Can a machine think? Can a machine desire? It’s typical to look for the positive answer to such questions in the fantasies about what the machine would think about, or what would it want to do. Those fantasies, as applied to the psychoanalytic concept of desire, lead us nowhere in understanding the machine, as any… Read More »
It is typical for any modern ideology to turn to scientific discourse as a way to self-naturalize. The science writers, the least conscious abusers of science, typically try to connect it to ‘common sense’ in the most exegetical, uncritical manner; science in their works never acts, and is instead quoted. In doing so they, however, make visible the power of scientific discourse itself, as only in this type of discourse – and never in the consciously ideological writings nor in the science papers themselves – we can hear science speaking, that it says this and that. Science is thus constructed as a subject, and this allows for a new space of critique – not the critique of the relation of its utterances to the truth, but rather the critique of its subjective structure, and most importantly of the narcissistic image that this science-subject has of itself. As is the deal with such images, what science communication can thus reveal is that science is actually much more complex, interesting, ambiguous and free than the way it sees itself, at the painful cost of losing the faux-stoical image to which it holds on fearfully as its only claim to truth.