The Limits of Epistemic Control, the Powers of Actualization, and the Moral Economies of a Fictional Collective

ABSTRACT

This essay narrates from a collective of social scientists giving up on the phantasy of ‘being in,’ or ‘having’ epistemic control, not – however – on the ‘dream of epistemic democracy’. This community does not feel ‘pre post-truth’ nostalgia. And when there is a special issue asking ‘what are possible reconfigurations of collaborative research beyond control?’, they reply: ‘we are not sure, but we are in the mood to figure it out.’ This mood is not related to the naïve assumption that knowledge production was not a powerful control machine in its own right, or that issues of control could be ignored or dismissed as vanities. It is built upon the feeling that dynamics of epistemic control cannot be escaped, but can and should be played and experimented with. The essay makes use of Lorraine Daston’s conception of a ‘moral economy of science’ to fictionalize the ‘mental state’ of such a collective of social scientists and the ‘emotional forces’ integral to their ways of performing research.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic control
• epistemic democracy
• pre-recorded research realities
• the powers of actualization
• fiction

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the MCTS (Munich Center of Technology in Society) of the Technical University of Munich, the LIT (Linz Institute of Technology) of the Johannes Kepler University and the STS department of the University of Vienna for providing space and time for me to use my imagination.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Speaking of ‘epistemic democracy’ as a dream evokes an understanding of democracy as an ideal that cannot be reached, or that cannot be reached once and for all. As Dewey puts it, ‘[democracy] is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of something which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be’ (Dewey 1927, 148). And yet there isn’t anything else to do than put constant effort into the creation of possible realizations of ‘epistemic democracy’ in the sense of staying attentive to the effects our ways of (non-)controlling, organizing, and restricting knowledge production processes show on our communal lives and vice versa.

2. https://www.residenztheater.de/inszenierung/ein-volksfeind accessed on 15 January 2019.

3. ‘The notion of credibility allows the sociologist to relate external factors to internal factors and vice versa. The same notion of credibility can be applied to scientists’ investment strategies, to epistemological theories, to the scientific reward system, and to scientific education. Credibility thus allows the sociologist to move without difficulty between these different aspects of social relations in science.’ (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 188).

4. Is it possible to draw analogies between Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault’s Societies of Control (Deleuze 1992; Foucault 1977), and our epistemic control societies? ‘[I]n the societies of control one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.’ (Deleuze 1992, 4).

5. Deleuze ([1977] 2002) writes about the process of actualization in a chapter on ‘the actual and the virtual’: ‘Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. […] The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization, simultaneously, without there, being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but the virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whilst the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into the subject.’ (148–149).

6. Facticious: ‘artificial, visibly made up, but made up in such a fashion that it carries with it an irreducible element of reality; in other words, the situation cannot be dismissed as simply fictitious.’(Lezaun, Muniesa, and Vikkelsø 2013, 279).

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Judith Igelsböck

Judith Igelsböck studied sociology and science and technology studies at the University of Vienna. In 2016, she joined the Munich Center for Technology in Society of the Technical University of Munich as a postdoctoral researcher. Since October 2018, she has been the PI of the Project ‘Upper Austrian Innovation Scripts’ – an inquiry and artistic intervention into the organization of innovation activities – at the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT). Judith has worked in various social scientific research areas, including human computer and human robot interaction, work studies, science and technology studies, and innovation and organization studies. These days, she finds herself in an anti-disciplinary and experimental mood. One of her current obsessions is the fusion of theatrical play and innovation research.