Knowledge and Experience

Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs. scientific thought

• What thinking is like in the pervasive contexts of people’s lives?

• What kind of knowledge underlies lived-in experience?

• What people do in weekly, monthly, ordinary cycles of activity?

relation of social (cultural system) and individual

experience

Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs. scientific thought

• methods / models (functionalist vs. practice theory):

• cognitive science (1970s) (focuses on problem-solving; practice/knowledge emanates from scientific thought; informs education, research) learning transfer / knowledge domains

• anthropologists (detailed knowledge of ‘real life’ activities & situations; now also informs education) activity of persons-acting in setting / located nature of activity

Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs. scientific thought

• Problem-solving:

• individual, rational, cognitive, experiment, information processing

• life skills disembodied from contexts of use; extraction of knowledge from particular experience, activity, context, in order to make it generally applicable in all situations

Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs. scientific thought

• Lived-in, in situ action:

• socially contextualized experience in ways that require theorizing

• empirical description, or analysis

• ethnographic study of that process

Knowledge and Experienceeveryday thought vs. scientific thought

• Why important? power relation of whose thought / knowledge worlds are expressed in education, institutions, social processes

• Lave, Cognition in Practice

• deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Knowledge and Power

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)

• hegemony (Gramsci)

• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• hegemony (Gramsci; 1930s)

• ability in certain historical periods of the dominant classes to exercise social and cultural leadership and by these means, rather than direct coercion of subordinate classes, to maintain their power over the economic, political, and cultural direction of the nation

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• hegemony does not operate by having people concede power against their common sense, but we bear complicity in our own subordination

• winning of consent to unequal class relations (peasants-workers’ strike in Italy)

Gramsci and Hegemony_____________________________________

ilkustration credit:Introducing Cultural Studies(Icon Books, 1999)

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• hegemony binds a society together without the use of force, under the leadership of the dominant classes

• how achieved? manipulations of images and meanings; institutions as producers of sense, knowledge, and meaning

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• realm of consciousness and representations: when totality of social, cultural and individual experience is capable of being made sense of in terms that are defined, established and put into circulation by the power bloc

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• realm of cultural agency of institutions (the state, the law, the educational system, the media, the family): prolific producers of sense, knowledge, and meanings; organizers and producers of individual consciousness; yet institutions are taken as impartial or neutral, representative of everybody (no apparent reference to class, race or gender)

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• institutions (cont): site on which hegemony can be established and exercised if captured or colonized by a power bloc which finds allies in professionals and managers and intellectuals of various kinds (subaltern classes) who perceive their interest as congruent to or identical with those of the dominant group

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• Results? Hegemony naturalizes what is historically a class ideology, and renders it into the form of common sense

• Power is exercised not as force but as authority; cultural aspects of life are depoliticised; ideology is naturalized

• Culture seen as mode of domination and liberation (cultural studies)

Gramsci and Hegemony____________________________________consentcompromiseculture as site of struggle of competing interests

intellectuals forge consent in the interest of the ruling class

illustration credit:Introducing Cultural Studies(Icon Books, 1999)

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.)

• analysis of culture in terms of its relationships to a mode of production and its specific social formation

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• culture is a form of superstructure which articulates the interests and ideologies of those who control the economic base of society (reductionism, economic determinism)

• recognition that institutions are involved in distribution of power in society

Knowledge and Power relationship of knowledge and society

• capitalist mode of production structure political, legal and cultural institutions of their time

• contribution: analysis of art, literary form and ideology, reading of cultural texts as expressions of social experience and ideology