History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Milan Jaros & Petra Jedlickova
Centre for Research in Knowledge Science and Society & Department of Physics, Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship, Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University Prague
Czech Republic
e-mail: Milan.Jaros@ncl.ac.uk
TERRITORIAL ONTO-EPISTEMIC SIGNATURES OF QUASI-OBJECT COMMODITIES
The Kantian modernity was grounded in a static universal ontology based on the Galilean separation of humans and "things". Today's machinic processes have fatally weakened the normative power of any meta-narrative and rendered unhelpful the Kantian autonomy of subject and object, of the natural and artificial. Hence "thingness" is better thought of as a "dynamic capacity to be affected and affecting", to behave or act or be treated as an object. New knowledge transfer agencies have been created skilled in manipulating the onto-epistemic status of products of human labour by animating and codifying heterogeneous assemblages (of "humans", "things", "networks"). The bringing to life of quasi-object assemblages depends on animations via networks of knowbots and playbots which contain the consumer as one of the principal actors. This creates a new knowledge market and research agendas. The shift is particularly apparent in education (e.g. universities) and leisure super-markets (e.g. theme parks, intelligent playthings). It is of particular research interest here, firstly, to identify and examine some key "real" and "virtual" mechanisms that, in the absence of powerful traditions or ideologies of progress, drive the rising and decaying of quasi-object assemblages today. Secondly, it is argued that such mechanisms carry the signature of the inscriptions deposited in (e.g. local, "national") knowledge territories by the application of technoscience peculiar to them.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006