Stylistic Sabotage and Thorstein Veblen's Scientific Irony

摘要

Thorstein Veblen based his political economy on a sociology of knowledge in which emergent consciousness produces an epistemological point of view. That point of view, born from socially shared habits of life and work, sets the boundaries for what comes to be called reality. It selects significant perceptions and structures them into positive fact. An institutional fabric weaves reality into its web of signification, and the information available to the reasoning and socialized mind depends upon this metaphysical web. Every human society produces such a semiotic architecture, but the edifice built upon the ground of the machine seems particularly unfit for human habitation. At the same time that he indicted capitalism, on another front Veblen radically questioned the semiotic and psychological structures imposed by mechanized, modern life. And, yet, in doing so, he seemed to cut the ground away from his own critique, since science itself depends upon the epistemological values inculcated by the machine. For the scientist, as for the "common man," "life is not offered on any other terms." Veblen compensated for this linguistic lack by holding to the terms of scientific discourse, but turning them back upon themselves; he used the scientific stance to critique the limitations imposed by the machine age's scientific point of view; and this critical negation took the form of a logical and stylistic irony. In this sense, by negating science and yet clinging to the tenacity of its norms, Veblen turned scientific ideology on its head and transformed its prbpositions into a kind of objective "negative mysticism." Still, Veblen did not reject science. He did not reject the machine age. But he called them into question. He examined their limits and the limitations they impose upon the architecture of human consciousness. And, in that questioning, he guided us toward an unspoken understanding of the tasks that must be undertaken if we are ever to move from the "machine age" to a new age, a "post-modern era," in which a socialized humanity might be finally unbound, if not unbounded.