Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• conceptual-synchronic approach
• transformational (historical) approach

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• knowledge systems
• knowledge systems related to post-Englightenment
  epistemology
• other situated knowledges

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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

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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?

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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

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• episteme historically specific, dynamic field
  of representations of knowledge
• defined in Michel Foucaults 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

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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

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• how episteme is multiplied by communication
  among different disciplines (language
  technology of transmission totality of
  peoples interactions )

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• In the late 18th century, science becomes
  established as cultural apparatus, in the form of
  materialized semiotic fields
• (Haraway, Modest Witness_at_Second_Millennium)

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• post-Enlightenment epistemology its effects
• modernity ideas of progress, science, reason,
  nature
• natureTM (nature as not nature)
• cultureTM

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• 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)

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• Printing Transforms Knowledge (James Burke, 1986)

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Intellectual Origins of Knowledge Systems

• relationship of knowledge systems to moral order
• deviance
• culture / nature
• naturalizing discourse

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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

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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

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The Laboratory, or, The Passion of OncoMouse,
(Lynn Randolph 1994)
From Donna Haraways, Modest_Witness_at_Second_Mille
nnium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.
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From Donna Haraways, Modest_Witness_at_Second_Mille
nnium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 47.