Review Article
Review Article | Science’s Stories and Other Possible Grammars:
Dear Science and Other Stories, by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2021)
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bold Type Books, 2021),
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (New York University Press, 2020)
Rutgers University
silvjake@gmail.com
Science is simultaneously splendid and suspect. It is the very stuff through which we understand the universe and our places in it, and yet it has become a tool of racist empires throughout history. It provides wonderous stories about evolutionary transformation, and yet select scientists have co-opted such stories to elevate themselves and their own racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered identities over others. Science can tell multiple stories at once: it can reveal information about human and natural history, and it can also be employed to explain why one group is more “human,” more “cultured,” or more “civilized” than another. “An analytical conundrum is thus posed” for the three books at hand that try to balance an analysis of science, that which has dehumanized Black populations for centuries, with an analysis of Black humanity: “How might we think about the social construction of race in terms that notice how the condition of being black is knotted to scientific racism but not wholly defined by it?” (McKittrick 2021, 135).
These three texts weigh and wonder about science's dual qualities: it is an awe-inspiring prospect that, unfortunately, has become an antiblack tool. Dear Science presents Katherine McKittrick’s attempt to put her equivocal relationship with science into words, to try and work out how scientific logics anticipate Black death while also considering how science might possibly escape this racist mooring because, as she writes, science “is restless and uncomfortably situated and multifarious rather than definitive and downward-pressing” (2021, 3). The Disordered Cosmos is a similarly personal struggle to explain the physical magic of the universe alongside the deeply disturbing ways that physics as a field embodies and perpetuates racist, classist, and sexist worldviews. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein elaborates her experiences as the first Black woman to receive a doctorate in cosmology theory, showing the reader how physics is complicit in colonial, imperial, and racist systems, yet how it might become ripped from them, how it does not depend on the forms of supremacy that live through it. Becoming Human recasts the very origins of science, contending that racist ideology informed the theoretical incarnation of the cell, the organism, and the species as scientific concepts, even though the temporality of scientific racism usually appears in the reverse (that racist logics colonized science). Because Black voices have been absent for centuries in the production of regnant knowledge systems, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2020, 35) looks toward “black arts and letters” as critical sites where Black individuals and communities have enacted epistemological theories, ones that Jackson uses to speak back to and remake the scientific canon.
Together, these books stage critical interventions at the brink of the known and the unknown. For one, science is motivated by what we don’t know; it is about grasping at the inconceivable and transforming it into something graspable, speakable, familiar. But in this hunt for knowledge, science already narrates how we can possibly conceptualize others (other humans, other beings, other matter). To try and grasp the elements and nuances of the universe, science always already casts languages, rhetorics, vocabularies, and narratives upon the possible and the expansive, delimiting how we can understand the perceptible (and even the imperceptible) in the hunt for one correct and objective story about being. Take, for example, classic cases about the racialization of genetics that have been used to legitimate slavery (Curran 2012), the policing of Black communities (Brown and Barganier 2018), and notions about who is or is not “naturally” smart (Welch 2002). In these cases, science is at once a tool to explain the vibrancy of worldly heterogeneity as well as a means to cast valuations upon those differences, to inflect the relationship between matter and meaning. Scientific stories and breakthroughs, after all, cannot escape the social contexts upon which they stand; they are “a site of—rather than an alternative to—social and political contestation” (Pollock 2012, 2).
While the three texts work to descriptively show what racial logics inform scientific practice, they are also attentive to undoing these knots of contempt and calculation. They work to open up our very understandings of the relation between science and story. Perhaps at their center is one important question: What counts as a scientific narration of life? To answer, these monographs assemble archives of evidence that eschew one “correct” way of telling stories about the universe; story, instead, becomes science’s bedfellow. Science here is not simply a collection of stories to describe the world, as others at the intersections of STS and feminism have argued to critique science’s role in propagating and naturalizing narratives of inequality (Fausto-Sterling 1987; Haraway 1989; Martin 1991), but story becomes a powerful method to rethink and rematerialize science’s own archives, to dig into its discursive elements and better understand how different voices, materials, characters, crescendos, and chains of events can compose such archives. They rethink the origins of knowledge through geographies, connections, enmeshments. Relationalities across spaces that are usually stubbornly fractured into “disciplines” or different arenas altogether begin to harmonize, enabling for more multitextured and multipersoned archives to compose what we know as science.
Theory, here, is itself a recombinant “form of storytelling” (McKittrick 2021, 7) that builds off a rich trajectory across Black feminist theory (Nagar 2014; Carby 2019) and feminist STS (Benjamin 2019; Fullwiley 2011; Leong 2016; Nelson 2016; Subramaniam 2014; TallBear 2013) that uses stories to reject the aspirational notion that there is one way to narrate each thing or phenomenon or encounter (Wynter 2001). Such theory moves away from the dream of one story that authoritatively explains matter, and enters a space of sharing, collaboration, and the interstices of encounter. Descending into multiple archives and narrations, after all, forces us to reconsider “how we would go about evaluating any empirical truth claim” (Jackson 2020, 7–8). And that is key: these texts do not simply recognize a diversity of “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988), but instead they ask why such differences emerge, offering story as an entry point into humankind’s entangled discontents and the obstinate inequalities they have inspired. Science and story become relational beings refracting such politics precisely because “our collective assertions of life are always in tandem with other ways of being” (McKittrick 2021, 106). Why, for instance, do some narrations about life—in the texts at hand, Black life—rely on the biologic or the biocentric (Wynter 2003), while others do not? Why do astrophysics’ origin stories, Prescod-Weinstein raises (2021, 7–8), revel in the Isaac Newtons of the world and disregard those who have long studied the sky under duress, from Black women to Indigenous communities to working-class families in Los Angeles? What might these splits in the story spill? “The story opens the door to curiosity” (McKittrick 2021, 7).
Story here is not a settlement, a definitive declaration about why the world is the way that it is, nor is it about how the world should be. It is an unfolding of human (hi)stories and futures that constellate around encounter, posing textual questions about social life that such “objective” narrations about humanity normally obscure. This is precisely why these texts resist singular disciplinary attachments, as if there is one correct methodological way to realize and represent political attachments. Instead, they approach science and story as a medley of perspectives and narrations caught in the thrust of “multivocality with contradiction” (Jackson 2020, 23). The story “demands representation outside itself…[It] asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained cues and diasporic literacies, rather than reams of positivist evidence” (McKittrick 2021, 4). Story becomes a method poised to openness, a method unafraid of being unsettled into uncharted territories. What, for instance, if difference does not become the foundation for scientific grammars about and (e)valuations of ability, capacity, livelihood, potential, worth, humanness? What if the very concept of story is not beholden to a singular grammar, but to entangled grammars in the plural? Stories begin to accumulate and change scientific concepts at even the broadest scales (Tsing 2015 37–38): the collective, the human, the planetary.
If story is a critical object here, then we must ask: What elements are part of science’s stories? What might they be? In the following pages, I attend to how narrative elements move through McKittrick, Prescod-Weinstein, and Jackson’s portrayals of science, how epistemology is loaded with beginnings, plotlines, genres, characters, dialogue, uncertainties, pivots, surprises, endings, composing grammars that are multiple and multisited rather than singular, oriented toward curiosity rather than rehearsed scripts. “Wonder is study,” McKittrick writes (2021, 5). Figures like Nalo Hopkinson and fields like ethology and metaphysics sit side by side (Jackson 2020, 83–120). Working at this generative interface, these authors experiment with science and story, pondering how enfleshed life both exceeds and comes to be defined by story (Barad 2007)—and how story might capture (or convolute) those very excesses. Such a method recasts “story” as something less redemptive and, instead, something resolutely plural that only finds life in the limitations of narration, something generatively worldly yet always enworlded.
My own personal investment in these texts derives from the fact that, while they largely concern Black life, their arguments are conceptually important for all those working on the social life of science. When the word science is uttered, certain people usually come to mind—those straight cis white men that normally sit in positions of power in biology, chemistry, or physics departments (and STS departments, too, no less). Science as a concept and a practice itself circumscribes who can sit at the table to discuss how science happens, what it can mean, what it can do. When science is affixed to a region, its circumscriptions can spiral. My anthropological research in Palestine with astronomers normally evokes academic assumptions about what science can and cannot look like there. Countless people have assumed that astronomy in Palestine is akin to a high school club, and many surmise the field is a type of political escape from Israel’s occupation as if, first, Palestinian life revolves around the occupation and, second, Israel’s military apparatus cannot take flight into the sky. Science and story meet to draw boundaries and limits. But these texts offer us methods for thinking past these impulses that colonize epistemology by asking why different grammars emerge; they denaturalize the social differences that sometimes precede science and come to determine its stories, its variables, its pathways. They depart from the notion of scientific closure that can deaden life. As McKittrick (2021, 187) powerfully punctuates the final lines of her book, “We are curious. I want to sustain wonder.”
(Racial) Tales as Old as Time
Science’s stories have long depended on hierarchies that, by definition, are far from equal. The beauty of these texts is their ability to discern the epistemological vocabularies through which such stories are staged to reveal the inequalities subtending contemporary knowledge. Jackson, for example, works to surpass the terms human and species altogether precisely because these concepts emerged from racist, colonial logics that then structured the genealogical classification of organisms and cells. In theories of endosymbiosis, in which two species with a mutualistic relationship form a new one over time, many scientists depict the relationship as if one species is “enslaved” by another (Jackson 2020, 153). The story of (co)existence is slavery. Jacob Bontius’s early evolutionary work taxonomized orangutans as the children of women in the (East) Indies “who mate with apes and monkeys to satisfy their detestable desires” (quoted in Jackson 2020, 181). The story of evolution is Black animality. And Darwin used the terms race and species interchangeably, “at times even using the term ‘sub-species’ to refer to people” (Jackson 2020, 171). The story of species is racial. The struggle for sovereignty and autonomy, Jackson argues, exists at the level of the cell and the organism; subtending epistemology are antiblack legacies concerning who is capable of effectively governing a body, a land, and a culture.
Epigenetics is also a curious—and dangerous—case for Jackson. As she writes, her goal is to demonstrate how the epigenetic turn furtively marks Black cells for death while espousing a horizon of post-racial biology: “I want to query how social processes—the prison ‘cell,’ the political party ‘cell,’ and the military ‘cell’—interact with somatic cellular processes, producing alterations to the immediate cellular environment and cellular functioning in a manner that we might also describe as necropolitical” (2020, 205). She lays out how the field innovatively links social factors and biological expression, positing that certain genes become activated (or suppressed) by experiential environmental factors. On the surface, this research thus seems to make a landmark intervention that race is a biological fiction that nonetheless has disparate effects on differently colored bodies. Yet Jackson notes the hazard in this conceptual development: with the understanding of the environment’s role in the expression of DNA comes the expectation, even the social responsibility, that one can manage their very own DNA. One can seemingly overcome genetics by governing their social, psychic, and environmental life. The racial trappings of genetics become something one opts into, even though, as social scientists have long pointed out (Graves and Goodman 2021; Gravlee 2009; Sullivan 2013), the genetic classifications of race have long been socially constructed—it is, rather, the existence of racism that wreaks havoc upon racialized bodies. With epigenetics, biological difference along racial lines suddenly becomes a result of individual choice, which fails to account for the ways that an antiblack world weathers specific communities, bodies, aspirations.
In memoiresque fashion, Prescod-Weinstein similarly unearths the racism that underpins the one concept through which scientists narrate the expanses of our universe: dark matter. There has been a historical tendency to analogize Black people and dark matter, a linkage that many Black writers and academics have themselves found productive for theorizing Black possibility alongside astrophysical potencies. Prescod-Weinstein (2021, 115) speaks back to this analogy, arguing that we have spent millions of dollars to try and understand dark matter, even as it continues to evade our comprehension, while (white) society has failed to invest in Black writers, voices, or talents. “We know almost nothing about dark matter, but we know a lot about Black people. Even white people know a lot about Black people” (Prescod-Weinstein 2021, 116). And yet, this knowledge about Black people is used in the service of policing, used to mark them for death, as McKittrick shows (and as I detail in the following paragraph). The analogy, Prescod-Weinstein argues, is not about some inherent glow, but about the attention we give and do not give. It is about where society thinks there might be a possible glow in the first place—and as history has demonstrated, those in power in imperial states have not located it within Black people.
McKittrick also incisively reveals the narrative structure of technoscience itself, demonstrating how the scientific method of asking questions about Black life relies on rehearsed scripts of Black inhumanity. “Black life,” she writes “is absent from the classificatory algorithms that are applied to statistically organize our world” (2021, 105). Citing a Harper’s report titled “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” a study that aggregated data about four hundred thousand students in Chicago to predict who was likely to be shot later in life, McKittrick demonstrates how science presupposes certain stories: here, that Blackness equals death. To be Black is to be shot. To be Black is to die. “Premature [Black] death is an algorithmic variable” while “black life is outside algorithmic logics altogether” (2021, 106). She works out the ways that Black life is reduced to data that only registers death. The landscapes in which Black people live, for example, are transformed into metrics of risk. All humanity within such communities disappears. The story science tells here of Black death ends up prophesizing the very results of the algorithm. “In other words, black inhumanity…is a variable in the problem-solving equation before the question is asked” (2021, 111). The story technoscience tells of the future is wedged in the racism of the past and the now. “If we want different or better or more just futures and worlds,” McKittrick urges, “it is important to notice what kind of knowledge networks are already predicting our futures” (2021, 116). For her, one method to reorient how we scientifically predict such futures is storytelling precisely because in the world we all inhabit now, “racism acts as an eerie origin story that can steer us” (2021, 105). Unearthing science’s origins can undo this narrative structure, revealing the genealogies and histories of social prediction and political mattering upon which such origins stand. From such fictive origins, then, we begin to see other constellations, other earths, other relations.
On Origins—or Not
To imagine such radical change, one usually looks toward a new origin point, a new beginning. “Once upon a time,” anew. Again. A counterhistory or counternarrative. Yet liberation, McKittrick argues, rejects any origin point, as if there is only one way to know liberation. For her, liberation is open-ended. Unfurling. Dynamic. “The work of liberation does not seek a stable or knowable answer to a better future; rather, it recognizes the ongoing labor of aesthetically refusing unfreedom” (2021, 61). Drawing from these books’ attachments to interdisciplinarity, they do not romanticize particular objects as those upon which feminist or antiracist STS must hinge as if there was only one way to know the world. To do so would animate a grammar of singularly over multiplicity, objectivity over intersubjectivity, authority over “the unintelligent.” Stories, then, become ennetworked, irremovable from the excesses of the universe and our attempts to discursively capture it. Story is not a singular pathway to justice precisely because there is no easily identifiable origin from which more just futures necessarily develop. Instead, McKittrick offers collaboration as a mode of possible liberation, a type of shared curiosity whereby one’s openness to others radically remakes the many perspectives that fill science and its forms of recognition and re-cognition. For liberation, one story is not authoritative. Multiple stories interlace. Instead of one discrete story, forms of crosspollination are themselves the story. “The sharing of ideas (no beginnings, no ends) enables a terrain of struggle, through which different futures are imagined” (McKittrick 2021, 25). “Beginnings-to-ends and questions with knowable answers,” McKittrick contends, drawing from Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, and Frantz Fanon, “are ineffective analytical equations…liberation cannot, in any way, be a formulated answer to how we resolve the troubling awful world we inhabit if it is posed as a subsequent counterreaction to that troubling awful world” (2021, 23), as such a reaction seeks a future within the very parameters and perimeters of an equation it aspires to disrupt.
Rethinking this very narrative structure of liberation and equity, McKittrick cautions STS scholars to not organize their work as “science first, social construction [as critique] second, and [forms of possible] resistance third/later” (2021, 138). Jackson also contends with the deficiencies of critique that pivot upon the imagination of stable, unshaking scientific concepts like “human,” since, as we’ve seen, the epistemological moorings of the human are rooted in antiblackness. Commenting on science and literature’s historical tendency to “experiment” with Blackness as biological matter that is always already equated with the “sub/super/human,” Jackson insists that critiques simply call for more inclusion rather than identifying “alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people” (2020, 3) themselves. She explicitly states that she doesn’t want to rehearse the vocabularies of liberal humanism by only offering critique: “Becoming Human is more interested in redefining terms than entering into preestablished ones” precisely because the scientific realms in which the book cruises “position blackness in the space of the unthought, and therefore are not sufficient grounds for theorizing blackness” (2020, 17). Terms change by welcoming their unsavory pasts. Stories narrating the same Black bodies rub up against one another—some from scientists like Darwin or Bontius and others from Black people and writers themselves—revealing different grammars of humanity that both bolster scientific thought. One of Jackson’s central claims, for example, is that Black humanity was not simply denied over the past half millennium, but that Black humanity has always been plastic, has been an experiment through (and against) which white colonizers could invent their own selves (2020, 27). Her goal in the book is not simply to “show that antiblackness is actually central to the very construction of ‘the animal,’” a key intervention that the book nonetheless makes, “but also that (anti)blackness upends these fields’ frameworks of analysis and evaluative judgments” (2020, 17). The vocabulary of singular scientific answers does not upend Black dehumanization precisely because its logic depends on antiblackness. For Jackson, like McKittrick, the grammar of these stories—ones resting upon an objectivity rooted in discrete organismal difference—must change.
At first thought, rethinking origins when it comes to Prescod-Weinstein’s work seems nearly impossible—after all, her research as a cosmologist is about the physical origins of the very universe itself. Yet Prescod-Weinstein is less concerned with origins themselves than who gets to narrate them, and how the politics of that narrating affect who and what matter in the universe. “Physics is not the universe,” she writes. “Rather, it is one very human attempt to get at its innards” (2021, 147). Science and story do not predate one another, but meet and are made through particular and particularly located encounters. When Prescod-Weinstein attempted to publish some of her dissertation research for a top science magazine, for example, she decided to “write the essay and space science in [her own] voice, rather than trying to put on Authoritative Science Voice, which is effectively the same thing as, White Man Confidently Telling You How the World Works” (2021, 128). The result: the editor informed Prescod-Weinstein that the article needed to be rewritten—not because the research was bad, but because her voice was not a “good fit.” Her voice was not how the editor wanted the public to digest science. “But which public?” asks Prescod-Weinstein (2021, 129). Who gets to decide who narrates the universe’s beginnings, and how? The politics of origins are bound up in narration, in genre, in form. As each of the authors raise, scientific depictions of the world begin to change if “classic” narrations, genres, and forms change.
Character Arcs
Science, however, is never just one person talking or narrating. Even in singular scientific discoveries, which are wrongly attributed to one or two or three figures, entire networks participate in the scientific process. There is no origin when it comes to knowledge precisely because, as Prescod-Weinstein argues about physics in particular, “the ideas that come to populate [the field], especially the ones that stick, are rarely the product of one person’s ideas but rather the result of a community effort” (2021, 55). Extrapolating from the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, she unfurls and unravels science, redefining it shape and contours according to who makes research possible. Science’s characters change. She mentions janitors, IT staff, cafeteria workers—generally the only people of color in academic buildings. “What would it mean,” she asks, “to understand all of this work as part of the scientific project?” (2021, 195). Recognizing all this work as scientific also recognizes relationality; it does not award (largely white, male) scientists alone for their discoveries precisely because those discoveries are communal efforts. Science becomes something more attuned to collaboration and interactivity. Science here does not enact divisions between the wise and the unwise, the capable and the incapable, but it becomes a practice oriented toward collectivities. This is a recognition of, as she calls it, “wages for scientific housework.” And indeed, those whose labor participates in the scientific process should be compensated like their scientist coworkers.
In each of the texts at hand, relationality is a key part of imagining and enacting science’s horizons. Here, Prescod-Weinstein redefines who is billed as someone involved in the creation, narration, and enactment of knowledge. McKittrick is quite explicit that storytelling—and science and story emerge together—is a collaborative project: “I will share this with you, coauthor this with you, and live this life with you, I will tell you my secret” (2021, 8). She and Jackson both reach out toward mediums and media that rarely take center stage in critical STS work, and these forms—from art to music to letters to memories to experiences to literature to walks to science fiction to citational practice to hopes—create a relational archive of how people know the world from a diverse set of positions and locations. “We are the reason that we bother with the universe at all,” Prescod-Weinstein writes. “Our location in all of it matters” (2021, 3, emphasis added). And our relative locations to one another matter. We do not simply tell science; it is our telling that is a part of science. To bring Audre Lorde in dialogue with Carl Linnaeus, as Jackson does, or slaves’ music with neurobiology, as McKittrick does, reveals how scientific discourses move through the world and affect each of us differently, enabling us to know the world differently. Jackson (2020, 121–58), for example, reads Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild (1995) as a scientific piece that rejects an epistemology premised on (racialized) distinctions that divide bodies into separable autonomous units. As Jackson argues, the story, which details how one species must volunteer their bodies for the survival of another, raises that flesh does not simply divide in the way that science conceives of organisms and cells, but it invites multiplicities and atomic entanglements that incorporate viruses, bacteria, fungi, other species, other humans, relations. “The human organismic body,” then, never exists in isolation as if there was “a sovereign ‘I’” (Jackson 2020, 132). Butler’s novel speaks back to science, incorporating new characters (and new interdependencies) into the collaborative work that is epistemology. A new archive of knowledge—and of scientific concepts, categories, and fields—is born.
Sincerely, Fondly, and All the Best
When it comes to narrative structures, I would be remiss to disregard how McKittrick and Prescod-Weinstein similarly choose to end their books. Both take their final chapter to write a letter, to stage a type of intimacy and literally perform the relational work that they raise. McKittrick calls out to science, offering a final letter to epistemology (“Dear Science”) about how it has simultaneously frustrated her through its racist legacies yet kept her captivated, leaving her searching for explanations to her curiosities. And Prescod-Weinstein offers a deeply intimate thank you to her mother, a thank you for being there and supporting her while she faced so much shit while going through graduate school, a thank you for passing her political attachments and organizing on. These endings bend genre in books that already resist easy classification. Suddenly, in their final pages, there is an explicit addresser and addressee. Letters establish a relation. They compel. McKittrick and Prescod-Weinstein are working to show that this is what all writing is: an incitement to talk, to gather, to engage. Science is not abstractly out there without placement or context, but it exists between and among us. Between and among us, its story goes on, reaching through the page. Its story is the interstices between our own, where our stories (and their possible differences) meet. After all, we each relate to science differently, meaning that science becomes a bridge for us to know one another relationally, inviting all the discontents of difference into its halls. Yet these authors caution against seeing such differences as preceding our stories and, subsequently, narrating them for us. Scientific wonder need not rely on biological or phenotypical difference as springboards for experimentation or speculation or analysis. Instead, intimacy upends the irrationalities of authority.
McKittrick’s and Prescod-Weinstein’s choice to publicly stage such relationality is a reminder of the deeply decolonial mission at the center of these texts: to not erect borders, walls, or ruptures between us when we imagine science’s future. Our futures. In McKittrick’s letter, science is not an anonymous arbiter of objectivity. It is a character, a something or a someone—or, more accurately, a number of someones. It is even those reading her letter. Us. It is our stories meeting, along with the feelings that such encounters evoke. McKittrick tells science, tells us, “There is more to you than I know” (2021, 186). There are anonymous others, anonymous forms, strangers out there in the world that will change science’s archives and meanings. And she reaches out toward those others in her letter: “Until soon, Katherine xo” (2021, 187). Sincerely, fondly, and all the best. These conclusions do anything but conclude, instead reaching out into world and acknowledging one story and one person and one text’s inability to narrate it all, in a way animating “the potential liberatory use of nonrepresentationalist inquiries into ontology” that Jackson espouses (2020, 184). The entanglements housed within these final letters show that what’s on the pages is not a fully realized vision of science or of knowledge. Communication, rather than finitude, becomes aspirational, becomes a means to grasp, if momentarily, how capacious the world and the universe are.
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Author Bio
Jake Silver is a cultural anthropologist whose work constellates around astronomy in Palestine, particularly how science, settlement, and struggles over sovereignty meet in the sky. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University.