Knowledge Production Systems

The way that knowledge is produced in, for example, universities and museums, is related to social power and hegemonic patterns of control, including during the present global era. There are two ways in which knowledge production systems can be understood: through systems theory and historically.

Knowledge production systems can be discussed in an abstract generalized way within the frame of systems theory as articulated in the 1970s, particularly with reference to interdisciplinary and cognitive philosophy areas. But this task can also be approached historically, that is, by studying the concrete ways of producing and transmitting knowledge in particular cultures and civilizations. The two approaches can be merged by analyzing the knowledge production system that defined modernity and that was defined by it, starting from the 16th century onward. In this case, one would have to begin with the concept of systems in [Page 1005]the social sciences as it was implemented by Immanuel Wallerstein in his long-lasting project, modern world-systems analysis.

Modernity is not a historical process but an idea that describes certain historical processes. This idea needs a system of knowledge to legitimize it. Simultaneously, once the idea was created, it legitimized the system of knowledge that created it. By the same token, the idea of modernity and the system of knowledge that legitimized it became a mechanism to disavow other systems of knowledge and to render other historical processes nonmodern. This is the darker side of modernity that we call colonialism. The system in which colonialism is embedded also created a metalanguage wherein its own affirmation went hand in hand with the justification to disavow systems of knowledge that the metalanguage described as nonmodern. Metalanguages have the peculiarity of detaching the known from the knower, the said from the act of saying, and create the effect of an ontology independent of the subject. Modernity then is the construction of a metalanguage that originated in the European Renaissance coupled with European imperial expansion. Through the centuries, the metalanguage was transformed and at the same time maintained during the Enlightenment and adjusted during the period of neoliberal globalization, to become globally hegemonic. How and under which conditions it has been elaborated and how it has functioned are explored in this entry.