Loyal Opposition and the Clarity of Dissent: Commentary on Donald P. Spence's “The Hermeneutic Turn”

I have no complaints about Don Spence's hermeneuticism. My sole complaint, rather, is that he gets homesick for the old positivism he has left behind even before it disappears over the horizon. But I have great sympathy for that kind of agoraphobia, for I know all too well how lonely it can get once one leaves the ancestral mansion of positivist science with its familiar furnishings — its scientific explanations, its objectivity, its error-proof methods, and the ornate, if lapsed, ritual letter of credit that goes with it all. To put it bluntly, I do not like the stance of “loyal opposition” that he proposes: indeed, I find it a self-defeating stance in general, particularly so in a debate that seems to me to be more a prelude to revolution than an attempt to write a compromise budget. For these are revolutionary times in the human sciences, part of a revolution, I think, that extends well beyond the decorous limits of learned debate. And besides, to make the matter more local, compromises seem rarely to work well in the psychoanalytic movement where dissent has traditionally been treated as a form of heresy.

But I suspect that there are good psychological (or, at least, dramaturgic) reasons why we are all tempted to characterize our dissent from positivism as “loyal opposition.” I suppose that even our scientific identities are composed of competing selves. Given the nature of habit and of faith, there will usually be one member of our cast of selves who, in spite of a majority vote against him, will still yearn for the innocent pleasures