by Carsten Horn
The defunding of research institutions, the laying off of researchers and the active intervention into research infrastructures (e.g., the deletion of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)) illustrate that the Trump administration – besides the global turmoil and the atrocities it is responsible for – has shifted the landscape of knowledge-making in the US. What resources does Science and Technology Studies (STS) provide for understanding these shifts, their causes, and their consequences? How can we contemplate the role of science and technology in the polarization and fragmentation of the US?
On 15 April, the STS Department had the pleasure of hosting Professor Stephen Hilgartner from Cornell University (who spent several days with the INNORES project team) for his talk “Science, Technology, and the Unmaking of the United States as We Know It” in the Vienna STS Talks series. Speaking in front of our nearly full seminar room and with a substantial online audience, Stephen argued that the US is facing what legal scholars call a “constitutional moment”, a moment of intense scrutiny and contestation of the socio-political order. It is certainly not the first time such a moment has occured, but it is particularly relevant for STS as it concerns the role of science in society. However, while previously controversies may have arisen around individual technoscientific issues, hybridizing factual and value-based debates, since the 2000s, it is “science itself” and belief in it that have become contentious. Crucially, Stephen contended that this shift originates with the Democratic Party who thus (inadvertently) created the terms on which the contemporary conflicts operate and contributed to the polarization of fronts and the hardening of positions. For instance, the Bush Administration was accused of being “anti-science” by 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and Barack Obama vowed to restore “science” to its rightful place. These conflicts surrounding science thus map onto the political divide1 in the two-party system in the US. Democrats frequently accuse Republicans of being “anti-science” and call for public trust in science (as illustrated by the slogan “Follow the Science” or the Marches for Science), while Republicans argue that they are the true defenders of science from ideological biases from Democrats. Echoing Sheila Jasanoff and Hilton Simmet (2017), Stephen noted that in this polarization, both sides then operate with a clear distinction between “science” and “society,” overlooking the essential interconnection between them. The ability to establish publicly accepted and legitimate facts is increasingly in doubt.
In the second part of the presentation, Stephen illustrated that this polarization surrounding technoscience occurs in, and contributes to, a broader context of the fragmentation of the mechanisms that Benedict Anderson (1983/2006) posited bind a nation together as an “imagined community”. There is a significant division between red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states, which correlates with the distribution of top US universities—in one ranking, only one of the top 25 is located in a red state. Social connections are dissolving and being replaced by interactions on social media. Disagreements over what constitutes a common heritage and history have become contentious and violent, as evidenced by disputes over the removal of Confederate statues. Traditional media outlets have not only become polarized but have also given rise to alternative news and knowledge sources on social media. In essence, while science and technology once played a crucial role in shaping the United States (Nye, 1994), they have now become entangled in what Stephen identified as the unmaking of the United States as we know it.
This troubling conclusion raises further questions: Is there a silver lining? Is there room for resistance or hope? An audience member asked whether the “constitutional moment” could potentially lead to a positive outcome. What role could STS play in all of this? It is worth considering the concept of the “constitutional moment” and broadening its meaning. The fact that it concerns the relationship between society and science as a whole should be of particular interest for STS. The, albeit obscured, kernel of truth in the Republicans’ otherwise indefensible attacks, aligns with one of the field’s tenets from early on: debates over facts cannot be separated from debates over values. The Democrats’ well-meaning call to simply “follow the science” (and the accusation that Republicans are anti-science) risks oversimplifying this relationship and misrecognizing what is at stake. The constitutional moment and the turning point the US is facing may point to another constitutional moment for what Bruno Latour (1993) has termed the “modern constitution”: the clear distinction between “science” and “politics”.
Whether STS is well equipped to capture the full scope of the constitutional moment in the US and how science and technology are entangled may be questionable. As many questioners and commenters from the audience lamented, there is a need for approaches and concepts for STS to investigate empirically, for instance, the role of Big Tech capital and ideologies in the unmaking of the United States. Moreover, it is improbable that the field – if it ever could – can still count on a responsive audience in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, STS could provide a language to come to terms with the underlying constitutional moment of the modern constitution. To paraphrase one of the questions by an audience member: Isn’t this what we STSers have been preparing for for the last 40 years?
References
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. (Original work published 1983)
Jasanoff, S., & Simmet, H. R. (2017). No funeral bells: Public reason in a ‘post-truth’ age. Social Studies of Science, 47(5), 751–770. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717731936
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.
1 Not least since Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” do we know about the productive potentials of typos (what the philosopher in me would call “serendipity”). In the review process, Stephen made me aware that I had originally mistakenly written “dive” here which, evidently, does not come without its own (dark gallows) humor: The “unmaking of the US” in this political divide perhaps becoming a nosedive… (this is also a long way to thank Stephen for his comments and reassurance when writing this piece).
Carsten Horn is a doctoral candidate at the STS Department. He investigates the residues of digital innovation societies as part of the INNORES research project. In his dissertation project, he studies the growing contestations of data centers in Austria, Ireland and France.