Between Facts and Narratives

We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down.  The word “reality” is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

—Niels Bohr

As long as we stick to things and words we can believe that we are speaking of what we see, that we see what we are speaking of, and that the two are linked.

—Gilles Deleuze

            In a recent interview with Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos objected to what he perceives as the “sloppy, ideological reporting” from left-wing journalists who champion progressive ideals.  Yiannopoulos went on to associate this kind of journalism with the “brazen untruths” and “major plagiarism scandals” that he claims also mostly come from the left, and summed up the reason for this association in a single comment: “They believe in narrative over facts.”

            This is the Gradgrind mentality, for fans of Charles Dickens: “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”  Anyone who spends enough time reading right-wing forums or chatrooms, blogs, tweets, etc. knows that those who subscribe to this general mentality proclaim their intellectual superiority through recourse to fact-based knowledge, rationality, logic, objectivity… a host of terms that have trickled down to non-experts, primarily through so-called pundits such as Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, and others: “These words are usually used interchangeably and without regard to their proper usage,” writes Aisling McCrea, “squished together in a vague Play-Doh ball of smug superiority, to be thrown wherever possible at their ‘emotional’ and ‘irrational’ enemies: feminists, Marxists, liberals, SJWs, and definitely the feminist Marxist liberal SJWs.”  The opposition here is between the rational right and the irrational left, almost always identified with the academic left (a homogenous suite, apparently—I’m sure Noam Chomsky would disagree), whom the right accuses of peddling not facts, but narratives: presumably false stories or expressions of social reality that lack the facts necessary for backing them up.

            Despite its centrality in contemporary political debates (if they can be called debates), this distinction between facts and narratives isn’t new.  In a very strong sense, it can be traced back to C.P. Snow’s influential 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures.  For Snow, intellectual society found itself, in the mid-twentieth century, divided into two camps: the sciences and the humanities.  A scientist himself, Snow accused those in the humanities—whom he referred to as “literary intellectuals”—of being largely ignorant of scientific matters, and of being unable to properly engage with scientific discourse.  Scientists, on the other hand, expressed admiration for (and, more importantly, an understanding of) the liberal arts.  Snow’s argument wasn’t that literature was less important than science, although some may read such sentiment into his lament; rather, he argued that there was a disparity in education between scholars in the sciences and those in the humanities: “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up,” he writes, “and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.”

            Objections aside, Snow’s position is not an explicitly antagonistic one (although it is, perhaps, a presumptuous one; informed dialogues between the arts and life sciences were in fact a central aspect of intellectual life at Cambridge University in the 1920s and ‘30s).  As Steven Meyer writes, “Snow himself came to regret the sharpness of the division, even proposing a third culture, sociological in nature, to bridge it.”  This proposal anticipated the rise of science studies, a primarily sociological perspective on scientific development that paid attention to how science approached, observed, and represented its findings.  A burst of publications in the philosophy and history of science followed Snow’s lecture, including Thomas Kuhn’s monumental The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975), and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979).  At this point, things begin to look murky, especially from the position of those who champion facts and rationality.  Their objection lies at the heart of much political disagreement today: how can facts be constructed?  For those in the humanities, this usually isn’t even a question.  The social construction of facts is simply a given.  And yet Latour and Woolgar themselves expressed some retrospective regret over their choice of subtitle, and even eventually removed the word “social” (not that this assuaged those who object to the construction of facts in any sense).

            Latour and Woolgar describe the construction of a fact as a difficult process to comprehend for the not-so-simple reason that it involves the decontextualization of the fact.  In other words, the fact loses “all historical reference.”  It becomes (or appears as) an abstract, valueless contingency of the universe, rendered effectively meaningless.  To examine how facts assume the appearance of objective, ahistorical entities, Latour and Woolgar focus on the existence of the thyrotropin-releasing factor, or TRF, demonstrating that its emergence as a fact depended not on its ahistorical existence (whatever the factor might be regardless of history) but on the subfields and disciplines that informed the approaches to the uncertain possibility of TRF—specifically, biochemistry and neuroendocrinology.  It’s beside the point that what we call TRF exists beyond human observation (that is, it’s there whether we observe it or not).  The point is that its existence can only be framed and expressed in the languages of particular discourses, or what Latour and Woolgar call the “literary inscription” of laboratory work.  In effect, what these sociologists of science did was unveil the narrative of a fact’s emergence.

            It’s no surprise that natural scientists don’t look kindly on this assessment of their work, and their resistance has proven detrimental to the sociological enterprise.  Looking back, Latour and Woolgar’s study is viewed as a seminal publication in the history of a particular brand of intellectual discourse that was awarded several names: most familiar are constructivism, relativism, and postmodernism.  The most naïve misunderstanding of the discourse that these names tend to stand in for is that they reject reality altogether, a position that is proven false by even a mildly close reading of Laboratory Life.  I doubt many committed scientists take this position.  Rather, theirs is a more nuanced objection, and appears to derive from the impression that if facts are socially constructed (or even just constructed) then they can’t be useful; but this isn’t what Latour and Woolgar claim either.  To the contrary, they readily admit the usefulness of scientific facts.  They merely object to their necessity.  Addressing Roger Guillemin’s decision to approach the existence of TRF via its hormonal structure, they write that “[b]ecause of the success of his strategy, there is a tendency to think of Guillemin’s decision as having been the only correct one to make. But the decision to reshape the field was not logically necessary.  Even if the decision to pursue the structure of TRF(H) had not been taken, a subfield of releasing factors would still exist.”  In other words, if Guillemin hadn’t approached TRF in the way he did, another possible approach could have been equally (if not more) successful in bringing its existence to light.

            It’s only in retrospect that such decisions appear necessary—that is, they couldn’t have happened any other way.  It is, and has been, one of the central concerns (I would venture to call it an imperative) of the humanities to reveal the inaccuracy of this notion.  To many intellectuals today, this point is usually viewed one of two ways: a) absolutely, things could have happened any number of ways—right on! and b) absolutely, things could have happened any number of ways—who cares?  To those in the second camp, the contingency imperative feels old, tired, dated.  It no longer tells us anything new.  And to an extent, they’re correct.  Within academia, the knowledge and understanding of historical circumstance and contingency is quite extensive, and objections to it often rest firmly on what might be called pragmatic grounds:  But things did happen this way, and so this is the way the world is.  For some in the humanities, this constitutes a dangerous position because it’s seen as enabling and naturalizing a hierarchical view of social organization, despite the fact that those who maintain this position fully admit historical contingency.  For others, this position is less dangerous than it is restrictive.  If we acquiesce too easily to the situation as is, then we risk missing out on the possibility of ameliorating circumstances (this might be seen as a less radical version of Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method, in which he promotes an “anything goes” approach to scientific practice).

            Yet for others, the “things happened this way” crowd simply reinforces the aspect of facticity that Latour and Woolgar find disturbing: the wiping away of history.  The push to ignore how things happened contains an implicit rhetorical move to treat historical circumstances as abstract, ahistorical things—cold, hard facts.  Thus, when this rhetoric trickles down into the corridors and forums of the internet, users latch onto the facticity of things without regard for their constitutive narratological basis: their constitution (or construction, if you like) through narrative.  Absent narrative, facts are meaningless.  Even worse, they’re entirely imperceptible in any impactful sense.  We have facts because we have narratives—not the other way around.  We treat gravity as a fact because we know what happens when someone falls from a high place; we treat the human respiratory system as a fact because we know what happens when someone tries to breathe underwater.  These are real occurrences, but they become facts because the occurrences mean something.  They serve a narrative purpose in our lives.

            Put another way, there’s no such thing as a fact that isn’t narratively inflected.  This isn’t to say that narratives can’t be damaging, or that the material basis of facts—the world we inhabit—somehow doesn’t exist.  There is a way to read the current political fetishism of facts as a reaction to perceived left-wing impressions that the lives and experiences of a significant portion of Western individuals aren’t real in any substantive sense.  The result is an instinctive attraction to the solidity of facts as affirmation of one’s livelihood.  Yet the difference between these two camps isn’t a belief in facts; rather, it’s what each side takes facts to be.  The facts-over-narratives camp takes facts to be autonomous.  Paul Feyerabend calls this the autonomy principle: the assertion “that the facts which belong to the empirical content of some theory are available whether or not one considers alternatives to this theory.”  Feyerabend’s critique of the autonomy principle is a variation on Latour and Woolgar’s idea of social construction; for Feyerabend, the theoretical underpinnings of facts make them potentially invisible when observed through alternative theoretical frameworks.

            Feyerabend’s anarchic approach (which he wouldn’t call a methodology) aims to diminish the unspoken mythic status of facts.  He argues that entertaining other methods—even seemingly absurd methods—can illuminate facts that would otherwise go unnoticed.  Although Feyerabend’s thesis may apply to some facts, it’s doubtful whether it applies to all of them; that is, some facts most certainly transcend the frontiers of theoretical discipline.  Perhaps a more compelling argument is to be found in Niels Bohr’s philosophy-physics, which call into question a host of assumptions involving our instrumental capacity to know the world around us, as articulated by Karen Barad:

·       A belief in representationalism (the independently determined existence of words and things)

·       The metaphysics of individualism (that the world is composed of individual entities with individually determined boundaries and properties)

·       And the intrinsic separability of knower and known (that measurements reveal the preexisting values of the properties of independently existing objects as separate from the measuring agencies)

The emphasis of these points, as Barad explains, is their challenge to the subsistence of facts.  Facts don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re shaped by the instruments, strategies, and theories that isolate them.  Returning to Latour and Woolgar, it isn’t necessary that a fact’s emergence be tied to the theoretical apparatus that identified it; but that doesn’t mean the fact remains the same regardless of the apparatus.  For example, the thing that Latour and Woolgar discuss as TRF was debated among scientists: what some deciphered as the thyrotropin-releasing factor others suggested should be called the thyrotropin-releasing hormone.  This disagreement reflects the varying methodologies by which scientists approached their object of study.

            In other words, what we take to be facts don’t necessarily mirror the world prior to our articulation of the world in terms of facts.  Facts only appear to us because they fit into a preconceived narrative.  Again, this doesn’t mean that entities in the world don’t exist or that facts, narratively conceived though they may be, aren’t useful.  The problem I’m focusing on here emerges when people try to separate narratives from facts, as though this itself is a categorical distinction in the world.  Facts only appear as such to those with a vested interest in making them independent of narratives—because this is how we absolve ourselves of prejudice.  If facts preexist our discovery of them, then they can’t be shaped theoretically; they’re simply a part of the world, out there for our observation.  But facts only come into being through our preconceptions.  They only manifest meaningfully against the backdrop of a theory.

            Two possible objections, by way of conclusion:

1.     Isn’t it possible to stumble upon a fact accidentally?

a.      Counterintuitive answer: No, because to discover a fact means that one must already be looking for it.  We can stumble upon anomalies—but anomalies aren’t facts, although they may eventually become facts.  Prior to sufficient theorization (or narrativization), anomalous aspects of the world are not facts, but gaps in knowledge.

2.     Aren’t you posing the entanglement of facts and narratives as a fact?

a.      Intuitive answer: Yes, but as a fact like all others—that is, a fact bound to a particular narrative approach.  And as I’ve already said, just because facts are narratively inflected or informed doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

Before I conclude, one final objection is worth pausing over: that even after sufficient theorization, certain facts may remain that don’t fit the theoretical framework.  Indeed, as Feyerabend contends, “no single theory ever agrees with all the known facts in its domain.”  The disharmony between theories and their facts may signal the inconsistency of the theory, but it may also signal the inconsistency of factual observation.  In either case, these contradictory facts exist, metaphorically speaking, as plot holes.  Even if they don’t fit nicely into the theory at hand, it’s because they don’t make narrative sense.  So the takeaway isn’t that contradictory facts reveal their theory-independent or preexistent nature, but merely that our abilities to observe the world will, inevitably, turn up inconsistencies.  After all, we’re only human.

            This short essay began politically before turning scientific; but these two realms aren’t unrelated, and the lessons of science have much to tell us about the assumptions we make in our social and political conversations.  It's often assumed that science is the bastion of hard facts and objectivity, that it unveils the being of the world.  But the more we attend to the writings of scientists themselves, the more we realize that science understands (or has come to understand) just how narratively structured our knowledge is.  To return to Yiannopolous’s comment, privileging facts over narratives or narratives over facts is a false dichotomy; those who privilege facts are privileging narratives, even if they don’t recognize it.  We have access to facts, we discover facts; but they’re not out there in the world, waiting for us.  We build facts between us and the world, as they accord to our narrative premises and the material entities that make up reality.  The world is out there, in other words—the universe is out there—but our knowledge of it only emerges through the stories that organize our lives.