I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.
Marge Piercy, woman on the Edge of Time
The concept of the body politic is not new. Elaborate organic images for human society were richly developed by the Greeks. They conceived the citizen, the city, and the cosmos to be built according to the same principles. To perceive the body politic as an organism, as fundamentally alive and as part of a large cosmic organism, was central for them (Collingwood, 1945). To see the structure of human groups as a mirror of natural forms has remained imaginatively and intellectually powerful. Throughout the early period of the industrial revolution, a particularly important development of the theory of the body politic linked the natural and political economy on multiple levels. Adam Smith's theory of the market and of the division of labour as keystones of future capitalist economic thought, with Thomas Malthus's supposed law of the relation of population and resources, together symbolize the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism. The permeation of Darwin's evolutionary theory with this form of political economy has been a subject of considerable analysis from the nineteenth century to the present (Young, 1969). Without question, the modern evolutionary concept of a population, as the fundamental natural group, owes much to classical ideas of the body politic, which in turn are inextricably interwoven with the social relationships of production and reproduction.
The union of the political and physiological is the focus of this chapter. That union has been a major source of ancient and modern justifications of domination, especially of domination based on differences seen as natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral. It has also been transformed by the modern biobehavioural sciences in ways we must understand if we are to work effectively for societies free from domination. The degree to which the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences, especially in those disciplines that seek to explain social groups and behaviour, must not be underestimated. In evading the importance of dominance as a part of the theory and practice of contemporary sciences, we bypass the crucial and difficult examination of the content as well as the social function of science. We leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts, to render them Utopian in the worst sense. Nor must we lightly accept the damaging distinction between pure and applied science, between use and abuse of science, and even between nature and culture. All are versions of the philosophy of science that exploits the rupture between subject and object to justify the double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity. This anti-liberation core of knowledge and practice in our sciences is an important buttress of social control.1
Recognition of that fact has been a major contribution by feminist theorists. Women know very well that knowledge from the natural sciences has been used in the interests of our domination and not our liberation, birth control propagandists notwithstanding. Moreover, general exclusion from science has only made our exploitation more acute. We have learned that both the exclusion and the exploitation are fruits of our position in the social division of labour and not of natural incapacities.2 But if we have not often underestimated the principle of domination in the sciences, if we have been less mesmerized than many by the claims to value-free truth by scientists as we most frequently encounter them - in the medical marketplace (Gordon, 1976; Reed, 1978) - we have allowed our distance from science and technology to lead us to misunderstand the status and function of natural knowledge. We have accepted at face value the traditional liberal ideology of social scientists in the twentieth century that maintains a deep and necessary split between nature and culture and between the forms of knowledge relating to these two putatively irreconcilable realms. We have allowed the theory of the body politic to be split in such a way that natural knowledge is reincorporated covertly into techniques of social control instead of being transformed into sciences of liberation. We have challenged our traditional assignment to the status of natural objects by becoming anti-natural in our ideology in a way which leaves the life sciences untouched by feminist needs.3 We have granted science the role of a fetish, an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it, no longer responsive to the dialectical interplay of human beings with the surrounding world in the satisfaction of social and organic needs. We have perversely worshipped science as a reified fetish in two complementary ways: (1) by completely rejecting scientific and technical discipline and developing feminist social theory totally apart from the natural sciences, and (2) by agreeing that 'nature' is our enemy and that we must control our 'natural' bodies (by techniques given to us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kingdom of the cultural body politic as defined by liberal (and radical) theorists of political economy, instead of by ourselves. This cultural body politic was clearly identified by Marx: the marketplace that remakes all things and people into commodities.
A concrete example may help explain what I see as our dangerous misunderstanding, an example which takes us back to the point of union of the political and physiological. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1962) developed a theory of the body politic that based human social development on progressive domination of nature, particularly of human sexual energies. Sex as danger and as nature are central to Freud's system, which repeats rather than initiates the traditional reduction of the body politic to physiological starting points. The body politic is in the first instance seen to be founded on natural individuals whose instincts must be conquered to make possible the cultural group. Two recent neo-Freudian and neo-Marxist theorists have ironically reworked Freud's position in illuminating ways for the thesis of this essay: one is Norman O. Brown, the other Shulamith Firestone. Freud, Brown, and Firestone are useful tools in a dissection of the theories of the political and physiological organs of the body politic because they all begin their explanations with sexuality, add a dynamic of cultural repression, and then attempt to liberate again the personal and collective body.
Brown (1966), in Love's Body, developed an elaborate metaphorical play between individual and political bodies to show the extraordinary patriarchal and authoritarian structure of our conceptions and experiences of both. The phallus, the head; the body, the state; the brothers, the rebellious overthrow of kingship only to establish the tyranny of the fraternal liberal market these are Brown's themes. If only the father was head, only the brothers could be citizens. The only escape from the domination that Brown explored was through fantasy and ecstasy, leaving the body politic unchallenged in its fundamental male supremacy and in its reduction to the dynamic of repression of nature. Brown rejected civilization (the body politic) in order to save the body; the solution was necessitated by his root acceptance of Freudian sexual reductionism and the ensuing logic of domination. He turned nature into a fetish worshipped by a total return to it (polymorphous perversity). He betrayed the socialist possibilities of a dialectical theory of the body politic that neither worships nor rejects natural science, that refuses to make nature and its knowledge into a fetish.
Firestone (1970), in the Dialectic of Sex, also faces the implications of Freud's biopolitical theory of patriarchy and repression but tries to transform it to yield a feminist and socialist theory of liberation. She has been immensely important to feminists in this task. I think, however, that she committed the same mistake that Brown did, that of'physiological reduction of the body politic to sex', which fundamentally blocks a liberating socialism that neither fatalistically exploits the techniques given by sciences (while despairing of transforming their content) nor rejects a technical knowledge altogether for fantasy. Firestone located the flaw in women's position in the body politic in our own bodies, in our subservience to the organic demands of reproduction. In that critical sense she accepted a historical materialism based on reproduction and lost the possibility for a feminist-socialist theory of the body politic that would not see our personal bodies as the ultimate enemy. In that step she prepared for the logic of the domination of technology - the total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future. She made the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects, with the logical consequence of seeing technical control as a solution. She certainly did not underestimate the principle of domination in the biobehavioural sciences, but she did misunderstand the status of scientific knowledge and practice. That is, she accepted that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations. In that context, liberation remains subject to supposedly natural determinism, which can only be avoided in an escalating logic of counterdomination.
I think it is possible to build a socialist-feminist theory of the body politic that avoids physiological reductionism in both its forms: (1) capitulating to theories of biological determinism of our social position, and (2) adopting the basically capitalist ideology of culture against nature and thereby denying our responsibility to rebuild the life sciences. I understand Marxist humanism to mean that the fundamental position of the human being in the world is the dialectical relation with the surrounding world involved in the satisfaction of needs and thus in the creation of use values. The labour process constitutes the fundamental human condition. Through labour, we make ourselves individually and collectively in a constant interaction with all that has not yet been humanized. Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labour. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and our social bodies, is made possible for us through labour. Therefore, culture does not dominate nature, nor is nature an enemy. The dialectic must not be made into a dynamic of growing domination.4 This position, a historical materialism based on production, contrasts fundamentally with the ironically named historical materialism based on reproduction that I have tried to outline above.
One area of the biobehavioural sciences has been unusually important in the construction of oppressive theories of the body political: animal sociology, or the science of animal groups. To reappropriate the biosocial sciences for new practices and theories, a critical history of the physiological politics based on domination that have been central in animal sociology is important. The biosocial sciences have not simply been sexist mirrors of our own social world. They have also been tools in the reproduction of that world, both in supplying legitimating ideologies and in enhancing material power. There are three main reasons for choosing to focus on the science of animal, especially primate, groups
First, its subject and procedures developed so as to span the nature-culture split at precisely the same time in American intellectual history, between 1920 and 1940, when the ideology of the autonomy of the social sciences had at last gained acceptance, that is, when the liberal theory of society (based on functionalism and hierarchical systems theories) was being established in the universities. Intrinsic to the new liberal relations of natural and social disciplines was the project of human engineering - that is, the project of design and management of human material for efficient, rational functioning in a scientifically ordered society. Animals played an important role in this project. On the one hand, they were plastic raw material of knowledge, subject to exact laboratory discipline. They could be used to construct and test model systems for both human physiology and politics. A model system of, for example, menstrual physiology or socialization processes did not necessarily imply reductionism. It was precisely direct reduction of human to natural sciences that the post-Spencerian, post-evolutionary naturalist, new ordering of knowledge forbade. The management sciences of the 1930s and after have been strict on that point. It is part of the nature-culture split. On the other hand, animals have continued to have a special status as natural objects that can show people their origin, and therefore their pre-rational, pre-management, pre-cultural essence. That is, animals have been ominously ambiguous in their place in the doctrine of autonomy of the human and natural sciences. So, despite the claims of anthropology to be able to understand human beings solely with the concept of culture, and of sociology to need nothing but the idea of the human social group, animal societies have been extensively employed in rationalization and naturalization of the oppressive orders of domination in the human body politic.5 They have provided the point of union of the physiological and political for modern liberal theorists while they continue to accept the ideology of the split between nature and culture.
Second, animal sociology has been central in the development of the most thorough naturalization of the patriarchal division of authority in the body politic and in the reduction of the body politic to sexual physiology. Thus this area of the natural sciences is one we need to understand thoroughly and transform completely to produce a science that might express the social relations of liberation without committing the vulgar Marxist mistake of deriving directly the substance of knowledge from material conditions. We need to understand how and why animal groups have been used in theories of the evolutionary origin of human beings, of 'mental illness', of the natural basis of cultural co-operation and competition, of language and other forms of communication, of technology, and especially of the origin and role of human forms of sex and the family. In short, we need to know the animal science of the body politic as it has been and might be.6 I believe the result of a liberating science of animal groups would better express who the animals are as well; we might free nature in freeing ourselves.
Third, the levels at which domination has formed an analytical principle in animal sociology allow a critique of the embodiment of social relations in the content and basic procedures of a natural science in such a way as to expose the fallacies of the claim to objectivity, but not in such a way as to permit facile rejection of scientific discipline in our knowledge of animals. We cannot dismiss the layers of domination in the science of animal groups as a film of unfortunate bias or ideology that can be peeled off the healthy objective strata of knowledge below. Neither can we think just anything we please about animals and their meaning for us. We come face to face with the necessity of a dialectical understanding of scientific labour in producing for us our knowledge of nature.
I will restrict my analysis primarily to a few years around the Second World War and to work on a single group of animals - the primates, in particular, the rhesus monkey, native to Asia but present in droves in scientific laboratories and research stations world-wide. I will focus principally on the work of one person, Clarence Ray Carpenter, who helped found the first major research station for free-ranging monkeys as part of the school of tropical medicine affiliated with Columbia University off Puerto Rico on the tiny island, Cayo Santiago, in the late 1930s. These monkeys and their descendants have been central actors in dramatic reconstructions of natural society. Their affiliation with tropical medicine in a neo-colonial holding of the United States, which has been so extensively used as an experiment station for capitalist fertility management policies, adds an ironic backdrop appropriate to our subject.
Men like Carpenter moved within a complex scientific world in which it would be incorrect to label most individuals or theories as sexist or whatever. It is not to attach simplistic labels but to unwind the specific social and theoretical structures of an area of life science that we need to examine the interconnections of laboratory heads, students, funding agencies, research stations, experimental designs, and historical setting. Carpenter earned his PhD at Stanford for a study of the effects on sexual behaviour of the removal of the gonads of male pigeons in mated pairs. He then received a National Research Council Fellowship in 1931 to study social behaviour of primates under the direction of Robert M. Yerkes of the Laboratories of Comparative Psychobiology at Yale University. Yerkes had recently established the first comprehensive research institution for the psychobiological study of anthropoid apes in the world. For Yerkes, apes were perfect models of human beings. They played a major part in his sense of mission to promote scientific management of every phase of society, an idea typical of his generation.
It has always been a feature for the use of the chimpanzee as an experimental animal to shape it intelligently to specification instead of trying to preserve its natural characteristics. We have believed it important to convert the animal into as nearly ideal a subject for biological research as is practicable. And with this intent has been associated the hope that eventual success might serve as an effective demonstration of the possibility of re-creating man himself in the image of a generally acceptable ideal. (Yerkes, 1943, p. 10)7
He, then, designed primates as scientific objects in relation to his ideal of human progress through human engineering.
Yerkes was interested in the apes in two main regards - their intelligence and their social-sexual life. For him intelligence was the perfect expression of evolutionary position. He saw every living object in terms of the outstanding problem of experimental comparative psychology in America since its inception around 1900: the intelligence test. Species, racial, and individual qualities were fundamentally tied to the central index of intelligence, revealed on the one hand through behaviour-testing and on the other through the neural sciences. He had designed the army intelligence tests administered to recruits in the First World War, tests seen to provide a rational basis for assignment and promotion, to indicate natural merit fitting men for command (Yerkes, 1920; Kevles, 1968).8 His role in the war was entirely compatible with his role as an entrepreneur in primate studies. In both cases he saw himself and his scientific peers working to foster a rational society based on science and preserved from old ignorance, embodied especially in religion and politics.
The social-sexual life of primates was for Yerkes thoroughly intertwined with their intelligence. Mind would order and rule lower functions to create society. In a classic study of the origin of the body politic, Yerkes (1939) observed that female chimpanzees who were sexually receptive were allowed by the dominant males to have food and 'privileges' to which they were ordinarily not entitled. Primate intelligence allowed sexual states to stimulate the beginnings of human concepts of social right and privilege. The sexual reductionism hardly needs emphasis. His study linking sex and power was typical of work in the 1930s, and hardly different from much to this day. In an early feminist critique, Ruth Herschberger (1948) marvellously imagined the perspective of Josie, the female chimpanzee whose psychosexual life was of such concern to Yerkes. Josie seems not to have seen her world in terms of trading sex for 'privilege', but to Yerkes that economic link of physiology and politics seemed to have been scientifically confirmed to lie at the organic base of civilization.
In addition to direct investigation of physiological sex and social behaviour in human beings' closest relatives, Yerkes exercised, along with his peers, a tremendous influence on the overall direction of the scientific study of sex in this country. He was for twenty-five years chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded National Research Council Committee for Research on Problems of Sex (CRPS). This committee, from 1922 until well after the Second World War when federal funding became massively available for science, provided the financial base for the transformation of human sex into a scientific problem. Fundamental work on hormones and behaviour, sex-linked differences in mental and emotional qualities, marital happiness, and finally the Kinsey studies were all funded by the Committee for Research on Problems of Sex. It played a key role in opening up sexual topics for polite discussion and respectable investigation in an era of undoubted prurience and ignorance.9
However, the opening was double edged; the committee, in its practice and ideological expressions, was structured on several levels according to the principle of the primacy of sex in organic and social processes. To make sex a scientific problem also made it an object for medical therapy for all kinds of sexual 'illness', most certainly including homosexuality and unhappy marriages. The biochemical and physiological basis of the therapeutic claims immensely strengthened the legitimating power of scientific managers over women's lives. The committee closed the escape holes for those who rejected the American Freud's kind of sexual reductionism: whether from the psychoanalytic or physical-chemical directions, sex was safely in the care of scientific-medical managers. Monkeys and apes were enlisted in this task in central roles; as natural objects unobscured by culture, they would show most plainly the organic base in relation to which culture emerged. That these 'natural objects' were thoroughly designed according to the many levelled meanings of an ideal of human engineering has hardly been noticed.
Carpenter arrived at Yale's primate laboratories already enmeshed in the web of funding and practice represented by the CRPS. His PhD work had been funded by the committee, his post-doctoral fellowship granted by essentially the same men, and his host, Yerkes, was the central figure in a very important network of scientific assumptions and practices. Those scientific networks crucially determined who did science and what science was considered good. From his education, funding, and social environment, there was little reason for Carpenter to reject the basic assumptions that identified reproduction and dominance based on sex with the fundamental organizing principles of a natural body politic. What Carpenter added, however, was significant. Methodologically, he established the demanding skill of naturalistic observation of wild primates in two extraordinarily careful field studies, one on New World howler monkeys and one on Asian gibbons. These studies are worthy of note because they are simultaneously excellent, commanding work and fully reflective of social relations based on dominance in the human world of scientists.10 Theoretically, Carpenter tied the interpretations of the laboratory disciplines of comparative psychology and sexual physiology to evolutionary and ecological field biology centred on the concepts of population and community. In short, he started to link the elements of natural and political economy in new and important ways. The classic Darwinian conception of natural political economy of populations began to be integrated with the physiological and psychological sciences that greatly flourished in the early twentieth century. The integration would be complete only after the Second World War, when Sherwood Washburn and his students transformed physical anthropology and primate studies by systematically exploiting the evolutionary functionalism of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and the social functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski's theory of culture.
In addition to linking levels of psychobiological analysis to modern evolutionary theory, Carpenter analysed primate groups with the tools of early systems theory that were simultaneously providing the technical base for the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group. Carpenter's early social functionalism - with all its remaining ties to an older comparative psychology and to developmental physiology (experimental embryology) - is crucial for examining the connecting chains from physiology to politics, from animal to human. Carpenter himself did not work within the doctrine of autonomy of natural and social sciences. Neither did he permit direct reduction of social to physiological or of human to animal. He elaborated analytical links between levels that were shared by both adherents and opponents of the crucial nature-culture distinction. Indeed, his primate sociology is a useful place to begin to unravel the many varieties of functionalism emerging within biological and social sciences between the two world wars, all based on principles of hierarchical order of the body and body politic. The functionalist disciplines underlay strong ideologies of social control and techniques of medical, educational, and industrial management.
A single experimental manipulation embodies in miniature all the layers of significance of the principle of dominance in Carpenter's seminal work on the animal body politic. In 1938 he collected about 400 rhesus monkeys in Asia and freed them on Cayo Santiago. After a period of social chaos, they organized themselves into six groups containing both sexes and ranging in size from three to 147 animals. The monkeys were allowed to range freely over the thirty-seven-acre island and to divide space and other resources with little outside interference. The first major study undertaken of them was of their sexual behaviour, including periodicity of oestrus, homosexual, autoerotic, and 'nonconformist' behaviour. Carpenter's conclusions noted that intragroup dominance by males was strongly correlated with sexual activity, and so presumably with evolutionary advantage. All the sexist interpretations with which we have become monotonously familiar were present in the analysis of the study, including such renderings of animal activities as, 'Homosexual females who play masculine roles attack females who play the feminine role prior to the formation of a female-female consort relation' (Carpenter, 1964, p. 339).
In harmony with the guiding notion of the ties of sex and dominance in the fundamental organization of the rhesus groups, Carpenter performed what on the surface is a very simple experiment, but one which represents the whole complex of layered explanation of the natural body politic from the physiological to the political. After watching the undisturbed group for one week as a control, he removed the 'alpha male' (the animal judged most dominant on the basis of priority access to food, sex, and so on) named Diablo, from his group. Carpenter then observed the remaining animals for one week, removed the number 2 male, waited another week, removed the number 3 male, waited, restored ail three males to the group, and again observed the social behaviour. He noted that removal of Diablo resulted in immediate restriction of the territorial range of the group on the island relative to other groups. Social order was seriously disrupted. 'The group organization became more fluid and there was an increase in intra-group conflict and fights ... After a marked disruption lasting three weeks, the group was suddenly restructured when the dominant males were released' (1964, p. 362). Social order was restored, and the group regained its prior favourable position relative to other groups.
Several questions immediately arise. Why did Carpenter not use as a control the removal of other than dominant males from the group to test his organizing hypothesis about the source of social order? Literally, he removed the putative head from the collective animal body. What did this field experiment, this decapitation, mean to Carpenter?
First, it must be examined on a physiological level. Carpenter relied on biological concepts for understanding social bodies. He drew from theories of ernbryological development that tried to explain the formation of complex whole animals from simpler starting materials of fertilized eggs. One important ernbryological theory used the concept of fields organized by axes of activity called dominance gradients. A field was a spatial whole formed by the complex interaction of gradients. A gradient was conceived, in this theory, to consist of an ordered series of processes from low to high levels of activity measured, for example, by differential oxygen consumption. Note that at this basic level dominance was conceived as a purely physiological property that could be objectively measured. The slope of a gradient could be shallow or steep. Several gradients making up a field would be organized around a principal axis of greatest slope, the organization centre. An organism grew in complexity through integrated multiplication of dominance systems. An appropriate experimental system within developmental physiology designed to test theories of fields, gradients, physiological dominance, and organization centres was the simple hydra. It had only one axis or possible gradient: head to tail. One could cut off the polyp's head, observe temporary disorganization of remaining tissue, and see ultimate reestablishment of a new head from among the physiologically 'competing' cells. Further, one could remove much or little from the head portion of the activity gradient and test the extent of ensuing organic disorganization.11
Carpenter conceived social space to be like the organic space of a developing organism, and so he looked for gradients that organized the social field through time. He found such a physiological gradient of activity in the dominance hierarchy of the males of the social group. He performed the theoretically based experiment of head removal and 'observed' ensuing physiological competition among cells or organs (i.e., other points - animals - on the activity-dominance gradient) to re-establish a chief organization centre (achieve alpha male status) and restore social harmony. Several consequences flow from these identifications.
First, other groups of animals in the society could be ordered on activity axes as well; females, for example, were found to have a dominance hierarchy of less steepness or lower slope. Young animals had unstable dominance gradients; the observation underlying that interpretation was that ordinary dominance behaviour could not be reliably seen and that immature animals did not show constant dominance relations to one another. As unseen 'observations' became just as important as evidence as seen ones, a concept of latent dominance followed readily. From this point, it is an easy step to judgements about the amount of dominance that functions to organize social space (call that quantity leadership) and the amount that causes social disruption (call that pathological aggression). Throughout the period around the Second World War, similar studies of the authoritarian personality in human beings abounded; true social order must rest on a balance of dominance, interpreted as the foundation of co-operation. Competitive aggression became the chief form that organized other forms of social integration. Far from competition and co-operation being mutual opposites, the former is the precondition of the latter - on physiological grounds. If the most active (dominant) regions, the organization centres, of an organism are removed, other gradient systems compete to re-establish organic order: a period of fights and fluidity ensues within the body politic. The chief point is that without an organizing dominance hierarchy, social order supposedly is seen to break down into individualistic, unproductive competition. The control experiment of removing other animals than the dominant males was not done because it did not make sense within the whole complex of theory, analogies to individual organisms, and unexamined assumptions.
The authoritarian personality studies bring us to the second level of explanation of the body politic implicit in Carpenter's experiment: the psychological. The idea of a dominance hierarchy was derived in the first instance from study of 'pecking orders' in domestic chickens and other birds initiated by the Norwegian Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe (1935) as early as 1913, but not incorporated into American comparative psychology in any important way until the 1930s. Then animal sociology and psychology, as well as human branches of the disciplines, focused great attention on ideas of competition and co-operation. Society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. One looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels.
The third and last level implicit in Carpenter's manipulation is that of natural political economy. The group that loses its alpha male loses in the competitive struggle with other organized organic societies. The result would be reflected in less food, higher infant mortality, fewer offspring, and thus evolutionary disadvantage or even extinction. The market competition implicit in organic evolutionary theory surfaces here. The theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behaviour and evolution (competitive, division of labour, resource allocation model) with the social integration aspect (co-operative co-ordination through leadership and social position) and with the purely physiological understandings of reproductive and embryological phenomena. All three perspectives link functionalist equilibrium social models established in the social sciences of the period - to explicit ideological, political concerns with competition and co-operation (in labour struggles, for example). Since animal societies are seen to have in simpler form all the characteristics of human societies and cultures, one may legitimately learn from them the base of supposedly natural, integrated community for humanity. Elton Mayo (1933) - the influential Harvard, anti-labour union, industrial psychologist-sociologist of the same period - called such a community the 'Garden of Industry'.12
The political principle of domination has been transformed here into the legitimating scientific principle of dominance as a natural property with a physical-chemical base. Manipulations, concepts, organizing principles - the entire range of tools of the science - must be seen to be penetrated by the principle of domination. Science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology, a crass ideological exercise in any case, which denies a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labour. But the difficult process of remaking the biosocial and biobehavioural sciences for liberation has begun. Not surprisingly, one of the first steps has been to switch the focus from primates as models of human beings to a deeper look at the animals themselves - how they live and relate to their environments in ways that may have little to do with us and that will surely reform our sense of relation to nature in our theories of the body politic. These 'revisionist' scientific theories and practices deserve serious attention. Of them, 'feminist' perspectives in physical anthropology and primatology have stressed principles of organization for bodies and societies that do not depend on dominance hierarchies. Dominance structures are still seen and examined, but cease to be used as causal explanations of functional organization Rather, the revisionists have stressed matrifocal groups, long-term social co-operation rather than short-term spectacular aggression, flexible process rather than strict structure, and so on. The scientific and ideological issues are complex; the emerging work is justly controversial.
In our search for an understanding of a feminist body politic, we need the discipline of the natural and social sciences, just as we need every creative form of theory and practice. These sciences will have liberating functions in so far as we build them on social relations not based on domination. A corollary of that requirement is the rejection of all forms of the ideological claims for pure objectivity rooted in the subject-object split that has legitimated our logics of domination of nature and ourselves. If our experience is of domination, we will theorize our lives according to principles of dominance. As we transform the foundations of our lives, we will know how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world. We, like Dawn in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, want to fly into nature, as well as into the past, to make it come out all right. But the sciences are collective expressions and cannot be remade individually. Like Luciente and Hawk, in the same novel, feminists have been clear that 'Nobody can make things come out right'; that 'It isn't bad to want to help, to want to work, to seize history .. . but to want to do it alone is less good. To hand history to someone like a cake you baked' (Piercy, 1976, pp. 188-9).