I have been thinking a lot about the resonance between the current moment and this book
I am going to state this as clearly and as succinctly as possible. This is my thesis: the administration of Trump 2.0 is attempting to institute a new episteme, a new standard and idea of truth. This can be seen in the assaults on the funding and institution of higher education, on the cuts to funding scientific research through NIH and NSF, and in the undermining of vaccines and public health through RFK jr.'s management of Health and Human Services. All of these actions not only undermine the existing episteme, with its layers of expertise and legitimacy, but effectively enshrine a new one, a new practice of what constitutes truth and how it can be found and established.
A few questions follow from this claim. First, and most immediately, what do I mean by episteme? I am taking the term from Michel Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge. In that text Foucault writes
"By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; the lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices. The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period ; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities."
That is a lot, and I must admit that I am using the term somewhat loosely, must because I have not looked at the Archeology of Knowledge for some time. However, a few things are useful from Foucault's definition. First, he is quick to point out that an episteme is not a zeitgeist, a spirit of the time, located in a general world view, it is located in practices, in the practices and relations that determine what counts as knowledge. What practices define the current episteme? They can be boiled down to one singular maxim, "do your own research." This is often presented as an anti-elite, and democratic ideal. In an interview with Dr. Phil, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the following.
“I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research,” the health secretary said, in response to a question from a woman in the audience who asked how he would advise a new parent about vaccine safety. “You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”
As many people have pointed out, "doing your own research" without the any knowledge or ability to sort out or evaluate the information one is presented with often collapses on itself in the worst sort of confirmation bias. One ends up just finding out what one already knows. I would take this a step further and say that what this mantra enshrines as knowledge is precisely what Spinoza called the imagination. For Spinoza the imagination is a kind of inadequate knowledge, inadequate because it mixes together something about the thing under consideration, and something about the way it affects us. Inadequate knowledge involves an encounter between our body and another body, between us and something in the world, but it tells us little of either. What we get is a mix of our own desires, fears, and hopes and some qualities of the object, of what we encounter, but these appear jumbled, as our perceptions and projections shape and distort the object while the object only reveals part of who we are. It is from this perspective that we can grasp contemporary conspiracy theories which often begin from certain kind of empiricism, not the empiricism of experiments and labs, but of immediate everyday experience and desires. It is this experience, the experience of the world as one sees it, an experience that seems increasingly insignificant in the face of contemporary society, that conspiracies bestow with a new importance and dignity.
The limitations of doing one's research, the tendency to confirm existing fears and biases, become, in this view, its strengths. I was watching a clip of Trump talking about sharks because of my hurricane shark obsession, and there is a method to his madness.
The experts, "these people," as Trump puts it, insist that there is no problem with sharks, that most shark attacks stem from confusion, sharks mistaking people for sea lions and seals, and not "anger." That is, as far as I know, the existing consensus about shark attacks by people who actually study sharks. Sharks do not seek out people as prey, and thanks to drone images, we can see how often sharks swim near surfers without attacking. However, this view, that sharks do not pose a threat goes against what one feels or thinks, of course sharks attack people. There are clips on youtube. Do your own research means who do you trust more your own feelings and impressions or a bunch of weird eggheads who swim with sharks? The same point can be made with respect to vaccines. Vaccines have been tested and used again and again, and are largely safe, but being injected with a foreign substance just feels wrong, and that is what a vaccine skeptic is, someone who thinks their feelings about something count more than what is known and studied.
The new episteme shifts focus from experts to everyone. This is often presented as democracy, as the people against the elites. This brings us to a second question. What is wrong with this new episteme, one in which every does their own research and makes their own decision. First, at the level of an ideal or an imaginary, this overlooks the fundamental fact that it takes a lot of time and energy to learn about sharks or vaccines. This is why we live in a society, why nothing is more useful to man than man, as Spinoza put it, we need other people, people with different interests and talents, in order to live. I am glad that there is someone out their studying mRNA vaccines, it does not interest me and seems really hard to understand. (I am secretly jealous of people who get to study sharks though). Of course Spinoza's optimism and utilitarianism when it comes to the division of labor, material and intellectual, different people being useful because they do and know different things, needs to be undercut with Marx's understanding the division of intellectual labor. It is because there is a division of intellectual labor, that we are dependent on the knowledge (and the labor) of others, that it is possible for the ruling ideas to become the ideas of the ruling class. Specialization is the condition of both knowledge and domination.
It is tempting to posit a democracy of everyone doing their own research as an alternative to the actual history in which experts have gotten many things wrong, and have used their expertise to pursue all sorts of political and economic agendas. Vaccines may have saved millions of lives, but the pharmaceutical industry is, like any industry, in the money making business, not the life saving business. However, countering this division with a democracy of everyone doing their own research can only be a false democracy. To put it bluntly, do you own research is a little like sell your own labor power. It presents the powerlessness of isolation and alienation as the power of independence and autonomy. The more we do our own research the more we fall prey to those who are willing to exploit our biases, and even cultivate and create them. The fear of sharks that Trump invokes is less some primal fear of the unknown than it is the product of Jaws, over thirty years of shark week, and countless sharknados. Vaccines do not have the same pop culture driven anti-PR image, but, as Naomi Klein has argued, the anti-vaccine sentiment is fueled in part by experience of technology that is at best ambivalent, as each new device increases the possibilities for surveillance and control. We are less the country that put a man on the moon than the country that put a U2 album on everyone's iphone.
As much as Trump, Kennedy, and their cohorts make it sound as if they are trying to save us from the biases of elites and their agendas, they are actually turning us over to another system of elites that are all the more pernicious in that they present themselves as liberators. The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement as it is called, is not only destroying the remnants of public health in this country, it is also opening the door to all sorts of grifters who will be glad to sell us supplements and advice so that we "rely on our own immune system."In privatizing health to an individual matter and concern it is increasing the rule of private property over health and the role of health in generating wealth for private property.
This brings me to my last question since I invoked Foucault at the outset. For all of his writings about the connection between power and knowledge he surely did not mean by that connection anything as simple as a new president imposing, as if by fiat, a new episteme. That seems to be putting the head right back on the king. Is this really how a new episteme comes into being, through an election? This new episteme is less a transformation from above than it is the way that the powers from above are exploiting forms of knowledge, skepticism, and distrust that were already elements of society, hence the importance of conspiracy theories. Foucault and Spinoza agree that politics, the important politics that legitimate forms of knowledge, imagination, and desires, happen upstream of politicians and their decisions. The new episteme was already at work in the margins, on social media, in the tik-toks of various online influencers, and in the advertisements for supplements and other snake oils sold by various celebrities of the extended online alt-right universe; all of which now have cabinet positions.
Two lingering questions remain. First, I have not said enough about the role of LLM, or so called generative AI, in this new episteme. As the news of the recent MAHA report, suggest that AI offers the possibility of generating citations to confirm one's biases, to have the hallucinations that match one's imagination. Doing one's own research quickly slides into creating one's own archive of sources. This is happening at the same time as the outsourcing of basic skills of reading and writing threatens to undermine even the capacity to do research. It is clear to me that so called generative AI will play a fundamental role in both the destruction of the old episteme and the creation of the new one. With respect to the former Musk seems convinced that AI allows for the state to do away with pesky experts and skilled labor, automating it all, and with respect to the latter, I do not think that is the first fabricated report we will see in this administration.
Finally, there is the big question, why is this happening now. With respect to that question we need to look at multiple levels, there is of course Trump's own petty grievances and biases, they play a role, but as Foucault says, we need to move beyond the head of the king, and also see the structural conditions, economic and political, that lead to this moment. I do not think Covid can be discounted, on multiple levels, paradoxically, leading to an increase of anti-vaccine sentiment, and, more importantly, the summer of 2020 created as situation in which the bare remnants of public health that exist in this country appear to be threats to both corporate profits and political power. The ruling class has more or less decided "never again" after Covid, and by this they do not mean prevent another pandemic at all costs, but make sure that prevention measures, shut downs, vaccines, etc., do not lead to increased worker activism and political activity. That is another layer, but not enough.
Ultimately, and this is something that I can only put out now as a provocation, I think that the real reason we are seeing a fundamental restructuring of the existing episteme, and its institutions from the university to institutions of scientific research, is that knowledge is increasingly incompatible with capital. It is telling us that our society, one which focuses on the wealth of the few at the expense of everyone, is unsustainable, unbearable. That the planet, our social existence, and even our individual health cannot be sustained under capitalism. This is America. When knowledge gets in the way of profits, destroy knowledge.
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