(Section 5 of Ideology and Practice)
So far we have introduced the idea of a bimodal concept of ideology, composed of doctrine and doxa. In the process of unfolding the distinction between the two poles and giving examples of both it can seem that this expands the concept of ideology to cover all forms of thinking in all spheres of human endeavour. If doctrine is the form of formalised, rigorized thought or theory put into forms that can be taught, then that could potentially cover everything from science, art, philosophy, history, culture, you name it. And then doxa would include everything else. Clearly such an unbounded concept that encompasses everything would be useless — if everything is ideology then nothing is. So in order to progress, having expanded the possibilities of the ideological duality, we now need to take a moment to refocus by restricting the scope.
De-scoping —source, object, method
Initially our de-scoping exercise will focus on teachable doctrine. In modern capitalist society we have a variety of educational institutions that teach an enormous variety of different subjects, topics and disciplines. Our first lens for discriminating between all these different forms of knowledge and thought is the presumed source of the knowledge. That is, that the source is recognised to be human-made, as opposed to divine revelation, or its secular variant, “natural laws” that are passed onto us by “tradition” or some method of excavation (whether by speculation or revelation), but are not human-made but somehow just “are”, eternally and externally given.
The next two criteria for distinction are object and method. The object is what the discipline of knowledge is about or “of”. Physics has an object which is clearly distinct from that of sociology, for example. Method is the collection of practices through which the discipline seeks to advance the knowledge of its object.
Alchemy and chemistry have more or less the same object, but different methods. The common notion that the distinction between the two is that the former was carried out by mystics and the latter by scientists is refuted by the fact that early scientists and Royal Society founders like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton carried out research into both the science of chemistry and the secrets of alchemy, often on the same substances. The difference lies not in the mentality of the individual practitioner, but the particular method they happened to be using in each experiment and research project.
Return of the repressed
Compared to object and method, source may seem a poor cousin in terms of developing a set of criteria that can serve as a grid to analyse the relation between ideology on the one hand and science, art and culture on the other. However it does have some interesting lessons for us.
In the cultural and ideological revolution referred to retrospectively as the Enlightenment (the participants of the time referred to their approach as “modern”, making them the original modernists) a major theme behind “sapere aude” — dare to know, often re-phrased as “question everything” — was the rejection of accepting all doctrines or dogmas based on external, non-human sources. Whether that be the teachings of religion or appeal to “tradition”, the Enlightenment insisted that the only legitimate source of knowledge was human inquiry.
At the time those inquiries were not necessarily exclusively scientific, as we understand the term today, there was still a large influence of deistic thinking, “rationalism” in the Cartesian sense, and the idea of “natural law” that could be uncovered by rational thought based on “first principles” — a process we would categorise as speculative today. But regardless of our scepticism of this particular method, this is still knowledge attributed to human production, and thus potentially contingent, possibly erroneous and, above all, open to challenge and debate in a way that “the Word of God” never was.
However, having delegitimated exogenous sources of knowledge like tradition and revelation, the threat of relativism or uncontrolled scepticism, particularly to an intellectual elite, conscious of their need to justify their socially privileged position as the dominant exploiter class, meant the irresistible temptation of a re-legitimation of the unquestionable authority (particularly for the lower orders) of Enlightenment thought — especially on existentially crucial questions like the sanctity of private property, for example. So, a little bit like Freud’s “return of the repressed”, the idea of absolute truth — knowledge whose ultimate source was not endogenous, fallible, human creation, but externally guaranteed by the cosmos or reality itself — putting the Universe into universal — was readmitted by the back door, as it were. Today we find this implicit appeal to exogenous, cosmic authority — a form of secular revelation — in the subtle but ideologically significant difference between science and “scientism”. More of which later.
On method — alchemy or chemistry?
Returning to Newton, Boyle and their twin-track experimentations in both alchemy and chemistry, we need to look more closely at what was the methodical difference between the two fields of their endeavours.
As we have seen, the difference was not in the subjective beliefs of the practitioners. Nor, in fact, was it to do with their individual direct practice, which was equally experimental in both alchemical and chemical efforts. The methodological difference was dictated by the different goals of the two tracks.
The goal of alchemy is to discover a secret — how to transmute base metals into gold — and in order to function as a means to the ultimate goal, how to become immensely wealthy, the secret needs to be kept exclusively private[1]. Whereas in chemistry the advantage of cooperation with fellow researchers, in sharing the results of your experiments, far outweighs any marginal gains to be made by keeping them secret. This is due to the general nature of knowledge as a non-rival good (i.e. I can acquire the same knowledge you have, without you having to give up your own possession of the knowledge) and the advantages of cooperation in dividing up a project into separate tasks that can be worked on in parallel.
In summary, the methodological difference between the science of chemistry and the occultism of alchemy is in the collective and cooperative method of the former — to be provocative, the element of communism in its method. The same factor is behind the dominance of open source software in the infrastructure of the internet, for example. The key thing to note here is that when we are looking at practice we are looking at it from a materialist perspective, certainly, but not just any materialism in the abstract.
Imagine if you will, a silent movie of people in a workshop engaged in some form of manufacturing process. The camera shows us clearly, through a constructed combination of wide shots and close ups, the physical activities the different workers are engaged in. But even if in wider shots we may occasionally see the lips of one or more of the workers move, we have no idea what they were saying, whether it was related to the work at hand or last night’s football. We can call this filmic metaphor a kind of “dumb” materialism. It shows practice merely as movement of the body completely divorced from the minds of the humans in the picture. Also not shown is whether the people have been brought together by wage slavery, working in a factory on a construction that will be the property of the owner, or are a voluntary association working on a float for a community carnival. In such a “silent movie” dumb materialism, even if we were to magically have footage of Newton or Boyle in their laboratory, at their experiments, we would have no way of telling if they were engaged in the scientific or alchemical part of their researches. To tell the difference between the practices of chemistry and alchemy, automobile assembly or carnival float making, we need a materialism that does not effect a Cartesian separation between body and mind, that is, a social materialism.
Only through a social materialism, as opposed to a “dumb”, one-sidedly physicalist, decontextualised materialism of practice, can we distinguish Newton and Boyle’s alchemical endeavours from their scientific ones. Because the practice of secrecy in the search for a method of transmuting base metal into gold only makes sense in a society where gold is money, and money is wealth and wealth is power. The knowledge that science, including chemistry can bring, is also a form of power, but power of a different category from that conveyed by wealth in a capitalist society. So a social materialist view of practice is also one that recognises the intercourse between different forms of knowledge and different forms of power.
Having raised the spectre of “Power/Knowledge” we must very briefly differentiate our approach to social materialism from that of Foucault’s, who coined that particular formulation. In brief, Foucault’s development of Althusser’s anti-humanist post-structuralist problematic results in a social theory that doesn’t so much escape from humanism as abstract away from it. The cost of such a manoeuvre is twofold. Not only is human agency reduced to the point where individuals become merely the passive bodily canvas on which ideological discourses draw their subjectifications of power (along with the consequent reification and mystification of capital-p “Power” itself), but the distinction between the individual and the collective, particularly in the realms of practice and ideological production (praxis) is erased as a materialist category.
It is one of the main contentions of our argument here that the distinction between the individual and the collective, both in terms of productive practice and ideological (re)production is a key materialist differentiator of primary significance in the arena of social change. One that is also pivotal in the demystification of a unipolar Foucauldian ontology of power into the antagonistic binary of power and counterpower.
Science and Ideology
In terms of source we can say that science is a consciously human-made knowledge. In method, that it is based on a methodologically empiricist experimental practice in a collective and cooperative context that is in pursuit of a ‘universalist’ knowledge — one that is public and open and recognises its power in the advance of the ‘general intellect’. In its object we will temporarily restrict the scope of science to the physical sciences (and deal with the question of social sciences in a moment). In that scope, the object of (physical) science is the external, non-human natural world in its fullest scope, from the sub-atomic to the cosmic, inorganic and organic, from organisms to ecosystems.
The ‘externality’ of the object of the physical sciences allows it to serve as a ‘non-reflexive’ point of reference that can settle differences of opinion amongst the practitioners in a given discipline. ‘Reflexivity’ in this context, is a generalisation of the behavioural economics concept in the field of financial investment. In George Soros’ formulation, reflexivity is the feedback loop that the expectations of investors affects the movement of the markets, which in turn changes investor expectations. Crudely, in a positive feedback example, if everybody expects a stock price to go up, they buy the stock and it goes up and their belief in it going up is reinforced (until it doesn’t).
What matters here is the concept of non-reflexivity — that the phenomena displayed by the objects of the physical sciences change according to dynamics that do not reflect the human beliefs of the observers in any way. This non-reflexivity conditions our concept of “objectivity”. It does so because in the modern era, the physical sciences are seen to have been so productive in revolutionising the forces of production and reshaping the conditions of our social being, that they have acquired a uniquely privileged status of esteem in our shared imaginary and culture. (At least amongst those who have not adopted, for various reasons, a consciously “anti-science” perspective — but even that perspective, which generally associates some or all the evils of society to the “tyranny of science”, is simply a negative reflection of that uniquely exalted cultural status.).
This dominant cultural status of becoming the standard by which all other forms of knowledge are measured has a two-fold effect. Firstly, a huge increase in the amount and quality of knowledge produced in all fields. While much of this is to do with general increase of quality of life, health, longevity, literacy, free time and sheer population mass, it would be churlish and perverse not to recognise the enormous scale of the positive effect. Secondly a much less obvious ideological effect on the predominant common doxa.
Science and the ideology of non-ideology
As object, the physical sciences have a “natural” object — i.e. a non-reflexive, a-strategic, value-free object, indifferent to us and incapable of antagonism to us[2]. The ideological reflection of this becoming the dominant model for “best in class” knowledge is the notion or doxa that only value-free knowledge is true knowledge. “Objectivity” here has ceased to simply refer to the non-reflective character of the object, but become a normative claim for the superiority of “value-free knowledge”.
Consequently, because ideology (whether doctrine or doxa) is inherently value-laden, the opposition “Science versus Ideology” as relation of mutual exclusion, appears as a common sense truth “that goes without saying…”. Here we find the germ of what we have called earlier “The ideology of non-ideology” — that which is true is not ideological, that which is ideological is not true. This is the opposite of what Destutt de Tracey intended when he set out to separate scientific knowledge from the “muck of ages” bequeathed us by religion, superstition and tradition[3].
Aside from the latent positivism, the object of natural science is one the practitioner has power to experiment on directly (albeit usually with non-trivial requirements for expensive apparatus[4]), unlike the object of the social. Hence the relation between discipline (doctrinal field), object and collective of practitioners is one in which the practitioners can access the object directly (somewhat as Protestants can dispense with the intermediary of the Church to access the divine individually) and use it to mediate their social relation to the collective production process.
This pattern of physical objects mediating social relations, so that the latter appear as relationships between things, has obvious parallels with the fetishism of commodities described by Marx. But whereas Marx was talking about the effect of fetishism in obscuring the origins of value and thus the role of social production in the individual relations of humans to commodities and each other; here fetishism is not only mystifying the necessarily collective practice of science with the egotism of individual “discovery”, but in the process undermines the source of scientific knowledge itself, by potentially reintroducing a secularised version of “revelation” by the back door.
Contemporary scientism is a system of beliefs about the epistemological grounds and normative status of human beliefs, even if this is often mistaken for, or conflated with the beliefs about the objects themselves. The distinction is subtle and in the field of natural sciences is pretty much a distinction without a difference — there is little to no practical difference between beliefs about physicists’ beliefs about gravity and the beliefs about gravity themselves, given the non-reflexive nature of gravity (let’s ignore the observer effect in quantum physics).
But the subtle difference is that a belief about beliefs, actually has the social as its object, which becomes clearer when the object of the discipline is something like human evolution in prehistory — as in Evolutionary Psychology. The belief that the “findings” of EvoPsych are of the same epistemological standing as those regarding particle physics coming out of research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, is scientism. The object of EvoPsych is doubly disqualified from producing knowledge of the same epistemological standing as physical science. First in its temporality — objects of study that lie in the historical past cannot be directly observed given our lack of time travel technology, and those that lie in the further past of prehistory even less so (prehistory: clue’s in the name). Second, human evolution has the social as its object, which is the most fundamentally reflexive of objects. Temporality and reflexivity account for why much research into evolutionary genetics takes place on fruit flies not people.
Scientism is not just the confusion between the object itself and the epistemological status of beliefs about the object, producing the paradox of “value-free values”, but the psychological retreat from the insecurity grounded on source — the return of the repressed. If the source of science is artifice — i.e. human-created, and thus fallible knowledge — then there is an ever-present temptation of retreating into the certainty of transcendent truths whose absolute character is guaranteed by the uncreated cosmos itself. Even Einstein’s ironic retort to quantum physics’ uncertainty principle, that “God does not play dice with the universe” indulges in a little bit of this, although he was far from being a proponent of vulgar scientism, overall.
Social science?
So what happens when the object of knowledge is the social? Society itself in its myriad aspects, economic, political, (human) geographic, etc? The natural science of biology, when applied to the individual human body, starts already to partake a little bit of the social, in practice, because the living human body is attached to the mind of a social being with social behaviours that feedback to its body. Once we consider human biology in the context of public health, we are unquestionably in the realm of the social. As the recent quarantine and lockdown policies in response to the coronavirus illustrate all too well.
Clearly the social is a reflexive object. Quite apart from ethics, teams of researchers caught trying to carry out experiments on society as a whole will have far worse things to worry about than simple invalidation of the results. The complexity, reflexivity and intractability (in all possible senses of the word) make experimentation in the same controlled conditions as is possible in the physical sciences simply impossible.
But does that mean that there’s no such thing as social science? Is the term simply self-aggrandisement and imposture? That’s hard to answer definitively, or at least incontestably — the contrary case that its dangerously misleading to give social science the same epistemological status as physical science can never be entirely dismissed.
But we can make a distinction between social theories that claim to have divine or transcendentally “cosmic” sources (which generally we would categorise as religious, spiritual or mystical) and those that accept their basis in human artifice. And in these secular or modernist sourced social theories, there is a further distinction to be made between doctrines that are formulated primarily by “insight” or from “first principles”, i.e. speculatively, and those that rely on methodologies based on social statistics, metrics or objective data that can be shared between, tested and argued about, between different teams of researchers.
Finally, while we are talking about methodology, its time to descend from the level of abstraction where we talk about collective practice of science in its collaborative aspect in isolation from the real world conditions — and institutions — in which this cooperative dimension has to contend with the competitive dynamics imposed upon it by the real world of capitalist social relations.
There are two main domains in which the contradictory dialectics of cooperation and competition in the disciplines of physical and social sciences have to be fought out — the academy and the commercial world of “industry”. The role of competition in commercial industry is probably fairly obvious to most. Although again the current pandemic crisis provides an object lesson, that even in the competitive struggle between different pharmaceutical firms racing to win market share of available state spending for their vaccine products, a certain minimum of cooperation and sharing of testing results has been absolutely necessary.
The role of the academy in transforming subjects into disciplines
Academic institutions play a number of roles in liberal democratic bourgeois societies. They play analogous roles in single-party dictatorships constrained by a state-imposed ideological doctrine as well, but we’ll concentrate on situation in an officially pluralist liberal polity as the more general case. One of these roles is in further education, an extension of elementary and secondary schooling necessary for a workforce with sufficient training to operate at a high level of technical development of the forces of production.
But another role is in creating an environment for the gathering, processing and development of knowledge in general, insofar as social knowledge in general, what Marx called the “General Intellect” is a significant part of the forces of production. Conventionally this all goes under the heading of “research”. And the word most commonly associated with research is funding. Neoliberal initiatives in academia aside, a significant amount of general research is not a directly profit-making enterprise. Which means that there is a funding infrastructure financed by state taxation, industry bodies, charitable foundations and so-on. Academia does not have a monopoly on the distribution of these funds, by any means, but is an important player in the various bodies that mediate the competition for these funds.
As well as developing the forces of production through the basic and applied research, particularly in STEM subjects, that lead to technological innovation, the intervention of state departments, civil service and other superstructural bodies into social development, is effected by social policy. The research of the social sciences departments of academia serve as inputs into social policy formation. In certain edge cases, academic research can even have use as plain old intelligence to the more repressive arms of the superstructural apparatus.
Perhaps because of this, certain past theorists of ideology in the Marxist tradition have emphasised the supposed functional domination or repressive role of academic institutions, as for example in Althusser’s conceptually still-born idea of the academy as part of the collection of “Ideological State Apparatuses”. We have already discussed the theoretical impasse of such functionalist definitions of ideology in previous sections.
The view we take here is that the primary role of the academy in research (i.e. knowledge production, rather than further education) is in mediating the collective and even cooperative aspect of individual researchers work, in a given “field”. Indeed, providing the infrastructure to inter-relate individual research efforts in a given subject in order to actually create a “field” by means of a form of collective discipline.
It may be hard, given the amount of competition between academics in fighting for funding and scrambling for status and position, to see this as a collective process, still less a cooperative one. But behind the spectacle of the rivalries and score-settling, academics are also always on the search for allies and opportunities to share results and resources with people pursuing the same track as them in the wider field. Even the criticism of opposing factions within a given field, whether through the peer-review or conferencing processes, can help reveal weak spots and guide revision towards strengthened positions. From within the academy, on the privileged side of the “Great Academic Publishing Paywall” (a truly global scandal, but let’s not digress), access to all the published literature in the chosen field, even the competitive pressure to have to keep up with the general developments in the field outside one’s particular avenues of research or position, is a productive discipline.
The contrary example are the internet and social media enabled cranks or conspirators who exercise selection bias in finding the one stray academic paper (published or pre-print) that if you squint at hard enough, seems to justify their chosen delusion. If you want to be a climate denier, then the Carbon Lobby has already located the few accredited academics willing to sell any remaining credibility in their field to shill for Big Oil.
But such crank selection bias is more difficult to sustain within the discipline of an academic field. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists accept that climate change is happening (and is one of the most serious threats facing contemporary society), not because the UN, the New World Order or the shape-shifting lizards of Zion have dictated that this must be the line, but because they freely agree this is what the evidence says.
That’s not to underplay all of the manifold problems of academia, which have been written about in many places, from the results of publication bias, funding-driven competition for media headlines, the replication crisis, and so on. Our emphasis here is on the collective discipline of the academic process, through its institutions.
Above all, we can reach a preliminary conclusion on the status of social science. If, on the one hand, any discipline that takes the social as its object, is inevitably ideological, not only in the specific sense of ultimately not being completely neutral on questions of social policy, but also in the more general sense of partaking in centrist and liberal views on the desirability of pluralism and, indeed, the ideology of non-ideology. But on the other hand, through the adoption of scientific methods in social research and the collective discipline of the academic process, you can achieve a level of science in social subjects. Or certainly, by abstaining from any scientific methodology and relying on purely reflective or speculative methods (like literary criticism or cultural studies or what have you), you can say that some disciplines in social theory are definitely a lot less scientific than others. All of which to say, the answer to the question of the status of social science is that the choice between ideology or science is not either/or but both/and (if not always).
De-scoping II — Ideology and Culture
As a final step in the de-scoping exercise, I need to distinguish ideology from culture (and politics and psychology, while we’re at it). But I need to start with a caveat. It’s bad enough trying to give a new definition to a word like ideology, even if it is relatively new and hopelessly inconsistent in common usage. But to try and redefine a word like “culture” would be absurd overreach given its ubiquity. So the redefinition I give here is simply a local and tactical temporary redefinition purely for the purposes of distinguishing ideology from it.
Caveat registered, let’s press on. In the local context of this exposition then, I would define culture as being based on hedonic values, in contrast to the normative values that lie at the heart of ideology. Ideology has the social as its object and its norms are to do with the fate of society, what is good and bad for society, what threatens it, what can it potentially become, and so on.
With culture I want to once more insist on distinguishing between individual desires and the hedonic values of a culture or subculture. We all have individual desires when it comes to pleasures of the flesh (sex, food, drink, dancing, sports) or mind (music, games, entertainment). But culture arises when those individual desires create collective encounters based on shared hedonic values. The scale of that collective commons can range from the dominant national or regional cultures, to smaller subcultures that swim against the tide of the dominant local culture.
As an example of the distinction between individual desire and the hedonic values of (sub)cultures, consider sexuality. An individual growing up in a predominantly homophobic ideological environment who happens to be gay can experience internal psychological conflict between the demands imposed on them and their personal desires. But to the extent that they may still have internalised the homophobic ideology (especially in a religious context) they have been raised in, that conflict will be experienced mostly as an internal, psychological trauma. Let’s now say this individual leaves the familial and community context of their upbringing and relocates to a big city, for further education or work. In the city they find a slightly liberalised ideological environment that is still predominantly heteronormative, but tolerates a minority LGBT subculture based around a number of pubs, clubs, events and leisure pursuits. Our protagonist engages with this subculture, community, “scene” (take your pick) and finds acceptance and validation as a person and a relief from cognitive dissonance and psychological torment from their previous ideologically hostile environment.
But culture is not ideology. People can be attracted to particular subcultures on the basic of music and drinking and dancing and fashion, without necessarily internalising particular ideologies associated with that subculture. The skinhead subculture initially arose in England as working class fraction from mods who extended the mod interest in American black music (linked to the Northern Soul subculture) to Jamaican rude boy fashions and rocksteady and ska music. Although the initial skinhead wave faded as reggae took over Jamaican music, it was later revived in the late 70s as an alternative “proletarian” style to the perceived peacock fashion displays of “Carnaby punks” with their dayglo foot-high mohawks and bondage trousers.
This second wave revival in skinhead fashion and culture in England took place against an increasingly febrile political culture where football hooliganism backgrounded the rise of the far right in the shape of the National Front and clashes between leftists and fascists both in the streets and in the concert halls. The NF courted the skinhead revival assiduously, but in response the Midlands-based two-tone movement promoted the anti-racist message through a ska revival.
The broad outlines of the story are well-known. But despite the skinhead subculture being the site of an ideological battleground between SHARP skins and anti-fascists on one side, and Blood & Honour and other hate-rock affiliated nazi boneheads on the other, for the last four decades, there are still so-called “neutrals” in the scene. Regardless of how hypocritical those of us with anti-racist commitments may find those skinheads who combine a love of Jamaican music with a “neutral” position of the ideological confrontation between and antifa and fash skins, the fact remains that in any subculture, regardless of how strong the association between the subculture and a particular ideology, there will always be people who are really only there for the hedonic values. LGBT activists may assume that the LGBT “scene” or subculture should be unequivocally committed to gay liberation and LGBT rights, but in reality there will always be those who use the scene for leisure and enjoyment without ever so much as attending a Pride march, never mind being politically active.
So much for the distinction to be drawn between ideology and culture. Brief cartoon sketch as it is, it hopefully gestures towards some of the larger stakes and suffices for our purposes here. Before we bring this interlude section to a close, I want to make one final point on my insistence on distinguishing individual and collective dynamics in not only ideology and culture, but in all social theory. For lack of a name, let’s call it a rejection of methodological individualism in favour of a methodological collectivism. The most obvious motive for such an insistence is my own pre-existing ideological commitments, which I’m not going to deny by any means. But I do think there is a more general epistemological point to this methodological choice. That is that within the context of an individual consciousness, it is almost impossible to separate out the roles of individual psychology from ideological, cultural or political drivers. It’s only by focussing on what passes between individuals, in speech acts, texts, rituals, collective practices and behaviours, that we can start to distinguish between communications leaning primarily on normative values, hedonic values, or the contingent appeal of particular decisions to be made on the opportunities or threats of the conjunctural situation. Above all, it allows us to create an analytical grid to look at current issues like populism or “down the rabbit hole” conspiracist ideologies like QAnon, without resorting to Father Dougal’s default “That’s mad, Ted” response to perplexing phenomena.
In the next section we’re going to look back again at “what Marx really meant” by ideology as a basis for drawing a distinction between protagonist and antagonist social ontologies to revivify the “materialist conception of history” so as to reconceptualise terms like “centrism”, “liberalism” and “populism”, so we can apply our model of ideology to advance our understanding of real world political problems.
Notes
[1] This point about the role of pecuniary motive in differentiating Newton and Boyle’s chemical and alchemical experiments is apparently covered in Tim Harford’s latest book “How to Make the World Add Up”, as recounted in his discussion of it on an episode of BBC R4’s “More or Less”, which is where I heard of it.
[2] Revealingly, the “scientism” of the Victorians psychologically projected a fundamental antagonism onto the object of “nature” by the (normatively male) scientist in his struggle to “master” or “dominate” a feminised nature, in a transparently phallic and patriarchal libidinal schema.
[3] In the next section we will argue why this semantic inversion in the meaning of ideology is not simply a contingent historic irony but reflects the inevitable unfolding of an internal contradiction based on the endless search for the escape from ideology promised by the ideology of non-ideology.
[4] But not always. Einstein famously produced the four papers of his ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in 1905 that revolutionised Physics, using only his mind and a pen and paper. And of course the stimulating effect of discussions with like-minded Physics friends and colleagues in Bern while he was still working at the Patent Office there.