When I chose to attend this course I
expected above all to be surprised, to get the opportunity to hear
about theories completely out of my academic comfort zone. Reading
assignments were impressive because of their volume. However this course
allowed me to get in touch with ideas I would not have known about otherwise.
Fortunately enough it seems I got used to reading a lot of English. The overall
main idea of interest was that of the social position given to those
who are in charge of producing knowledge and understanding for the entire
society.
The journey started with Tolstoy.
According to Tolstoy, the way we construct the historical account of events is
far from being the most obviously rational one. It is in fact oblivious of the
role played by the majority of the society. Details, small decisions
and modest actors also make history happen. There would hardly have been any
great men or heroes – that is to say, people perceived as exceptional –
without the support of small actors to trust in them, obey them, and eventually
to recognize their actions as utterly beneficial.
“All the impossible orders inconsistent with the
course of events remain unexecuted. Our false conception that an
event is caused by a command which precedes it is due to the fact that (…)
we forget about the others that were not executed because they could not be”,
“those who command take the smallest part in the action itself” (chapter
VI).
“Examining the events themselves and the connection in
which the historical persons stood to the people, we have found that they and
their orders were dependent on events.” “The movement of nations is caused not
by power, nor by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the
two as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the
people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such
a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on
themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.” (chapter VII).
With Tolstoy, there are already two
fundamental ideas: (1) to be entrusted by the society with the role to produce
(in this case, historical) knowledge about the society is a source of power.
The reading of Masco’s work illustrates that technopolitics can be used
as a mean of power (the bomb and the discourse on security surrounding it, the
way things are presented to the public opinion). He emphasizes
particularly the role of communication: it seems possible to govern by imposing
in the public debate one’s definition of what to fear. (2) Society itself is an
active actor in the events. The third reading (Latour) go further on this path
and brings the idea that society is even active in the way the historical
discourse processes events (that is to say, in the way an historical meaning is
provided to events). As a History major, reading Tolstoy was quite
enlightening: we should the analysis to a wider range of actors to
embrace History as complex as it is. This reminds me of a course I have
attended before which pointed out that women were maybe the most forgotten
actors in history: we hardly know what their lives were. The approach of
history through selected great figures is so reductive it creates blind spots
large enough to render invisible half – if not more – of humanity.
The very act of producing meaning is consubstantial to creating a certain space
of visibility – constructed culturally and thus, biased – on the basis of a
technical support/material (be it historical sources, or a panoptic view
of the battlefield in live streaming). “Spaces of constructed visibility are also
always spaces of constructed invisibility – because they are not technical but
rather techno-cultural accomplishments” (Gregory p.7). The way we process
information is always biased culturally, what questions the role and status of
knowledge producer.
“A crowd may move a mountain; a single man
cannot. If, therefore, we say of a man that he has moved a mountain, it is
because he has been credited with (or has appropriated) the work of the crowd
that he claimed to command but that he also followed”. (Latour p.22).
Latour demonstrates Pasteurians acquired
a medical authority only because a large part of the society itself needed this
type of knowledge at that time to serve their own interests. Hygienists were
eager to believe in Pasteurians’ work – which was not convincing in itself
because not complete yet. Pasteur only had to prove his concept of variation
of virulence, and then hygienists chose to validate Pasteur’s
theory and to conduct the required complementary experimentations themselves.
“Like the psychoanalysts, the Pasteurians set
themselves up as exclusive interpreters of populations to which no one else had
access.” (Latour p.40).
Once again, it is possible to isolate two
big ideas: (1) knowledge produced about the society becomes a source of power
only if the social body itself – or at least an influential group composing it
– choose to validate this production, (2) the fewer the number of
people able to provide validated knowledge about a subject, the
greater the power. We discussed later one of the consequences of this principle
through the instance of think tanks. Generally speaking, the power
given by the production of knowledge is quite restricted: indeed, according to
the Foucaldian view of power we were introduced to, there
is a whole net of powers (experts, teachers, doctors, etc.) interacting to
produce knowledge and understanding, and sometimes it ends beyond their
personal influence. In Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault
even deduces that every type of domination is restricted to a limited
and precise domain, and that no group – not even the State – can really handle the
whole network of power present in a society. Back to the case of think
tanks, we see that producing immediately available and ready-to-use
knowledge in the harsh conditions of a crisis is a technical prowess think
tanks aim to achieve (Kosmatopoulos). By doing so, they
increase their value on the knowledge market and their influence.
This course provided me with
intellectual tools and material to think about the link between knowledge and
power, which is a question that fascinates me. But the course aroused also a new
reflection I had not considered yet: how does the researcher position herself/himself
toward the act of producing knowledge? She/he is entitled and often
expected by the society to play the role of “trickster”, that is to say to mediate between two worlds (Masco). Being an expert is a status difficult to
bear as a profession.[1]This
position is at the same time personally empowering and endangering for the
researcher. Georges Marcus tried to describe how the researcher defines her/his
identity on sensitive fields, somewhere between the expected figure of the
expert and that of a more engaged enlightened witness.
[1] There is this quite funny example of the soviet experts in
France who had to find a new field of expertise after the Soviet
Union collapsed. Many of them specialized in the study of the "risks" represented by the suburbs
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