10 - On Symbols, Propositions and Idiocies: Towards a Slow Technoscience

Summary

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur: – like unto an arrow in the hand of a child.

(Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect)

Alfred North Whitehead's Barbour-Page lectures, published as Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), are often overshadowed by his much more substantial Gifford lectures (1927–8), published as Process and Reality. This should come as no surprise, given that Symbolism offers a less thorough treatment of the topic than Process and Reality. For this reason, Symbolism has been largely forgotten. What is often overlooked, however, is that Symbolism contains one of the few clear instances where Whitehead speaks about symbolism's importance for the maintenance and destruction of ‘political societies’. For example, he talks about the significance of symbolism in the English revolutions in the seventeenth century and the American Revolution in the eighteenth century (S 77–8). He also underscores the importance of balancing novel revisions of and reverence for the symbolic codes of a political society; without this, the society will decay ‘from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows’ (S 88).

This chapter takes seriously the idea that Whitehead's work on symbolism in the Barbour-Page lectures, and elsewhere, is still relevant for understanding the political-economic conditions of our twenty-first-century epoch. To do so, I draw on a set of contemporary practices whose use of symbolism eclipses new patterns of value: today's technoscientific industry. I contend that Whitehead's work on symbolism elucidates how technoscientific production has been captured by a system of political and economic meanings (neoliberalism) which tends to disqualify modes of resistance. I draw heavily on Isabelle Stengers’ recent plea for a ‘slow science’ in the face of fast and competitive technoscience in order to expose how it is that we are in dire need of new forms of symbolism in today's scientific knowledge economy. Along the way I consider how Whitehead's notion of the ‘proposition’ in Process and Reality makes a key intervention in this discussion and reinforces the importance of symbolism in the culture of twenty-first-century technoscience.