The environmentalists were almost animist and deficient in theory. Their antique idols were simply mounted down by the state and recast as science and utility and such was the nature of their victory. The rights move- ments have eroded the former heirarchies based on sex, class, age, race and culture, but the hierarchies of science and state have been the implicit beneficiaries of the displaced power. This description is an attempt to take stock of the relationship between science and state. By its nature it is unacceptable in the terms of the state it seeks to describe.
Apostasy is so.
Its politics are in its language and in the power of naming. Science is the orthodoxy, but it is largely quiet on the question of itself. In a world of artifice, science is the central feature. In a world of imminent and impending artifice, the question of the state must be reopened. It is perverse that within the state of science, what is called value, is not, in fact, valued, and that what now unacknowledgedly partakes of that meaning and committment are only science and its issue.