Epistemic Insecurity, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Belief in Rationality

Abstract

Since the end of the 19th century, the social sciences have largely consisted of a founding enterprise: theories and methodologies converged on the production of rules and criteria aimed at distinguishing them from other types of discourse about the social world. The 1970s’ radical critique of the sciences undermines the very foundations of a relatively detached view of the world, as per Weber’s notion of Wertfreiheit. Donna Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge insisted that some are more capable of developing knowledge because of their social location: women, the colonized, the subaltern. The relative security of an epistemological common framework seems impossible now since we acknowledge the irremediable disunity of science. However, what Peter Galison called is a new framework that can reduce the high level of insecurity afflicting social theory today, with epistemological and geopolitical insecurity being closely linked. Considering the enormous social insecurity toward which we are headed, and which knowledge alone cannot remediate, we must reassess our own capacities to say something meaningful about the social world. Once we accept the postcolonial revision of our ambitions and its inability to provide novel analytical frames, where are we to go? In his famous commentary on Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung, Michel Foucault considers the debate for or against the Enlightenment to be meaningless as such and calls for a new space of research that takes into account our own determination as subjects by the Enlightenment and makes it the object of a new history, yet to come.