“However, if we take ideology in some wider sense than merely ideas, such as the unawareness of the material (political, economic and technological) origins and/or conditions of our ideas, then it becomes a more plausible notion, but it can no longer be the Other of science, and we have left the space of structuralist epistemology.”
“This is what Bernard Stiegler is proposing under the name of “organology”, and he finds only fragmentary examples of it in intellectual history. His idea is that with the advent and dissemination of digital technologies we are at a point where the technical conditioning (here too in a wide sense, as he recards the invention and spread of alphabetic writing as one major form of technical conditioning) is being transformed in depth and so we may be able to become more aware of it, and if not control it, as this is not possible, at least inflect it in a favorable direction (as its influence is conditioning but not determining), and orient it towards a more curative and less toxic bifurcation.”
“Having taken this step outside structuralist epistemology the poststructuralists began to riff on the tension between the psychoanalytic and the structuralist strands. Structuralism was scientistic and tended to read Lacan from a rationalist perspectiver, but Lacan’s vision of misrecognition as a systemic feature led the poststructuralists to see that even science contained “ideological” features, hence the decomposition of the notion of ideology into sub-components, that are then conserved under other names, except for the treatment of ideology as the other of science.”
“But poststructuralist French theory balked at a barrier that in other countries Science and Technology Studies (STS) breached. Foucault did genealogies of human sciences, but did not touch the natural sciences (except biology). Lyotard briefly toyed with relativising the authority of the sciences but eventually just limited it to the cognitive domain, where he gave it unrivalled hegemony. Deleuze talked about “nomad” vs “sedentary” science, but this constituted a distinction at the level of its content (fluids vs solids) and its procedures (problematic vs theorematic) rather than involving a heuristic analysis of the processes of construction of scientific results.”
“Certain theoretical figures have emerged that are situated halfway between structuralism and post-structuralism. One could call them “demi-post-structuralists”. Badiou is a good example, with his scientism intact. Still stuck in the problematic of the conceptual space opened up by the Althusser-Lacan conjuncture, they privilege Lacan as an alternative way out of structuralism yet they try to “rationalise” their problematic by appeals to notions of scientificity based on methodological rigour.”
“The problem with the primacy of method is that it is not content neutral. A formal method has substantive claims about its domain coded into it. The opponents of “method” are not crazy spontaneity-addicted narcissists but people like Bohr and Einstein who claimed that explicit scientific method was a bottom up, post hoc clarification, not an a priori top-down imperative.”