At the end of Chapter 16 of her Delusions of Gender (New York: Norton, 2010), the concluding chapter of the section on "neurosexism," Cordelia Fine discusses the way speculative claims about biological explanations of gendered behavioral differences always end up being refuted (and sometimes even retracted!) -- though of course with the bold claim making headlines, while the refutations that follow a few months later are buried on p. 14, below the fold. She then writes on p. 186:
But before this {the refutation] happens, speculation becomes elevated to the status of fact, especially in the hands of some popular writers. Once in the public domain these supposed facts about male and female brains become part of the culture, often lingering on well past their best-by dates. Here, they reinforce and legitimate the gender stereotypes that interact with our mind, helping to create the very gender inequalities that the neuroscientific claims seek to explain.
It's important not to confuse this historical realism with Foucault's celebrated genealogical analysis of the constitution of the objects of the human sciences, to which he compares his analysis of the constitution of the objects of the liberal and neoliberal power-knowledge dispositifs and their regimes of truth (e.g., various forms of homo economicus). I qualify the ontological status of these objects as "interactively realist" in the sense that they are not dependent on a human subject or intersubjective community, but are, in Foucault's terms, "marked out in reality" as a result of the dispositif of practices that constitute them (NB 21-22F / 19E). "Interactive realism" is basically the same as what Ian Hacking calls, in an update to his important essay "Making Up People," the "looping effect" of a "dynamic nominalism." [5] That is to say, the interaction of the constituting practices and the constituted objects is extended in time and is structured by feedback loops, so that the expectation of an action increases the probability of that action. We also know this phenomenon by two other terms: "self-fulfilling prophecy" and "methodology becomes metaphysics," as when a policy based on an assumption creates the conditions that produce behavior conforming to that assumption. [6]
NOTES:
[5] Ian Hacking, "Making Up People," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. by Weller, Sosna, and Wellberry, Stanford University Press, 1986. The updated version to which I refer was published in the London Review of Books 28.16 (17 August 2006); only this version contains the phrase "looping effect."
[6] For an article examining just such a looping effect in contemporary practices based on the assumptions of Rational Choice Theory producing the neoliberal homo economicus, see Elinor Ostrom, "Policies that Crowd out Reciprocity and Collective Action." In Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005: 253-275
Recent Comments