[Reader-list] minutes of knowledge and democracy meeting

[Aarti]

Dear all,

here are the minutes of the knowledge and democracy meeting held on 3 
august in the CSDS library. it is not a complete minute and therefore if 
anyone who participated would like to add to this please go ahead. again 
if you feel that what you said has been misrepresented , i apologise, 
and please post any clarifications.

Aarti


Discussion on Knowledge and Democracy, 3 August 2004:

These are rough minutes of the Knowledge and Democracy colloquium held 
in the CSDS library. The meeting was convened by Avinash. This is not an 
exhaustive minute, but I hope it provides some sense of the discussion 
that occurred. Avinash asked four people to think about the issue and 
present for about five minutes each after which the janta responded.

Avinash began by speaking about his experience in a Documentation 
Center. He said he was interested in looking at questions of how 
knowledge was accessed and organsied. His presentation articulated two 
broad concerns. The first related to the organsiation of knowledge in 
society, and here he raised issues of access and the impact of new 
digital technologies on older forms of information collation such as 
documentation centers which were being seen as increasingly irrelevant. 
If it were true that the knowledge indices of society related to the 
spread of new technology, America was arguably the most knowledgeable 
society in the world. This was clearly not the case. He also spoke of a 
plurality of knowledge systems and the possibility of discovering the 
“truth” about anything given this plurality. Finally he raised the 
question of how the immense amounts of information that were being 
generated related back to the world.

Shuddha began by saying that he was very glad Avinash had called this 
informal meeting because at Sarai we had been thinking about the 
politics of information for some time. Moreover it was appropriate that 
the site for conversation was the CSDS library. The library might be 
seen as a metaphor for a bazaar for the circulation of possibilities. He 
spoke of the destruction of the library of Alexandria which was 
destroyed three times because people saw the knowledge it contained as 
being irrelevant. They were confident that new knowledge supersedes the 
old such that it was no longer required. If compatible then irrelevant, 
if incompatible then blasphemous. Shuddha drew attention to the position 
of the outsider as a protector of a knowledge system. For instance we 
knew that the canons of world religions were preserved as references in 
the canons of other religions. Did our protocols allow space to this 
“lay” reader? He ended with a few comments on the linkages between the 
production and creation of knowledge and the protocols of academic 
publishing. The world of intellectual production operated within the 
ambit of media monopolies which owned academic journals. Academic 
reputations today crucially depended on a system of cross citations. In 
order for a piece of work to acquire any degree of legitimacy it needed 
to be quoted in journals within the discipline. The availability of 
these journals was therefore a critical determining factor in the 
production of knowledge. Centers for scientific research therefore 
needed to source enormous funds to ensure access. The funds invariably 
came either from the State or from the corporates. By the 1970s there 
was a growing realisation that very many questions were simply not 
looked at and thus began a movement to create open access journals. Was 
this happening with the social sciences as well? We needed to spend some 
time thinking about the political economy of the production of knowledge.

Vijay Pratap spoke from an activists standpoint. He noted that the gap 
between action and knowledge was increasingly being reduced with 
theorisation following action rather than preceding it. His concerns 
related to the exclusionary nature of new technology, and the erosion of 
older, more democratic traditions. He also spoke of the discomfort with 
addressing moral and ethical questions in the public domain and noted 
that without moral anchors which provided the cohering force to 
democracy, society would falter . He spoke at some length of the tyranny 
of reason where the faithful had no place. Finally he spoke at some 
length about the divide between academics and activists and hoped that 
the academic community would be more hospitable to perspectives from the 
grassroots.

Jeebesh began by noting that this was an extremely interesting juncture 
in terms of the new frameworks within which knowledge debates were 
reconstituting themselves on a different terrain. Conflicts over 
knowledge today were being reconstituted around property and anchoring 
themselves on a property regime. There was a crisis in established 
knowledge systems and therefore a search for other forms of innovation. 
His presentation focused on the notion of duration i.e the gestation 
time required for knowledge to be produced and to be deemed as 
knowledge. It was when we appreciated duration that we arrived an 
understanding of a knowledge system and a life world.

In the discussion session that followed there was some concern expressed 
about the direction the subsequent discussion would take given the 
extremely diverse, and unconnected, nature of each presentation. Peter 
summarised what he saw as being some common themes in each presentation. 
He presented this clustering of concerns as those which related to 
knowledge and its relationship to reality in terms of protocols, 
procedures of organisation and so forth. The second cluster related to 
concerns regarding control and controllers, the management and 
manipulation of knowledge by power structures. Thirdly concerns related 
to the processes of dissemination of knowledge and here issues of access 
were raised. Another cluster looked at subversions, elisions, silences 
in the production of discourses on knowledge. What we were left with 
then was a picture of a knowledge production universe which was 
extremely diverse, characterised by eclecticism and eccentricity.

Shuddha expressed some discomfort with an attempt to construct a moral 
hierarchy between what was seen as the knowledge of the “people” and 
other forms of knowledge. His interest lay in looking for eccentricities 
where they arose. To create protocols which were hospitable to 
eclecticism and eccentricity. Anannya raised the question of political 
knowledge and its relationship with democracy. she said that political 
knowledge was the only kind of knowledge that was really in the peoples 
control and which they exercised through suffrage. this in her opinion 
was a hopeful domain within which to discuss questions relating to the 
production knowledge because other forms of knowledge were becoming 
increasingly difficult to access. the relevance of this category of 
political knowledge excited some debate. Avinash wished to know what was 
included in the category of 'meaningful political knowledge. Did it 
include, for instance, science? What was useful and what was irrelevant 
and were these fixed categories? Asish Nandy responded by stating that 
this was not a relevant category because that which was relevant 
political knowledge today would not remain so for all time to come. 
Knowledge was not created simply to service power. D.L Sheth responded 
by noting that though knowledge was not created simply to service power, 
however it was impossible to think of knowledge as being disconnected 
from power.

Sadan raised the issue of pleasure and knowledge. Why were we constantly 
overwhelmed by the burden of analysis? Were desire and pleasure 
illegitimate? Awadhendra Sharan said that his interest lay in looking at 
the new sites of knowledge production where earlier broad categories 
were breaking down. So today, for instance, history was reproduced in a 
court of law, traditional knowledge in debates about intellectual 
property rights. The discussion concluded with Nandy raising the issue 
of certitude. What provided certitude? Why were we refusing to see that 
which we did not wish to see? Any knowledge system could potentially 
become a new religion, intolerant of interlopers.