Abstract
Science has not only led to the mass production of knowledge but also has it invaded society with multifarious effects.
This text was originally published as Stehr, Nico. 2001. “Knowledge Politics—The Paradox of Regulating Knowledge Dynamics—Policing Knowledge”, in: Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager (eds.), Science Studies. Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag: 257–290. Permission to reprint was granted on behalf of Transcript Verlag by Stefanie Hanneken on 21 July 2017.
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Notes
- 1.
By the same token, a report issued by the Rand Corporation (Fukuyama/Wagner 2000: 1) anticipates that in the early part “of the 21st century, the technologies emerging from the information and biotechnology revolutions will present unprecedented governance challenges to national and international political systems.” The report deals with the governance of both research and knowledge policies.
- 2.
The discussion and formulation of the novel moral principle for a “right to ignorance” by Jonas (1974: 161–163) is germane in the context of this discussion.
- 3.
The new political field I identify as “knowledge politics” is, certainly, not immediately connected with the often-described ambivalent sense of crisis in modern societies, based on the over- and/or mass production of knowledge. The tension between the extent of knowledge production in advanced societies and the limited capability of the individual person to assimilate the huge amount of knowledge available, was already described by Simmel ([1907] 1978) a hundred years ago in a theory of the current age in the final chapter of his Philosophy of Money. The tragedy of culture manifests itself in the cleavage between objective culture made independent and the obstinacy of subjective culture. The problem of the policing of knowledge is not related to the production of knowledge in total—even if it is related to overproduction, however that may be defined—but rather to the range of incremental knowledge, which is conceived as being capable of changing reality.
- 4.
Nelkin (1995: 447–456) has published an informative typological summary of the public controversies in which science has found itself embroiled in the United States in the past.
- 5.
Fuller (1993: 377) advances a similar assertion, as far as I can see. He indicates that “in the world of tomorrow, breakthroughs in the natural sciences are regarded as triumphs of applied sociology and political economy, rather than of, say theoretical physics, chemistry, or biology”. It is better understood and presumed that the implementation of a specific knowledge claim can alter the social fabric of society and the anticipated transformation is no longer seen as mainly beneficial.
- 6.
Cf. “Kansas Votes to Delete Evolution from State’s Science Curriculum”, New York Times, National, August 12, 1999.
- 7.
The regulation or the stratification of access to knowledge is nonetheless a constitutive component of everyday life. The world of adults, for example, is differentiated from that of children. These stratified worlds go hand in hand with the ability to impede or even to obstruct children’s access to certain forms of knowledge. The quotidian forms of regulating access to knowledge are not under discussion here.
- 8.
I am grateful to Günther Küppers for this observation.
- 9.
Whether the public willingness to support the field of knowledge politics will intensify in connection with what some scientists have defined as a “comprehension gap” among the population, or whether this willingness will have any significance at all, remains to be seen. In a lead article, the English Sunday paper The Observer (21 February 1999, 28) describes the perceived wide comprehension gap as follows: “Between the scientific upper class, the latter-day Leonardos trekking into the brain or sketching the universe, and the majority of voters and politicians in all Western democracies, there is now a deep comprehension gap”. This deficit in comprehension, however, should not be underestimated in the sciences themselves either, given the growing division of labour among the disciplines.
- 10.
A shift toward concerns with the externalities of science does not mean that contested efforts to regulate the conduct of “scientific inquiry” (cf. Wulff 1979) and, for that matter, attempts to manage or plan scientific research (e.g., Van den Daele et al. 1979) will disappear. On the contrary, issues of ethics, accountability, and conflict, as they relate to the genesis and execution of inquiry, will of course remain highly significant. At the same time, discussions about the conduct of inquiry will be affected by anticipated outcomes of research.
- 11.
My use of the concept of ‘regulation’ resonates with the way in which Steinmetz (1993) deploys the term to analyze the regulation of the emergence of the welfare state in Imperial Germany. This concept takes its distance from the economic literature on regulating the practices of capital accumulation (e.g. Jessop 1990) because that approach tends to rely on an overdetermined image of the ultimate efficacy of regulation practices.
- 12.
- 13.
Assessing the impact of the interventions by uncredentialed participants in biomedical research and in AIDS care, Epstein (1996: 346) concludes that “the impact of the AIDS movement on biomedical institutions in the United States has been impressive and conspicuous [and] it has rapidly become something of a cliché to say that the doctor-patient relationship will never be the same in the wake of AIDS”.
- 14.
As late as in the 1970s, confidence in the capacity of ‘disinterested’ scientists to resolve public issues in the area of space exploration, nuclear power or food additive regulation, etc., was still considerable and significantly exceeded confidence in other groups or agencies (cf. Miller 1983: 90–93; Jasanoff 1990: 12). The general decline in the last two or three decades among the public of developed societies of the trust in science and technology as a problem-solver, a trust that had hitherto been a core element of modernity, has been documented by Inglehart (1995: 391).
- 15.
Mukerji (1989: 197) describes the trade-off: “What reassures scientists the most when they face the power of the voice of science and their powerlessness to use the voice in the public arena is the idea of their autonomy. Scientists are not, in the end, politicians, and they suffer political defeats better than the loss of face among their peers. As long as they can conduct research with which they can advance science [both science itself and their positions in it], they can feel potent. But the cost is that scientists cultivate an expertise that empowers someone else”.
- 16.
A more extensive description and analysis of both Schelsky’s and Marcuse’s critiques of the excessive power of modern science and technology in society may be found in Stehr (1994: 203–221).
- 17.
The decisive outcome of these developments is that the workers are incapable of acquiring a critical view of the repressive social order. The “masterly enslavement” is pervasive throughout society, affecting all individuals at all levels of production .
- 18.
- 19.
The genealogy of Schelsky’s and Marcuse’s fears about the impact of modern science and technology is of course much longer. I will refer to Max Weber but could list many more observers who have expressed concerns about the fateful consequences of science and technology in the age of modernity. Marcuse’s and Schelsky’s diagnoses resonate closely with Max Weber’s analysis of the modern age as a demystification of the world resulting from the growing rationalization of social relations through science and technology . Weber emphasizes the painful tension between rational, empirical knowledge and meaning systems found in the life-world. Moreover, Weber’s intellectual ‘grandchildren’ often share an “Exodus impulse”, namely the attempt “to explode the fatalistically closed ‘steel-hard casing’ of the demystified world” (Bolz 1989: 7). Schelsky and Marcuse therefore also make use, although for the most part implicitly, of a long established radical as well as conservative (romantic) intellectual tradition that launched a highly critical and skeptical analysis of the impact of technology and science on culture and social relations.
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Stehr, N. (2018). Knowledge Politics: Policing Knowledge. In: Adolf, M. (eds) Nico Stehr: Pioneer in the Theory of Society and Knowledge. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76995-0_18
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