political, and historical character. He would have us attend to the language of environmental discourse, taking this language seriously as culture and as political practice foundedly ultimately on the value of sustainability (cf. Killingsworth 1992, Wynne 1987).

 

In this view, he follows in a long tradition that understands language as the essence of humanity, in the sense that languages carry cultural modes of cognition within them, transcending particular individuals and providing for the continuity of cultural traditions through their role in individual socialization. Indeed, Wright overstates the originality of his argument in this regard. Consider, for example, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of language (see Brown 1967), from which a great deal of modern linguistics and anthropology has descended. Humboldt held that human languages have a significant degree of autonomy from their speakers inasmuch as those speakers have only a limited formal understanding of how their language works. Furthermore, he held that languages develop in two clear stages. The first stage corresponds to the founding period of any given nation, during which the people collectively evolve a language suited to the trials of making a living from their particular landscape. Once that language acquires a stable form, the second period begins as that form starts to solidify; rather than being improvised to suit the functional needs of productive work, it is now handed down intact as an organically interconnected system of autonomous linguistic forms. For the philologists in Humboldt’s Germany, this theory motivated the project of reconstructing ancient modes of consciousness through the figurative spadework of historical linguistics. Language was ecological, tied to the earth, in the sense that it developed as an organic part of the ancient nation’s sustainable natural-social relations to its local geography and ecology.

 

To be sure, Wright’s theory differs from Humboldt’s in a variety of ways. Wright’s social-ecological project is not nostalgic; his argument for sustainability does not require that we revert to lost folkways. Quite the contrary, sustainability is to be achieved through two requirements: that institutional legitimation be continually referred to consciously formulated understandings of sustainability; and that this reference be endlessly open to contest and critique. He wishes knowledge to become “wild” in the sense of being formally open to this kind of unbounded critique. In particular, Wright’s theory, unlike that of the German tradition from Herder down to Gadamer, is not hermeneutic: the key to sustainability is not locked away in language but rather articulated in institutional legitimation and critique. Nonetheless, he greatly underestimates the extent to which cultural theory has struggled with the relationship between culture and technical reason (see Sahlins 1976).

 

What is more, Wright also underestimates the struggles of social theorists to reconcile nature and culture (for the particularly fascinating case of Lukacs see Feenberg 1986), and in so doing to formulate simultaneously adequate conceptions of both individual agency and social organization:

 

Through [its various accounts] of individual motivations, social theory created different strategies for social legitimation and social explanation. In all of these versions social theory has accepted the scientific version of objective nature, as the valid basis for reason and knowledge, and thus social theory has revolved around the idea of the autonomous scientific individual. Because this individual is logically asocial but empirically social, social theory has generally focused on the relationship between the individual and the society, with the individual being in various stages of tension and conflict with society. This tension is inevitable, and it makes social order somewhat problematic, at least theoretically. This is the famous problem of social order: individuals "are naturally" free and society imposes external constraints on them, constraints that both inhibit freedom and enable individual rationality, fulfillment, and so on. (134-35)

 

This formulation oversimplifies through its ascription to “social theory” of an altogether regressive “scientific” theory of individual subjectivity. The fact is that theorists such as Elias (1982 [1939]; cf. Mennell 1989) have invested great effort in overcoming such distinctions. The anthropological conception of culturally specific consciousness is already a considerable departure from the “scientific” individual, and the theories of embodied social practice of Elias, Bourdieu, and others go further. Nonetheless, deep difficulties do remain. Wright proposes to resolve them through an appeal to language as the formal matrix of institutional legitimation. In reducing social order to questions of legitimation, he faces a considerable challenge.

 

But he is nothing if not courageous. He sees a deep connection between language as the locus of human sociality and sustainability as the goal of human institutions. Inasmuch as social action, sustainable or otherwise, is organized at a trans-individual level through the framework of language, he views language itself as providing for its own perpetuation through the formal conditions it establishes for the simultaneous conduct of legitimation and critique.

 

[L]anguage is more about involved mediating and surviving than about detached representing and mirroring. . . . language necessarily structures the way we think about ourselves and our world, since language is actively striving to sustain its own possibility, through human knowledge and actions. . . . language can sustain itself, actively, only through the organizing and legitimation of social institutions, which means through versions of knowledge and reason as legitimating, organizing endeavors. (179)

 

Knowledge serves the formal goal of language, the goal of sustaining the social-natural possibility of language through organized, legitimated human actions. . . . Language must be seen as formally directing human actions, through efforts at knowledge, toward its inherent, formal goal, the goal of sustaining the possibility of such human actions. (187)

 

[I]ndividuals would be understood as formally motivated by language, where language, unlike scientific nature, is already understood as participating in this formal, goal-oriented structure, and thus they would be understood as motivated by the same formal mechanisms that generate knowledge, social life, and social legitimation. Individuals would be understood as formally motivated to act in such a way as to sustain their own human possibility, the possibility of social life. (188)

 

In other words, Wright’s point is not that human language directly encodes sustainable productive practices–except perhaps in traditional cultures, which however are unable to accommodate significant environmental shifts due to the inflexibility of this encoding and the religious delegitimation of critique. On the contrary, his point is that language provides the formal resources with which conscious human beings, by their very nature as social and therefore linguistic beings, are able to legitimate and criticize institutions by appealing to the imperative of sustainability.

 

The precise protocol by which legitimation and criticism must proceed, though, is unclear. Perhaps the appeal to sustainability must be mediated by some general account of truth:

 

Specific cultural actions must be legitimated in terms of conceptions of "truth" and "reality," but the validity of these conceptions must in turn be evaluated in terms of the formal criteria of sustainability.(193)

 

It seems implausible, however, that a conception of truth and reality could itself determine whether a system of social practices is sustainable. So perhaps it is also permissible to appeal to sustainability directly:

 

The reference for all issues of legitimacy would be sustainability, and thus the only legitimate criticisms would be those that could argue for or demonstrate ecological failures on the part of the established practices.(210)

 

But this position cannot be entirely right either, given the likelihood that several institutional orders might be ecologically sustainable in a given historical situation, and that of those institutional orders would be enormously preferable to others on non-ecological grounds.

 

Be this as it may, Wright does not prescribe any particular set of institutions but rather an unfolding history in which institutions lose their legitimacy through social-natural shifts in the practical conditions of sustainability. He says that

 

actions that are legitimate under certain social-natural conditions may not be legitimate under later, changed social-natural conditions, conditions that result from the effects of those legitimated actions.(193-94)

 

Shifts in the conditions of sustainability presumably also include exogenous environmental changes, scientific discoveries about eco-social system dynamics, and technological innovations. In any case, periods of institutional legitimacy through sustainable practices alternate with periods in which this legitimacy is lost and newly appropriate institutions arise. Note that this is not a particularly materialistic theory of history; the social effectivity of accurate understandings of sustainability is more or less assumed.

 

Moreover, the periodic institutional shifts are understood, strikingly, in terms of forms of individual identity. In particular, institutions themselves are largely understood in terms of the dimensions of social difference (race, gender, class, sexuality, et cetera) that these institutions recognize. The established institutions of any given period will reckon insider/outsider distinctions in particular terms. Although dissent as such would always be valued as such, the established distinctions of a given period will find their justification in the social-natural facts of sustainability.

 

Although Wright presents this prospect optimistically as the formal celebration of difference, I think that it inadvertently identifies one of the profound dilemmas in environmental thinking. He says, for example,

 

In this conception the idea of equality refers to an institutional guarantee, in the name of rationality, that all individuals can maintain effective local control over their chosen lives, and that any disruption of that local control must be legitimated in the name of a shared ecological rationality.(217)

 

This may sound reasonable, but its flip side does not: if the sustainability of social practices provides their ultimate justification, then it also provides the ultimate justification for whatever marginalization–or even outright oppression–these practices might entail. I can easily imagine someone arguing that toleration of homosexuality, for example, is inconsistent with ecological sustainability.

 

Can this be right? The difficulty, I would conjecture, lies in Wright’s implicit model of social institutions. Wright, as I have remarked, differs from Humboldt and the rest of the anthropological tradition is that he locates social identity in language as such and not in particular languages. Differences among people, likewise, are not understood as culturally specific but as universal. Such a view effectively suppresses cultural difference and thereby eliminates the possibility of geniune “otherness” among human beings and their respective forms of knowledge (see, for example, Grossberg 1988: 382).

 

In the end, Wright’s model of institutional legitimation, shaped in the image of our “global” environmental difficulties, is “global” itself. Society itself becomes, in one sense or another, one large institution:

 

[T]he social order must be seen, formally, as an organization, or metaorganization, with its own inherent, formal goal, and that legitimating critical access is the only organizational strategy that is rational and ecological.(213)

 

But in the real world of 1992, the legitimation of global institutions for the regulation of putatively sustainable practices has very little to do with democracy, or indeed with genuine sustainability The Ecologist 1992). The challenge for an argument such as Wright’s, in my view, is to unpack the notion of “institutions” and their legitimation in a way that recognizes the diversity not only of individuals but of local forms of knowledge.

 

References

 

• Brown, Roger Langham. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
• Cone, Kathy, Luis Quinones, Robert Salter, Brian Shields, Luis Torres, and Janice Varela. “The language of land-use conflict: New Mexicans talk about public lands, environmentalists, and ‘People for the West!'” The Workbook 17 (1), Spring 1992: 2-6.
• Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.
• Downey, Gary L. “Structure and practice in the cultural identities of scientists: Negotiating nuclear wastes in New Mexico.” Anthropological Quarterly 61 (1) 1988: 26-38.
• Drescher, Gary. “Demystifying quantum mechanics: A simple universe with quantum uncertainty.” Complex Systems 5, 1991: 207-237.
• Easlea, Brian. Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy: An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution 1450-1750. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.
• The Ecologist 22 (4), July/August 1992. A special issue entitled Whose Common Future?.
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• Grossberg, Lawrence. “Wandering audiences, nomadic critics.” Cultural Studies 2 (3), 1988: 377-391.
• Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Dean Steffens. “Effectiveness in the environmental impact statement.” Written Communication 6 (2), 1989: 155-180.
• Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
• Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Engineers and Scientists Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Mennell, Stephen. Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
• Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.
• Sahlins, Marshall. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
• Wright, Will. The Social Logic of Health. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982.
• Wynne, Brian. Risk Management and Hazardous Waste: Implementation and the Dialectics of Credibility. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987.