Literature News Archive
The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge
Economy, Technology, and Geopolitics
In recent years, a seismic shift in the organization of the world’s economies, cultures, political and social formations, and processes of knowledge production seems to have taken place. Although we are interested in the latter and in the transformation of the ways in which the world’s knowledges are organized, categorized, materially produced, institutionalized, circulated, and consumed, we also seek to inquire into the relationship of those practices to larger social, cultural, economic and political trends. Thus, rather than focusing solely on the subject, say, of the corporate university, or the decline of book culture, or even on the transformation of knowledge production by new technologies, we would like to think structurally about the relationships among the various factors creating this overwhelming sense of seismic shift -- a shift that suggests to some that all forms of traditional knowledge (including what might be called “literary” knowledge) are outmoded and therefore open to renovation – and to others that such forms must be protected and conserved at all costs.
Our goal is not to offer a simple political complaint about the corporate university, or even a theoretically informed account of the transformation of knowledge production in its more general aspects. Rather, we are hoping that we might push the analysis of the relationship between what we have tentatively labeled “the collapse of traditional knowledge,” and the emergency posed by certain concrete and specific social, economic, and cultural conditions that both demand and enable alternative practices that might be characterized as thinking “otherwise.” Our hope is to find a way to join the various conversations that have preoccupied us, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively in such a way that we might reflect critically on the conditions of possibility for our own thinking while exploring how those conditions both function as constraints -- as new forms of discipline, if you will -- and as tendencies toward a potentially new course for the generation of thought about the world.