The Politics of Knowledge.

Patrick Baert, Fernando Domínguez Rubio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415704755
• eBook ISBN: 9781134004379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Social scientists often refer to contemporary advanced societies as 'knowledge societies', which indicates the extent to which 'science', 'knowledge' and 'knowledge production' have become fundamental phenomena in Western societies and central concerns for the social sciences. This book aims to investigate the political dimension of this production and validation of knowledge.

In studying the relationship between knowledge and politics, this book provides a novel perspective on current debates about 'knowledge societies', and offers an interdisciplinary agenda for future research. It addresses four fundamental aspects of the relation between knowledge and politics:

• the ways in which the nature of the knowledge we produce affects the nature of political activity

• how the production of knowledge calls into question fundamental political categories

• how the production of knowledge is governed and managed

• how the new technologies of knowledge produce new forms of political action.

This book will be of interest to students of sociology, political science, cultural studies and science and technology studies.

1 The politics of public reason^*

Sheila Jasanoff

Politicizing science

Science and technology are commonly taken as drivers of social change. Less visibly but quite centrally, as this book argues, they are also crucially important objects and instruments of politics.¹ What happens in the course of knowledge production, and still more plainly in the translation of knowledge into technologies, affects the kinds of lives we lead, the relationships we form, and, increasingly, how we perceive ourselves and what entitlements we therefore claim. All of the traditional categories of social organization – race, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, economic and professional status, occupation and family – have been profoundly reshaped in modernity’s long march through the scientific, industrial and high-tech revolutions. Whether we see ourselves as enlightened, globalized, networked or knowledge societies, those era-defining terms themselves reflect epistemic and social configurations that would not have been possible without fundamental changes in science and technology. Hence, science and technology are fitting though strangely neglected subjects for political analysis.

The project of politicizing our understandings of science and technology holds formidable difficulties. One measure of science’s extraordinary institutional successes over the past four centuries is that intellectuals have by and large fallen out of the habit of thinking that there is anything political about science, either as a domain where politics happens or as a subject matter that is influenced – except in the most mundane and corrupting sense – by politics. Almost by definition, science is the sphere of incontestable knowledge, a space that both is and should be immune to politics because it is simply about being truthful to nature. We get to science, conventional wisdom holds, precisely when we have shorn away values, conflicts, passions, desire, emotions, interests; in short, all those things that make up the stuff of politics. It follows that to politicize science seems in principle a forbidden act; it sounds suspiciously like settling the truth by popular vote, by economic power or by diktat. It is how to keep politics out of science, often described as preserving scientific integrity, that has preoccupied the politics of knowledge making for many decades.

When it comes to technology, the erasure of politics has been somewhat less complete, but even then political analysis largely limits itself to looking at the ways in which technological systems affect people’s lives.² Politics, on this view, comes into play principally when technology is implicated in limiting or enhancing life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. Innovation proceeds, so it is believed, through the natural operations of human ingenuity and the market. What needs reflection, and possible political control, is only technology’s potentially harmful impacts or, in standard apolitical parlance, its unintended consequences.

If persistent depoliticization is one part of the problem for a deeper politics of knowledge, then a further difficulty is the lack of developed theoretical frameworks in which to ask, or answer, penetrating questions. What should political analysis concentrate on when the subject matter is something so abstract and seemingly bloodless as knowledge? And, even if one grants that politics and epistemology are somehow related, how should analysts deal with the fact that the discourses in which we speak of politics constitute a knowledge domain that itself needs critical reflection? Is such reflexivity possible or will it paralyze normative as well as epistemic analysis? Little in the classical works of political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to Juergen Habermas invites today’s scholars or citizens to consider how the fundamental categories of political thought – such as power, representation, and democracy itself – have been modified or recast in light of the far-reaching transformations wrought by science and technology.

A full-blown political analysis of science needs to ask not only how to expose the values inadvertently locked up in the spheres of science and technology, but also the symmetrical question of how unexamined assumptions about democracy get reified through the intrusions of science and technology into the public sphere. What kinds of democracies are possible, imagined or actualized in technoscientific societies? Why do ways of steering science and engaging publics differ even among closely similar societies? Are there good and less good ways of relating politics and science? Put differently, what can democratic theory gain if we perceive science and technology not only as sites but as active agents of political production, enabling different forms of democracy to come into being and to perpetuate themselves with little further self-questioning? Those are the questions that this chapter chiefly addresses.

Two principal arguments run through the chapter. First, divergent accounts of the right relationship between science and democracy reflect historically and culturally situated conceptions of how science governs itself. Second, as articulated into political practice, these theories underwrite radically different constructions of the human subject as political actor and agent of democracy. I begin by sketching two diametrically opposed strategies for resolving the tensions between science and politics: separation through firm demarcation; and integration through broad public participation. I then show how theories of scientific knowledge-making have underwritten particular modes of demarcation and participation; and how the incorporation of these theoretical positions into contemporary political practices affects the production of public reason. I conclude by showing that the demarcationist and participatory approaches correspond to fundamentally different constructions of the human subject as a knowing political agent. These variations in the theories and practices of public reason need to be unpacked and assessed if we are to approach the democratization of science and technology as a meaningful project.

Science and democracy: from demarcation to engagement

Democratic theory has not been completely oblivious to the links between science and politics. In particular, the paradox of creating influential but apolitical preserves within democracies has been a source of continuing vexation for theorists as well as concerned citizens. As societies have come to depend more heavily on science and technology, the need to look critically at the relationship between expertise and democratic values has been widely acknowledged. If elected officials rely on unelected experts to govern, how can public decisions remain accountable and subject to democratic control? Worries have grown, especially in European political thought, about the power of technical rationality when joined with instruments of state to organize and orchestrate life, discipline it, condition its possibilities for expression and individuation, and at the limit to obliterate human-ness or make it not worth cherishing. Both political theory and political practice have wrestled with such issues, oscillating between two major prescriptions for striking the right balance between science, technology and politics: first, demarcation, to define and keep well apart the spheres of facts and values; second, participation, to ensure that people’s voices are heard and acknowledged deep within the perimeters of technical decision making.

Historically, demarcation came first, reflecting concerns about the dominance of expertise in public life, and the resulting risk of hyper-specialization and narrowing of vision at the expense of wisdom and sound judgment. Critics believed that these problems could best be solved by restricting scientific experts to clearly defined technical and advisory roles, “on tap rather than on top” in a neat turn of phrase attributed to Winston Churchill.³ By the 1970s, however, both law and policy reframed the democracy problem as having less to do with experts usurping the role of elected representatives and more to do with experts’ lack of accountability to lay publics. Openness became the new watchword, and procedural creativity the chief means to implement it: from transparency rules for advisory committee meetings to freedom of information and expanded opportunities for publics to question administrative decisions.⁴

Concerns about the power of experts – in relation to public officials as well as citizens – were premised on an inarticulate mix of epistemic and normative assumptions. On the epistemic front, the demarcationists tended to accept that experts do know best, at least about the subject matter within their control. Their doubts centered on classical principles of democratic delegation, in which elections and politically accountable appointments, not superior knowledge, form the only legitimate basis for authority. Problematic too was the felt difference between expert knowledge and the knowledge needed to govern well, in short, the difference between specialist and sage. Relegating technical expertise to a place apart seemed to be the only practical answer. Insulated from the messiness of politics, science would be free, in the words of Don K. Price, a founder of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, to “speak truth to power.” If politics ignored the voice of disinterested truth, it would do so at the risk of its own credibility and effectiveness. This is the logic that, forty years later, propelled science writer Chris Mooney’s 2005 book, The Republican War on Science,⁵ to best sellerdom. Mooney lambasted the Bush administration to great effect precisely for having turned its back on well-recognized scientific truths.

Advocates of participation, by contrast, see the promise of clean demarcation as grounded in false or misleading presumptions. Expert knowledge claims, according to proponents of participatory democracy, often conceal undisclosed and undiscussed assumptions, opaque, untested, and inevitably value-laden. Expertise, in other words, tends to gather under its depoliticizing umbrella matters that are properly political. Citizen participation then is the antidote to a kind of overbroad delegation that allows experts, operating beneath layers of epistemic claimsmanship, to seize control of democracy’s normative agendas. By opening up expert judgment to lay review, this line of criticism seeks to give power back to people – restoring to citizens their rightful place in the politics of expertise.

For many decades, the two logics for balancing science and politics coexisted in relative harmony, though they were organized around different understandings of the politics of knowledge and called for very different strategies of implementation. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, signs of friction set in. For old-style demarcationists, charity toward lay opinion seemed to have gone too far. Increased participation raised fears of a new populism, resistant to modernization, technological progress, and the benefits of globalization. Episodes of seemingly irrational behaviour – such as opposition to the measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccine as a possible cause of autism in the United Kingdom,⁶ the European resistance to genetically modified (GM) crops, South African president Thabo Mbeki’s ill-conceived rejection of the viral theory of HIV-AIDS, and the US administration’s failure to react to climate change under President George W. Bush – appeared to confirm fears that public ignorance was overwhelming reason. A 2007 letter to Nature put the point crisply:

SIR – Last night I had a nightmare. In my dream, all the recommendations made by Pierre-Benoit Joly and Arie Rip in their Essay “A timely harvest” (Nature 450, 174; 2007) became a reality here in the United States. The public were consulted and actively engaged in practical scientific matters.

I dreamed that the dos and don’ts of science and research were dictated democratically by the American public, of whom 73% believe in miracles, 68% in angels, 61% in the devil and 70% in the survival of the soul after death. In my dream, this majority dictated through vigorous “public engagement” that science should deal with virgin birth, the thermodynamics of hell, the aerodynamics of angel wings, and the physiology and haematology of resurrection.⁷

In response to such fears, some tried to formulate new ground rules for public involvement, so that science and technology policy would stay out of the clutches of the ignorant, the fearful and the politically opportunistic. From this protectionist vantage point, the problem of democracy was in effect up-ended: not how to make ruling technical elites more accountable to the governed, the chief concern of many twentieth-century democracy theorists, but how to keep the unruly demos (and its unreasoning representatives) out of places where they had no right to be.⁸ The new defenders of expertise argued that publics must meet threshold criteria of knowledgability before they could interact with experts, let alone overrule them.

Defenders of democratic participation, among whom I count myself, view this retreat to a given-in-advance demarcation of expert from non-expert spaces as intellectually and normatively untenable.⁹ Such demarcation, to begin with, rests on prior political choices, as documented by a generation of work in science and technology studies.¹⁰ Values inevitably get sequestered within the domains labeled as science or expertise and are shut off to deliberation unless opportunities exist to look behind the labels. Public opposition may signal not unreason but the failure to take relevant values sufficiently into account. One reaction against the new demarcationists has therefore been to push the logic of public participation still more aggressively: “upstream,” into processes of research policy and technological design. The call then is for “public engagement,” a variety of proactive measures to involve people in shaping the purposes of research and the design of technologies. Britain’s nationwide public consultation on agricultural biotechnology, the 2003 GM Nation?, was perhaps the best known European experiment in engaging publics so as to transcend the limits of end-of-pipe, product-focused, risk-based regulation.

Producing knowledge, reproducing politics

Both the reactionary and the radical solutions to the problem of participation converge in one respect: both focus mainly on the production side of science and technology, asking who should govern science’s infinite potential to engender novelty. For today’s technocrats as for yesterday’s, the question “who knows best?” looms largest, fed by fears that ceding power to the non-knowledgable could lead to unreasoning restrictions on research and innovation. For the resurgent democrats, the key question is about people’s right to determine the directions of social and material progress, a goal that demands wider public engagement. From both perspectives, though, science and technology are conceived more as things shaped by politics than as players shaping the essence of the political.

That second direction of the arrow can no longer be ignored. If, following W.B. Gallie, we take democracy to be “essentially contested,”¹¹ then the focus of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• List of contributors
• The Politics of knowledge: an introduction
• 1 The politics of public reason
• 2 The politics of non-knowing: an emerging area of social and political conflict in reflexive modernity
• 3 Technology, legal knowledge and citizenship: on the care of locked-in syndrome patients
• 4 ‘Step inside: knowledge freely available’– the politics of (making) knowledge-objects
• 5 Informal knowledge and its enablements: the role of the new technologies
• 6 Secularisation and the politics of religious knowledge
• 7 Social fluidity: the politics of a theoretical model
• 8 Collateral realities
• 9 Transforming the intellectual
• Index