Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown

We know it in a manner that could never come under the transcendentally constituting conditions of a subject, but rather through the ceaselessly reconstituted conditions of an ungrounded historical process without a subject. That is: a process in which subjective determinations are displaced, refracted, dispersed, and reconstituted in a complex of determinations traversing technical, mathematical, and experimental protocols exceeding the synthesis of subjective faculties.

      Bachelard transforms Kant’s categories. By phenomenon Bachelard means: constituted by conditions of experimental observation (object of experience). By noumenon he means: formally determined by rational, mathematical extrapolation beyond conditions of possible experience (object of reason). Knowledge of the object of experience and the object of reason co-constitute one another, constrain and recursively refine one another, such that they become the same object (at once phenomenon and noumenon). But by knowledge of “noumenon” he does not mean absolute, direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Bachelard opens an epistemological field in which objects are known as both phenomenon and noumenon insofar as they are constituted as neither “for-us” nor “in-themselves.” This specifies the terrain of what I would call provisional objectivity. Scientific knowledge is “objective” for the same reason it is “provisional”: because it is constrained and enabled by fields of relational formalization and recursively refined experimentation, it is adequate to refutation and correction, and the process of its rectification is unlimited. That process defies subjective synthesis. Properties of an object are known scientifically insofar as it is constructed as an object of knowledge, but if this construction distinguishes the object of knowledge from the thing “in-itself,” it also distinguishes it from knowledge of the thing as it is “for-us.” Science renders objects of knowledge irreducible to either the in-itself or the for-us. Provisional objectivity suspends objects in the medium of construc tion, in a process of rational/empirical constitution that filters the givenness of subjective determination. It would be quite reductive to call this process “intersubjective,” since its transmission, assimilation, and recomposition depends not only upon relations between individual subjects but also upon technical apparatuses, inscriptions, necessary entailments of formal chains—upon the relaying of information irreducible to human observation, human thought, and human communication.¹⁵

      ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE

      Although Althusser deploys the term “rationalist empiricism” to characterize an epistemological tradition to which Bachelard was central, he does not often characterize his own epistemology in such terms. But we can read the dialectical transmutation of rationalist and empiricist epistemological values back into Althusser’s theory of science. Althusser’s distinction between “science” and “ideology” is more frequently dismissed than defended, but he makes clear in his “Lecture Course for Scientists” (1967) that there is no clean separation between the two.¹⁶ Rather, science requires a historical process of critique and clarification that perpetually intervenes in their relationship. Since science is always infiltrated by ideology, it requires forms of theoretical practice capable of subjecting ideology to critical interrogation. The criterion of “science” is the constitution of forms of knowledge capable of overcoming what Gaston Bachelard called “epistemological obstacles”—ideological impediments to such critique and clarification. A science is a form of knowledge that has arrived at mutually determining concepts and methods making possible a field of recursive, historical self-interrogation. The criteria of scientific knowledge are never fixed and can never be divorced from a practice in process; they are relative to the capacity of a conceptual and methodological field to subject itself to refutation, refinement, and generative conflict, which remains a ceaseless task. For Althusser, Marx’s critique of political economy founds a science because it elaborates a conceptual structure making systematically legible the ideological afflictions of a field of knowledge, thereby rendering its own elaboration open to a history of critique wherein the stakes of theoretical determinations and their application in practice can be recursively interrogated.

      In “On the Materialist Dialectic,” Althusser schematizes the process of recursive self-critique by which science is constituted and sustained through his theory of the three “Generalities” (see Figure 1). By the term “generality” Althusser means to stress that:

      Figure 1. Althusser’s Three Generalities. Generality II (present scientific theory) works [1] on Generality I (ideological or outdated scientific concepts) in order to generate [2] Generality III (knowledge: new concepts and conceptual relations). Generality III is integrated [3] into Generality II through revision of scientific theory, the production of new experimental apparatuses, the construction of new theoretical problems. Past elements of Generality II requiring revision in relation to present scientific theory become [4] elements of Generality I.

      science never works on an existence whose essence is pure immediacy and singularity (“sensations” or “individuals”). It always works on something “general,” even if this has the form of a “fact”…. It does not “work” on a purely objective “given,” that of pure and absolute “facts.” On the contrary, its particular labour consists of elaborating its own scientific facts through a critique of the ideological “facts” elaborated by an earlier ideological theoretical practice. To elaborate its own specific “facts” is simultaneously to elaborate its own “theory,” since a scientific fact—and not the self-styled pure phenomenon—can only be identified in the field of a theoretical practice.¹⁷

      These remarks offer a critique of vulgar empiricism—one that takes the objects of scientific practice to be pure phenomena that have not undergone a process of either ideological or theoretical transformation. Althusser emphasizes that science is continually involved with the discrepancy between theory, as constituted at present, and “facts” promulgated by ideological practices or devolving from earlier stages of science. The “raw material” upon which science works—which he names Generality I—is thus not pure phenomena but rather “ideological concepts” or “scientifically elaborated concepts which belong nevertheless to an earlier phase of science (an ex-Generality III).”¹⁸ Generality III denotes knowledge produced by such theoretical labor upon Generality I: new scientific concepts and conceptual relations. Generality II, which works upon Generality I to produce Generality III, is “the corpus of concepts whose more or less contradictory unity constitutes the ‘theory’ of the science at the (historical) moment under consideration, the ‘theory’ that defines the field in which all the problems of the science must necessarily be posed.”¹⁹ Note that the present state of scientific theory constitutes for Althusser both a field of knowledge and a field of problems: a problematic field through which new questions can be posed to old facts in order to generate new knowledge.²⁰

      Importantly, Althusser stresses that “scientific theory” (Generality II) “rarely exists in a science in the reflected form of a unified theoretical system.” Rather, it “includes the whole field of technique, in which the theoretical concepts are in large part invested” and “the explicitly theoretical part proper is very rarely unified in a non-contradictory form.”²¹ The present state of scientific “theory” is in fact a “theoretico-technical” complex capable of “pos[ing] an existing difficulty in the form of a problem.” We can thus locate in Althusser’s epistemological schema an uneven, complex, non-unified field of rational knowledge, experimental techniques, and technological apparatuses that works upon ossified “facts,” and we can say that what characterizes these ideological or outdated “facts” is that they have either become abstracted from or have yet to enter into the dialectic process of epistemological transmutation between reason and experience theorized by Bachelard. They must be addressed within the “theoretico-technical” field through which the present state of scientific theory (in all its tension between discrepant findings, regional theories, competing interpretations) works upon both pre-scientific intuitions and ossified formalisms, theories, or data to produce new concepts and empirical findings. The integration of this knowledge into scientific theory will then depend upon the capacity to coordinate