Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems conceptual-synchronic approach transformational (historical) approach.

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

•conceptual-synchronic approach

•transformational (historical) approach

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• knowledge systems

• knowledge systems related to post-Englightenment epistemology

• other situated knowledges

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge= periodization? subject? episteme?

• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into ‘what’ was known at a given moment to discursive practices that rendered something knowable

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge= analysis of an episteme = theorization of the grounds of knowledge by analyzing the represenational paradigms which organize the theorization

• what could be knowable? boundary objects? anomalies? displaced categories?

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• analysis of a range of fields in a given historical moment demonstrates a set of discursive practices common to all the fields = constraints and limitations imposed on a range of discourses in the human sciences and other knowledge practices

• Order of Things - 17th century episteme of the problem of order

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• episteme = historically specific, dynamic field of representations of knowledge

• defined in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: as the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history or ‘archaeology’ of human sciences avoids producing the traditional unity of subject, spirit,or period

• history of knowledge may be represented as a dynamic, constantly changing totality

• analysis of a range of fields in a given historical moment to demonstrate a set of discursive practices common to all the fields

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• how episteme is multiplied = by communication among different disciplines (language + technology of transmission + … totality of people’s interactions )

In the late 18th century, science becomes established as cultural apparatus, in the form of materialized semiotic fields

(Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millennium)

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• post-Enlightenment epistemology & its effects

• modernity: ideas of progress, science, reason, nature

• natureTM (nature as not nature)

• cultureTM

Instead of a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on the discovery of the right logical category. The memory of this system of logical categories and scientific causes would exempt the individual from the necessity of remembering everything in detail ... The problem of memorizing the world, characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved into the problem of classifying it scientifically.

(James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, 1992, 13)

Printing Transforms Knowledge (James Burke, 1986)

Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• relationship of knowledge systems to moral order

• deviance

• culture / nature

• naturalizing discourse

Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense / everyday experience

• categories organized into systems

• transmitted body of knowledge

• natural symbols

• formalized knowledge: information infrastructures

• Why? moral order creates meaning

Critical Analysis

• repositioning of discourses (self-awareness, situated knowledges)

• diversity

• civic responsibility, driving democratic change, balancing power

• … or what? loss of capacity for social criticism

The Laboratory, or, The Passion of OncoMouse, (Lynn Randolph 1994)

From: Donna Haraway’s, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.

From: Donna Haraway’s, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 47.