ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE AND POWER: FROM SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY TO TECHNOLOGIES OF IMPERSONALITY AND SOCIAL DESIGN

Abstract

Main study claim is that technocratic public administration based on knowledge as a key element of power, significantly affects the idea of what is objective and what is objectivity. I explore how scientific objectivity as a part of the scientific ethos has been evolving on the example of economic knowledge. A key institutional feature of economic knowledge is that it includes in fact two relatively autonomous epistemic cultures: academic one, connected to the production of knowledge in academia and expert-administrative one developing in public and corporate governance systems. The peculiarity of knowledge demanded and functioning in public administration is instrumentality (a possibility to be transformed into technology) and an exeptional focus on quantification. As a result 'governing by number' becomes a key social technology and at the same time numbers seem to embody objectivity. I show that economic knowledge in public administration involves an inevitable and deepening ontological gap with 'objective reality'. The state needs not true but effective knowledge: the task of administrating does not presuppose a realistic representation of the administrated object, but rather seeks to simplify it, to plan it, or even to construct. Thus, unlike scientific knowledge, the objectivity of knowledge in administrative practices has almost nothing to do with the object (in sense of truthfulness, representation). Meanwhile, ongoing need for academic economic knowledge to be used into the state administration and its further development in a fundamentally alien sphere leads to a significant deformation of scientific ethos, which is a crucial regulatory element in the scientific knowledge production. Erosion affects both aspects of objectivity as an ontological principle and as an 'epistemic virtue'. Against this background, objectivity as an 'epistemic virtue' has been transformed into the 'technique of distancing' and the principle of technical impersonality, which imply eventually the replacement of the 'knowledge self' by a technical system.