Beyond the subject–object binary: Towards cosmopolitan knowledge

Beyond “West is best”

Key to the epistemological imperialism of Western social science is the assumption that its methods of observation, experimentation, and quantification that separate and distance subject (observer) from object (observed) guarantee its objectivity. While implying its own universal validity, this “objective” social science contrasts itself with folk forms of knowledge that are only “true” for, thus implying no validity beyond, the “folk.” The subject position of social science implies a hierarchy of knowledge that places itself “above” and folk knowledge “below.” By privileging its own subject position, Western social science facilitates its epistemic imperialism defined as a mode of dominating, silencing, and appropriating “othered” forms of knowledge.

If there is no subject in (social) science, then self-checking for culturally based epistemological constraints does not even arise as a matter for consideration. Further, if folk systems of thought have no truth beyond the self-referential subjectivity of the folk, then they cannot legitimately critique scientific knowledge. Thus, while the agents of Western knowledge have free rein to judge “others,” no legitimate reciprocity for the others applies. In other words, the Western social scientist is free to criticize and dismiss, and thereby silence, other forms of knowledge that have no “right of reply.” They may be able to “speak” and “be heard” once having been passed through the lens of Western knowledge, but only in the voice of Western appropriation.

For example, first, only since psychological science has taken “mindfulness” for observation and experimentation has it been accorded scientific validity. Concomitantly, largely unacknowledged by Western appropriators is the historical fact that “mindfulness” is actually the concept of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, and it has been central to Buddhist theory and practice for thousands of years, up to and including the present. This is epistemological appropriation by plagiarism. For example, second, while touting itself as enlightenment, this unchecked Western “science” was free to construct a racialized hierarchy of intelligence that rationalized and legitimated the brutal enslavement of African peoples. Further, the discourse and practice of this “primitive accumulation” period of Western capitalism’s ascendancy lives on in racist discourse and practice to this day. Of course, the imperialistic role of Western social science is just a recent version of the intellectual game, which runs through human history, of claiming superior enlightenment as a rationalization of self-interested brutality.

By disabling recognition of the value of other epistemologies while immunizing itself from critique either from within or without, Western social science limits the possibility of a global logic of knowledge advancement. In contrast, the critical alternative introduced here facilitates the constructive articulation of different forms of knowledge, which thereby can enrich each other while simultaneously facilitating a cosmopolitan knowledge greater than any one of them.

Illustrative here is a key difference between the epistemological subject positions of Western social science and Eastern Buddhist dharma regarding distance between the subject and object of knowledge. While Gautama treats self-knowledge as true, Western social science dismisses it as merely anecdotal. For Gautama, the self-knowledge of enlightened mindfulness that removes all distance between the observer and the observed constitutes an unmediated first-hand subjectivity–objectivity synthesis, while observational-based knowledge has only a mediated second-hand validity (e.g., see Batchelor, 2012). In contrast, Western social science treats self-knowledge as being without objective merit. It is unsubstantiated anecdote that reflects the prejudices and biases of ordinary individual people. In other words, while Western scientific epistemology treats the subject’s distance from its object of observation as a necessary premise of objective knowledge, the Buddhist epistemology treats it as an inferior second-hand form of knowledge. Actually, both epistemological subject positions have strengths and limits.

In summary, Western social science’s privileging of its own epistemological position facilitates appropriation of other knowledge. Simultaneously, its immunization from external critique by, and constructive interaction with, other forms of knowledge undermines the development of what I call here “cosmopolitan knowledge” that is also central for achieving universal human solidarity.

Gramsci’s intellectuals

Antonio Gramsci (1971) famously notes that though “everyone is an intellectual” (p. 9), there are specialized locations in the class structure occupationally reserved for intellectual laboring. Nonetheless, he argues not for a hierarchy of knowledge forms but rather for a recognition of the strengths and limitations of differently located forms of knowledge.

While occupationally designated intellectuals have time and tools for observing and explaining social processes, their knowledge is constrained by their own lack of relevant individual experience. Put differently, they are constrained by their own “subject location” (see next section) that limits their capacity to really understand the experience of people who occupy other subject locations. In contrast, and resonating with Gautama, Gramsci argues that only the worker really feels and thus knows her exploitation. Nonetheless, the workers’ experiential self-knowledge is constrained in its potential epistemological development, partly because workers do not have the resources of occupationally designated intellectuals. In the mature (and in contrast to the young) Marx’s (1976) analysis, exploitation can only be revealed by intellectual labor because it is a hidden reality running counter to everyday experience. In short, experiential knowledge does not simply translate into theoretical or explanatory knowledge because of the limited scope and resources of everyday life.

Compounding the problem of everyday experiential knowledge is the subaltern classes’ subordination to hegemonic ideology. Capital’s intellectuals transmit the capitalist worldview into the everyday world, thus becoming what Gramsci (1971) describes as self-evident “common sense.” Thus is generated a contradictorily paralyzing consciousness that feeds the subaltern class’s compliant acceptance of its felt experience of exploitation (p. 333). In contrast to this paralyzing contradictory articulation, Gramsci envisions a complementary articulation of experiential and theoretical knowledge across multiple subaltern social groups and their organic intellectuals as the path towards solidaristic knowledge and solidaristic human society. Thus, in effect, Gramsci demonstrates implicitly how various “subject positions” can articulate with a given class “subject location” (see Neilson, 2015).

Introducing an alternative approach

Premised on breaking down social science’s bifurcation of the subject–object relation that privileges itself by claiming a superior access to reality, this commentary’s alternative position considers how different “subject locations” and “subject positions” can be drawn together in a constructive articulation that can facilitate solidarity.

Here, “subject location” refers to variations in the subject’s objective location within existing cultural, social, and intellectual relations, while “subject position,” here, refers to the subject’s explicit paradigm. Subject location differentiates knowledge contexts that set limited parameters for subject positions. However, no single or necessary subject position can be imputed from subject location; and paradigmatic advances can sometimes facilitate epistemological transformations of existing subject positions.

In sum, all forms of knowledge have subject positions “underdetermined” by subject location that are both enlightening yet variously limited. The constructive interaction of different forms of knowledge can facilitate their mutual advancement. Such dialogic interaction is also the path towards cosmopolitan knowledge, which, in turn, is integral to achieving a world practically governed by the principle of social solidarity.

Class and intersectionality

The target article counters the “anti-objectivists” in Psychology who encourage incorporating folk knowledge into science by demonstrating that folk knowledge can be a key source of racism and that, actually, social science can usefully facilitate antiracist outcomes. Held (2020) thus argues for a progressive social science that can objectively expose racist attitudes about, and their oppressive consequences for, the “other.” Following contemporary orthodoxy, Held’s (2020) last paragraph claims that this argument about “race” applies equally to class, gender, and sexuality. By inference, a progressive social science is one that can “objectively” expose the subjective falsity of, and social inequality caused by believing in, a social hierarchy based on “race” and by extension including gender/sexuality and class. This is the subject position of intersectionality theory that is based in Weberian social stratification theory.

Weberian-based approaches treat class, race, and gender, similarly, as the status dimensions of a unilateral power hierarchy. They do not see that the everyday experience of “class effects” (Neilson, 2018) are not generated by subjectivity principle of status, but rather arise from objective capitalist social relations of production. In general, Weberians are blind to the class logic terrain of capitalism on which race and gender divisions play out (Neilson, 2018). Their strength, and inversely a Marxist deficit, is their concern with the processes centrally including raced and gendered power relations that systematically allocate people to different places in the social structure.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels (1969) avoid dealing both with allocation themes and race and gender distinctions by arguing that they will become irrelevant because the logic of capitalism will generate a situation where the “immense majority” will be reduced to the same industrial “wage slave” situation. However, Marx’s mature thought together with neo-Marxist theories of “uneven development,” raise serious problems with the Manifesto’s “grand homogeneity” thesis. The logic of capitalism actually gives rise to a complex heterogeneity of “class effects” (Neilson, 2015, 2018). Therefore, though operating on the terrain of capitalism, systematically gendered and raced class allocation processes, linked with underlying cultural power structures, reflect and reinforce various forms of cultural segmentation.

Constructive articulation of neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist approaches offers a potential way forward. Like Weber’s status approach to stratification theory, “subject location” refers to a contingent set of defining dimensions and is methodologically individualist. Class location identifies only one dimension of subject location. It (subject location) brings in nonclass factors such as culture/race and gender that, with class location, define an individual’s, or intersecting group of individuals’, situation. The multiple dimensions of subject locations that underpin subject positions point towards the likelihood that individual and collective subjects, including the bearers of intellectual knowledge, may hold contradictory positions.

Intersectionality theory, on the one hand, claims the importance of subject location for subject position. That is, in a kind of subaltern reversal of the “right to speak” discourse of Western social science, intersectionality theory privileges the subaltern holders of organic knowledge (i.e., only those who experience it know it). However, it also bases itself in Weberian social science that, like Western social science generally, privileges the subject position of the distanced observer. This paper’s position, alternatively, argues that there is no single epistemologically privileged subject position, and that articulating different subject positions offers a way forward.

Marxism has its own debate that relates to contradictory subject positions. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács (1971) tries to resolve the problem by aligning the proletariat’s subject position with Marx’s theory of capitalism. In other words, Lukács “imputes” the socialist subject position, that is, the view the proletariat would have if it objectively understood capitalism from its class subject location, concluding that the proletariat can become the first “subject–object” of history (Lukács, 1971). However, to come to this conclusion, Lukács has to adopt a variation of the young Marx’s “grand homogeneity” thesis. Further, he has to equate Marx’s perspective with an objective account of capitalism that simultaneously expresses the proletariat’s enlightened subject position, but that at the same time dismisses actual forms of proletarian consciousness. Gramsci’s (1971) position as outlined above offers a way forward that, in contrast to Lukács, recognizes the fundamental importance of experiential knowledge and the need to construct from this basis a complementary articulation with theoretical knowledge.

By way of conclusion: A note on emancipatory projects

The limits of Held’s (2020) implicit emancipatory project align with the Weberian limits of intersectionality theory. Social science’s fostering of antiracist attitudes can help to challenge the objective effects of the subjective hierarchy. However, the “equality” that arises from eliminating the subjectivity base of a racist status hierarchy is only, though importantly, about the allocation process. From a neo-Marxist subject position, the problem is that an equality of opportunity does not address capitalism’s structural reality that divides people between profit makers and wealth producers who are stratified by a highly segmented labor market.

Marx’s “grand homogeneity” thesis is deeply flawed. Solidarity and a project of social change require articulating social, cultural, and intellectual heterogeneity. Further, beyond the Marxist vision of socialism that remains fundamentally Western centric, a progressive counter-hegemonic project envisions constructive articulations of different forms of knowledge as central to a globally cooperative “model of development” that can contain a variety of locally viable and ecologically sustainable “accumulation regimes” (Neilson, in press-a, in press-b).