Article Phitosophy ofthe Social Sciences 2022, Vol. (0) 1-29 The Return of the © The Author(s) 2022 Repressed: Subject, Ee arereerenrrcnreay eee Truth and Critique in SSAGE Times of Post-Truth Johan Séderberg' and Olle Bjurd” Abstract The surge of post-truth calls for a reassessment of psychoanalytic and ideology critique-approaches in the social sciences. Both traditions are dismissed by the principal antagonists in the post-truth debate, the “positivist” defenders of science and the “post-modern” critics of science. The antagonists share a predisposition towards anti-humanism, refusal to distinguish between the latent and the manifest, and adherence to descriptive methods. In order to substantiate these claims, the article investigates commonalities between B.F. Skinner and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The article concludes that the allegedly “pseudo-scientific” or “metaphysical” concepts of Subject and Truth, pivotal to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, need to be rehabilitated in response to the challenge of post-truth. Keywords post-truth, subject, critique, psychoanalysis, ideology, science wars Received 17 April 2021 "Theory of Science at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Géteborg Universitet, Sweden Independent researcher Corresponding Author: Johan Séderberg, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, Theory of Science, Géteborg University, 405 30, Box 200, Gothenburg, Sweden. Email: [email protected]2 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) Introduction: Post-Truth and the Demise of the Subject in Late Capitalism The contested nature of scientific truth claims have been demonstrated once more by the phenomenon known as “post-truth.” By that word is understood a surge of widespread skepticism about the consensus opinion of experts in a range of scientific fields, notably in the environmental and climate sciences. In the shadow of the public discussions about how the scientific community, news media, and educational institutions ought to respond to post-truth, a second-order debate is raging within the social sciences over who is to blame for having unleashed science skepticism among the public (Collins and Evans 2017; Fischer 2019; Neinimark et al. 2019). Post-truth has revived intellectual positions familiar from the original Science Wars of the mid-1990s. That old dispute is typically represented as a stand-off between natural scientists, who defended a “positivistic” idea of scientific realism, against scholars in cultural studies and science studies departments, who upheld “post-modern,” social- constructivist, and relativist tenets. Superimposed on top of the strife over the scientific method is another contestation over political values and ideological allegiances. In the opinion of one of the combatants, the Science Wars amounted to a "second front” in the Culture Wars (Ross 1996). Conservative opinion-makers embraced the natural scientists as the voice of reason in contradistinction to the post-modern and politically correct ideas of student activists and left-leaning social scientists. ‘What is noteworthy about the post-truth moment is that the tables have been tumed on the received view of what kind of epistemological convictions one can expect to find in the different ideological camps. Free market think tanks monger popular skepticism about regulatory science (Jacques et al. 2008), while environmental activists rally behind the banner of scientific realism. The science studies community has fallen into disarray from the realization that its relativist tenets are being endorsed by militants on the opposite ends of the political spectrum (Radin 2019; Sdderberg 2021). With this article, we engage in the ongoing reassessment of how scientific inquiry and political allegiances presuppose one another, although we enter the fray from a somewhat different angle. We contend that the convention of opposing “positivists” against “post- modernists” as the main antagonists (mirroring the antinomy between realismSéderberg and Bjuré 3 versus relativism) is misconstrued. It excludes from view a third contender in the Science Wars. Namely the entwined positions of psychoanalysis and ideology critique.’ Both of these intellectual traditions are summarily dis- missed by champions of scientific realism, as well as by constructivist critics of science. Hostility towards critique is a point of agreement between the two would-be antagonists in the Science Wars. This suggests to us that they have more in common than are typically assumed. As a representative of the positivist-cum-scientific realism outlook, we dwell on the radical behaviorist B.F. Skinner. He advocated a methodology for the study of human beings that was directly influenced by the original positivist, August Comte. As representatives of the post-modem, or, less derogatively put, post-structuralist, camp, we highlight Foucault and Derrida, to whom present-day, constructivist critics of science are heavily indebted. Although having little in common in terms of methodology and political allegiances, we argue that radical behaviourists and post-structuralists con- verge in their shared hostility towards psychoanalysis and ideology critique.” Others before us have observed that there are overlaps between radical behaviourism/positivism and post-structuralism. In a comparison between Skinner and Judith Butler, Carrie Hull (2003) foregrounds Quine’s analytical philosophy as a transmission belt between behaviourism and linguistic and ontological relativism. In the same vein, Mark Freeman and Charles Locurto ask why radical behaviourism and post-structuralism provoke such different responses and attract such different followships, considering that anti- humanism is at the core of both doctrines. The former is decried for de- basing human dignity, while the latter is lauded for challenging logo- and anthropocentrism (Freeman and Locurto 1994, 39). The anti-metaphysical worldview that radical behaviourism and post- structuralism espouses, which can be summarised in a “what-you-see-is-what- you-get”-mode! of the world, is on a collision course with the epistemology of psychoanalysis and ideology critique. The latter two traditions put emphasis on the subject, in the first case an individual-cognitive subject and in the second case a collective-political subject. Subject philosophies of all stripes testify to an 'With “ideology critique” we refer to the original school of critical theory as well as to its heirs in contemporary academia. In the secondary literature, it is conventional to describe critical theory as the marriage of Marx with Freud (Whitebook 2004). Conservatives concur with this assessment. They trace the genealogy of the “post- ‘modern lefi” to the irrational turn allegedly taken by members of the Frankfurt school when they incorporated psychoanalysis in the socialist canon (Hicks 2004, 1591) 7As suggested by Ian Parker: "Discourse analysis presents a challenge to mainstream psychology, but it risks either neglecting individual experience by employing a quasi- behaviourist notion of “blank Subjectivity’ or folding back into simple humanism through an appeal to ‘uncomplicated Subjectivity.” (1997, 479)4 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) earlier, modern edifice of Western thought, where critical and transfor- mative self-reflection was linked to a quest for Truth. Upon this promise hinges the possibility of doing critique. In the assessment of Fredric Jameson, psychoanalysis and ideology critique are twins in their anach- ronistic status within the historical processes he describes: "Only an old- fashioned communism and an old-fashioned psychoanalysis stood out upon the agrarian landscape like immense and ugly foreign bodies.” (Jameson 1991, 183-184). Following Jameson’s seminal work on postmodernism, we argue that the collapse of the analytical distinctions between the latent and the manifest (or, differently put, between substance and subject) to a single plane of existence should be understood against the backdrop of late capitalism. Scientific inquiry, having been fully subsumed under the logic of capital accumulation, is severed from the quest for individual and collective self-understanding, and, hence, individual and collective self- determination. In the absence of a collective-political subject, society umbs to cultural schizophrenia, just as schizophrenia is the diagnosis, given to individuals suffering from a fragmented apperception. In our reading of the present situation, post-truth is the latest exponent of the same old tendency in late capitalism to mechanize its own cognitive superstructure. We acknowledge that there have been many other proposals over the years on how to steer a middle path between scientific realism and science skep- ticism. The stratified picture of reality developed in the tradition of critical realism comes to mind (Bhaskar 1987). Another example is the ambition in social epistemology to describe the admixture of cognitive and contextual factors in scientific discovery (Fuller 2002). Contemporary heirs of critical theory within feminist science studies, notably standpoint epistemology (Harding 1998), describe the interconnectedness between science and politics in terms similar to ours, Our focus on psychoanalysis and ideology critique is motivated by the likelihood that insights from these two traditions will be marginalised in a post-truth debate waged between positivists and relativists. The knee-jerk reaction of science warriors to alarming rates of superstition among the public is to demarcate legitimate scientific inquiry from pseudoscience. Concepts such as “subject” and “truth” are first in line to be disqualified as speculative and metaphysical. As we will demonstrate in the article, those concepts fare no better in the hands of science studies scholars. The latter are responding to the challenge of post-truth by doubling down on their constructivist critique of scientific truth claims and expertice. Our contention is that the concepts of subject and truth, which are indispensable to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, offer a better starting point for responding to the post-truth condition.Séderberg and Bjuré 5 Reassessing the Science Wars in Light of the “Post- Truth” Debate “Science Wars” was the theme of a special issue in the journal Social Text, the same which ended up publishing the now (in-)famous paper by physicist Alan Sokal: ’Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ (1996). Immediately after the publi- cation, Sokal revealed the text to have been a hoax, perpetrated with the aim of showcasing the lack of argumentative rigour in the field of cultural studies and related, theoretical schools of thought. In the debate following the hoax, natural scientists lined up on one side and scholars in humanity departments on the opposite. Superimposed on top of the strife over the scientific method were political differences. In the editorial introducing the ill-fated special issue, the Science Wars was announced as a “second front” in the Culture Wars (Ross 1996). Ever since, conservative opinion makers have seized on the hoax as a confirmation of the vacuousness of left-wing identity politics and political correctness. It has allowed the political right to cast itselfas the defender of free speech, rational dialogue, and scientific inquiry (Hicks 2004; Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020, for a critique: Wilson and Kamola 2021). Concurrent with the showdown between the left and the right, however, the Science Wars reactivated the split between the old left and the new left (Lee 2007). Whereas supporters of the old left view science as an ally in the fight against superstition and material scarcity, social movement activists with roots in the new left often encounter scientific and medical expertise as obstacles to political progress. The causes championed by new social movements (1 nority rights, patient rights, etc.) go hand in hand with a critique of the epistemic authority of the expert. This critique resonates with the signatory, post-modem trait: The destabilisation of metanarratives about reason, ob- jectivity, and universality. The theoretical deconstruction of scientific truth claims draws support from historical lessons and/or self-reported experiences of marginalization and abuses committed in the name of those same meta- narratives (Homborg 2017, 96). In the crosshairs of this critique are not only the natural scientists, however, but equally so the political heirs of the En- lightenment, both liberals and socialists (Roze 2020; Turner 2003). Sokal, a self-declared old school leftist, assured his readers that it was not physics that he wanted to rescue from relativism, but the political left. In his, opinion, the left was being hoodwinked by a politically regressive, post- structuralist and social-constructivist, intellectual fashion (Sokal and Bricmont 1998, 210; Sokal and Bricmont 2001, 182). It is thinkable that Sokal and Bricmont’s case would have received a more favourable hearing among left-leaning activists and academics today, after the outburst of right- wing populism and corporate doubt-mongering (Neimark et al. 2019).6 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) With the surge of truthiness, fake news and the “gaslighting” of public opinion, the Science Wars-debate is back on the agenda. Unsurprisingly, many have responded to the challenge of post-truth by circling the wagons around scientific institutions and the authority of ex- perts. Calls are repeatedly made for stricter adherence to empirical methods in education, news reporting, social media, and university research (McIntyre 2018; Oreskes 2019). Taken individually, these proposals are not without merit. Taken as remedies against authoritarian populism and corporate-sponsored doubt-mongering, however, these proposals are po- litically shortsighted. The surge of fact checking schemes, truth-policing algorithms, and top-down, science education campaigns, signals the revival of unreformed scientism, often in more crude forms than anything advocated by the card-carrying members of logical positivism. With this knee-jerk reaction to post-truth, some usual suspects show up as threats to the integrity and authority of science: speculative thinking, ideology critique, and metaphysical language. The scenario that scientism will be revived in response to post-truth has alarmed scholars in the field of science studies (Jasanof and Simmet 2017; Marres 2018). Although the warming is well-founded, we suspect a self- serving agenda behind their protestations. Facing allegations of being cul- pable for post-truth, constructivist science scholars seize this opportunity to ask for a renewed mandate for their preferred theory choice (Séderberg 2021). As we will demonstrate in the following, their remedy for post-truth, i.e. to double down on the deconstruction of universalistic and overarching meta- narratives, dovetails with the anti-metaphysical tenor of those defenders of scientific realism who are advocating a stricter adherence to empiricist- observational methods. We contend that an adequate response to post-truth must draw on supposedly metaphysical, overarching and speculative con- cepts, such as, for instance, the concept of “capitalism”. The Empiricist Challenge to Psychoanalysis The hegemonic standing of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get-epistemology, or empiricism for short, can be gauged from the perceived “anachronism of psychoanalysis”, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s words once more. In fact, psychoanalysis was on the butt end of criticism since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. On moral or/and political grounds, psychoanalysis has been accused of being bourgeoisie (Bolsheviks), Jewish (Nazis), patriarchal and phallocentric (Derrida and feminists), and eurocentric and universalizing (post-colonialists and anthropologists). Closer to our concerns are objections pertaining to psychoanalysis’ violation of the correct scientific method. Karl Popper singled out psychoanalysis, along with Marxism, as a schoolbook example of the “reinforced dogmatism” that comes with the false pretenses ofSéderberg and Bjuré 7 being scientific. Psychoanalysis had forfeited this status because its pro- nouncements about the world could not be tested empirically (Popper 2002, 422), Variations on the Popperian thematic are recurrent in much of the critique against psychoanalysis, coming both from its academic cousins in psychology departments, and from rivaling psychotherapeutic schools in clinical practice. It is not by accident that psychoanalysis falls short of the criteria of empirical verifiability, as can be seen from Emst Gellner’s (1993) historical account of the rise of the field.’ Psychoanalysis emerged as a reaction to the two dominant themes of early modem philosophy, empiricism and materi- alism, The earliest and most consistent application of these doctrines to the human being is found in David Hume’s description of man as a “bundle of perception” (Gellner 1993, 11), The ascendancy of this outlook marked a turning point in the cultural self-understanding of the human being at the verge of early modemity (Gaukroger 2010). Gellner argues that within the Western tradition, going as far back as St Augustinus’ interpretation of the Scripture, man had been conceptualised as an essentially split creature, tom between sinfulness and love for God. The idea of the soul as a battleground for cosmic forces and conflicting passions found no room in the rationalised accounts of a species reduced to a bundle of perceptions. After Hume, the human being was investigated with the same observa- tional methods as were being deployed in the study of any other wordly object that present itself to our senses. Human behaviour was conceptualised in such a way that it could exhaustively be described with what the radical behav- iorists would later call “stimulus-responses.” The kind of explanations of human behaviour considered as valid was narrowed down. Lost was the biblical notion of the human being as a house divided against itself. In Geliner’s estimate, the poverty of the empiricist and materialist doctrines provoked a reaction in the form of a surge of public interest in Freud and Nietzsche. The commonplace allegation against psychoanalysis for being pseudo- scientific or even metaphysical can thus be contextualised with Gellner’s account of the biblical remnants in Freud’s, and, following him, Lacan’s, thinking. In a moder and secular form, psychoanalysis rediscovered the Augustinian idea of the human being as a house divided against itself, which had been lost in the empiricist and materialist dogmas of the preceding century. The fall of man, for instance, is analogous to the process known as “This “fall” or “death’ of psychoanalysis has been explained in many different ways, see for example (Firestone 2002) for a cultural diagnosis of the death of psychoanalysis. For a book-long treatment of the issue see Paris (2005).8 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) (symbolic) castration within psychoanalysis.’ According to this Freudo- Lacanian reading of the human being, the symptom is conceptualized as a clue to the inner logic of the patients’ psychological economy, especially that of their un- conscious, Lacan (2017, 440) explicitly treats the symptom as a signified, which comes about as a result of a metaphoric and/or metonymic effect of repressed signifiers. In this intellectual move, whereby something hidden is postulated to be lurking behind the manifested discourse or symptom of the analysand, psychoanalysis affirms its place in a philosophical tradition where essence is duly separated fom appearance, and where knowledge is acquired by going beyond or behind the surface level (Jameson 1991, 12; Ricoeur 2004, 138-146). Despite much diversity within psychoanalysis, this episte- mological wager remains one of the core tenets throughout the movement. It sets psychoanalysis apart fiom its many detractors, both in the positivist and in the post modemist camp. Saying this reaffirms the point we made in connection to Gellner above, is. that psychoanalysis contrasts to the single-level understanding of the in- dividual espoused in the empiricist tradition, It is from within the latter, philosophical outlook that psychoanalysis has been challenged by its rival twin at the university, psychology. Academic psychology took little notice of psychoanalysis until the late 1940s and 1950s, when “psychoanalysis was becoming so popular that it threatened to eclipse psychology” (Hornstein 1992, 258). The response from the academic dis- cipline was to test en masse the claims of psychoanalysis, drawing on its own standards of empirical validity; "Every conceivable psychoanalytic concept was put to the test, in hundreds of studies whose creativity was matched only by the uselessness of their findings” (ibid). As a result, the image of psy- choanalysis as a pseudoscience was firmly established in university departments. Other branches of clinical treatments have often responded to psycho- analysis in much the same way. In psychopharmacological treatment, for instance, the symptoms of the patient are categorized according to the DSM, whereafter the relevant medicine is prescribed. Likewise with Cognitive- Behavioural Therapy (CBT), one of the strongest trends in psychiatric treatments in recent years. Combining viewpoints developed in behavioral psychology with cognitive psychology, the therapy brackets any meaning- making process which the patient cannot (with some effort) consciously reconstruct, directing the intervention at the level of the patient’s cognitive and/or behavioral mechanisms instead (Larsson and Carlsson 2012, 82). On this mechanistic approach to symptom relief rests the bid of CBT to be a member of the family of the natural sciences (Hollon and DiGiuseppe 2011). Intriguingly, psychoanalysis is also criticized in a branch of clinical psychotherapy known as the narrative-relational approach. Instead of, as in the ‘Lacan himself makes this connection between the original sin and the Oedipus Complex (2006, 695).Séderberg and Bjuré 9 case of the aforementioned therapies, being grounded in the scientific method, the narrative-relational approach takes its cues from post-structuralist writ- ings. In the narrative-relational approach, the symptoms of a patient are assumed to emerge from an interactive, performative narrative, without pointing to any underlying condition.® Psychoanalysis is accused of: "function [ing] as a fixed interpretative system in the human sciences and an oppressive regime of truth in therapeutic practice.” (Parker 1997, 479). In spite of the many differences between these approaches to the treatment of psychological disorder, where some psychotherapeutic schools subscribe to a Popperian ideal of the scientific method and others adhere to French Theory, they converge in a rejection of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is accused of entertaining a dualist metaphysics of essence and appearance, surface and depth, etc. This dualism is expressed in the outdated notion that symptoms. give clues to an underlying, suppressed Truth, disfigured but in principle available to the analyst (Summers and Kaplan 2007). The anti-metaphysical thrust against notions such as essence,” “substance,” and, of particular importance to our inquiry, “subject,” is a key tune of the various opponents of psychoanalysis, whether they take their cues from Popper or from Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. To substantiate this claim, we will now proceed to discuss in more detail the two streams of anti-humanism. Anti-Humanism #1: French Theory Early 20th century father of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure provided a piece of the puzzle of what later became (post-)structuralism. He demon- strated that signs do not derive their meaning directly in relation to their referent in the external world. Signs could only do so through their syn- chronous relation to other signs. These signs are entirely arbitrary, and taken together as a language, they form a “system of pure values, determined by nothing else apart from the temporary state of its constituent elements” (Saussure 2013, 94). In the middle of the 20th century, this basic argument would be reiterated, repackaged and repurposed to fit all kinds of fields, from the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, to the intellectual history of Foucault, and to the psychoanalysis, of Lacan, As such, what might seem like a rather technical argument within a specific academic discipline (linguistics) became a pivotal idea for one of the most influential, intellectual movements in the 20th century. For the purposes of this article, we focus on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in the second Sometimes, this: “hermeneutic, postmodern view is contrasted with what is con- sidered an outmoded, positivist view that assumes a singular, correct reality” (authors? emphasis) (Wolitzky 2011, 83). The idea of psychoanalysis aligning itself with positivism will be implicitly criticized in this essaylo Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) half of the 60s, that is to say, their early period, from which emerged the later, (post-)strueturalist current. Anti-humanism was a constant theme in the works of both periods. Foucault consistently repudiated the notion that the world reveals itself in layers, He declared that he wanted to “dispense with things” as brute dumb and unconstructed matter (Foucault 2010, 47). This plays into the first wave of poststructuralists, who sought to reduce materiality to an effect of signifi- cation. A case in point is Butler, when she exclaimed that: “The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This significs produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover” (Butler 2011, 6). In latter-day iter- ations of post-structuralism, after the so-called "material turn,” the stress that was previously put on discourse has now been moved to materiality (Marres and Lezaun 2011) This volte-face has not, however, yielded any change in the underlying thought model. The tenet about the one-layerdness of the world is maintained with the same ardor as ever before.° What is thereby ruled out is the possibility of a dialectical interplay between different ontological layers. Following from the same repudiation of dialectics, differences in the world must now be imagined as extrinsically, and thus, heterogeneously, related to one another (Jameson 1991, 3434). We stress this point in order to forestall the expected objection to our argument, that Foucault, unlike Derrida, did not reduce the world to texts. In spite Foucault’s talk about “power” and “bodies,” he conceded no ground to the so-called 19th century models of depth and layers. Speaking of madness, for instance, Foucault insisted that we must never phantom anything laying behind or under the statement of the doctor or the psychiatrist. He urged his followers to: "make a structural analysis of discourses that would evade the fate of commentary by supposing no remainder, nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical appearance” (Foucault 2003, xvii). From this, Habermas (1987, 241) draws the conclusion that Foucault “give[s] up all hermeneutics, no matter how deeply it may penetrate below the surface of the text, He no longer seeks madness itself behind discourse about madness [...] A hermeneutics of unveiling always still connects a promise with its critique; a chastened archeology should be rid of that.” What Foucault said about the objective world, applied with equal force to the human subject. French anti-humanism of the 1960s was most succinctly put in the closing pages of The Order of Things; “If those arrangements were The proximity of constructionism and new materialism is foregrounded by Andreas Malm, a profiled critic of both tendencies: “If the former collapses nature into society, the latter does the reverse. As we have scen in the figure of Latour, the two are closer might first appear; indeed, they sometimes seem to be ensnarled branches g out of the same ideological trunk” (Malm 2020, 149)Séderberg and Bjuré " to disappear as they appeared [...] then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1994, 387). The arrangements referred to here are the contemporary episteme and the discourses which forms it, of which the human being is claimed to be an emergent effect. Just as Foucault furnished (post-)structuralism with its most famous anti- humanist proclamation, this school of thought owes its most iconic statement about the single-layerdness of the world to Jacques Derrida’s declaration, that; “There is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida 2016, 172). Hence: “reading, [...] cannot legitimately transgress toward something other than it, towards a referent” (ibid), and furthermore “there has never been anything but writing; there has never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only emerge in a chain of differential references” (ibid, 173). A widespread interpretation of this statement has it that everything existing can be reduced to language, or, in a variation thereof, that everything in the world functions in the exact same way as language does, as strings of differance deferring to each other. Many more writers joined hands with Foucault and Derrida in denying intentionality and transparency of meaning, Roland Barthe’s pronunciation of the death of the author comes to mind, However, due to the consistency of Derrida’s theoretical claims over time, he is the first staging-post for critics of postmodem theory anxious to diagnose the malaise of our times. (Ferry and Renaut 1985; Harvey 1990, 53-54; Jameson 1991). Derrida strived to get rid of the idea that a thing is identical to itself, which he claims to have been the privileged point of view in philosophy for mil- lennia, Nothing, neither an utterance nor a text, neither an object nor an event, has any meaning in-itself. Contained in this statement is not just the basic insight in the phenomenological tradition, which stresses that we are always- already dwelling in a world of meaning, and that we as such always encounter our surroundings within a certain horizon of interpretation. Neither does he merely restate Saussure’s idea, that the sign is determined through its relations toa structured totality of signs. The notion of such a structured totality must, according to Derrida, be abandoned as soon as we accept the proposition, that the chain of absent signifiers which determines the meaning of the text is forever deferring. The priority he assigns to absence in determining meaning is more radical than it was for his mentors, Saussure, Husserl, and Heidegger (Derrida 1984, 310). This argument serves to abolish the “transcendental signified” that ties a philosophical system and a meaningful universe together into a social whole. He lists some notions that have served this purpose historically: “essence, existence, substance, subject, aletheia, tran- scendentality, consciousness, God, man.” (Derrida 2001, 353). It is the mentioning of “subject” in the quote above that is of greatest interest in the context of our argument, Derrida insisted that meaning was determined through an utterance’s unsaturable relation to other signifiers, not12 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) through its relation to the speaker’s intention. He charged the logocentric view of traditional philosophy with the fallacy of taking speech as something directly connected to intention, while written text was seen as a derivative of this orientation. Derrida sought to overturn this dogma by showing that speech is in fact always already victim to internal difference, thus barring it from any original and pure relation to intentionality. Language and speech are some- thing external, slippery, and ultimately something which imposes itself on the subject, instead of being something which the subject imposes on its sur- roundings; "the subject is [..] inscribed in language, a function’ of language” (Derrida 1984, 15). Anti-Humanism #2: Radical Behaviorism On the opposite side of the Atlantic, at the same time as the French anti- humanists wrote their iconic works, B.F. Skinner developed a philosophy of radical behaviourism. Needless to say, he stood very far from Foucault and Derrida and their collaborators. The fact that his intellectual trajectory and temperament as a scholar greatly differed from those of the pioneers of French Theory, underlines what they had in common: The sustained polemic against humanism. Skinner announced; “Do I mean to say that Plato never discovered the mind? Or that Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Kant were preoccupied with incidental, often irrelevant by-products of human behavior? Or that the mental laws of physiological psychologists like Wundt, or the stream of con- sciousness of William James, or the mental apparatus of Sigmund Freud have no useful place in the understanding of human behavior? Yes, I do.” (cited in Freeman and Locurto 1994, 43.)" The error of this disparate band of thinkers consisted in that they had entertained the notion of an internal will or inner causes when accounting for human behaviour and human nature (Skinner 1965, 27). This was un- equivocally condemned by Skinner as speculative and unscientific. Skinner, following John B. Watson (and even earlier, Auguste Comte), wanted es- sentially to limit the study of human beings to observations and mild theo- rizing of their behaviour. There was to be no complicated metapsychological structures consisting of ego’s and superego’s, no transcendental subject, and no innate, cognitive structures. Although he concedes that there is in principle nothing impossible about an inner cause or inner explanation, the inner workings of a given system are so hard to observe that to try to build our understanding of the system on them is forbiddingly difficult and futile. A *This is the kind of behaviorist statement which Freud himself polemicized against as an “extreme branch of thought” which “believes it can found a psychology that ignores this basic fact [of consciousness}!” (Freud 2003, 262)Séderberg and Bjuré 13 subset of these inner causes are “psychic inner causes,” which are erroneously called upon by psychoanalysis (ibid, 29). ‘What the argument boils down to is that we must abandon these types of explanations in order for the study of the human being to be set on a steady, scientific ground. To explain his own project, he draws up a three-tiered causal chain explaining why a person, for example, takes to eating at a given moment; (1): Person X is foran extended amount of time not given much food to eat. This causes: (2): The person becomes hungry. This causes: (3): The person eats food in their vicinity. Now since Skinner argues that this is a causal chain, there is actually no need to linger at (2), since (1) will lead to (3) regardless of what we know of (2). (2) of course also, conveniently, being the one which we cannot observe directly. (1) and (3), on the other hand, are the ones that a scientific study of the human needs to dedicate itself to, and which it indeed can dedicate itself to, without regressing into mere speculation. The central line in Skinnerian and general behaviorist thought is that human behavior is largely the result of previous responses to previous be- haviour, or rather, classes of responses which are defined as “operants” (Skinner 1965, 65). The difference between the two being that a response is a specific particular event, but that particular can properly never be repeated again, seeing as an action is by definition a singular thing taking place in a certain spatio-temporal extension. A similar action performed at a different time and a different location could not, for Skinner, be the same action This suggests that instead of positing responses as the primary center for conditioning, itis the above mentioned operants, or class of behaviours, which are to be understood. Skinner uses the example of a pigeon raising its head to successfully receive food, the operant here not being the singular act of raising its head, but rather the measurement of the height to which the head must be raised. These operants can be strengthened by reinforcing certain classes of behaviour in certain situations. When we come to see the human being in this manner, Skinner holds that: “we are likely to drop the notion of responsibility altogether and with it the doctrine of free will as an inner causal agent” (ibid, 116). For Skinner, the self is merely a “device for representing a functionally unified system of responses” (Skinner ibid., 285) or “at best a repertoire of behavior imparted by an organized set of contingencies” (Skinner 1976, 113). In his predecessor Watson, we learn that “there are no ‘centrally initiated responses’; all transformation or change in an organism is a result of con- ditioning” (cited in Hull 2003, 520). There is nothing being-present tying together the knot of disparate operant behaviour, no substance, tran- scendentality or any of the other terms Derrida had tried to dissolve, instead it is merely an endless string of difference between behaviour and response from14 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) surroundings. Behavior in radical behaviorism is typically explained as something which “consists of sets or chains of linked habits” (Hunt 2009, 267). It strongly resonates with the endlessly deferring chain of signifiers championed by Derrida. While radical behaviorism has largely been aban- doned within academic psychology, we will go on to argue that parts of it was passed down to the field of science studies through Quine’s enduring influence. From Subject to Schizophrenia, the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism We will now argue that the anti-metaphysical and anti-humanist positions discussed in the sections above are inadequate for responding to the challenge of post-truth, because they themselves are symptoms of the same crisis in the production of scientific knowledge. This crisis is intrinsically connected to the historical moment that we, following Jameson, call “late capitalism”. In Geliner’s account, psychoanalysis won acclaim in the late 19th century in reaction to the levelling-down of the human being in the empiricist and materialist doctrines that had reigned supreme up until then. Moving forward in the timeline, Jameson links the demise of psychoanalysis to the ascendancy of postmodernity. Postmodernism peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, after which the term went out of fashion. Nowadays the word is mostly used by its adversaries for polemical purposes. From this it does not follow, however, that Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodemity as the cultural logic of late capitalism is outdated. The tendential developments in the capitalist relations of produc- tion, i.e, a consumer-driven accumulation process, predominance of finance capital over industrial capital, globalization of the value chains, ete., to which Jameson attributed this intellectual current, have only grown in importance. It is therefore unsurprising to find that variations on the core themes of post- modernity, anti-foundationalism and anti-humanism, etc. keep circulating and proliferating in academic discourse, albeit under different names, A case in point, to be discussed in more detail further down, is Actor-Network Theory and its many off-shoots in the field of science studies. Jameson borrowed his periodization of capitalism from the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, According to Mandel, late capitalism had come into existence in the aftermath of the Second World War. It roughly designates the same stretch of time as is elsewhere spoken of as “post-industrialism” or “post-fordism.” The characteristic trait of late capitalism is that the super- structure, i.e. the cultural and legal scaffoldings of the economic system, has been turned into a productive force in its own right (Mandel 1978). In Jameson’s reinterpretation, this translates into the moment when nature, both physical and human, has been fully incorporated under capital’s circuits, Of particular note is the subsumption of the human (un)consciousness underSéderberg and Bjuré Is processes of specialization, rationalization, and commodification (Jameson 1991, 96). Post-moder culture accommodates and confirms this loss of the transformative power that critique once possessed, In accordance with the historical approach of his endeavor, Jameson ac- knowledges that the conditions for psychoanalysis had themselves emerged in conjunction with an earlier wave of reification. The enchanted world of ancien régime had given way to the referential language of modernity and science, both of which were intimately linked to the ascendancy of capitalism. For a brief moment, reification provided a foothold for critical reflection upon the world and oneself. Introspective probing of the deeper impulses of the (un) consciousness was conditioned on a modernist and utopian sense that the world as a whole stood to be upended. Critique and self-transformation, whether of the psychoanalytical-therapeutical sort or the ideological-political sort, presupposed a conceptual model of depth and layerdness. Jameson (1991, 12) lists four such models: (1); The dialectical one between essence and appearance, ideology/false consciousness and science/true consciousness. (2); The Freudian one of latent and manifest. (3); The existential(ist) one of authenticity and inauthenticity. (4); The semiotic opposition between signifier and signified. Alas the referential language of the Moderns, in which the sign and the signified are related to one another without being identical, could not withhold the corrosive power of reification for long. As the logic of capital accumu- lation kept evolving, the sign and the signified were further disjointed. The force of reification, Jameson argues, usurped the sign itself, turning the subject into a sliding effect of signifiers, or simulacrum. Arguably, Foucault concurred with this diagnosis when he dismissed Marxism as an épistémé bounded to the nineteenth-century in much the same way as the fish is bounded to water. In comparison, one must assume, Foucault considered his own, protruded vantage point on society to be more in step with the times (Foucault 1994, 264). ‘The worldview espoused by Foucault and by his contemporaries lays down that the world and the Self are indistinguishably enmeshed in a sprawling, single-plane network. It is commonplace to associate flatness and networks with non-hierarchy and democratic sentiments. Jameson was more on the mark when he diagnosed postmodemity with a nod to Lacan’s definition of schizophrenia (Jameson 1991, 26). Schizophrenia in Lacanian terminology is one possible variation of psychosis, resulting from the failure of castration to occur. That is to say, the child is never properly separated from its mother- figure, and so the law of the father is not instantiated together with the transcendental signified. The chain of signifiers, instead of being assigned a16 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) place in a meaningful whole, fall apart in random noise, fragments and alterity (Jameson 1998, 5-7). The subject is given over to schizophrenia, Jameson asserted, once it had been denied the capacity of extending its protensions across the temporal manifold, and, subsequently, to organize its past and future into a coherent experience. The diagnosis was reaffirmed by Daniel Rodgers in a more recent study, where he described how formerly stable categories of social reality, including personhood, have been frag- mented into flows of market signals. Our time is marked by the absence of an encompassing frame of reference from which a collective “we” could project a common future. Which is to say, by the absence of a political subject (2011). Denunciation of the “subject” is a common denominator of French phi- losophy in the 1960s and 1970s, both of the structuralist and post-structuralist creed (Descombes 1980). With the term “subject” is understood a point of origin of free and creative acts in the world, and, directly following on from this, a seat of moral reflection and self-regulation. In order for us to make sense of the subtleties of subject philosophy, as well as the stakes involved in its dismissal, we must keep in mind the double-sidedness of the “subject”, It designates at one and the same time an individual psyche and a collective actor. The most illustrious, historical example of the latter is the Marxist idea that the working class makes up a privileged, historical subject. The demise of the subject, thus understood, was hailed by a generation of French intellectuals and activists as a liberation from the oppressive predominance of the French communist party (PCF) in the preceding decades (Christofferson 2004). Foucault’s entrenched polemic against subject philosophy had two targets, existentialism and Marxism, both of which converged in the towering figure of Sartre (Dosse 1997, 3-9). Although “subject philosophy” had been inaugu- rated by Descartes and was through-and-through a bourgeois style of thinking, Focuault declared that it had reached its apex in marxism (Foucualt 1966, 342) Perhaps a few eyebrows are raised over the prominent place that we a: to Lacan’s analysis of schizophrenia for developing our critique of post- modernism/post-structuralism. As is known, cybernetics left a deep imprint in Lacan’s theories (Dupuy 2009), and the subsequent generation of French (post-)structuralists were heavily indebted to him, We concur with Jameson’s judgement that Lacan occupied an odd place within the broader, intellectual trend: “The problem of reference has been singularly displaced and stig- matized in the hegemony of the various poststructuralist discourses which characterizes the current moment [...] only Lacan has shamelessly continued to talk about ‘the Real’” (Jameson 1991, 93-94). If language is a pure exterior, as post-structuralists contends, then the notion of “the talking cure” becomes completely spurious, while for Lacan it remains indispensable: “a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject” (our italics) (Lacan 2008, 27).Séderberg and Bjuré 17 Derrida and his followers — the ones whose philosophical act most re~ sembles this deferring schizophrenia ~ consider both Freud and Lacan to be firmly stuck in an older era of thought. For instance, the prominent Derrida- scholar Geoffrey Bennington argues in a book co-authored with Derrida, that: “All Freud’s concepts belong to the history of metaphysies, and therefore to logocentrism” (Bennington 1993, 135). Lacan fares no better, in that he: “[...] does not succeed in performing the breakthrough expected of linguistics and psychoanalysis” for "what he takes from Saussure remains massively dom- inated by a phonocentrism; his “full speech’ remains caught in a metaphysical determination of presence and truth” (ibid). To top it all off: "...] his way of privileging the signifier in the determination of meaning and the psychic simply inverts the metaphysical opposition, and moreover sets up a tran- scendental signifier (the phallus), which communicates straightforwardly with the most traditional phallocentrism” (ibid, 136). The utterance of the overloaded word “truth” in the above quote gives a hint of where the connection is between, on the one hand, the contested, scientific status of psychoanalysis, and, on the other hand, our previous observations on the Science Wars. Pivotal here is the stress placed in psy- choanalysis on the link between knowledge (scientific or otherwise) and self- knowledge. Psychoanalysis, in one authoritative account, is described as a process in which: “[...] we trace the symptoms back to the instinctual impulses which motivate them; we point out to the patient these instinctual motives, which are present in his symptoms and of which he has hitherto been un- aware” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 368). This was how Freud defined psychoanalysis: “The work by which we bring the repressed mental material into the patient’s consciousness has been called by us psycho-analysis” (Freud 1919, 159). The link between knowledge that will “set us free” has been severed by the instrumentalisation of knowledge production under late capitalism, Indeed, breaking this linkage inherited from the Enlightenment Age was the primary achievement of post- modernism, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s seminal report on knowl- edge (1979, 82-83). The same argument can be put in terms more palatable to science policy discourse. So-called “mode 1” knowledge production, by which is meant the ideal of the humboldtian university, was characterized by deductive reasoning framed by disciplinary taxonomies. The restructuring of the university system during the last half century to make it resemble knowledge production in the corporate sector has introduced something called “mode 2”. Henceforth, knowledge is being produced through socially dis- tributed processes of trial-and-error oriented towards problem-solving, and without any pretense for theoretical understanding (Gibbon et al. 1994). More critically inclined observers of the same trend have warned that “post- academic science” (Ziman 2000), “science-Mart” (Mirowski 2011) orIg Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) “academic capitalism” (Hackett 2014) undermines the very preconditions for producing valid and trustworthy knowledge. In other words, the deteriorating legitimacy of scientific institutions and scientific expertise, or post-truth for short, is endogenous to science in its present organizational form. From which we conclude that an analysis of the mechanization of the cognitive super- structure, to reconnect to Mandel’s and Jameson’s terminology, is indis- pensable for making sense of the ongoing legitimacy crisis of science. Champions of scientific realism, whether they pledge allegiance to a popularized version of Popper, to old-school positivism, or even, to pre- Kantian naive realism, are responding to post-truth by redoubling their efforts to demarcate scientific inquiry from less stringent forms of research. The revival of unreformed scientism has caused alarm among scholars in the field of science studies (Jasanof and Simmet 2017). Being the heirs of post- structuralism, however, constructivist science studies scholars are just as estranged from the idea that knowledge must be acquired through transfor- mative self-critique, as are present-day, born-again positivists. Differently put, anti-humanists of both stripes are equidistant to the ideal of knowledge ex- pressed in the ancient dictum: “know thyself.” Constructivist Science Studies, Where Anti-Humanists of All Stripes Convene It might provoke disbelief to hear that science studies, an academic field closely aligned with the constructivist camp in the Science Wars, share an elective affinity with the opposite camp in that same debate. A brief exposé of the disciplinary history of science studies substantiates our claim. The foundational texts of the field stem in equal measures from the post-positivism of Quine, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, all of whom had personal ties to the original members of the Vienna circle, and, the heirs of structuralist linguistics and structuralist anthropology, passed on and reformulated by Foucault and Derrida. This amalgam has been dubbed by one longstanding critic of the science studies field as “post-modern positivism” (Fuller 2006). Itis worth recalling that the first generation of structuralists (Saussure, Levi Strauss, Althusser, early Lacan, early Foucault) sought to place their chosen field of inquiry on a secure, scientific ground. A contemporary critic of structuralism, Henri Lefebvre, smelled the rat of scientism behind the structuralists’ veneration for theoretical rigor and their hostility towards the notion of the subject (Lefebvre 1975). In the estimation of a later-day critic: *[...] a positivist supersession of philosophy was in the air, and, in their different ways - Lacan as psychoanalyst, Foucault as historian of cultural formations, even Althusser as theoretician of theoretical practice [...] tended to present their work [...] as something other than philosophy in the traditional sense, as convergent - if not identical - with science” (Dews 2007, 3).Séderberg and Bjuré 19 Reversely, it has often been observed that logical positivism and its later- day off-springs contained the seeds from which a radical critique of scientism (or science fout court) could later be harvested. This point is compellingly made by Larry Laudan: “[...] the imminent self-destruction (via self-referential incoherence) of relativism represents the playing out of the end game of logical positivism.” (Laudan 1996, 5).* The relativist tenets of the post- positivists, here referring to Kuhn, Rorty and late Quine, are: “[...] indigenous to positivism itself.” (ibid, p.6). The naturalism of Quine lay in wait to be radicalised and tumed against science itself. Science studies evacuated modernity’s last remnant of transcendence by studying science scientifically, Hence, Finn Collin’s characterisation of sci- ence studies as “naturalized philosophy” is very apt (Collin 2011, 32-33). It inaugurated the turn away from contemplating over the innate structures of scientific theories. Science could be exhaustively explained, the pioneers of the field asserted, by collecting observational protocols over laboratory practices. The first step down this road from which all the subsequent moves have followed was taken by David Bloor (1976). He faulted the older tradition of sociology of knowledge, represented by Mannheim and Merton, for having voluntarily delimited sociological inquiry to the institutional and cultural contraptions of science, thereby leaving the core issue of scientific theories to the philosophers to muse over (for a critique, see Pels 2003). Bloor deplored the “teleology” and “metaphysics” of his predecessors, in place of which he prescribed strictly empirical methods and causal explanations of the truth claims put forward by science. The flavour of radical behaviourism in this research program has been pointed out before (Slezak 1991). In this context it is relevant to recall Bloor’s disciplinary background in experimental psychology. In fact, Bloor’s Strong Program went only halfway, because it relativised the truth claims of mathematics, logics and the hard sciences by postulating another transcendent signified, namely “society.” This last vestige of meta- physics was attacked by disciples of Bloor heeding the same empiricist creed. Itwas to this effect that Bruno Latour endorsed Margaret Thatcher’s statement that: "There is no such thing as society.” (Latour 2005, 5). The trademark sign “The indebtedness of ANT-approaches to Focuault is widely recognised by the “actors” as well as by commentators (Law 2008, Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 2011). Latour laments that the anglophone reception: "turned [Foucault] into the one who had ‘revealed’ power relations behind every innocuous activity” (Latour 2005, 86n), which, according to Latour, is a "total inversion” (ibid). Power is not behind anything, for Foucault, it is essentially something produced, and it does not exist outside of this, performative production. (ef. Foucault 1998, 94). Latour latches onto the destabilizing, consequences this view on power has for the possibility of doing ideology critique.20 Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), together with its innumerable garden varieties, is the flattening of humans and things (scallops, speed bumps...) to a single network (Dyson 2019). The methodological conjoint to this outlook is the stricture to only describe what meets the sociologist’s eyes (Savage 2009), Anti-humanism underpins both the worldview and the prescribed method of ANT and its many off-shoots. It follows from the Foucauldian claim, unconditionally endorsed by ANT scholars, that discourse and power produces, rather than represses, the subject. This in contradistinction to the common sense-way of thinking the subject as temporally and logically prior to discourse and power.* In a language reminiscent of Derrida, Latour argues that: "There is no extemal referent, Referents are always internal to the forces that use them as touchstones” (Latour 1993, 166). Latour takes issue with the language- reductionist interpretation of Derrida, stating that; "Languages neither dominate nor are dominated, neither exist nor do not exist” (ibid, 184). The signifier is displaced from the privileged position it held in Derridean theory, only so that the same analytical procedure can be rolled out to become a “theory about everything.” In Latour’s own words: “Everything that is said of the signifier is right, but it must also be said of every other kind of entelechy (ibid, 184). OF note is Graham Harman’s assessment of the “Derridean moment” in Bruno Latour’s thinking, which: "stems from their shared im- patience with Aristotle’s theory of substance. There cannot be some true reality of a flower or sun lying beneath their interactions with other elements of the world. Hence, any name for anything at all is democratically confined to this layer of interrelations” (Harman 2009, 24-25). The pioneers of French (post-)structuralism engaged in a philosophically versed polemic against metaphysical concepts such as “substance” and “subject”. The same arguments, minus the philosophical erudition of the first generation (i.e. in the simplified form of a Latourian “mutable mobile”) circulate widely in the science studies community today. A case in point are the many denouncements of so-called explicatory and overarching frame- works. Some recurrent examples of such frameworks are: “society.” “in- terest” and “capitalism” (Woolgar 1981). Support for the argument is sought in an endless row of case studies, from which the same lesson is invariably drawn: All explicatory frameworks and theoretical generalizations must yield to the contingency and multiplicity of empirical existence (Mol 2003). The post-modemist writers of the 1970s had Marxism in sight when they set out to deconstruct grand narratives. The accusation of “totalitarianism” was always near at hand in their polemic against totalizing concepts (Jameson 1991, 1998, 38). Marxism remained the principal target when Latour de- nounced the explicatory power of social theory (Noys 2010, 80-105; Séderberg 2017), although his younger disciples are dimly aware of this bogeyman of the past.Séderberg and Bjuré 21 ‘The sources of this hostility can be second-guessed from another dive into the disciplinary history of science studies. The separation between something manifest and something latent, constitutive of the critical endeavor, puts the critic in the privileged position of telling truths to others that they cannot access on their own. The psychoanalyst lay claim to the capacity of mapping regions of the patient’s unconsciousness that are not transparent to the patient, In the Marxist tradition, likewise, an epistemic authority is invested in the vanguard intellectual, who claims to know the objective class interests of the working class better than the workers do themselves. Indeed, the communist, party intellectual was bete noire of a whole generation of French student radicals, whose intellectual trajectory often passed through a brief period of Maoist populism (Karlsen and Villadsen 2015; Wolin 2012). When the former Maoists reintegrated into the university in the late 1970s, at the same time as science studies consolidated itself as an academic dis- cipline, the populist creed was transposed to the study of science and medicine. The scientific and/or medical expert was assigned the equivalent role as the communist party intellectual had played before. Foucault is the primary vector of this discursive transformation, The enduring influence of the Chinese culture revolution is detectable in his unqualified rejection of sci- entific and medical authorities in the name of laymen, madmen and patients (Séderberg 2021). This line of thinking found a receptive audience among social movement actors. The anti-psychiatry movement is a case in point. Foucault’s writings “became the intellectual springboards from which the theorists of deinstitutionalization of the late 1960s would launch themselves” (Shorter 1997, 274). The anti-establishment rhetoric often extended its grasp to psychoanalysis. Foucault saw Freud “as inheriting the power of the doctor, a power that was consolidated in the regimes of asylum life” (Bracken and ‘Thomas 2010, 224) The Maoists dreamed of replacing all forms of political representation with an immediate appeal to the “people” (patient, user, etc.). The conundrum of representation and the need for representatives could be abolished simply by flattening all knowledge claims to the same base level This is the origin of the so-called “symmetry principle” in science studies. It lays down that all knowledge claims should be treated as of equal merit. For a long time, this epistemic outlook was closely associated with democratic values and a critical stance towards the-powers-that-be. Post-truth has shaken up the epistemic and normative presuppositions that the science studies community inherited from Foucault and his contempo- raries. The surge of corporate-sponsored doubt mongering to undermine regulatory science calls attention to an old historical lesson about populism, Anti-establishment thetoric can easily be manipulated by elites for private gain and political influence (Lynch 2021). It demonstrates that we cannot so blissfully dispense with theoretical notions about repressed memory and false (class) consciousness. We acknowledge that those concepts are veryn Philosophy of the Social Sciences 0(0) problematic. Scientific and medical coteries are prone to misuse the epistemic authority that they hold over others, and the historical crimes committed in the name of the vanguard party are horrific. Nevertheless, we venture to say that the expert role of the psychoanalyst and the party intellectual (implying their “secular” equivalents in today’s scientific and medical establishments) was coupled with an idea of public duties towards the patient and the rank-and-file party member. This idea imposed some (although insufficient) constraints on the expert’s freedom to act. That is not much of a safeguard against power abuses, but at least it is more than can be said about the anti-establishment populist. Conclusion In the article, we have compared the critique against psychoanalysis by radical behaviorists and poststructuralists. From this comparison, we drew the conclusion that, in spite of the glaring differences between these two schools of thought, they converge in a monistic worldview and in a methodological prescription to study appearances only. It is from this shared vantagepoint that a proponent of radical behaviorism may concur with an adherent of post- structuralism that psychoanalysis is at fault for distinguishing between es- sence and appearance. Latour epitomises this outlook when he instructs his followers to be "...] as positivist, as relativist as possible [...]” (Latour 2005, 170), in order to "[...] keep the social domain completely flat.” (ibid, 171) (italics in the original). The significance of this rather esoteric dispute over theory choice is in- dicated in the following remark by Theodor Adomo: *[..] if there is such a thing as a criterion of what is philosophy and what isn’t, [...] this is the distinction between essence and appearance, a distinction that has been sustained in almost every philosophy - with the exception of positivist critique and certain invectives in Nietzsche (Adorno 2008, 100). That Adorno mentions “Nietzsche” next to “positivism” in the paragraph is very telling. Post-structuralism developed out of the French reception of Nietzsche. ‘Adorno was no less astute about the political ramifications of this outlook: “[.J this attempt to deny the distinction between appearance and essence is arch-ideology because it compels us that the phenomena are just as they appear.” (Adorno 2008, 102). Resignation over the transformative possibilities of critique, whether it be of the psychoanalytical or ideological-political kind, is the order of the day (Latour 2004). The sustained popularity for singe-layered, flattened-out worldviews, long after the word ”post-modenism” has gone out of fash- ion, is comprehensible in the light of Jameson’s diagnosis of the cultural logic of late capitalism. Reversely, models of depth, such as the inquiry into the human consciousness pioneered by psychoanalysis, are remnants of an earlierSéderberg and Bjuré 2B conjuncture within capitalism. To elaborate this point, we discussed Emst Gellner’s interpretation of the rise of psychoanalysis as a reaction to the predominance of a reductivist understanding of human beings in early mo- demity, which in his opinion was epitomized in Hume’s philosophy (1993, 12- 13), The corrosiveness of Humean empiricism was such, that the Scottish philosopher could not even be sure of his own continuation as a single, conscious being from one fleeting moment of chaotic sensory stimuli till the next (Hume 1960, 207). If this philosophical musing is transposed to a medical setting, it gives an accurate description of schizophrenia. It is the same regressive implications to human reason that makes empiricism alluring to the opponents of subject philosophy. The anti-metaphysical zeal may, if pride of place is given to the singular, observational facts, translate into an urge to demarcate scientific inquiry from contamination by speculative thinking, value judgments, and ideological dogmas. Altematively, if the stress is instead put on the impossibility of generalizing from the individual facts, then the charge against metaphysics will translate into skepticism, relativism, and anti- foundationalism. We find empiricists on both sides of the frontline that runs through the Science Wars, past and present. The real cleavage does not separate positivist defenders of scientific realism from constructivist critics of science. The dividing line runs between these two camps, on the one hand, and Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist ideology critique, on the other hand, The “metaphysical” concepts of Truth and Subject, as developed in the intellectual traditions of high modernity, provides a foothold for articulating a political and epistemological informed response to the challenge of post-truth. 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Ziman, J. 2000, Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ise: Postmodern Intel- Author Biographies Johan Séderberg is an associate professor in Theory of Science at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Géteborg University. Séderberg’s empirical research is about sites of non-authorised knowledge production, ranging from hackers to users of illicit drugs. The- oretically, he is interested in the interdependency between ideology andSéderberg and Bjuré 29 science. In 2022, he published Resistance to the Current: Dialectics of Hacking (MIT Press) with his co-author Maxigas. Olle Bjuré is an independent researcher specializing in Philosophy and Theory of Science. His main research interests move between 20th century philosophy, social and political theory, psychoanalysis, as well as work pertaining to the intersections of these fields.