Knowledge society

Promo for the Ritsumeikan University new campus by @jamespond628

Knowledge society is a society where “knowledge has become a productive force that increasingly replaces capital, labour and natural resources as central value- and wealth-creating factors.”(361) But additionally, it is a society characterised by the knowledge culture — “society permeated with knowledge settings,” which are “processes and principles that serve knowledge and unfold with its articulation” (362)

Knowledge society also has a general knowledge culture — a scaffolding of “general knowledge-environment and its structures and policies” (362)

In this context philosophical tools are no longer sufficient for the discussion of the cultural aspects of knowledge, since the interest of philosophy largely lies in scientific methods, but not in how the knowledge is produced. (362)

What is an ‘epistemic culture’?

Epistemic culture (EC) is a set of practices, pertaining to a given area of expertise, that make up how we know what we know. Cultures are “epistemic” rather than “knowledge” because they are “cultures of creating and warranting knowledge.” Further, EC goes a step further by looking not at the machineries of knowing themselves, but at their construction. (363)

The core assumption in the EC is that “cultural specificities arise …when domains of social life become separated from one another” and “become self-referential systems that orient more to internal and previous system states than to the outside environment.” (364)

Key characteristic of EC:

• EC approach emphasises practice, similarly to the sociological turn to understanding knowledge as practice. Such emphasis in EC makes it engage with the frames of meaning and the symbolic doings (such as rituals).
• Attention to practice allows cultural analysis to account for material regularities alongside symbolic ones, as well as cross-associations between the two. (364)
  For example, Actor-network theory considers non-human objects as agents and network nodes in their relation to human agents. (365) In considerations of this kind, it is necessary to allow for multiple agencies, but also for the shifts, drifts and rotations of agency between constructs.
• EC also brings to attention the notion of non-agent, or the object of knowledge, which, however, does not mean that those elements are passive.
• Object-relations regimes are the assumed ways of relating to objects of knowledge and how they are approached.
  One example here is negative knowledge, which is not the absence of knowledge, but the understanding of the limits of knowing, which is gained from the errors and uncertainties of inquiry into the domain of the known.(366)
  The so-called liminal approach is a culturally-specific elaboration which is used to pin down the regions unoccupied by positive knowledge.
• Information, for the purpose of EC, is a “specific epistemic attitude that locates relevance not on the level of underlying laws but on the level of surface events” (not truth but news). (368) Information-knowledge is opposed to scientific knowledge, which is non-decayable.

Knowledge cultures (KC)

An intermediary step from EC to KC is macro-epistemics, which are the concrete institutional arrangements for exchanging and processing information outside of bounded spaces.

KC is even wider view of society’s epistemic and implies that “different cultures have different sciences and technologies,” (369) which sees KC as something that includes the social, political and economic life as its constituent parts.

To articulate KC, then, it is required to reveal the references to social institutions, categorisations and descriptions which already describe society in knowledge terms. (370) More specifically, KC is tightly bounded to, on the one hand, to expertise and on the other, to governance.

Two key characteristics of KC in such respects are:

1. Sociality. Forms of binding between human beings and human groups. While non-human objets are usually not included, they are related to sociality by (1) creating the embedding environments and (2) become a part of the intimate relationship of an expert to an object of expertise.(371)

2. Temporality. The clashes of the temporalities of knowledge and expertise and the times of government (372) Time also comes in alongside the cognitive-emotional capital, as another productive force of knowledge labour. (372)

Refences

• Cetina, Karin Knorr. 2007. “Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32(4): 361–75.