Puppets and Wire Models

CLAIRE HOBBS

THIS TRICK, THIS INSIGHT

. story is told by Walter Benjamin, in his posthumously published "Theses on thePhilosophy of History,"

of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, an-swering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and witha hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrorscreated the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchbackwho was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings.1

Benjamin's interpretation of this allegorical story is well known: The puppet historical ma-terialism, if it is not to lose, is supposed to enlist the services of the hunchback theology.

It is not difficult to invent another interpretation of this story, one that might wellserve as an illustration of the workings of the history of science as they get figured in Tho-mas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this interpretation, the puppet wouldbe normal science and the hunchback, scientific revolutions. From opening gambit toendgame, the puppet, normal science, would stage a virtuoso performance, accumulating anever-growing string of unbroken wins, and the little hunchback, scientific revolutions, wouldbe rendered invisible by the cleverly constructed system of mirrors. Arguably, Kuhn's origi-nal trick in his book is to shatter the wondrous system of mirrors and thus expose the his-tory of science's unbroken string of successes for what it is: a fraud. This way of puttingthings, however, risks making Kuhn sound more of a revolutionary than he really is. ForKuhn's own model of the history of science as a paradigm-governed activity punctuated ev-ery now and again by revolutionary-like gestalt switches, which bring about a change ofparadigm—of which his own book is surely meant in some sense to be both description andexemplar—is, on a number of counts, as John Krige has shown, a liberal, not a revolution-ary, one.2 Moreover, Kuhn is only marginally interested in exposing science's distortion andsuppression of its own history, what Margaret Masterman rather charitably calls science's"unconscious dishonesty."3 He is interested in it in as much as it points to an anomaly in thehistoriography of science. As the build-up of anomalies is a prerequisite for paradigm changeand, as has already been suggested, Kuhn's book is meant as both description and exemplarof such change, the fraudulent image that science fashions of and for itself is merely onepiece of ammunition among others that enables Kuhn to speak of a "new" historiography, a"historiographic revolution," in the study of the history of science.4

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The European Legacy, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 770-774,1997©1998 by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas

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Whether Kuhn in fact believes that the "new" historiography represents a paradigmshift is, however, an open question. Nor is recourse to Kuhn himself likely to shed defini-tive light on this matter. For as he wryly remarks in "Reflections on my Critics": "I am re-peatedly asked whether such-and-such a development was 'normal or revolutionary,' andI usually have to answer that I do not know."5 On the other hand, Kuhn clearly does believethat the new historiographic model represents a reaction to the older one as well as, insome sense, an overcoming and development of it. This is a triad that, as Benjamin remindsus, Engels found particularly objectionable in cultural history because it perpetuates animage of the history of science, religion, art, for example, as a hermetic self-sufficient en-tity cut off from a wider political and economic context.6 As Engels's objection raises theproblem of defining a relation between "base" and "superstructure," and as this problemhas proved a particularly recalcitrant one and has come to be coupled in many people'sminds with cruder kinds of recourse to expressive, homologous, or mechanical models, itis an objection that is unlikely to detain Kuhn long.7 This is not to let Kuhn off the hook.For any account of the history of science that studiously ignores its darker episodes—ofwhich, as I write, the disclosure of the United States' cold war-era atomic projects providesonly the most recent example—itself remains open to the charge of being ideological in thepejorative sense of this term. The crucial question, however, is this: Does Kuhn's new his-toriographic model represent a significant shift over its predecessor? Or, to put the ques-tion another way, does Kuhn in fact take over the same old historicist wire model, merelyadding to it a few embellishments of his own?

"THE WAY IT REALLY WAS"

From the perspective of the "new" historiography, the older historiographic paradigm,which views science as a process of accretion, comes to be seen as little more than an ideo-logical myth produced by science retroactively to explain its own genesis and, at the sametime, enables it to require the self-evidence of a linear progression. Kuhn's own account doesnot entirely escape getting caught up in this kind of circularity. For in order to get the newhistoriography off the ground, so to speak, in order to claim that a revolution has taken placein the history of science, that things are now different, that a transformation has been effectedwhich is somehow decisive but incommensurable with the older historiographic paradigm,it is incumbent upon Kuhn to show that revolutions do in fact take place in the theory andpractice of science. Kuhn's knight's gambit then, to return briefly to our allegorical tale oncemore, is to make the little hunchback scientific revolutions literally visible.

In the opening sentence of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes that"history, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce adecisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed."8 A gooddeal here hinges on what is meant by more than anecdote or chronology. Few people thesedays are much enamored of an idea of the history of science in which a mass of data anddiscoveries are strung together like the beads of a rosary; in which progress is regarded asinevitable and linear; and in which science appears as an untarnished jewel in the crownof cultural treasures.

The positive side of Kuhn's case is that he himself has done much by his cogent criti-cism of the concept of development-by-accumulation in the history of science to ensure that

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the older historicist model has few defenders nowadays. On the other hand, the alternativepicture that Kuhn proposes of the history of science as a succession of normal periods andrevolutions only seems to represent an overcoming and development of the older model; itdoes not present even the appearance of a challenge to the potent modern myth of science.For it has signally failed to break with other traits of historicism that are no less objection-able than the concept of science as the continuous process of piecemeal development.

One reason Kuhn wishes to jettison the historicist notion of development by accu-mulation is a striking and simple one: that was not the way it really was. This is not to saythat Kuhn believes that the practitioners of the older historiographic model were laboringunder a delusion, anymore than he believes Aristotle was deluded when he saw swingingstones rather than pendulums. Truth for Kuhn is historically variable, relative to the opin-ions and beliefs of the dominant scientific community of a particular epoch. As with most,if not all, relativists, Kuhn's relativism is itself relative, in the sense that he clearly does be-lieve that the history of science is a history of revolutions and their resolutions. From thevantage point of the present, then, the older historiographic model cannot be said to befalse as such. The most a Kuhnian historian of science can say is that the older model nolonger fits, that it is beset with difficulties and anomalies, and that it can no longer solvethe problems it was designed to address. And this is exactly what Kuhn says about the olderhistoriographic model. Add to this the repeated suggestion that the new historiographymight provide a new image of science—that we might see rabbits where we once sawducks—and it becomes hard to know quite why Kuhn hedges his bets when it comes toclaiming that the new historiography constitutes a new paradigm. His reluctance on thispoint puts us in mind of someone who can describe a rabbit down to the last whisker, butwhen shown a rabbit miserably fails to identify it as such.

THE SUBSTANCE OF ANECDOTES

If the presence of revolutions is what turns history into something more than a re-pository for anecdote or chronology, then what should one make of Paul Feyerabend'sclaim that revolutions themselves are "substance for ancedotes"?9 A cursory glance at thepolitical revolutions in Eastern Europe lends some credence to Feyerabend's claim; forwhile the rhetoric of the "fall of communism" has dominated public consciousness of theseevents, newly independent states and former satellites of the old Soviet Union are return-ing to office in many instances those very Communists that the recent revolutions weresupposed to have routed. Feyerabend sees well enough that scientific revolutions no lessthan political ones cannot be accounted for in purely reasonable or logical terms. Rheto-ric, myths, fictions, symbols, and slogans, as well as rational arguments, are the stuff ofrevolutionary changes. But it does not follow from this that the Polish miner or Hungar-ian peasant is acting in an unreasonable fashion by casting his or her vote for a Commu-nist or former Communist Party. The Polish miner may come to see the shortcomings inthe newly emergent capital system as more cruelly exploitative than the shortcomings inthe Communist system. This need not be read as either irrational or as a naive hankeringafter the good old bad times. As Zygmunt Bauman notes in "The Polish Predicament," onestill needs ration cards in the post-Communist East, but the ration cards these days are dis-guised as cash.10

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When Feyerabend speaks of the "normal," as opposed to the "philosophical," compo-nent of revolutions as the substance for anecdotes, he sails perilously close to a naive ideal-ism that locates rationality in an uncontaminated, supersensible realm of ideas and therebydenies any real share of the rational kernel to the vast majority of the individual or collectiveparticipants in revolutionary transformations. In this he comes close to Kuhn. Both Kuhnand Feyerabend regard fundamental changes in science as shot through with nonrational el-ements, and both maintain that these nonrational elements can be rationally explained.

For all his wary skepticism of the rationality of revolutions, however, Feyerabend, un-like Kuhn, is less inclined to let matters rest here. For Kuhn the nonrational elements of sci-ence are structural. They derive from the theory of the arbitrary and random nature of ge-stalt switches and the resulting incommensurability between pre-and post-revolutionaryparadigms. Like the Freud of The Future of an Illusion, Feyerabend is acutely aware that ar-guments are a poor bulwark against the claims of human desire, but he also shares withFreud the sense that there is nothing inevitable or eternal about the precariousness of hu-man reason. It is up to us, writes Feyerabend, "to either accept this many-faced monster [sci-ence] and be devoured by it, or else to change it in accordance with our wishes."" From thevantage point of human reason no longer firmly wedded to desire, a point, perhaps, thatlies, as Freud says, "in a distant future, but probably not in an infinitely distant one,"12 ourpresent stage of consciousness is bound to strike us as in some measure incommensurable;just as who we are now is in a sense incommensurable with who we were as an infant. ForFeyerabend, then, incommensurability is not an insurmountable obstacle to the develop-ment of a more rational science but, rather, an indispensable condition for its realization.

EMPATHY WITH THE VICTOR

Neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend conceive the history of science as a homogeneous, lin-ear, continuous course of events. Kuhn's new historiography, though, shares with tradi-tional historicist accounts, in ways that Feyerabend's does not, what we might call, afterBenjamin, an empathy with the victor. "Revolutions close with a total victory for one of thetwo opposing camps . . . and [the victors] are in an excellent position to make certain thatfuture members of their community will see the past in the same way."13 What failed in thehistory of science is then either stifled or drastically distorted. The victims of scientificprogress and the toil of those countless men and women who made it possible in the firstplace are quite simply to be written out of the account. If all this smacks of a Nietzscheanhistoriography, of the right of the winners to impose their own view on history, we wouldnot be entirely wrong. But nor, according to Kuhn, would we be entirely right. For the out-come of scientific revolutions is decided not by might but by a uniquely competent pro-fessional group of scientists whom, if Kuhn is to be believed, are curiously immune frompolitical, ideological, or class interests in ways the rest of us presumably are not.

The Kuhnian historiographic perspective is then formally the perspective of thosewho have won; it is the perspective of a victor whose victory is guaranteed by the peculiarlycompetent and "objective" nature of a professional scientific community who "must be seenas the sole possessors of the rules of the game."14 This community is a sublimely disinter-ested one. The judgments it makes on scientific matters are arrived at by putting out of playall motives other than the will to scientific knowledge; which is to say, by pure reason, and

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are thus entirely free of rhetoric, coercion, and nonscientific influences of all kinds. Nor arewe encouraged by Kuhn to view this community in any sense as an ideal one, a sort of nec-essary fiction along the lines, say, of Jurgen Habermas's ideal speech community. On thecontrary, we are led to believe that this is how the mature scientific community works, thatis indeed free of all pathological and political interests. Sporting such impeccable creden-tials, science is located in a realm wholly removed from the quotidian one. Propelled intoan epistemological orbit that other disciplines only dream of, it takes on the status of amyth. To speak of the "myth of science" is not to claim that what scientists normally do isillusory; it is not to deny the theoretical accomplishments or compelling successes of muchof scientific discourse. What is mythical about science is less this or that particular theory,or this or that piece of research, than the entire edifice of science itself. Surrounded by anaura of specialness, science in effect is conveniently cut adrift from sociality as such. And theupshot of this is to remove science beyond the reach of critical discussion. This is why, inspite of the accent on revolutions, incommensurability, and gestalt switches, Kuhn's view ofhistory is thoroughly historicist. If it has broken with the view of history as a continuouslinear progression, it is nonetheless firmly on the side of the victor, and it writes, as the olderhistoriography wrote, a positive history of science's achievements.

Kuhn views the scientific community a bit like Gulliver in the fourth book of Swift'sGulliver's Travels views the Houyhnhnms; Feyerabend, on the other hand, knows that thescientific community cannot be wholly identified with the Houyhnhnms or the Yahoos.Science, Feyerabend remarks, "continues to utilise every talent and every folly of man."15

One of the legacies of such folly is the fetishized image of science and the scientific com-munity by which we are now possessed.

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana Press, 1973), 245.

2. John Krige,"Revolution And Discontinuity," Radical Philosophy 22 (Summer 1979), 3-14.3. Margaret Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm," Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed.

I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 87.4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (London: University of Chicago Press,

1970), 3.5. Thomas Kuhn, "Reflections on my Critics," in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 251.6. Walter Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian," One-Way Street, trans. E. Jephcott and

K. Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), 350-51.7. Not all attempts at defining a relationship between "base" and "superstructure" have been crude. See,

for example, the chapter "Concerning the Relationship of the Basis and Superstructures" in V. N.Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka and I. Titunik (Massachu-setts: Harvard University Press, 1986).

8. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1.9. Paul Feyerabend, "Consolations for the Specialist," in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 214.10. Zygmunt Bauman, "The Polish Predicament," Telos 92 (Summer 1992), 126.11. Feyerabend, "Consolations for the Specialist," 215.12. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, quoted in T. Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), 178.13. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 168.14. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 168.15. Feyerabend, "Consolations for the Specialist," 215.