At 11:52 AM 3/5/97 +0000, David Byrne wrote: >Finally, there is a serious addressing of the issue of the >collapse of disciplinary boundaries in relation to =91fields=92 >as the objective of social science. If I have a criticism >of the report it is that it really only recognizes >developments in the academy here. In other words it >emphasizes fields of the kind represented by =91Area Studies=92 >and doesn=92t recognize the profound significance of the >application of the social sciences to areas of policy >implementation. In the UK =91Urban Studies=92 and =91Health >Studies=92 stand in this kind of relationship to the academy. >In relation to this omission, the report singularly fails to >address the issues raised by the conception of social >science as =91action-research=92 - the role of the soal >scientist in active transformation of that which is the >object of study. The report is outstandingly clear on the >antinomies of past / present and nomothetic / idiographic, >but really doesn=92t handle at all the antinomy of pure / >applied and the related but distinctive antinomy of engaged >/ observational. > >I have written this piece because the report does seem >profoundly important. Obviously it is an immediate response >and subject to modification in detail but I would appreciate >other=92s views as they read the document. The main intention >locally at least, is to get people to read the thing for >themselves. While I share the report's recommendations to abolish the institutional boundaries in social science, I also believe that the narrative of the social science development, as told by the report's authors, ends too soon, namely in the late 1970s and then only selectively focuses on the input of feminist and pomo critique of positivism. By so doing, it misses an important and extremely onerous development that occurred, or rather accelerated, during the 1980s and 1990s. Had they taken those developments seriously, their optimism for the development of a universalistic science would have been muted, and the report would have taken a more alarming= flavour. The development in question is what call "epistemological privatisation of knowledge." To understand what epistemological privatisation of knowledge is, let us contrast it with its opposite, the ontological privatisation of subject matter -- as described in the historical narrative of the report. The development of idiosyncratic sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften, was accomplish through the following theory-building strategy. First, certain areas of the subject matter were ontologically separated from other areas of the subject matter. The former which, using Max Weber's terminology, can be described as "historical individuals" called for the use of different methods of study (namely historical analysis and description, focus on their uniqueness, etc.) than the other subject matter area that can be characterised, using Leibniz terminology, as the "population of monads" or virtually identical elements which required nomothetic methods of analysis (i.e. aiming at uncovering universal laws governing the behaviour of those monads). However, these two different methodologies were supposed to produce a universally valid and recognised knowledge. =20 This theory building approach, known as hermeneutics or learning something that is universal from the insight into what is particular, can be schematically represented as follows: ontological separation of subject matter: Historical individuals vs. population of monads | | | | produces two different methodological approaches: idiographic methods vs. nomothetic methods (Geisteswissenchaften) (natural sciences) \ / \ / which merge of the epistemological level as: universal and intersubjectively accepted knowledge (even if pretences to universalism are parochial). This is the process the Gulbenkian Comission describes in its historical narrative. The narrative ends in late 1970s when the challenges to the ontological (and institutional) separation of the subject matters were challenged from the epistemological positions. That is: different viewpoints produce different classification of what is, in fact, a single subject matter. Therefore, why do not we pull those different point of view together is a form of a dialog to produce a better, that is, more universalistic, knowledge of that single subject matter? While based on their historical narrative, Wallerstein & Co. call for a greater universalism in social sciences, the production of science itself took a sharp turn in the opposite direction to that depicted in the narrative -- toward the epistemological privatisation of knowledge. Unlike the hermeneutical approach described above, the anti-hermeneutic approach of episemological privatisation of knowledge reverses the the hermeneutic process "from particular subject to universal knowledge" and goes "from universal subject to particular knowledge." The epistemological privatisation claims no special subject matter, in fact, it studies the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary (cf. the marketing studies of everyday shopping behaviour, or public opinion polls). What it aims to accomplish, however, is knowledge that is not universal, but PROPRIETARY. That is, knowledge whose main value lies not that it is shared by others, but in that it is NOT shared by others. In fact, the dissemination of that knowledge to others would strip it of its value to the owner. The proprietary knowledge gives the owner a strategic advantage over competitors, to be sure, but its epistemological importance goes well beyond its short-term market utility. It is the mode of knowing that ultimately epitomizes the Foucauldian ideal of "seeing without being seen." My power comes from my knowledge and from my material resources. Both are my private property. Just as no-one can question what I choose to do with my material possessions, nobody can question what I choose as knowledge. Proprietary knowledge guides the owner's actions -- perhaps in the right way, perhaps in a wrong one -- but that is for no one but the owner himself to decide. Proprietary knowledge is exempt from any public scrutiny not just on the level of application (e.g. the owner may decide to use his knowledge of atomic theory to build a bomb or a power plant), but on the level of production and verification as well. It is the owner, not the public, who decides not only what knowledge is to be produced, but how the validity of that knowledge is to be judged. The eptiome of epistemologically privatised knowledge is marketing research. Marketing research is devoid of any theorizing, save for the most rudimentary assumptions about human behaviour. In fact, marketing research is nothing more than a collection of measurement techniques and a collection of measurements that are sold, in chunks, to the clients. Each measurement (e.g. a study of market appeal of a product) does not have a slightest pretence of being universally valid, in fact, such an assumption would quickly put the marketing researchers out of business, as their clients would say "since I bought from you what is universally valid, why should I buy more of the same?" Furthermore, the study has a value if an only if its results are known to the client but are NOT known to her competitors. Had the competitors known the results, the competitive advantage of proprietary knowledge would disappear. More importantly, the proprietary character of marketing research results in a situation that goods and services are manufactured solely on what the owner of the knowledge in question knows, without any input from the public (other than being "laboratory humans" manipulated by the researchers). That is, the marketing researcher may be utterly wrong (or not) in how she determines "public tastes" -- but because the knowledge is declared and sold as private -- it is not subject to any public scrutiny, as the universal knowledge hitherto produced in universities is. Therefore, the corporate execs' claims that the shit their companies produce serves some "public demand" should be (but is NOT) qualified "public demand as depicted in private knowledge that is exempt form any scrutiny, except by its owner." Of course, private knowledge was not an invention of the 1980s. It is a well known fact that professions (especially doctors) use a different set of principles to diagnose cases than the formal body of knowledge taught at universities (A. Abbott, _The System of Professions_, 1988). The "diagnostic knowledge" is a private property of the doctor, or perhaps the medical profession. The fact that the language of medieval theology was Latin means NOT that that Latin was a lingua franca, but that using language different from that of everyday discourse effectively made medieval theology a private property of the experts, while the populace was effectively excluded in participating in theological discourse. The same principle is used in modern economics. Its use of incomprehensible jargon to discuss matters that can be explained by common-sense discourse without losing any of the contents, effectively bars non-expert from participation and renders economics a private knowledge of the experts. However, both medieval theology and modern economics can be, in principle, understood by anyone who takes the effort to learn the jargon. This, however, is not the case of knwoledge that has been privatised by classifying it as off limits to the public by the so-called "public" authorities. Thus, national security policy decisions are based almost exclusively on private knowledge gathered by intelligence agencies, and that knowledge is declared off limits and cannot be verified by anyone. A CIA report may be a result of an honest and meticulous study, or a fiction concocted by operatives with literary talents -- but the public and its so-called "representatives" have no way of knowing that, because that knowledge has been classified as private property of a supposedly "public" agency. The privatisation of the US universities is a well documented fact (see, for example an article in the last issue of Dollars&Sense on that subject). By providing research grants to universities, private corporations are given, by university administrators, the right not just to use the findings for their own profits, but also to: - have a say what research are being pursued; and - decide whether and how the results of that research can be published. That such practices are not wide-spread (yet) in social sciences is mainly a result of the relative insignificance of these sciences in the political and commercial arenas. In bio-medical research the corporate control of the production and dissemination of knowledge is much more widely-spread and tight, as some serious corporate interests are at stake. Those interested in details can read the article in the last issue of Dollars & Sense on that subject. Another example of private knowledge is the whole area of research pertaining to tobacco smoking. What private tobacco companies know about the addictive properties of tobacco is declared proprietary knowledge and is exempt from any public scrutiny. In other words, tobacco manufacturers are *LEGALLY PROTECTED* by "our" government from disclosing any information about the product they are selling to the public. Other examples may include public domain data (statistics, legal information) handed over by "our" government to provate distributors who become the private gatekeepers of what used to be public knowledge, or various credit-worthiness report that are collected without public knowledge and with only nominal oversight by private agencies.=20 With recent trends toward privatisation of both, institutions producing knowledge (universities and research institutes) and the knowledge itself, the history of scientific development comes to a full circle when it began in prehistoric or medieval times. Back then, knowledge was jealously guarded secret of shamans and priests, and handed down to the masses in a simplified pictorial form =96 e.g. as myths and legends depicted on the stained glass= of medieval churches. Today we approach that stage, as knowledge again is being jealously guarded by private corporations, and handed down to the stupefied public in the form of color graphs, charts and ads on the "stained glass of the modern church" =96 the TV screen. >From that perspective, the institutional divisions among social sciences Wallerstein & Co. write in the Gulbenkian Commission report are of secondary importance. What we face here is a disappearance of social sciences altogether, as the privatisation of universities progresses. That is, the research of human collective behaviour is increasingly carried not as a part of building a universally accepted body of knowledge (regardless of how parochial those claims to universality are) =96 but as a part of private research endeavour designed to produce private knowledge of interest to the paying clients: how to affect the outcome of the upcoming election, how to manipulate public opinion on this or that issue, how to boost the market appeal of a product, etc.=20 That proprietary knowledge, legally exempt from any public scrutiny, is the ultimate form of the Foucauldian knowledge-power, a fusion of knowledge and the ability to intervene into the subjects of that knowledge (both their lives and their bodies). What bio-medical and, increasingly, social science researchers are producing is what Max Horkheimer (the founder of the Frankfurt School for Social Research) aptly called the "Herrenwissenschaft" - or the science of the master race (a clear reference to the Nazi ideology of "herrenvolk" or "master race" ) - a knowledge about us produced and applied without us and serving as a tool of the ruling corporate class to control us. That probably does not concern academic superstar celebrities like Wallerstein (whose work I otherwise highly respect) who have a secure place in the academia, can pursue their own research agenda, and publish the results in the medium of their choice. But for the academic peons like myself and thousands of others who toil as temporary mental workers in private teaching and research factories called universities =96 this is a serious concern. An that concern did not even get an honorary mention in the Gulbenkian Commission report. wojtek sokolowski=20 institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 **** REDUCE MENTAL POLLUTION - LOBOTOMIZE PUNDITS! **** +------------------------------------------------------+ |Wenn ich Kultur hoere, entsichere ich meinen Browning.| | -Hanns Johst |=20 | |=20 |When I hear "family values," I reach for my revolver. | | (no apologies to Hanns Johst) | +------------------------------------------------------+