My thesis began with the title ‘Community Development as Knowledge Work: toward a empirical metaphysics analytic.’ I felt relatively comfortable with it and there was enough in that title to keep me puzzling away. The term ‘knowledge work’ I found intriguing more than anything and I was happy with it. Two years later, the puzzling has taken a rude shock. All this time while I was working with ‘knowledge work’, the projects of knowledge and epistemology were being undermined and aborted by some of the very researchers I claim to be following: John Law, Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol. It was a shock both because it had not struck me as so obvious before and that I suddenly felt I had to come up with something quick to salvage something from my evaporating thesis (which I must admit has the rather shallow puddle existence of a title).
I went to some books, thinking how did this happen? In Latour’s Irreductions, (p 159), he writes:
“Nothing is known – only realised.”
I went to John Law’s After Method, straight to the index and under ‘k’: Kata Tjuta, Barbara Kingsolver, Thomas Kuhn. I went through other books and become slightly more reassured, but knowledge still did not feature strongly, though Kuhn and Kant loomed large under ‘k’. Perhaps it is these two names which are enough to be turned off epistemology as a project.
My thesis title did change when I chose to spend a year living in a remote Aboriginal community in North East Arnhem Land following numbers amongst other things. My title became, “Using the challenge of encounter between radically different knowledge traditions to develop a general theory of knowledge: an investigation through numbers in Gapuwiyak.” This seems to have landed me in more strife.
How would I develop a theory of knowledge which abandoned epistemology as a project? Since Kant, philosophy has tended to have one dominant project of epistemology that relies on a particular kind of knower – a universal, independent, rational subject. And much as been caught up in and resonated from this asymmetry between the knower as human subject and the known as less-than-human object (including the believer and the savage). As Latour points out in Irreductions, ‘Of course, it is it is exciting to believe that one actor may contain the others because we start to believe that we “know” something, that there are equivalences, that there are deductions, that there is a master, that there is law and order.’ (p 190) I agree this notion of knowledge needs to be dumped. But what next?
Following this disintegrating thread of ‘knowledge’ in Actor-Network Theory and related and inspired work, including the rapidly growing Object Oriented Philosophy, I seem to have struck two points of contestation which I hope can be worked into some answers. But for now I’ll leave them as places to start.
First, what do we do with asymmetries? Again according to Latour, ‘Asymmetry grows with the flood of words; as meaning flows, slopes and plateaus are soon eroded.’ (Irreductions p 181). He goes onto say that some statements are true and others not, and some words are metaphorical and others literal. That there are winners and losers. But we engage our research efforts by no deciding on these before our encounter. Graham Harman has some trouble with this as he does not want to let go of some losers (good losers – a point he makes in this recording), which raises the question of whether we are talking about ‘how do do research’ or ‘what are robust metaphysics’?
Second what do we do with paradox. In the Actor-Network Theory area of hyphen seems to be creating havoc. How can one entity be many and one. How can it be a network and an actor? How can we say nothing is irreducible to anything else, that is that things are themselves, yet also say they are only relation to others? How can two objects be the same and different at the same time? How can we say ‘representation knowledge is valid’ and that it is not, that it is simply enacted? Because all of this, I would like to do with the concept of knowledge.
Irreductions is published as the second section of this book: Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Harvard University Press, 1988).
John Law, After Method: mess in social science research (Oxfordshire and New York: Routledge, 2004).
